TOKYO — “Albert Speer’s Grandson Addresses Joint Session Of Congress.”
Can you imagine that headline? I can’t either, particularly if Speer’s grandson had devoted much of his life to rehabilitating his grandfather’s image, was on record as being sympathetic to Holocaust deniers and had used his political base among Germany’s neo-Nazis as the springboard to secure the prime ministership.
Had Speer III, on reaching office, launched a systematic campaign to intimidate and silence media critics, appointed an education minister intent on deleting all references to Kristallnacht and the invasions of Poland and Russia from school textbooks, and begun spearheading an effort to replace the postwar German constitution with a new document that would gut protections for freedom of speech and association while lifting restrictions on deployment overseas of the Bundeswehr, one might have an even harder time picturing John Kerry hosting a private dinner for him at his home in Boston or Barack Obama giving him a personal guided tour of the Lincoln Memorial.
Yet this is pretty much what happened last week, except that the prime minister in question was not the fictional grandson of the Minister of Armaments and War Production for the Third Reich, but the actual grandson of the Japanese Minister of Munitions in the wartime cabinet of Hideki Tojo.
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