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Published: March 1st 2012
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A common denominator of Japan and China is leadership that denies shameful moments in history.
Japanese leaders Ishihara and Nagoya remind me of two museums I visited on my trip to Harbin in 2009.
The Germ Warfare Museum and the
Harbin Jewish Museum offer two separate accounts of the Second World War within the same city.
Harbin, China's Ice Festival town bordering Siberia once had a thriving Jewish Community. In 1937 the Japanese Army set up a prison camp for experimental torture similar to Joseph Mengele's work in
Auschwitz. All the while it appears that Harbin's Jewish hybrid looked the other way. Was there any mutual support? What are the lessons learned?
Last week Tokyo's Governor
Shintaro Ishihara, joined the ranks of renound Holocaust denier
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by supporting
Nagoya Takashi's claim that the
1937 Nanjing massacre did not occur. This is beyond a slip of the tongue, considering that this is probably the worst time in history to offend Beijing.
Japan's bigoted elderly statesmen did not consider the repurcussions of alienating the world's second largest economy. Japan depends on Chinese consumerism just like every other nation since 2008. Chinese kids love
hello kitty , and learn about sex through illegally downloaded Japanese porn. Denying the Nanjing massacre is even
more distrespectful considering that last year the CCP donated millions in aid after Japan's
2011 Earthquake .
This would be a perfect time for Japanese leaders to offer a public appology for the actions in the Second World War. However, it's hypocritical of Beijing's leaders to ask Japan for an appology without publicly admitting shameful events: I.E.
Great Leap Forward,
Cultural Revolution and
1989. Japan serves at the perfect scapegoat for China's unresolved internal problems. However, these are not the only nations with skeletons in their closets.
Americans find it hard discussing the assassination Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-languageƐ mso-fareast-languageƐ mso-bidi-languageƐ}of
Salvadore Allende ,
Wounded Knee, or the recent
censorship of wikileaks and supression of Iraq War whistle blower
Bradley Manning. Apologizing was the forte of Bill Clinton who asked forgiveness for the
Tuskegee experiments in 1997
bombed Kosovo two years later (the 90s were a fascinating time).
Ishikara and Nagoya are no doubt motivated by the recent success of the film
Flowers of War, which gives a very sugar spin on the Nanjing Massacre. The movie provides a definitive here and villain. History for people who don't enjoy thinking. A fluffy-boy band esc. version of
Shindlers List meets
Hotel Ruwanda pity part- that children and adults can watch together. Perfect for Mainland and US audiences. The film's success shows that living in a Chinese Century means that westerners must abandon the illusion that The Second World War began
1941.
This week Chinese Media outlets have made an effort to valorize the late American historian
Iris Chang , who's research in the mid-1990s brought the attention of the Nanjing Massacre to the west. Today
Yahoo China published some of the more gruesome photos of the event. Though anyone who actually read the book knows that Chang not only faults Japan alone.
Iris Chang argued that the
Kowmingtan deliberately locked Nanjing's city walls allowing the a month of rape and torture to happen; afraid of the inevitable rise of the Communist Party. This doesn't sit well with conservative Taiwanese and explains why Mao Zedong is still regarded by rural mainlanders as God-like.
As human beings we rank the importance of tragic events by the status of the victims. If we look at massacres in recent human history such as
Bosnia ,
Cambodia ,
Kurdistan, or
Sudan and the one with the most attention shows what part of the world were living in. If the word "genocide" is equated with the Nazi Holocaust you're probably living in the United States.
Globalization, has forced nations to depend on each other for trade and sharing of information, but it has not changed the world's self-righteous and narrow view of history.
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