Saturday, April 28, 2007

 

Apologies & Global Dimming

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was in Washington last week. A focus of many of the news stories has been on the (in)sufficency of his country's apologies "for Japan's wartime exploitation of foreign women as military prostitutes." The US House of Representatives is working on a "resolution to demand another formal apology from Japan to the so-called comfort women."

The Chinese and Koreans have every right to pursue this matter but American politicians ought to shut their mouths until the US apologizes for using the nuclear weapons that killed 155,000 to 214,000 people, mostly Japanese civilians, in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Admiral William D. Leahy said:
It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.
And where is the US apology for the prostitution that is to this day endemic at many overseas US military bases, including Okinawa, Japan? To learn more about the impact of such prostitution in the Philippines, see "Campaign Against The Return Of Military Prostitution."

While we're on the subject of apologies, it turns out that the droughts that triggered, but did not cause, the famines in sub-Saharan with their millions of victims in the 1970s and 80s may have been caused by the pollution of industrialized nations, mostly in Europe and North America. According to the PBS documentary film, Dimming the Sun (watch trailer here), the pollution probably resulted in a cooling effect that caused the African monsoon rains to fail.

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Comments:
COMFORT WOMEN ISSUE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9VFiNPe4do

Korean Newspaper Ads for “Comfort Women,” 1944
http://www.occidentalism.org/?p=527

Comfort woman gives contradictory testimony
http://www.occidentalism.org/?p=531
 
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