How History Remembers The Truth
Right Versus Wrong
May 24, 2002
In April of 1999, Japan’s then prime minister, Keizo Obuchi, arrived in the United States for a six-day visit. Prominent among the stops on his itinerary was the Japanese-American National Museum in Los Angeles.
The museum is home to a restored barracks building from a World War II internment camp in Wyoming were some Japanese-Americans were held during the war.
In remarks to reporters, Obuchi said, "We can see the hardships of the Japanese-American people with this museum." (no mention that these “hardships” were created by Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor)
While standing in front of the barracks, Obuchi told bystanders, "Things like this should never happen again."
It is no wonder that Obuchi was the guest of then President Clinton.
If ever there was a spin to transport one from abuser to the abused, Obuchi rose to the occasion.
It is insulting that no Japanese leader can emerge from the dark hole of revisionist history and apologize for the atrocities of the Bataan Death March and the innumerable other Japanese war crimes. But, it is at least understandable that our former enemy would try to frame the history of the event in the best possible light for Japanese national interests. As taught in Japanese schools, Pearl Harbor was a great Japanese victory in a war that the United States was responsible for starting.
It is unforgivable that the American government begrudgingly honors its own veterans who sacrificed so much. While Japan has a very prominent memorial to peace in Hiroshima and America certainly has the Los Angeles memorial that bemoans the suffering of Japanese-Americans during World War II, all can stand proud in the knowledge that at 1050 Old Pecos Trail, Santa Fe, New Mexico sits the Bataan Memorial Military Museum and Library.
As the Bataan Memorial Military Museum and Library website clarifies, “It has been housed in many locations and in various sizes over the years, depending on interest and space availability.” It’s fortunate that at least America can provide methadone for its heroin addicts even if it can’t fund honor for its heroes.
Unfortunately, most Americans and their government are more preoccupied in the honoring of secretaries on “Administrative Professionals Day” (April 25). It’s a successful commercial event. There just isn’t a big demand for flowers, expensive lunches and cards when it comes to honoring those who suffered at Bataan.
The factual truth of Japanese-American history becomes blurred by the new agenda. Japan is a major economic power and a vital Pacific ally. For pragmatic convenience, the picture of American service people suffering and dying under Japanese terror is left out of the frame. The revisionist semantics write the history in a blur of mutually unfortunate “incidents”.
Powerful interests are content to forego the truth in pursuit of national and economic interests. In the late 1030’s, when American business interests lost access to the rubber and oil of Asia, Japan was a nation of sneaky warlike “Nips”. Today, it is the U.S. veterans who are expendable.
That’s the elusive non-absolute about truth. It is interpreted according to the frame it is in and the semantics that define it. The frame is the agenda and the semantics are the rationalization.
As America has learned all too painfully in the last eight years, a truth can be a lie and a lie can be a truth. Dependant upon one’s agenda, the difference between right and wrong become fungible.
American history has given Japan an easy pass regarding Japan’s World War II atrocities. The agendas of the political and economic interests overwhelmed the agendas of truth and justice. The enemy in the European theater was cast in a decidedly different frame and interpreted with decidedly different semantics.
There must have been decidedly different agendas competing for attention.
It is not uncommon for equal actions to have dissimilar outcomes. Life is not math. There are no absolute laws for human social interaction. The fact of competing agendas between disparate interests allows for no law of equality in either interpretation or outcome.
On March 18, 1997, in New Britain, CT, San Chiu Wong, a recent Chinese (legal) immigrant to the United States, was executed with a bullet to the brain by Gino Gentile, a nobody robber. Gentile was described by the court as, “…a high school drop-out who fathered children without ever being married, sold illegal drugs to get cash, has no verifiable employment history in his 23 years and now stands convicted of killing three people within a three-week span.”
Gentile must first finish a 40-year-to-life sentence in New Jersey for a double murder that he committed there before beginning the 100-year sentence he received in Connecticut. Gentile was convicted of randomly killing two Arab-American teens in Paterson, NJ only 13 days after Wong's murder.
Meanwhile, in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, Richard Baumhammers was convicted on May 9, 2001 for the murder of his Jewish neighbor, two Asian men, an Indian man and a black man during a shooting spree on April 28, 2000.
Baumhammers’ crime was described as racially motivated by the, “Prosecutors (who) maintained the white unemployed immigration attorney selected his victims because of their ethnic backgrounds.”
Baumhammers was sentenced to death.
Gentile, during a robbery, kills an Asian and two Arab-Americans and vacations for life at the expense of the taxpayer. Baumhammers, because he is crazy, kills a Jewish neighbor, two Asians, an Indian and a Black and wins a ticket to the lethal injection chamber.
Somebody should inform the Pennsylvania court that an Indian is an Asian. Also, strictly speaking Arabs are considered to be from a part of Asia. These PC idiots probably don’t think a Canadian is a North American.
Correctly stated, all of the murder victims were Americans. Yet the two murderers were cast in different frames and interpreted with different semantics. The different agendas produced different judicial outcomes.
It’s doubtful if Ming Zhang, Wong's widow really cares about Gentile’s agenda. All she knows is that Gentile should be put to death because, “the killing shattered the family, robbed a son of a loving father and led to the death of Wong's mother from a broken heart."
Damn justice and full speed ahead with the semantics of political correctness. Baumhammers committed a “hate” crime while Gentile only executed an innocent husband and father in the commission of a robbery. Any reasonable featherhead should be capable of understanding why semantics made Baumhammers crime the more heinous of the two…and diminished Wong’s worth as a human.
When truth and justice starts to be administered by the persuasion of semantics, a nation is no longer deserving of self-government.
More precisely, the nation’s government is no longer deserving of legitimacy.
Justice under American law is supposed to be blind. Rumor has it that justice represents the fair and equal administration of the law, without corruption, avarice, prejudice, or favor.
When equal crimes merit unequal justice as a result of the crimes “Politically-Correct Quotient”, the nation has embarked upon a slippery slope towards tyranny.
Travel back in time to the Nazi Germany of 1938. A Nazi murders a Jew and he eliminated a vermin-like threat to Germany. A Jew sneezes and it becomes a capital offense. The Nanking, China of 1938 was even more compelling because powerful interests revised the truth almost as soon as it occurred. A Japanese soldier beheads a Chinese civilian with his sword and it isn’t a murder because the Chinese are an inferior race and not considered fully human by the Japanese. A Chinese civilian steals food for his starving children and he is beheaded.
As history has witnessed, sometimes murder just isn’t murder because truth ceases to be truth. It depends upon who is supplying the definitions.
Politically-Correct semantic games have no place in the administration of laws and justice.
The semantic inversion that justifies reverse discrimination but condemns (forward?) discrimination is abominable. Does government value one group of its citizenry less than another…based on self-serving and autocratically imposed definitions?
What happens when the progenitors of Politically-Correct semantics become the dispensers of free speech?
Some free speech has already been regulated as hate language. A Black calls a White “Honkie” and it is comedy, but a White calling a Black “the infamous N word” is hate language. Many consider just typing the previous sentence to be inappropriate.
The politics of semantics is a violation of Constitutional spirit. Semantics create the environment to practice the politics of personal destruction. And…personally destroying individuals with differing ideologies has become a favorite weapon in intimidating large segments of American society to forego their right to free speech.
In contemporary America, the dissenters are not dodging bullets (yet); they are dodging labels. And a label can be deadly. Falling on the wrong side of the semantic scale can unleash the tyranny of the state.
Under the Clinton administration organizations that earned the conservative moniker were consistently audited by the I.R.S. Among these are included the National Review, The American Spectator, The Christian Coalition, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Oliver North's Freedom Alliance, The Heritage Foundation, The National Rifle Association, The Western Journalism Center, The National Center for Public Policy Research, Fortress America and Citizens Against Government Waste.
Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition were never audited.
Just being labeled a “separatist” was enough justification for the government to murder the wife, son and dog of Randy Weaver. (It is interesting to note that the media sold the news of these murders with less moral conscience than B.T. Barnum had when he sold tickets to view the freaks in his circus.)
Perhaps someday history will remember those with the courage of their convictions. These dissenters are the brave souls whose resolution is directed at halting the tyranny of elitist PC “hit squads” endorsed by an intrusive government. The crime of the dissenters is a thirst for the restoration of truth and individual liberty.
For now, the dissenters are the “racist”, “gun-crazed”, “homophobic”, “hate-mongering” reactionaries who believe in that revolutionary document entitled The Bill Of Rights. They are condemned and smeared for their refusal to surrender the Constitution to a government perverted by special interest corruption.
Thank God that the true Americans from Hollywood and the media are here to protect the nation. They know that the only free speech good for the country is their free speech. What would become of the Union without their PC semantic revisionism?
Martin H. Fischer, a physician and author, once noted that, “Whenever ideas fail, men invent words.” Or, in the case of the CBS evening news…when even the words start to fail, just give the anchor a new “look”.
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