With the failure of the Democratic establishment, the crisis of liberal democracy is now seized by a new rise of power. The US empire with Trump as commander-in-chief has renewed its vow toward colonial domination. With nationalism and militarism in full swing, Trump’s America aims to radically alter the future of this country. His campaign slogan “make America great again” was a kind of historical revisionism, ignoring the deep oppression and inequality that runs beneath this nation’s history. From mass murder in the Middle East and the chaos of Libya to the destruction of Syria, along with conflicts with Russia and now tension with North Korea, the appetite of warmongering American expansionism never seems to end.
A similar trend is happening with US ally, Japan. As North Korea’s repeated missile tests threaten stability in the Pacific region, there is increasing pressure toward remilitarization. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe aggressively pushes to revise the country’s pacifist constitution established in post-WWII world that called for the complete renunciation of war. Such move appears to be a politically driven ambition to bring the nation back to the pre-war imperial Japan. The ultra right-wing engages in a reinterpretation of the past in efforts to make Japan “beautiful” again. They aim to erase the country’s wartime atrocities in neighboring countries in Asia, by replacing the conquest of the past with a narrative of heroism,…