Herbert can be a windbag and a broken record, but today he’s neither. This is a scary column.

The Tyranny of Fear
By BOB HERBERT
Published: August 17, 2006

Abdallah Higazy was on the phone from Cairo. ‘To describe it as frustrating would be an understatement,’ he said, ‘because you know you’re telling the truth. And you know the people speaking to you have incorrect information about you.’

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Higazy, the son of a former Egyptian diplomat, was in a room on the 51st floor of the Millenium Hilton Hotel, directly across the street from the World Trade Center. He was a student at the time, having won a scholarship to study computer engineering at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn. The Institute of International Education had arranged for him to stay at the hotel while he looked for permanent housing.

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That should be the name of this newly discovered blog, which I can promise you’ll all find well worth a glance. The writer is an actual China Daily editor, and he’s definitely got style. (Scroll down past the football post to get to the China stuff. You won’t be disappointed.)

A Chinese journalist expresses his anxiety over China’s controversial SARFT regulations. He expresses it very well. Don’t miss it.

I plan to phase out the NYT columns, offerin gonly the ones I think are indispensable. Like this one.

Big Talk, Little Will
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: August 16, 2006

The defeat of Senator Joe Lieberman by the upstart antiwar Democrat Ned Lamont has sparked a firestorm of debate about the direction of the Democratic Party. My own heart is with those Democrats who worry that just calling for a pullout from Iraq, while it may be necessary, is not a sufficient response to the biggest threat to open societies today – violent, radical Islam. Unless Democrats persuade voters – in the gut – that they understand this larger challenge, it’s going to be hard for them to win the presidency.

That said, though, the Democratic mainstream is nowhere near as dovish as critics depict. Truth be told, some of the most constructive, on-the-money criticism over the past three years about how to rescue Iraq or improve the broader ‘war on terrorism’ has come from Democrats, like Joe Biden, Carl Levin, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Bill Clinton.

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Japan is famous for turning a blind eye to the sins it committed against innocent and helpless Chinese civilians during WWII, so it’s interesting to read about a new Japanese movie that explores the topic with merciless honesty. Even more interesting is the fact that so many Japanese are flocking to see it.

On the 61st anniversary of Japan’s defeat in World War II, wider discussion of the conflict’s meaning to the nation is still controversial – and avoided.

But in a handful of theaters in Japan, “The Ants,” a recently released documentary about Japanese troops left in China after the war, is an attempt to remind Japanese of war memories many would rather not acknowledge.

The film, showing at theaters in Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya, has not gotten the national release and media blitz of war films that have taken a more nationalist tack. But it has played to packed theaters, prompting managers to add more showings.

From politicians to the major media, many here shrug off war memories, something that has cast a profound chill over Japan’s relations with neighbors that it once occupied. In anticipation of today’s anniversary, South Korea warned Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi not to visit Tokyo’s controversial Yasukuni war shrine, where war criminals are memorialized. Protesters in Tokyo seconded that sentiment.

Some Japanese say their country has apologized for wartime atrocities and should not have to continue to do so. But amid rising nationalism and ongoing controversies over how Japan represents its history in textbooks, those apologies “lack substance,” charges Yoshifumi Tawara, of Children and Textbooks Japan Network 21 in Tokyo. “They don’t get the impression that Japan offered an apology.”

This intriguing article focuses on a Japanese soldier who, with his comrades, was ordred to stay and fight against the Chinese even after the war was over. He describes his own murder of Chinese civilians, remarking, “We were turned into a so-called killing machine. I want to reveal how the military deprived us of our rational nature.”

Quite a horror story. Whether this will generate a shift in the consciousness of the Japanese at a time when many appear increasingly under a nationalistic spell is doubtful, but it’s good to see that some have the courage to demand the truth. For all the terrible things about democracies like Japan and the US (and most developed democratic nations), it’s infinitely cool that they have the freedom to hold the mirror up to their own governments and expose the warts.

Hey, I’m not making this up:

THE rapid spread of Western business practices in Japan has caused widespread mental illness and is responsible for a deepening demographic crisis, government officials say.

Statistics indicate that 60 per cent of workers suffer from ‘high anxiety’ and that 65 per cent of companies report soaring levels of mental illness.

Meanwhile, the size of the Japanese population is shrinking, and for the first time the Government has acknowledged that the falling birth rate is linked to job-related factors. Directors of the Japanese Mental Health Institute blame the same factors for rising levels of depression among workers and the country’s suicide rate, which remains the highest among rich nations.

Merit-based pay and promotion are of particular concern because they are at odds with the traditional system, built on seniority, that has reigned supreme in corporate Japan. In the harsh new atmosphere of cut-throat rivalry between workers, the Institute for Population and Social Security argues, young people do not feel financially stable enough to start families.

I can truly understand the Japanese workers’ concerns. For a developed nation, the American workplace – with its two weeks paid vacations, niggardly minimum wage, almost no national holidays and generally cut-throat, paranoid atmosphere – is appallingly heartless. To suddenly superimpose the “values” of the American workplace on any country, let alone one that has a long and cherished tradition of treating workers as part of a closely connected family — well, how could they not freak out? I’m all for being lean and mean and competitive. But the American model totally sucks unless you’re up at the tippy-top, and I hate to think that this is becoming the model for the entire world.

Via yet another site that I don’t get to often enough.

Last week in America, I read with amazement but not total shock (nothing about China – or the Bush administration – can totally shock me anymore) about the Chinese government holding an auction for the rights to hunt animals on the country’s endangered/protected species lists. The Chinese Internet went wild (justifiably so) and the plan was shelved. It was one of those stories that was so odd I couldn’t quite believe it, and I decided to leave it alone.

Luckily, another blogger wrote it up in a post that indicates we may have in our midst a supremely talented and insightful English-writing Chinese blogger whose style is almost as caustic as my own. This is a small snippet:

This is yet another perfect example of an unbelievably stupid government policy getting ripped into pieces by the Internet masses and on popular media, with the mandarins backing down shame-faced in the end. The difference is, this time around the skepticism and criticism is almost unanimous: At this very moment, CCTV is running an interactive news commentary program, “discussing” but mostly condemning it. Indeed, it’s almost a textbook case of bureaucratic incompetence with factors offensive to every actively outspoken group on the Internet:

To environmentalists and animal rights sympathizers: putting up some of our rarest animals to be gunned down, for a price? Are you f****** kidding me? And to be done by the Ministry of Forestry, the governent agency supposed to be protecting them? What kind of a world am I living in?

To nationalists: the bidding is open only to foreigners? What the hell? Like my RMB doesn’t smell as sweet as your US dollars even though mine is appreciating, under “international pressure”? Like we are going to tolerate foreigners (Americans, NRA members, probably; oh, and don’t even get me started on the Japanese!) with their big guns roaming free on OUR land, slaughtering OUR animals?

To the not rich and cynical: so, if you’re filthy rich enough, you can kill whatever you want. And the more you pay, the bigger and rarer the prey. So am I gonna become your game one day if you can pay the price?

The last paragraph of the post, which I’m not copying here, is the funniest. Go read the whole thing. And special thanks to Lisa for writing about this.

Definitely a new addition for my blogroll. There is a lot of superb stuff on this blog. Just keep scrolling.

There’s one sector of the Chinese economy which, under Hu, is virtually guaranteed to grow and prosper, and this blog offers compelling evidence as to why it’s a good bet for investors. Of course, what it says about China is another matter, but we’re talking strictly business here, not politics.

Aiding Our Enemies
By BOB HERBERT
Published: August 14, 2006

‘Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.’

– George Santayana

Here we go again.

I wonder if Americans will continue to fall for the political exploitation of their fears of terrorism, or if voters will begin to show some awareness of the fact that they have been cynically manipulated, and that our current policies have been disastrously counterproductive.

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On target.

Hoping for Fear
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 14, 2006

Just two days after 9/11, I learned from Congressional staffers that Republicans on Capitol Hill were already exploiting the atrocity, trying to use it to push through tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. I wrote about the subject the next day, warning that ‘politicians who wrap themselves in the flag while relentlessly pursuing their usual partisan agenda are not true patriots.’

The response from readers was furious – fury not at the politicians but at me, for suggesting that such an outrage was even possible. ‘How can I say that to my young son?’ demanded one angry correspondent.

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