RE-WRITING THE HISTORY OF NANKING-- IT CERTAINLY COULD HAPPEN HERE AND PROBABLY WILL

When I lived in Europe I couldn't afford the International Herald-Tribune, the ex-pat paper for Americans abroad put out by the NY Times and Washington Post but I often managed to get my hands on second-hand copies, especially when American tourists left them in the restaurant I worked in. These were pre-Internet times, of course, so getting even a semi-American paper-- it is published in Paris-- was a big deal to me. These days when I travel I never even glance at it. Today I did-- and I'm only in Montreal!-- because a headline caught my eye: 'No massacre in Nanking,' Japanese lawmakers say.

Do you remember the little discussion we had a couple months back about the need for national redemption in the form of facing up to what we allowed Bush and his cronies-- in the widest sense-- to get away with? Without a serious-- albeit difficult-- confrontation of what actually happened in the past 7 years, one day Republicans will be saying Abu Gharaib never happened and Bush never even stole one election, let alone two!

After World War II ended, the Japanese got away with murder-- unlike the Germans (primarily because of the Soviets who were adamant about their pound of flesh). But the Soviets were right. Germany is a real democracy. Japan is... God knows.

About 100 Japanese governing party lawmakers denounced the Nanjing Massacre as a fabrication on Tuesday, contesting Chinese claims that Japanese soldiers killed hundreds of thousands of people after seizing the Chinese city in 1937.

The members of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Liberal Democratic Party said there was no evidence to prove mass killings by Japanese soldiers in the captured Nationalist capital, then known as Nanking. They accused Beijing of using the alleged incident as a "political advertisement."

...Historians generally agree that the Japanese Army slaughtered at least 150,000 civilians and raped tens of thousands of women.

Wikipedia has the conventional wisdom the Japanese don't want to face up to. A few years ago I read Iris Chang's book, The Rape of Nanking, which led me to look into the wealth of historical evidence the Japanese have done all they could to distort the truth of one of the most hideous atrocities on the 20th century.

Take a look at this little film on YouTube. Obviously the Japanese political elites won't:



That's why Nancy Pelosi, for all her political astuteness, is woefully wrong-- tragically wrong-- about not impeaching Bush and Cheney. America needs to not bury what we've done. And, don't be fooled-- we is not just Bush and Cheney. And now the Japanese militarists and fascists are our friends.