"Page0082" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bloom Howard - The Lucifer Principle (htm))

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In 1945 the Japanese had been fighting American soldiers for six

years.  They had known they could not lose.  Their gods2 had made

them a superior people.  They had swept through China and the Pacific

Islands in the 30's like an avenging wind, taking vast territories,

conquering hordes of "inferior" peoples, showing the heaven-given

supremacy of their race.  The enemy who faced them was a

contemptible lot--unblessed by the divinity that buoyed Japan, and

crippled by racial impurity.

Yet the mongrels from the West were accomplishing the un-

thinkable.   They were beating down the warriors of Japan.  By the time

the Americans reached Okinawa, the Japanese could see that heaven

had deserted them.  The shame was unendurable.  Four thousand

Japanese killed themselves in Okinawa's underground naval

headquarters.  Another 30,000 military men and civilians threw

themselves from a nearby cliff.3

On the Japanese homeland, pilots volunteered to keep the

American marines in Okinawa from getting supplies.  Those flyers

were promised honor...and death.  Their mission was to guide their

planes to the enemy and stay at the controls as the explosive-laden

aircraft slammed into the enemy's ships.  "I will be doing my duty by

dying," they wrote in final letters to their families.  Fifteen thousand of

them fulfilled that fatal obligation.  One commentator, describing the

kamikaze experience forty years after the fact, explained that, "Japan is

a society of groups, not individuals."

To us the kamikazes' ultimate devotion seems baffling, alien,

something that could never happen here.  But it has happened here.

Patrick Henry was declaring his loyalty to his fellow revolutionaries

and their cause when he said, "Give me liberty or give me death."  He

was confessing that the social organism of which he was a part was

more important than his own existence.

Suicides in 1929, the year of The Great Crash, tended to be

flamboyant and highly publicized.   There was the head of the

Rochester Gas and Electric Company who asphyxiated himself with

3

In 1945 the Japanese had been fighting American soldiers for six

years.  They had known they could not lose.  Their gods2 had made

them a superior people.  They had swept through China and the Pacific

Islands in the 30's like an avenging wind, taking vast territories,

conquering hordes of "inferior" peoples, showing the heaven-given

supremacy of their race.  The enemy who faced them was a

contemptible lot--unblessed by the divinity that buoyed Japan, and

crippled by racial impurity.

Yet the mongrels from the West were accomplishing the un-

thinkable.   They were beating down the warriors of Japan.  By the time

the Americans reached Okinawa, the Japanese could see that heaven

had deserted them.  The shame was unendurable.  Four thousand

Japanese killed themselves in Okinawa's underground naval

headquarters.  Another 30,000 military men and civilians threw

themselves from a nearby cliff.3

On the Japanese homeland, pilots volunteered to keep the

American marines in Okinawa from getting supplies.  Those flyers

were promised honor...and death.  Their mission was to guide their

planes to the enemy and stay at the controls as the explosive-laden

aircraft slammed into the enemy's ships.  "I will be doing my duty by

dying," they wrote in final letters to their families.  Fifteen thousand of

them fulfilled that fatal obligation.  One commentator, describing the

kamikaze experience forty years after the fact, explained that, "Japan is

a society of groups, not individuals."

To us the kamikazes' ultimate devotion seems baffling, alien,

something that could never happen here.  But it has happened here.

Patrick Henry was declaring his loyalty to his fellow revolutionaries

and their cause when he said, "Give me liberty or give me death."  He

was confessing that the social organism of which he was a part was

more important than his own existence.

Suicides in 1929, the year of The Great Crash, tended to be

flamboyant and highly publicized.   There was the head of the

Rochester Gas and Electric Company who asphyxiated himself with