My points are thus:
1. It's very popular these days to talk about how boorish, violent, and stupid Americans are. Even one of our candidates for the Presidency engages in such talk.
2. During the Second World War, the Japanese committed atrocities which rivaled those of the Nazis. In addition, crimes such as the organized buying and selling of foreign women into sexual slavery are still committed in Japan, as discussed in my previous post.
3. For some reason, the world has seemed to be very willing to forget Japanese crimes against humanity despite the fact that Japan hasn't even been willing to admit wrongdoing or express remorse until very recently. We still think of Japan only as Zen gardens, gentle arts, and polite businessmen, as though Japan sprung full-grown as a pacifist nation less than 60 years ago.
4. Any nation which maintains a military and has occasion to use it is putting itself into situations in which wrongdoing may occur, on a small scale - perpetrated by some of its soldiers.
Even the United Nations "peacekeepers" have been committing atrocities against women and children in the countries they are "assisting.)
5. When American soldiers commit crimes, they are punished. That is the policy of our military.
6. Neither today nor during our service during World War Two did our military approve of actions such as the systematic rape and murder of children, pregnant women, and the elderly or the sytematic enslavement of women to serve as prostitutes for our soldiers, or medical experimentation on and vivisection of prisoners of war - actions which were committed on a massive scale by the Japanese Army against the Chinese and Koreans.
7. Japan is free of a modern military history because it was disarmed after a war in which they allied themselves with, and become a part of, the greatest evil of the 20th century: Hitler and Mussolini. Since then, American troops have not only resided in Japan as an occupying force, but helped to protect that nation, allowing it to spend money which they might otherwise have to spend on a military with offensive capabilities instead spend on technology: videogames and VCRs and transistor radios and videogame systems.
To malign the American military by attributing the actions of individual criminal soldiers who are tried and prosecuted for their crimes, when your own history is so bloody is to express both arrogance and ignorance.
The evidence of the goodness of the United States of America is visible in its reaction to scandals such as soldiers who commit criminal acts such as rape or when horrors such as Abu Ghraib occur lies in the fact that the American government spares no expense in prosecuting its own. It's a system of checks and balances we have in America as a safeguard.
Does our system work flawlessly? Obviously not. No system comprised of flawed human beings can work flawlessly.
Some Links:
The Japanese
Rape of Nanking
Japan
denies the atrocities.
But we have video, including
film shot by Christian missionaries,
proving the abuses.
Vivisection of Filipinos, including women and children.
Experimentation on prisoners
The U.N. -
Children as young as six are being sexually abused by peacekeepers and aid workers, says a leading UK charity.
Another link about the U.N.
None of this excuses the misbehavior of American troops, but neither are Americans the barbarians we are portrayed to be by some other, seemingly-hypocritical, nations.
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