[source]
London, November 29, 2003
David Irving
comments: Fisk --
one of the greats MEET Robert Fisk
-- consistently one of the world's
greatest and bravest writers. Unlikely to
win the Noble Prize for Literature or any
other "meaningful" award; but able, I make
so bold as to say, to sleep with his
conscience untroubled each night.
A few months ago
he spoke at a university in the United
States. No US newspaper (to my knowledge)
carries his despatches, and yet over a
thousand students turned up to meet and
hear the British journalist in person.
What does that tell us about
the growing might of the Internet? And
about why the traditional enemy is taking
frantic steps to control it? |
The
lies we tell our enemies who are now our friends
Tricky Stuff,
Evil by Robert Fisk WHEN George Bush sneaked
into Baghdad airport for his two-hour "warm meal"
for Thanksgiving, he was in feisty form. Americans
hadn't come to Baghdad "to retreat before a bunch
of thugs and assassins". Evil is still around, it seems,
ready to attack the forces of Good. And if only a
handful of the insurgents in Iraq are ex-Baathists
- and I suspect it is only a handful - then who
would complain if Saddam's henchmen are called
"thugs"? But Evil's a tricky thing. Here one day,
gone the next. Take Japan. Now, I like the Japanese. Hard-working, sincere,
cultured - just take a look at their collection of
French impressionists - they even had the good
sense to pull out of George Bush's "war on terror".
And Japan, remember, is one of the examples George
always draws upon when he's promising democracy in
Iraq. Didn't America turn emperor-obsessed Japan
into a freedom-loving nation after the Second World
War? So, in Tokyo not so long ago, I took a walk down
memory lane. Not my memory, but the cruelly
cut-short memory of a teenage Royal Marine called
Jim Feather. Jim was the son of my dad's
sister Freda and he was on the Repulse
[British battle
cruiser] when she was sunk by Japanese
aircraft on 10 December, 1941. Jim was saved and
brought back to Singapore, only to be captured when
the British surrendered. Starved and mistreated, he
was set to work building the Burma railway. Anyone
who remembers David Lean's magnificent film
Bridge on the River Kwai will have a good
idea of what happened. One of his friends later
told Freda that in Jim's last days, he could lift
the six-foot prisoner over his shoulder as if he
were a child. As light as a feather, you might say.
He died in a Japanese prisoner of war camp sometime
in 1942. I wasn't thinking of Jim when I walked into the
great Shinto shrine in central Tokyo where Japan's
war dead are honoured; not just the "banzai-banzai"
poor bloody infantry variety, but the kamikazes,
the suicide pilots who crashed their Zero
fighter-bombers on to American aircraft carriers.
Iraq's suiciders may not know much about Japan's
"divine wind", but there's a historical narrative
that starts in the Pacific and stretches all the
way through Sri Lanka's suicide bombers to the
Middle East. If President Bush's "thugs and
assassins" think of Allah as they die, Japan's
airmen thought of their emperor. At the Shinto
shrine, in the area containing photographs of the
Japanese campaign, there are some helpful captions
in English. But in the room with the portraits of
the kamikazes - including a devastating oil
painting of a suicide attack on a US carrier - the
captions are only in Japanese. I wasn't
surprised. What I was amazed to see, a few metres from the
shrine, was a stretch of railway with a big bright
green Boy's Own Paper steam locomotive
standing on it. Japanese teenagers were cleaning
the piston rods and dabbing a last touch of green
to the boiler. As a boy, I of course wanted to be
an engine driver, so I climbed aboard. Anyone speak
English, I asked? What is this loco doing in a
Shinto shrine? An intense young man with
thin-framed spectacles smiled at me. "This was the
first locomotive to pull a Japanese military train
along the Burma railway," he explained. And then I
understood. Royal Marine Jim Feather had died so
this pretty little train could puff through the
jungles of Burma. In fact, this very same loco's
first duty was to haul the ashes of dead Japanese
soldiers north from the battlefront. The Japanese are our friends, of course. They
are the fruit of our democracy. But what does this
mean? Even now, the Japanese government will not
acknowledge the full details of the crimes of rape
and massacre against women in their conquered
"Greater South East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere".
After the post-war International Military Tribunal
- 27 Japanese war criminals were prosecuted and
seven of them were hanged - not a single Japanese
has been prosecuted for war crimes in Japanese
courts. Men who have admitted taking part in the
mass rape of Chinese girls - let alone the "comfort
women" from China and Korea forced to work in
brothels - are still alive, safe from
prosecution. Didn't these men represent Evil? What is the
difference between the young Japanese men honoured
for blowing themselves up against American aircraft
carriers and the equally young men blowing
themselves up against American bases in Iraq? Sure,
the Iraqi insurgents don't respect the Red Cross.
Nor did the Japanese. 
IT'S all a matter of who your friends are. Take
that little exhibition of "crimes against humanity"
a year ago at the Imperial War Museum in London.
Included is a section on the 1915 Armenian
Holocaust, the genocide of one and a half million
Armenians by the Ottoman Turks, which taught
Hitler how to carry out the
greatest genocide of the 20th
century, the Holocaust of six million
European Jews. But the exhibition included a
disclaimer from the Turkish government, which still
fraudulently claims that the Armenians were not
murdered in a genocide carefully planned by the
Turkish leaders of the time - which is the truth -
but merely victims of chaos in First World War
Turkey.
Andy Kevorkian, whose father's entire
family was murdered by the Turks in 1915, wrote a
letter to Robert Crawford, the museum's
director general. Nowhere in the exhibition is
there a disclaimer of the Jewish Holocaust by the
right-wing historian David Irving or by
neo-Nazis, Kevorkian complained. Nor should there
be. But "for the IWM to bow to Turkish (or is
it Foreign Office?) pressure to deny what the
entire world accepts as the first genocide of
the 20th century is an insult to the Armenians
who survived... For the IWM to allow the Turks
to say that this didn't happen is a travesty of
justice and truth." But the disclaimer wasn't removed. The New
York Times, which originally broke the story,
now spends its time casting doubt on the killings,
calling them "alleged". Not long ago, the paper
carried a well-known 1915 photograph, taken by a
German, of a line of Armenian men being led away to
execution. But The New York Times caption
fraudulently stated that the Armenians were being
"marched to prison [sic] by Turkish
soldiers in 1915". What next? Is The New York
Times going to carry photographs of Europe's
doomed Jews
being packed into cattle trains and claim they
are en route to "resettlement camps"? It's the same old problem. The steam loco in
Tokyo and the disclaimer in the Imperial War Museum
and the newspaper photo caption are lies to appease
enemies who are now friends. - Japan is a Western democracy. So Evil is
ignored.
- Turkey is our secular ally, a democracy that
wants to join the European Union. So Evil is
ignored.
But fear not. As the Americans try ever more
desperately to escape from Iraq, the thugs and
assassins will become the good guys again and the
men of Evil in Iraq will be working for us. The
occupation authorities have already admitted
re-hiring some of Saddam's evil secret policemen to
hunt down the evil Saddam. Tricky stuff, Evil. © The
Independent 
... on this
website
Robert Fisk asks: Are
we now to support atrocities against the 'scum
of the earth' in our moral campaign against
Evil?-
We Are Paying The
Price For An Infantile Attempt To Reshape The
Middle East
-
"They're
getting better," Chuck said approvingly. "That
one hit the runway"
-
The hunt
for weapons of mass destruction yields --
nothing
-
Official Is
Prepared To Address Issue Of Iraqi
Deception
|
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