Let ye who is without sin cast the first stone…
Josh Hong
Amidst the flurry of anti-Japanese protests across China over Japan’s new history text books that gloss over the nation’s militarist past in recent days, a friend of mine asked, ‘Would any nation be forthright in telling the world about its darkest past?’
‘Fat chance.’ I said without a second thought.
The latest effort by Tokyo to whitewash the war crimes of the Imperial Army against much of Asia is indeed deplorable and despicable. With many of the victim countries still reeling from one of the most savage wars waged by an Asian nation against its neighbours, the recalcitrance of the Koizumi government - from the controversial visits to the Yasukuni Shrine to the revision of history – will only make Japan’s path to become a normal country strewn with greater distrusts and perils.
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Asians, especially Koreans and Chinese, can certainly be pardoned for having gone berserk with grief over Japan. For the surviving and aging comfort women, time is running out. What is most bizarre and unfathomable is that, while the Korean government is doing its best to help the Koreans fight their cases in Japan’s judicial courts, the Chinese Communist Party, eager to be seen as the Mother of Patriotism, is conveniently standing aside.
It is reported that the municipal authorities of Nanjing, where the Nanjing Massacre took place, have planned to demolish the largest and best-preserved prostitution quarters once frequented by Japanese soldiers during WWII, rubbing salt into the wounds of the dying comfort women there
And one can forget about the Europeans, for many of their national psyches are shaped by Nazism, the Holocaust and, needless to say, the ultimate victory over Nazi Germany. For countries like France and the United Kingdom, Adolf Hitler was only second to Satan. Ian Buruma, the author of The Wages of Guilt, would even dismiss any comparison between the Fuehrer and Emperor Hirohito.
To take their campaign up a notch, Chinese around the world have been mobilizing netizens to petition against Japan’s proposed permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on account of Tokyo’s whitewashing history as well as its refusal to apologise for its past war crimes.
Suffice it to say that the UNSC is a reward mechanism for the five powers that emerged out of their Pyrrhic victory in World War II. Having defeated Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and militarist Japan, they unashamedly clad themselves in glorious robes, and congratulated each other as ‘permanent members’ of the UNSC.
Oblivious to the fact that nations rise and perish, while empires arrive and depart, these five powers have clearly chosen to believe in their invincibility over the law of mortality and their ability to bring the vicissitudes in world history to a halt, all by declaring themselves ‘permanent’.
It’s not Japan only
One may be incensed to hear this, but Japan is not alone in refusing to show remorse for its past. If one is bent on denying Japan’s bid for a permanent seat on the UNSC, citing the oft-repeated reasons of inadequate contrition and historical whitewash is simply not enough.
Why? Because all the five powers that have been sitting comfortably on the UNSC since 1945 have all got blood on their hands, and the only problem is that none of them has manifested an iota of willingness to admit it.
The US, for one, was already a practitioner of biological warfare even when the country was still in its nascency. Lord Jeffrey Amherst, the British commander-in-chief for America, tarnished his own name after reports of smallpox-infected blankets being used as germ warfare against American Indians came to light. Not only have the successive US administrations been silent on the issue, many towns across the US are still named after Amherst, to the chagrin of the (remaining) native Americans.
The US went on to bag the Philippines after a bloody war with the Spaniards, and what is missing from most of the US history books is that 600,000 innocent lives were lost on the Luzon island alone, an act praised by Theodore Roosevelt as “for civilization over the black chaos of savagery and barbarism.”
Fast forward to the twentieth century. During the Vietnam War, 20 million gallons of Agent Orange were used by the Americans to exact ultimate toll of casualties. (Many Chinese have been complaining about the indifference of the world community towards the suffering of the Chinese nation under Japanese brutality. I wonder how much solidarity have the Chinese communities worldwide shown to the Vietnamese when it comes to US war crimes.)
Next comes the demised Soviet Union. It was a gargantuan state born out of invasion and conquest, beginning with the annexation of Belarus, Georgia and Ukraine, and ending with the relatively short-lived occupation of Afghanistan. At the height of the Soviet Empire, human rights were utterly disregarded, while gulags and political purges were commonplace. In those days, one must be deemed insane to call for an expulsion of the USSR from the UNSC.
With the ‘evil’ empire now consigned to history, Russia’s human rights records still leave much to be desired. Given Moscow’s high-handedness towards the peoples in Dagestan and Chechnya, surely one would hear of the righteous roar for Russia to be disqualified as a permanent UNSC member? But that is not forthcoming.
I always regard French as one of the most beautiful languages on earth, but the same cannot be said of French colonialism, which was plain ugly and deadly. President Jacques Chirac should indeed be commended for offering a sincere apology to the Algerians for the terrible war of 1960-61 that claimed no fewer than 250,000 innocent Algerian lives, but nothing has been said by the French about a famine of the early 1940s in northern Vietnam that rendered two million people dead, as rice was being forcibly exported to help sustain the war waged by the French against fascism in Europe.
The British may have created the biggest and the greatest empire in human history, but the imperial glory was brought about at the expense of the colonised and still tainted with blood. Tony Blair, in haste to mend fences with Ireland, once apologised on behalf of the UK to the Irish for the Potato Famine but he refused to be drawn on whether similar remorse should be expressed for the horrible opium trade initiated by the British that effectively made China a sickman of Asia.
(To be fair with Blair, the same Chinese communists that have been scoring political points by acting tough with Japan over the WWII issue are conspicuously quiet when history textbooks in the UK have long portrayed the two Opium Wars as a conflict over ‘trade interests’. Koizumi must have been feeling so jealous and hard done by.)
Or can anyone confirm if Queen Elizabeth II has ever expressed her deepest regret over the Amritsar Massacre in 1919?
The communist liar
And the crime list will not be complete without mentioning China. The Japanese have clearly been shameless in attempting to airbrush the darkest hours of their nation’s history. But if Premier Wen Jiabao, who sternly reminded his Japanese counterpart to ‘face up to history’ on the back of the rising anti-Japanese sentiments at home, is to look deep into the mirror, he may not quite like what he sees.
For the greatest liar in modern Chinese history is none other than the communists themselves. To consolidate their position as the nation’s saviour, history books of modern China have long sleeked over the role played by the Kuomintang in fighting against the Japanese between 1937 and 1945.
While the Chinese people do genuinely deserve a Nanjing Massacre Museum to commemorate the victims of Japanese aggression, a decades-long campaign to demand for a Cultural Revolution Museum has been snubbed by the authorities many times over. From the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution to the Tiananmen Massacre that transfixed the entire world, it is estimated that the number of unnatural deaths during the five decades of communist rule stands anywhere between 80 and 90 millions, and still counting. Not a word of apology from Beijing has been heard so far.
In 1959, Beijing sent troops into Tibet, then an independent state, with a view to gaining full control over it, claiming up to 87,000 Tibetan lives, a figure that even the Chinese authorities do not dispute. Down through the years, this aggression has been known as a ‘peaceful liberation’. Talk to any Han Chinese about the bestial act of the communists, he or she would be quick to deny it, in a way not too dissimilar from a right-wing Japanese politician seeking to refute the Nanjing Massacre.
And there is nothing new under the sun. It is estimated that Japan’s notorious Unit 731 killed more than 300,000 Chinese civilians between 1938 and 1945, and one would expect China, as the chief victim of Japanese invasion, to learn from this gruesome crime against humanity. Sadly, this is not to be.
In Malan (which is nowhere to be found on any official map of China), near the renowned Bosten Lake in Xinjiang, is located a secret nuclear base, which is barely 10 km from a Mongolian and Uighur settlement. The residents there have been suffering from hair loss and skin diseases, and the chances of women giving birth to deformed babies are high, all thanks to the series of nuclear tests conducted by the Beijing authorities. Dr Ken Alibek, a Soviet expert on biological warfare, who later defected to the US, reveals in his book Biohazard that Beijing has been carrying out germ tests in the area since the 1980s.
Should one think Japan is alone in distorting news and information, think again.
Closer to home, it is the democratic right of Chinese Malaysians to air their anger and frustration over Japan’s tactless and shameless diplomatic moves in recent months. But it cannot be more puzzling to see the same Chinese community leaders in Johor Baru, who were brave enough to burn an effigy of a Japanese Imperial soldier in protest, choosing to gloss over Beijing’s appalling human rights records.
And where are their voices when the Alliance, later Barisan Nasional, government has been whitewashing the contribution of the Chinese Malayans in fighting against the Japanese invaders and hastening the withdrawal of the British colonialists in Malaya? In short, save for a handful of Chinese organisations such as the Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall and Dong Jiao Zong, any public expression of indignation by many of the so-called community leaders is paltry and selective at best, so long as it does not hurt their business interests.
There is one more issue that concerns the Chinese in Malaysia, which is about the honokin (contribution fund) paid to Imperial Japan under duress. No doubt, any victim of coercion is entitled to seek redress and reparation, but to deny Japan’s bid for a permanent seat of the UNSC on this ground, one must also call for the expulsion of the UK, for innocent Chinese lives too were lost during the “Communist Insurgency”. According to Mark Curtis of the Guardian, the British ‘were given a free rein in Malaya’.
I do not dismiss that the wrath of the Chinese in China and the Chinese in Malaysia is genuine and legitimate. In the case of China, the fact that the Chinese people have allowed their nationalist sentiments to be manipulated by the authorities is worrying. It is clear to all that Beijing will only permit public protests if they serve their interests.
After all, one would be lucky to stand in Tiananmen Square with an anti-government banner in hands for just one minute. And Beijing is still haunted by the huge costs that it paid for sending troops and tanks into the square in the summer of 1989, and hence bent on nipping any dissent in the bud. The connivance of the Communist Party in the series of anti-Japanese protests therefore only reeks of political agenda.
There could be scores of reasons for one to oppose Japan’s being given a permanent seat on the UNSC, but the arguments of Chinese the world over in this respect are simply made of clay. It I were to employ the same yardstick, none of the current five permanent members – plus Japan - will be able to pass the test. That would leave the three other bidders – Brazil, Germany and India – happily in the race, and probably proudly and joyously entering the club in the end.
