The C.I.A. gave money to the Liberal Democratic Party and its members in the 1950’s and the 1960’s, to gather intelligence on Japan, make the country a bulwark against Communism in Asia and undermine the Japanese left, said retired intelligence officials and former diplomats. Since then, the C.I.A. has dropped its covert financial aid and focused instead on gathering inside information on Japan’s party politics and positions in trade and treaty talks, retired intelligence officers said.
The Liberal Democrats’ 38 years of one-party governance ended last year [in 1993] when they fell from power after a series of corruption cases – many involving secret cash contributions. Still the largest party in Japan’s parliament, they formed an awkward coalition in June with their old cold war enemies, the Socialists – the party that the C.I.A.’s aid aimed in part to undermine.
Though the C.I.A.’s financial role in Japanese politics has long been suspected by historians and journalists, the Liberal Democrats have always denied it existed, and the breadth and depth of the support has never been detailed publicly. Disclosure of the covert aid could open old wounds and harm the Liberal Democrats’ credibility as an independent voice for Japanese interests. The subject of spying between allies has always been sensitive.
“Marxism – from Marx’s
early writings onward – always understood human freedom as a universal
objective. Human slavery and the degradation of human beings into wage slavery
awoke in Marx his prophetic indignation. One of Marx’s most famous passages
in Capital (1867) pointed out that the ‘rosy dawn of the era of capitalist
production’ should not be found in the antiseptic bank or factory. The origin of
capitalism had to be found – among other processes – in ‘the extirpation,
enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the
beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa
into a warren for the commercial hunting of Black skins’. Capitalism grew and
was sustained by the degradation of humanity.”
“But my Marxist outlook pointed out to me with an illuminating clarity that women’s liberation could take place only as the result of the victory of a new social order and a different economic system.“
