Shinzo Abe Deserves Better Than a Hashtag Eulogy

No sooner had the former prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, died than partisans sought to whittle his life into shivs for America’s gun-control debate, denying him the eulogy he deserved.Some sneered that he had golfed with President Trump. Others touted his friendship with President Obama. CBS News called him a “polarizing … right-wing nationalist.” AP labeled him a “divisive arch-conservative” in its photo captions and wire stories. Outlets worldwide reprinted the description; NPR tweeted it. Lost in spin was that Abe backed America, regardless of the party in the White House.Rather than stick to condolences and praising Abe as a rare ally anxious to carry more of our defense burden, President Biden crammed the latest trending topic into his official statement.“[W]e know,” he said, “that violent attacks are never acceptable and that gun violence always leaves a deep scar on the communities that are affected by it.”The line put Abe’s death on par with someone gunned down in a bodega robbery or a schoolyard dispute over Pogs. Yet this was no random act of violence shocking a neighborhood.Abe — Japan’s longest-serving prime minister — was targeted, which is why the word “assassination” exists, to distinguish a crime like this from other homicides. Had Abe died of cardiac arrest, would Mr. Biden have given a shoutout to Americans battling heart disease, or stuck to the man rather than the method of mortality?In that case, Mr. Biden might have used that space to praise the success of free-market “Abenomics” and cited Abe’s toughness on North Korea and his efforts to strengthen ties with trade partners in the Pacific.The president of Free China, Tsai Ing-wen, had a more appropriate statement. “Not only has the international community lost an important leader,” the Taiwanese leader said of Abe, “but Taiwan has also lost an important and close friend.” Those legacies — not divisive, but unifying — will endure as topics on cable news, as will Abe’s push to reform Japan’s pacifist constitution to allow it to take a larger role in countering military threats. That posture was aimed at Communist China, where many social media users erupted in glee over Abe’s assassination. One even offered to send the killer money, before Beijing pulled the plug.Here in the West, the social taboo against speaking ill of the dead is long buried, too, with various left-wing news outlets one-upping AP, describing Abe as “controversial,” a “nationalist,” and a “right-wing militarist.”These insults flowed even as the man — still among Japan’s most powerful as a member of its legislature — lay in the hospital fighting for his life and then on a table in the morgue.Rather than refreshing their Twitter feeds for news of Abe’s condition, partisans scoured the internet for details of the assassin’s race, creed, and politics in seeking to hone their responses.Once a key detail emerged — the assassin used a homemade firearm — commentators settled on a common narrative; the hashtag brigades pounced. Leftists applied the term “ghost gun,” which they coined for occasions just such as this. The right countered that the assassin cobbling together the weapon proved the futility of trying to disarm evil men.That Japan is a nation with some of the world’s strictest gun-control laws brought jeers, while others bashed America by comparing deaths per capita from firearms. Everyone had something to give a little razzle-dazzle to their next tweet, column, or political harangue. As the posts flowed, the spotlight shifted from the martyr lying broken at center stage.When I speak to historians, I tell them that I don’t want to let someone like President Lincoln be defined by his assassination, to let the muzzle flash blind me to their legacy.Killers can only erase great statesmen if we let them, and if we fail to push back against those who would stuff them into narrative boxes or reduce their deaths to statistics.Shinzo Abe earned a far greater place in history than that by leaving his nation and our world a better place than he found it. That epitaph may never trend on Twitter, but it will endure longer and mean more than any hashtag ever could.

Shinzo Abe Deserves Better Than a Hashtag Eulogy

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