MAKING VICTIMS APOLOGISE

RMTnews :: september 2005 26 M y grandpa Fox fought in World War Two. He was captured in Singapore and forced at gunpoint to labour on the infamous Burma railway. He was, like all his comrades, treated abysmally. When he died 20 years later in the steelworks of Motherwell the post mortem revealed that his body had never recovered from the emaciation he endured in the 1940’s. My dad resents the Japanese to this day and struggles to come to terms with it all still. Japanese Premier Koisumi was last month forced to apologise [for the sixth time] for the actions of his countrymen in World War two. Some might think my family is entitled to an apology for the barbarity Tommy Fox undoubtedly suffered. He certainly is, but I am uneasy with an approach which sees only the vanquished apologise and suggests that the barbarity of war was one-sided. It wasn’t. Koisumi’s statement came, as anyone conscious of timing would notice, only days after the 60th anniversary of the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More than 700,000 people died! Where you might ask was the United States apology to the Japanese people for that? Those who died so horribly in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were no more guilty than those who died in London during the blitz, or in Belsen, or Stalingrad or later on in Hanoi where more US bombs were dropped than in all of the world war. They were innocent civilians. Another people with reason enough to seek an apology from Japan, are the Koreans who suffered the complete occupation of their country. Recently, seeking to understand this nation described as one of the ‘axis of evil’, I picked up a [disgraceful] book about North Korea called ‘Rogue Regime’ published by Oxford University Press. The American author Jasper Becker pushes the Republican Party line that the North Korean’s must stop threatening the people of USA with nuclear weapons. Yet after the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Koreans in their own land by US forces, the book seems never to think how much more likely and realistic is the threat the Koreans feel from attack and invasion by Bush! Now perhaps I am more sensitive to this juxta- positioning of logic because I have been charged with ‘contempt of democracy’ with three other SSP Members of the Scottish Parliament after we demanded that the Scottish Executive respect the democratic right to protest and to march against the G8 at Gleneagles in July. The four of us are now banned from the Parliament for 30 days [NewLabour wanted it to be a year] and fined £30,000 for taking part in a peaceful, largely silent, short protest where we held up pieces of paper reading ‘defend democracy’ in the debating chamber. Our penalty is as nothing next to the hellish suffering of the Japanese and Korean people’s of course, but it seems to me that this doublespeak, this corruption of logic and language, and the demand that victims apologise to aggressors illustrates how the themes predicted by Orwell in ‘1984’ are more and more recognisable in the modern world. Colin Fox, MSP Scottish Socialist Party convenor MAKING VICTIMS APOLOGISE