OSS report on Imperial Japan and Islam, the Caucases, Turkistan

no takers?

perhaps people are still reading

File: 09+-+Eurasia+by+Mackinder.jpg (59KB, 480x302px) Image search: [Google]

59KB, 480x302px

Surround Russia

bump?

perhaps I should try pol

This might be fascinating for you but all this was open knowledge to the worlds intelligence agency. You can probably find more thorough reports from British and Russian intelligence because the OSS was a 3rd rate intelligence service.

>>1644873

there is still a lot of info from the intelligence community that is now declassified but has not reached us commoners

google only yields so many results

i get the OSS wasn't top of the line, but still, this is a legitimate source that people will take seriously

are your former?

>>1644768
Gonna read this tonight OP. This may be slow, but you'll get better response than pol.

It's very interesting, but /his/ is a slow board. You don't need to bump too often, people will see it eventually. Try posting it on /pol/ for faster discussion.

>>1644398
This is nothing new. The report, written near 1938, certainly before Pearl Harbor and Japanese attacks on Western positions in Asia, is almost sensationalist in its writing, I thought. Japan before the war was very sensitive about its appearance as a modern nation, on par with the west. They would tote their Constitutional promises of religious freedom - and in this example, doing so by the opening of the mosques in Tokyo and Kobe despite Islam being an extremely minority religion - but in reality, State Shinto was enforced on the populace under the guise of a custom or folkway. The Emperor as a divine being had immense emotional power, and the deification of war dead at Yasukuni and other shrines only further indoctrinated the populace to nationalism and mobilized them towards the war effort. In this way, I think the author of the document misinterpreted the "higher" nature of Shinto as its "flexibility". Another part of Japan's modern image was helped by an orientalist movement undertaken by Japanese academics, who visited the Asian mainland for a variety of reasons, which included the cataloging of religions - a sort of intellectual good will tour, if you will. The article cites one such example, that of Aruga around 1894-95, however, I know similar trips were taken by other scholars to Theravada and Tibetan Buddhist communities.
I'm sure you're aware of Imperial Japan's infamous "Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere". This rhetoric was used to aid their expansionism within East Asia, and theoretically to rouse native populations to help in their conquests. That is what their appeal to Islam seeks to advance, which the author was correct about: a feeling of solidarity that would make them perhaps open to Japanese invaders. Remember the quagmire Japan found itself in with China; by 1938 it isn't surprising that they're appealing to Muslims, many of which own oil rich lands. The Dutch East Indies, which was to be seized by the Japanese, also has (1/2)

>>1645588
significant Muslim populations. Unfortunately for the Japanese higher ups, the japanocentric emotions instilled by the State Shinto system led to the ineffectiveness of their Co-Prosperity Sphere rhetoric. They treated their possessions like shit and their soldiers committed rampant war crimes.
>tl;dr
The author of the document ultimately focuses too much on Islam and makes a mountain out of a molehill. I also found his assumption of Muslim solidarity, over all other world religions, to be faulty. He very obviously spins a narrative; he heavily implies Adbul Kerim was assassinated in the USA by the Japanese. Truth was, the dude shot himself because he barely had a penny to his name by the time he got to the states.
I was going to make a whole scholarly response, quoting the document and citing sources and shit, but I'm very tired.

>>1645611

What I found most interesting was the greater geopolltics with Russia in the aftermath of the Russo Japanese War, which did include butting heads in Asia mainland Manchuria, and a desire to support seperatist movements in the caucuses, which was a common goal of the Promethians in Poland