Why we should be happy that the racists are out of the closet

WWW--There's a theme I keep coming across with some of my compatriots on the progressive left, and I think that it's unnecessary: the fear of traditional American racism coming out of the closet. These people are literally the lunatic fringe now, but they're white and they're loud, if not proud (OK, they're that too, just without any basis). The problem--mainly--is our reaction to them, and reaction in itself is the problem, there's too much of it. We need to be more proactive about these people rather than reactive, and that's not an endorsement of Scientology. That's why I support the legal actions of the SPLC and its director, Morris Dees. His targets seem to understand intuitively, as some of the mentally ill do, that he's got their number and that he's using the proper cure. This provokes very dramatic responses.

Just looking at the words behind the anagram tells you where they're coming from at the SPLC: The Southern Poverty Legal Center. I have had great admiration for Mr. Dees and his work for ages, and the key to his work and that of his great staff has been in tracking these groups and bringing them to the attention of the public while going after the very worst, the most dangerous of them, in the courts rather than in the streets where they're only going to be emboldened by physical attacks. Hate movements thrive on the victim mentality, but we should also remember that these folks are victims in their own right, frequently victims of poverty that breeds this form of mental dysfunction. Dees knows that this isn't simply a Southern problem, but an American one, and while it is a bit alarming that these groups have grown in numbers since the election of a black president, it's also a reason to be thankful for the fact that we have one. They're out of hiding and easy targets again, just as they became so in the 1960s. They were always out there, their number haven't really grown.

The Civil Rights movement of that decade (really beginning in the mid-1950s and cresting roughly ten years later) brought the flat-heads out of the woodwork. The ranks of the KKK swelled as they had with the great influx of European immigration during the 1920s and "White Citizens Council" offices sprang-up everywhere...and they lost, badly, to the civil rights workers and activists because history and moral authority weren't on their side. Crucially, the federal government was pressured into action and the FBI unwillingly had to conduct a barely submerged war on the Klan and other hate groups. Indeed, non-violence proved to be a vital tactic, but so too did African-American groups like the Deacons for Justice and the original Black Panthers in the South with their militancy and their rifle clubs, meant to protect black communities from terror tactics. But the real fight was won in the legislative arena and the courts and the laws are still on the books to this day and aren't likely to be rolled-back anytime soon. That's not to say we shouldn't be vigilant, however.

In the 1990s, the late Stokely Carmichael, one of the founders of SNCC and one of the central players in the rise of black nationalism said that the problem had become deeper, that racism had "gone into hiding" and was therefore harder to combat, and he was right. Racism became institutionalized and very much a phantasm, a free-floating force that was almost impossible to pinpoint, let alone to fight with traditional methods. That has changed now that the loons have come out of the woodwork and are now shooting their mouths off, not to mention committing some very heinous acts of violence again. But that's what people do when they're desperate and feel they have no other options. They'd better enjoy the fun while it lasts, because it's not going to for very long.

In other words, they feel very threatened in their racist beliefs and identities, and that's a good thing since those culturally pathogenic personalities can ultimately be isolated and marginalized out of existence. These small, reactive faux-personalities--once again--intuit this and that's when the fear comes, when the ego externalizes its innermost and darkest tendencies. The shadow side externalizing itself can be dealt with by civil society more easily. Now they're visible targets, even their goons they've embedded within the military. But we tend to take these revelations the wrong way, we react, and we become part of the fear. This is a mistake. We know who they are now, we have their number, and it's time to go round-'em-up when they misbehave. We can also make sure that they never come into being by fighting for social and economic justice. Poverty is a breeding ground for this kind of faux-personality.

A recent cross-burning in my community has had some alarmed, but I'm not especially worried. As much as I have a problem with the FBI on other issues, they're good at criminal investigations like this and they're likely to find out who was behind it. When-and-if they do, the perpetrators are going to be dragged into court and could face real jail time if not civil penalties, meaning heavy fines that have shut them down in the past. We should also keep in mind that not all rabid racists are poor and that this is a pathogenic cultural stream predicated on keeping things as they've been in America since the beginning: oligarchical and unequal. The name Tony Zirkle should come as a good example of the privileged racist flake.

Economic elites must become racists by-definition in order to hold onto that power, something that they're more-than-willing to do. The reality is that they're more frightened of the rest of us, these groups, and while it makes them dangerous, they're still marginal. Nonetheless, vigilance and awareness is the key, and now we have the added advantage of visible targets.

Unit 731 Nurse Breaks Her Silence: Mass Grave Beneath Tokyo Neighborhood

Tokyo--The Toyama No. 5 apartment block may have been built on a mass-grave used to hide the remains of one-hundred Asian-victims of medical-experimentation, says an 84-year-old Japanese woman.

Her name is Toyo Ishii, a former military nurse with Unit 731, a biowarfare-unit of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese war that bled-into WWII.

Most of the experiments occurred in Manchuria, so I was perplexed by this AP story. Certainly, Chinese nationals were taken as slave labor to the Japanese mainland, but it's surprising that experiments were conducted in Tokyo as well. 1989 excavations nearby attest that they did. Why? Look at the neighborhoods they were in: slums, therefore it was easier to control what the middle-class of Japan at that time knew about it. Who would care what a slum-dweller thought? This is why serial killers murder the indigent and prostitutes.

American and Soviet POWs were also exposed to the experimentation, but it was the Chinese who received the brunt of the project. The Chinese suffered under innumerable atrocities under the withering-attacks of the Japanese Imperial Army.

Also interesting, is the fact that Ishii says she wasn't in the section of the unit that did vivisections or injected Asians with virulent-diseases for research purposes. Granted, it was a sprawling-compound...in Manchuria, but would it have been within Tokyo? Would the Japanese military really want the public to see what was going-on in the Tokyo facility? Even under a military-dictatorship, it could be problematic. Surely, the facility was a very small one. One has to wonder if director Kei Fujiwara's film "Organ" was inspired from this tale...

Nurse Ishii claims she was employed in 'oral-surgery' during her time with Unit 731. Another interesting-fact: she has the same last-name as the administrator of the project, Dr. Chujo Shiro Ishii. Are they related? 'Ishii' means, 'rock well'. It gets even more interesting. Dr. Ishii was given legal-immunity after the war:

Although Unit 731, and its satellite laboratories were destroyed at the end of WWII, with the full co-operation of General Douglas MacArthur, Dr Shiro Ishii was given immunity from prosecution. The US authorities considered Ishii's research programme to be too valuable to be revealed in public. It is on record, as the author notes, that Ishii lectured in the United States after the war, and that he and other Unit 731 researchers went to South Korea in 1951 to advise the US military on biological warfare. Immunity from prosecution for war crimes was given to dozens of Unit 731 employees by the US government. (Brown, Sept. 2004)

Could the nurse be one of the individuals who was granted amnesty? We're not told. Are the sundry facts of Unit 731 still being kept secret because of Japanese-American relations? We're not told. Were they part of security and economic treaties? We're not told. These are valid questions that aren't present in the articles on nurse Ishii.

The Japanese government still officially refuses to acknowledge that the atrocities committed by this unit ever happened. Government ministers have played-down the possibility for any exhumations, even for regarding the Shinto-observance of honoring one's ancestors. Besides, they might be saying, they're Chinese and Korean dead, not Japanese. I don't think most Japanese citizens want to know what really happened at Unit 731 facilities.

This is troubling, but not atypical, in my humble opinion. Whatever the truth is, it appears the Japanese government doesn't want to know it--or for it to be known. And you thought the Japanese were quaint. You were wrong. While President George W. Bush makes his case for a stand against Iran, as well as the genocide in Darfur, stories like this tend to get lost because of their inconvenience and dissonance with the "accepted narrative." We should remember how these events became possible by knowing more about them and how they came-into-being.

There are many in the political classes of the developed-world who don't want this. The story of Unit 731 is emblematic of this. Apologies to China aren't going to be enough, there has to be a full-accounting. There have been American survivors who have come forward, only to be ignored by the American Congress in the late-1980s.

It's true that a few members of Unit 731 were hanged, but not the ringleaders. Japan has never fully-admitted or apologized for such atrocities in China, which should make them suspect as a nation wanting a seat on the UN's security council.

When they admit that they also exterminated American and British POWs, and when their ministries do what Germany did, then maybe. I'm sure there are Soviet POWs in there somewhere as well, and it's likely that they will get the usual brush-off without any living advocates.

Revised 09.07.2008

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2242/is_1664_285/ai_n6272944

http://www.ancestry.com/learn/facts/Fact.aspx?fid=10&yr=0&ln=Ishii

http://www.ww2pacific.com/unit731.html

http://www.centurychina.com/wiihist/germwar/731rev.htm

http://www.skycitygallery.com/japan/japan.html#opium