On the question of America entering the war I shall say this. People argue that America is a democracy, America has the White House. I say: slavery was abolished there half a century ago. The anti-slave war ended in 1865. Since then multimillionaires have mushroomed. They have the whole of America in their financial grip. They are making ready to subdue Mexico and will inevitably come to war with Japan over a carve-up of the Pacific. This war has been brewing for several decades. All literature speaks about it. America’s real aim in entering the war is to prepare for this future war with Japan. The American people do enjoy considerable freedom and it is difficult to conceive them standing for compulsory military service, for the setting up of an army pursuing any aims of conquest a struggle with Japan, for instance. The Americans have the example of Europe to show them what this leads to. The American capitalists have stepped into this war in order to have an excuse, behind a smoke-screen of lofty ideals championing the rights of small nations, for building up a strong standing army.
- Lenin, “War and Revolution”, 14 may 1917
I seen both here and on reddit that some people seems to have wrong impressions about the origins of Pacific War. So here’s the short quote of Lenin predicting it and attributing it solely to the natural developemnt of imperialism (described elswhere in the same article), almost quarter of century before it even started. As you can see, everything went exactly like he predicted.
In many ways this IMO does parallel Nazi Germany, with how the rough peace terms following WW1 led to Germany being forced to make a choice between socialism, fascism, or being an impoverished vassal. I wonder if socialism could have been a choice for the Japanese, too?
Not a chance. Just look at how the power changed hands during the Meiji revolution - aristocracy got literally abolished by law and the resistance wasn’t even much. Question is, who exactly was behind that move so it passed so easily unlike in Europe? I mean of course it was bourgeoisie and the progressive part of aristocracy but for that change to be so radical the power of bourgeoisie, despite legally being second lowest caste, was overwhelming at the time. And the feudal aristocracy was so incredibly rotten that only like 1% of them really participated in the strife of bakumatsu era.
Then we have another feature of bourgeoisie power that Lenin mentioned multiple times when commenting on the february revolution Lvov government - not only bourgeoisie needs to be dragged to power by the radicals of other classes (in Russia it was proletariat in 1905 and 1917, and in more backwards Japan it was radical part of aristocracy*), but it tends to get backwards to monarchy - like Lvov flirted with Romanovs and Japanese installed new aristocracy modelled after european.
Question about socialism here is “who would fight for it?” back then. Answer is, no one. Proletariat obviously didn’t exist in primitive feudal country, and peasants were hoplessly backward serfs - to illustrate this, the example of radical peasant movement that existed in the period was… Shinsengumi - the peasants who shat on the caste system, broke the law but instead of seeking liberation they became the death squad for the shogunate - opressed had only the ambition to became the opressors (and chosen the losing side).
*Again, strikingly similar to how Lenin describe the three revolutionary periods in Russia when the leading class changed - the nobles, the intelligence and the proletariat. Japan got their bourgeois revolution between first and second period, while Russia was firmly in the third one for all three revolutions of 1905 and 1917.