From the Japanese (from 1919!) A lesson to today's Italy

(To David Rossi)
19/07/18

In January 1919, almost a century ago, the Japanese Prime Minister Marquis Saionji Kinmochi, opening the Paris Conference, expected that his country was part of the "Five Great" winners of the Great War, along with the British Empire, the France, the United States and Italy. Unfortunately, the circumstances of the first weeks showed that the Rising Sun was not perceived as one of the major powers: the Japanese demands regarding the German colonial empire in the Pacific region languished: the Shandong and the archipelagos north of the equator (Marianne, Caroline, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands) were too many. And no one seriously thought of granting them peacefully to these obscure Eastern buffoos. At this point, the Japanese delegation took a counter-proposal out of the cylinder: that the "white" Powers should also hold the territories of the former German Empire ... in exchange for an official declaration on the racial equality of the member nations of the League of Nations. Open heaven, open wide earth! There was enough to hyperventilate the representatives of Australia and the States! The proposal was even put to the vote and approved by 11 delegates on 17, without negative votes ... but the British Empire and the United States raised the question of non-unanimity ... and took it off the table soon. The Japanese delegation was hastily granted all the territories requested, as long as they soon returned to their home, leaving the field free to the Western Powers and to the things ... serious.

We know how it ended: Japan, expelled from the group of the Great returned to militarist and revanchist politics. The history of racial equality was "digested" by the world only many years later, after the Nazi massacres, the collapse of the colonial empires and the "separation" policies implemented in South Africa, Rhodesia and last but not least in the United States.

The writer has told you this story because he would like to propose to Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte a simple way, to get out of the continuous impasse in the migrant crisis: propose to our European and Atlantic "partners" a declaration of condemnation of the Anglo-military intervention. French-American in Libya in 2011 - including a request for international investigations into the murder of Muhammar Gaddafi and his most influential sons -, the repeated attempts by private companies and public agencies of those countries to exploit the mineral resources of Libya, the repeated interventions of Qatar and Turkey in support of Islamists - always in Libya and always with the complicity of these three countries, in particular the French - and, finally, of the dispossession policies implemented above all by Paris in the dark continent. This declaration should be endorsed by NATO and the European Union. In exchange, Italy would act as a sponge, as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Turkey does at the price of many billions of euros paid by the European Commission. We would even do it for free at this point.

The reader believes that the answer would be different from a complete willingness of the dear old Western powers to invest in our security, to divide up or repatriate a couple of hundreds of refugees and economic immigrants and to stabilize Libya because it does not disturb us much. ?