I’ll be on hiatus for awhile while I’m traveling. I may send some posts for John to add to the blog while I’m gone.
But if not, you can all look forward to a big dose of China travelogue when I return.
:)
From MoJo, something to act on:
And the Rich Get Richer…
The federal deficit has reached record highs. Still, the Senate will vote next month on eliminating the Estate Tax for the richest 2 percent of Americans. To learn more about the Estate Tax repeal/reform visit: www.americanprogress.org To contact your senators about the Estate Tax cut visit: www.moveonpac.org.
Perhaps this is just political rhetoric, but this article hit me powerfully, especially the part where Tokyo pledges to never again go to war. Wish other nations would follow suit….
TOKYO (Reuters) – Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi marked the 60th anniversary of Japan’s defeat in World War Two on Monday with an apology for suffering caused by Japanese military aggression, and pledged that Tokyo would never again go to war.
Sixty years after Emperor Hirohito exhorted his subjects to “bear the unbearable” and accept defeat, memories of the war that killed millions in Asia still bedevil relations between Japan and its neighbors, particularly China and North and South Korea.
“Japan caused huge damage and suffering to many countries, especially the people of Asia, with its colonization and aggression,” Koizumi said in a statement.
“Humbly accepting this fact of history, we again express our deep remorse and heartfelt apology and offer our condolences to the victims of the war at home and abroad,” he said.
I just finished watching Pearl Harbor. Yes, it’s a dumb story [you’d think they could’ve spent as much on the writers as they did on special effects]. BUT, while it is a rah-rah America- can-whoop-anyone’s-butt kind of movie, it struck me as incedibly anti-war, too. Though perhaps not as vividly as many well-written war movies, this flick shows the futility of nations that (ab)use innocent young lives to promote their own political agendas. Just as the young Japanese pilot who bombs Pearl prays for help in his mission as he gazes on a picture of his wife, so do Doolittle’s men as they head for Tokyo. There’s no sense that the day-to-day battles have anything to do with the larger disagreements of the nations. Rather, they are a ceaseless round of individual suffering and misery.
IMO, there’s no reason for the young and innocent to sacrifice themselves for the abstraction, or ‘imagined community,’ of the nation-state. The loss of life on either side hurts us all. It’s a no-win game for everyone.
One website that tells more info about Doolittle’s raid also explains that the Chinese people who harbored and helped the American pilots may have, themselves, been biggest losers: “In May 1942, the Japanese army launched operation Sei-Go, with the dual aims of securing Chinese airfields from which raids could be launched against the Home Islands, and punishing villages which might have sheltered Doolittle’s airmen after the Raid. Exact figures are impossible to come by, but tens of thousands – perhaps as many as 250,000 – Chinese civilians were murdered in the Chekiang and Kiangsu provinces.”