‘This quote of the Oriental counterpart of Hitler at the moment of his well-deserved defeat should be known to the attendees of last week’s 2020 Vietnam International Conference of NGOs on History and Peace.’
INDEED, we declared war on America and Britain out of our sincere desire to insure Japan’s self-preservation and the stabilization of East Asia, it being far from our thought either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark upon territorial aggrandizement.” — Emperor Hirohito, Accepting the Potsdam Declaration, Radio Broadcast [Transmitted by Domei and Recorded by the Federal Communications Commission, 14 August 1945; https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/hirohito.htm]
This quote of the Oriental counterpart of Hitler at the moment of his well-deserved defeat should be known to the attendees of last week’s 2020 Vietnam International Conference of NGOs on History and Peace. Showa Tenno’s invocation of “stabilization of East Asia” entailed the Rape of Manila, Bataan Death March, Lipa Massacre, murder of Philippine Chief Justice Jose Abad Santos, and the martyrdom of Josefa Llanes Escoda, among others. Isn’t that so, Mikio Oishi (Professor, Asian University for Women, Bangladesh)?
“As long as there are peoples on this earth, there will be nations against nations and they will be forced to protect their vital rights in the same way as the individual is forced to protect his rights. One is either the hammer or the anvil. — Adolf Hitler [Munich, March 15, 1929]
And you want the Filipinos and their sibling nations in ASEAN to be the anvil to the hammer of Qiong Qi (穷奇)? Yes, the “legacies of Japan’s imperialism and colonialism have remained unaddressed across East Asia,” but to insist that the Gehenna of a Sino-centric tributary system will be pacific (replacing the Westphalian system on the 75th anniversary of the United Nations) is a provocation to the independent republics of Austronesia.
So cease “knockin’” and be thankful that the nomination of Hitler to the Nobel Peace Prize in 1939 was merely a political stunt. [https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/facts/facts-on-the-nobel-peace-prize/] Better to celebrate the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962:
“The use of the atomic bomb near the end of the war turned Pauling in a new direction. As one who had long worked on the structure of molecules, both normal and abnormal, on their behavior in the human body, and on their transmission through heredity, he took an immediate and intense interest in the potentially malignant effects of nuclear fallout on human molecular structures, as well as in the forces of blast and fire released by an exploding bomb. From the late forties on, Pauling, as a member of Einstein’s Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, which was active from 1946 to 1950, as a supporter of many peace organizations, and as an individual, has waged a constant campaign against war and its now nuclear nature. He calculated estimates on the probable frequency of congenital deformity in future generations resulting from carbon 14 and radioactive fission products released by nuclear testing, and publicized them; protested the production of the hydrogen bomb; advocated the prevention of the spread of nuclear weapons; promoted the banning of tests of nuclear weapons as a first step toward multilateral disarmament.” [https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1962/pauling/biographical/]
The scientist Linus Pauling (International Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi member who also won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 1954) said: “Our increased knowledge now provides the possibility of eliminating poverty and starvation, of decreasing significantly the suffering caused by disease, of using the resources of the world effectively for the benefit of humanity. But the greatest of all the changes has been in the nature of war the several million fold increase in the power of explosives and corresponding changes in methods of delivery of bombs.”
“No dispute between nations can justify nuclear war. There is no defense against nuclear weapons that could not be overcome by increasing the scale of the attack…The only sane policy for the world is that of abolishing war.” [Science and Peace, December 11, 1963; https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1962/pauling/lecture/]
Pauling called attention to the Mainau Declaration of 1955, thus, we do as well: “If war broke out among the great powers, who could guarantee that it would not develop into a deadly conflict? A nation that engages in a total war thus signals its own destruction and imperils the whole world.
“We do not deny that perhaps peace is being preserved precisely by the fear of these weapons. Nevertheless, we think it is a delusion if governments believe that they can avoid war for a long time through the fear of these weapons. Fear and tension have often engendered wars. Similarly it seems to us a delusion to believe that small conflicts could in the future always be decided by traditional weapons…All nations must come to the decision to renounce force as a final resort. If they are not prepared to do this, they will cease to exist.”
Since we are at it, we might as well bring up the Mainau Declaration of 2015: “So far we have avoided nuclear war though the threat remains. We believe that our world today faces another threat of comparable magnitude…If left unchecked, our ever-increasing demand for food, water, and energy will eventually overwhelm the Earth’s ability to satisfy humanity’s needs, and will lead to wholesale human tragedy. Already, scientists who study Earth’s climate are observing the impact of human activity.”
“Based on the IPCC assessment, the world must make rapid progress towards lowering current and future greenhouse gas emissions to minimize the substantial risks of climate change…This endeavor will require the cooperation of all nations, whether developed or developing, and must be sustained into the future in accord with updated scientific assessments. Failure to act will subject future generations of humanity to unconscionable and unacceptable risk.” [http://www.mainaudeclaration.org/]
The home of the Terrans is in the grip of catastrophic climate change, thus, the Free World ought to call out the worst violator of the Kyoto Protocol and the germinator of the COVID-19 pandemic. We resist the black magic of the Mulanese witch Xianniang even as we beshrew the lap dogs of the hegemonist who would rather we “flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” – H. P. Lovecraft, Weird Tales, February 1928
