One of the “wonders” of the modern United States is that you can just say any old shit and get away with it:
Bonafide patriot woman and “Fox & Friends” middle-seat host Ainsley Earhardt made an oopsie during a Thursday morning rallying cry for America when she made reference to the never-existent “communist Japan.”
[…]
“You know, we defeated communist Japan, radical Islamists. We ask our men and women to go overseas to fight for our country and sacrifice so much for our country so we can be the land of the free, the land of the brave,” the host said.
This is an example of a very prevalent phenomenon here in the United States, and from what I’ve seen the rest of the world, where people feel free to talk authoritatively about shit they know nothing about.
I’m currently reading a book on the history of Japan from the Meiji Restoration to modern times. I just got to the beginning of World War II. Although I was vaguely familiar with this aspect of Japanese history, after reading the chapters dealing with the 1920s through the 1930s I now understand just how anti-communist the Japanese government was at that time (and that attitude didn’t stop in the 1940s). This doesn’t surprise me since the Japanese government at the time was strongly focused on the emperor and communists hate emperors (the name specifically, they prefer the term chairman or premier).
Now that I’ve read that part of the book and have familiarity with the topic, I won’t shy away from talking about it. However, before that I would have shied away from talking about the Japanese government at that time because I wasn’t very familiar with it and I try to avoid talking authoritatively about things that I’m not familiar with. I also feel that I’m in the minority when it comes to that.