Lying About History (the Japanese in Okinawa; the U.S. and Torture)
Monday, October 08, 2007, 10:18:05 AM | Brian Tamanaha
from Balkinization
About forty years ago, when I was growing up in Hawaii, I was told a horrible story that I never forgot. Yesterday, the story made it into the New York Times.
My aunt was a nice woman, friendly and considerate, except for those days when she seemed impossibly distant, an unreachable dark face. As time passed, her behavior became more and more erratic, gradually deteriorating to the point that she was no longer the person I once knew as my aunt.
One day, when I was a naïve child of eight or so, I asked my dad what was wrong with her. This is the story he told me. My aunt was in Okinawa during World War II. When American troops landed on Okinawa, Japanese soldiers told the Okinawan people that American soldiers were savages who would rape women and bayonet babies and children. Many Okinawans knew little about the outside world beyond what they were told by Japanese authorities who ran the island. The soldiers told the Okinawans that the only honorable way out for them was suicide. Many people believed the soldiers, and mass murder and suicide followed, with family members first killing other family members, and then themselves.
My aunt, who had spent time in Hawaii before the war, didn’t believe the soldiers, and tried to convince others that they would not be harmed by the American troops. But to no avail. In the village she lived in, people threw themselves off a nearby cliff, mothers with their children in their arms.
That was the story I was told four decades ago by my dad. That was the story my aunt told our family after the war when she returned to Hawaii. My aunt, I suppose, couldn’t live with the horrors she had witnessed, knowing that it was based on a lie but helpless to prevent it. She was broken by the experience, and died at a relatively young age.
The New York Times reported yesterday about a large public protest in Okinawa over proposed changes that would erase from Japanese history textbooks any references to the role Japanese authorities had in causing the mass suicides. The current textbooks acknowledge what happened. The new textbooks would mention the suicides without saying how or why they came about. This is a piece of the ongoing resurgent nationalism in Japan.
What is the connection between this story and torture by the U.S.? This: the willingness to lie—to write history in a way that washes away sins and erases victims.
Once again, the Bush Administration is insisting publicly, loudly, indignantly, that the U.S. does not engage in “torture.” Were it only true.
What we have engaged in, as has been reported by many sources (see anti-torture memos at this site), is “alternative procedures,” which include water boarding, exposure to very cold temperature, and forced standing for hours on end. Robert Conquest, a venerable sovietologist and favorite historian of conservatives, who Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, called these (USSR) tactics “torture,” stating that “Torture is…a worse crime against humanity than killing.” If these sorts of actions were “torture” when the Soviet Union engaged in them, they are “torture” when we do them.
Deny, Deny, Deny. Hide behind a silly legalistic argument about the meaning of “torture.” But it doesn’t change what we did. [I optimistically use the past tense].
The victims of atrocities must not be erased.