It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
While fetus fetishists like to claim that they are protecting the unborn, they forget the mother who gives birth.
And while they denounce abortion and promote adoption there is another alternative for those women whose upraising is such that it denies them sex education or teaches them abstinence through fear of sex.
It is called infanticide.In this case it was abandonment, but it could have ended tragically.
The 18-year-old abandoned her newborn in sub-zero temperatures on the back step of a house Saturday morning after giving birth through the night.
Saskatoon police described the mother as a student living on her own, who comes from "a very difficult background" and has no family in the city.
"You have a very confused 18-year-old girl, without support, without friends in town, and she felt isolated, I think that probably describes her attitude or confused state -- not knowing what to do, clearly not being in a position to care for a child," Staff Sgt. Kirby Harmon told reporters Tuesday.
It is clear to me that we need to have comprehensive sex education and family life education not as voluntary programs but as compulsory in public schools.
Cases like this cry for the licensing of people to be parents. Just because you can procreate does not mean you are suitable to be a parent as the thousands of cases of child abuse prove. We license cars, guns, doctors, pilots, lawyers, teachers, etc.
Parenting is not natural it is learned there is reason for the saying "it takes a village to raise a child", because prior to the rise of the nuclear family, it was the village or extended family; tribe, clan that raised children as a collective effort.
Nor should birth be forced on women as being natural, their fate due to biology. Not in this day and age of birth control. Even if we are still waiting for a male birth control pill after forty years.
But the same folks that oppose abortion as a choice, oppose sex education also oppose birth control and in Canada and the United States they are the dominant special interest lobby.
Which is why their anti-sex politics are an emotional plague that infected this poor woman and led her to be wracked by guilt. Guilt for having sex, for having the baby, for giving birth. And she disposed of her guilt on someone else's doorstep.
Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings
Suicide used to be a deeply personal act by an individual. It appears now that suicide has become a plural phenomena. As the recent school shootings in Canada and the U.S. andthe increase in work place violence with guns shows. It exposes the continuing failure to deal with mental illness and depression as a public health crisis.
And of course the failure of the media to report on the epidemic of suicides across North America, leads to these kinds of public suicides. A private suicide is a statistic, a plural mass killing which is a public suicide makes the news. And it results in more copy cat killings.
Suicide is the eighth leading cause of death for all U.S. men (Anderson and Smith 2003).
Males are four times more likely to die from suicide than females (CDC 2004).
Suicide rates are highest among Whites and second highest among American Indian and Native Alaskan men (CDC 2004).
Of the 24,672 suicide deaths reported among men in 2001, 60% involved the use of a firearm (Anderson and Smith 2003).
What would have been a private act has become a public act, thanks to the failure of the powers that be in society to publicly deal with issues of mental health. That is because we have that mythical compasionate conservative ideologythat says mental health is your problem, not a social problem, and something that should be left up to the indvidual and their priest. They blame it on the evocatively amorphous euphimism "evil". In the extreme it says secular scoeity and public schools themselves are to blame.
Mental illness is not treated as a health problem, let alone a public health issue, like bird flu or SARS is. Yet its impact is just as serious as these diseases.
Mental health has been too often linked to questions of morality as well as being excused as an individual problem of their inability to cope with the stress of their lives. But that stress is a social phenomena of capitalist society. It is the physical reality of the alienation we experience in our daily lives.Workplace Shootings: Crazy Workers or Crazy Workplaces? People create coping mechanisms to deal with this when those fail they become prey to the overwhelming sense of dread, panic, and powerlessness, that is not an illusion but the very reality of the authoritarian political economy of capitalist society. It is the emotional plague of capitalism written into our psyches and our bodies.
A conference on school safety will now be held at the White House to deal with the three school shootings in the past week. They will suggest more parental involvement, better security in schools, blah, blah blah. But they will miss the most important issue that underlies this, besides the question of mental health.
You can't make schools or the work place safer by ignoring the biggest source of violence, easily accessable guns. An issue blithly ignored by the MSM that wants this to be another isolated event, by an unstable person. Someone not like you or me.
The misogynist patriarchical culture of the so called moral majority, fails to see that it produces crimes against women because it is inherent in its belief system. It has nothing to do with the devil or evil it has to do with the belief system of Christianity. Women are moral failures, they are temptresses who are out to corrupt men. The three recent shooitngs in the U.S. were not only cases of public suicide, but of attacks on women.
In fact the whole of our culture is inundated with misogynist propaganda, so men acting out on it should come as no surprise, they feel society approves.
Elaine Foster, who has been involved in Vancouver's goth culture for 20 years, said goths make convenient targets. Foster said instead of blaming goth culture or the internet for the Medicine Hat deaths, people should be looking at why a 12-year-old girl was involved with a 23-year-old man and surfing on adult websites.
The blaming of subcultures, especially such an outre and dark one is too easy, the real question of the emotional plague affecting the individuals gets shoved aside in favour of scapegoating kulture. Such as occured after the Columbine massacre.
This is not the first time that the Goth Subculture in Canada has been associated with mysterious deaths. Such was the case two years ago in Vancouver with Mark Rempel and Rachel Adams who disappeared, and later were found hung in mysterious circumstances.
Much was made in the media of their flirtation with tattoos, S&M and piercings led the media to claim they were part of the Goth scene. But as one member of the Vancouver Goth Scene wrote on the Goth B.C. listserve;
Apparently, although I didn't see it myself, Global Television used a picture that was uploaded to Gothic BC (not a picture I took myself so, unfortunately, by the terms of the upload agreement I don't control the copyright) in order to play up the "freaks get ratings" card in the disappearance of Mark Rempel and Rachel Adams. The Vancouver Province (both GlobalTV and the Province are owned by CanWest Global Communications, BTW) also played up the tenuous "Goth" connection.
While I have a general human concern for their well-being and sympathize with my friends that do know them through work and other associations I don't know either of these people. I've never met either of these people. I'm a decade older than Mark and a decade and a half older than Rachel. It was only through a friend who happens to work with Rachel that I learned about this in the first place.
The last place they were seen in public was at the Infected Mushroom concert - a psytrance event - yet there is no rave scene connection being made. Is it perhaps a little too close to Hallowe'en and someone in Global Media thinks that they will sell more seasonal ad space with an old-fashioned witch hunt?
I'm tired of this. I'm tired of being called "goth" and having a whole raft of assumptions come along with it. I'm a painter, a designer, a programmer, a writer... another creative intellectual coming out of a tradition that over the years has been called Romanticism, Bohemianism, Avant Garde, Beat, and what-have-you. Twenty-five years ago it picked up the moniker "Gothic" and it stuck for a while, but there has been more and more divergence lately.
In fact the goth subculture like the occult subculture in general has been a target of the Christian Revivalists who also attacked public daycare, same sex marriage, rock & roll, etc. as part of an incidious international satanic conspiracy.
Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, from 1996, and its sequel from four years later, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations. These Southern-Gothic documentaries, from Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, cover in detail the bizarre case of three Arkansas teenagers dubiously charged with satanic murders during the last outburst of Christian apocalypticism, in the late Reagan era.
This is the site that both accused visited, it is definitely adult in nature which is why it is full of personals by 14 and 15 year olds. Yes that was sarcasm.
Of course that is why the 12 year old accused listed herself as 15. Everyone else does too. There is a tragic irony in all this, since the current Conservative government wants to raise the age of sexual consent from 14 to 16 and drop the age that teenagers can face criminal charges for murder as adults to 14.
You are old enough to know better in one case and not the other. Typical muddled conservative christian moralist thinking. Which results in furthering the emotional plague of mixed value messages teenagers get from their surrounding culture.
What can the Black Death tell us about the global economic consequences of a pandemic?
March 3, 2020
Concerns over the spread of the novel coronavirus have translated into an economic slowdown. Stock markets have taken a hit: the UK’s FTSE 100 has seen its worst days of trading for many years and so have the Dow Jones and S&P in the US. Money has to go somewhere and the price of gold – seen as a stable commodity during extreme events – reached a seven-year high.
A look back at history can help us consider the economic effects of public health emergencies and how best to manage them. In doing so, however, it is important to remember that past pandemics were far more deadly than coronavirus, which has a relatively low death rate.
Without modern medicine and institutions like the World Health Organization, past populations were more vulnerable. It is estimated that the Justinian plague of 541 AD killed 25 million and the Spanish flu of 1918 around 50 million
By far the worst death rate in history was inflicted by the Black Death. Caused by several forms of plague, it lasted from 1348 to 1350, killing anywhere between 75 million and 200 million people worldwide and perhaps one half of the population of England. The economic consequences were also profound. ‘Anger, antagonism, creativity’
It might sound counter-factual – and this should not minimise the contemporary psychological and emotional turmoil caused by the Black Death – but the majority of those who survived went on to enjoy improved standards of living. Prior to the Black Death, England had suffered from severe overpopulation.
Following the pandemic, the shortage of manpower led to a rise in the daily wages of labourers, as they were able to market themselves to the highest bidder. The diets of labourers also improved and included more meat, fresh fish, white bread and ale. Although landlords struggled to find tenants for their lands, changes in forms of tenure improved estate incomes and reduced their demands.
But the period after the Black Death was, according to economic historian Christopher Dyer, a time of “agitation, excitement, anger, antagonism and creativity”. The government’s immediate response was to try to hold back the tide of supply-and-demand economics.
Life as a labourer in the 14th century was hard. British Library
This was the first time an English government had attempted to micromanage the economy. The Statute of Labourers law was passed in 1351 in an attempt to peg wages to pre-plague levels and restrict freedom of movement for labourers. Other laws were introduced attempting to control the price of food and even restrict which women were allowed to wear expensive fabrics.
But this attempt to regulate the market did not work. Enforcement of the labour legislation led to evasion and protests. In the longer term, real wages rose as the population level stagnated with recurrent outbreaks of the plague.
Landlords struggled to come to terms with the changes in the land market as a result of the loss in population. There was large-scale migration after the Black Death as people took advantage of opportunities to move to better land or pursue trade in the towns. Most landlords were forced to offer more attractive deals to ensure tenants farmed their lands.
A new middle class of men (almost always men) emerged. These were people who were not born into the landed gentry but were able to make enough surplus wealth to purchase plots of land. Recent research has shown that property ownership opened up to market speculation.
The dramatic population change wrought by the Black Death also led to an explosion in social mobility. Government attempts to restrict these developments followed and generated tension and resentment.
Meanwhile, England was still at war with France and required large armies for its campaigns overseas. This had to be paid for, and in England led to more taxes on a diminished population. The parliament of a young Richard II came up with the innovative idea of punitive poll taxes in 1377, 1379 and 1380, leading directly to social unrest in the form of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.
This revolt, the largest ever seen in England, came as a direct consequence of the recurring outbreaks of plague and government attempts to tighten control over the economy and pursue its international ambitions. The rebels claimed that they were too severely oppressed, that their lords “treated them as beasts”. Lessons for today
While the plague that caused the Black Death was very different to the coronavirus that is spreading today, there are some important lessons here for future economic growth. First, governments must take great care to manage the economic fallout. Maintaining the status quo for vested interests can spark unrest and political volatility.
Second, restricting freedom of movement can cause a violent reaction. How far will our modern, mobile society consent to quarantine, even when it is for the greater good?
Plus, we should not underestimate the knee-jerk, psychological reaction. The Black Death saw an increase in xenophobic and antisemitic attacks. Fear and suspicion of non-natives changed trading patterns.
There will be winners and losers economically as the current public health emergency plays out. In the context of the Black Death, elites attempted to entrench their power, but population change in the long term forced some rebalancing to the benefit of labourers, both in terms of wages and mobility and in opening up the market for land (the major source of wealth at the time) to new investors. Population decline also encouraged immigration, albeit to take up low skilled or low-paid jobs. All are lessons that reinforce the need for measured, carefully researched responses from current governments.
Authors
Adrian R. Bell Chair in the History of Finance and Research Dean, Prosperity and Resilience, Henley Business School, University of Reading
Andrew Prescott Professor of Digital Humanities, University of Glasgow
Helen Lacey Lecturer in Late Medieval History, University of Oxford
There is a passing similarity between the decent into madness of social isolation that Bobby Fischer suffered and the decent into madness of social isolation that affected Howard Hughes. Given time perhapsMartin Scorsesewill make a movie about this Brooklyn kid. He remained Bobby through out his life, never Robert. Perhaps his madness was that of never really growing up after having grown up too soon.
For it turns out from now declassified FBI files that Bobby’s biological parents, Paul Lemenyi and Regina Fischer (née Wender), were for many years spied on by the federal government, which feared they had pro-Soviet sympathies. Her husband, Gerhardt Fischer, whom she divorced in 1945 when Bobby was 2 years old, had in 1939 been permanently barred from entering the United States on account of his suspected Commie sympathies, and according to the FBI never did so. Short of also being possessed of magical powers of impregnation by a process of thought or telepathy, he could therefore not have fathered young Bobby.
Such social schizophrenia resulted in a very personal madness of social isolation. He went from Cold War Prodigy to Social Pariah in a few short years resulting in his further break down. As a result he is another victim of the emotional plague.
Influenced as he was by the Cold War propaganda of American Culture such social schizophrenia is understandable, it still exists today on the right. A right which sees Bolshevism and Communism as a Jewish conspiracy and even attributes that same conspiracy to the development of the anti-communist/anti-Stalinist neo-con movement of the Sixties being that it was made up of former leftists from the New York Jewish intellectual circles.
By the end of his life his eccentricity and paranoia had come to overshadow his achievement.
Even in his strange exile from the chess scene, however, Fischer continued to haunt it. He became the Howard Hughes of chess, with fans eager for his return reporting sightings at tournaments and continuing to analyze his games years after other champions had taken his place.
On the day after Bobby Fischer’s death it was clear that Icelanders felt they had lost a friend. Many had grown accustomed to seeing this bearded man in central Reykjavík. Even though he was a very private man who kept to himself it is clear that he had a small group of very good friends. Those remembered him yesterday with fondness even though they made it clear that he had been very difficult at times.
Mr. Kasparov: Definitely, Fischer’s contribution was the most revolutionary. He made chess more professional in terms of overall chess strategy and proper education in chess, in bringing everything he had into the game.
Q:What do you mean?
A: He exhausted himself, his opponent and all the resources at the chess board. He was a real fighter, at a time when short draws were often agreed. Fischer was unstoppable. They [other top players] had nothing to offer to conquer his dedication to the game. He also added an element of psychological warfare.
Q:Did he influence your career?
A: I was seven, eight, nine in the early 1970s. We didn’t know much about the Cold War, of Fischer being the symbol of individualism and freedom fighting the great Soviet machine. Only later when I worked on [writing the book] “My Great Predecessors” did I realize the full impact of the Fischer revolution. He was a unique combination of a great researcher and fierce fighter and great chess player — a man with tremendous chess capacity.
Fischer-Spassky, 1972, Game 6 Click on the diagram to replay a crucial game from the tournament. After losing the first game and forfeiting the second, Bobby Fischer had stormed back to tie the match after five games. In Game 6, he played an opening he had never played before, and in which Boris Spassky had never lost. In a masterful display, Mr. Fischer pushed Mr. Spassky off the board, took the lead in the match and never looked back.
COLUMBUS, Ohio – A tendency for one or both spouses to avoid or withdraw from tough conversations could set up married couples for emotional distress, bad feelings about their relationship, chronic inflammation and lowered immune function, new research suggests.
The analysis revisits data from a 2005 Ohio State University study that showed the stress couples feel during a brief argument could slow their bodies’ ability to heal from wounds by at least a day – a landmark finding at the time showing how psychological stress affects immunity.
A fresh look at the data shows that when married couples typically communicate with each other in negative ways, both spouses – and women in particular – suffer emotionally and their immune function wanes, in the form of having wounds that take longer to heal. The analysis revealed that the health consequences of negative communication patterns were evident even before the 2005 study began: These couples arrived at the lab with higher blood markers for inflammation.
The initial trial showed that one stressful argument – in a lab, recorded and analyzed by researchers – could harm immune function. This new study suggests that the more combative arguments in the lab were linked to more negative typical marital communication for these couples – and those daily patterns are a likely culprit behind persistent negative emotions and biological markers that can lead to poorer health outcomes.
“Marriage is associated with better health, but chronically distressed marriages can worsen health,” said first author Rosie Shrout, who completed this work as a postdoctoral researcher in Ohio State’s Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research (IBMR). “It’s important to understand what is going on behind the scenes that contributes to these effects.
“What we’re seeing is that both chronic daily negativity and acute negativity, and their combination – experiencing both of those – is particularly bad for couples’ emotions, relationships and immune functioning,” said Shrout, now an assistant professor of human development and family science at Purdue University.
The 2005 research was co-led by Jan Kiecolt-Glaser, senior author of the new study and professor emerita of psychiatry and psychology at Ohio State, whose decades of discoveries as a leader of the IBMR have shown the many ways in which stressful life events are detrimental to health.
The 2005 work involved 42 married heterosexual couples who had been together for an average of 12 years. Researchers tested the baseline level of a proinflammatory protein in their blood and used a device to raise small blisters on each partner’s forearm – the wounds’ healing progress was monitored as an indicator of how well each participant’s immune system was functioning.
Participants completed questionnaires assessing their typical communication patterns when problems arise – mutual constructive or symmetrical positive communication, or variations of negative communication patterns that involved either mutual avoidance or instances where one partner made demands and the other withdrew from the discussion in response.
Couples were recorded having discussions in two separate lab visits: The first focused on social support and the second was an attempt to resolve a known source of tension in the marriage, such as finances or in-laws. Researchers coded negative and positive behaviors during these talks.
In follow-ups, couples evaluated the discussions – whether they were satisfied with the conversation, and the degree to which they felt supported and understood by their partner, and in control and working productively while sorting out a problem. Their blister wound healing was assessed daily for eight days and then again on day 12.
In the new study, statistical modeling of the qualitative and biological data showed that couples’ negative communication patterns – specifically mutual avoidance or demand/withdrawal – had cascading effects on how they felt after the lab conversations, and on their inflammation and immune function measures.
“If they were more negative typically on a day-to-day basis, and were negative in those specific interactions, they rated the discussion more negatively and less positively, they felt fewer positive emotions, and their wounds healed more slowly,” Shrout said. “That chronic negativity and acute negativity had emotional, relational and immune effects – most notably for women.”
In contrast, couples who reported more mutual constructive communication patterns rated the lab conversations more favorably.
A few specific findings suggested how insidious the effects of poor communication patterns could be: Wounds healed more slowly in couples who mutually avoided talking about tough topics and also showed fewer positive behaviors during lab discussions. Even when mutual avoiders were more positive while trying to resolve conflict, that positivity didn’t help their wounds heal more quickly.
Kiecolt-Glaser, who has led a number of marriage and health studies, said it doesn’t take long for married couples to have expectations of what the marriage is like that can override any evidence to the contrary. In a bad marriage, a negative behavior is perceived as reinforcement of this expectation, while in a good marriage, a negative behavior is taken as a sign one’s partner is in distress.
“This study provides a window into relationships: What couples say about their relationship really did translate not only into how they behaved, but also what they said about the behavior, and their biology,” she said. “They walked into this study situation, and the way they’re responding may in part be because that’s what they’re expecting. They have such well-worn tracks in terms of interactions that it’s hard to derail the train.”
That doesn’t mean all is lost, Shrout noted – couples have lots of options to pursue education or therapy to help them learn better communication skills.
This work was supported by an Ohio State Presidential Postdoctoral Scholars Fellowship and the National Institutes of Health.
Additional co-authors include Megan Renna of the University of Southern Mississippi, and Annelise Madison and William Malarkey of Ohio State.
Marital negativity’s festering wounds: The emotional, immunological, and relational toll of couples’ negative communication patterns
Sunday, March 13, 2022
JAPANESE CBW IN CHINA WWII
Devil's deal stole justice from dead
By Zhao Xu in New York | China Daily | Updated: 2022-03-12
Wang Xuan (six from right) with Japanese lawyers and peace-lovers staging a demonstration at the Tokyo Metropolitan Hibiya Park in Sept 2003, demanding an apology and reparations from the Japanese government for conducting biological warfare in China. [Photo provided to China Daily]
LONG READ
"A bomb filled with bacteria was placed on the ground and about 20 Manchurians were tied to poles (that is, enough distance to prevent men's death) from the bomb, which were electrically exploded. By the bomb blast ... and its fragments, the plague bacilli and anthrax bacilli penetrated through the wound into human bodies."
This shocking revelation came from Major Tomio Karasawa, 35, who was captured by the Russians in September 1945, in the final days of World War II. Karasawa was an army physician who between 1939 and 1944 worked in Unit 731, a covert biological research and development unit run by the Japanese Imperial Army.
Unit 731, set up in 1932 by General Shiro Ishii, a microbiologist, in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in Northeast China, was responsible for some of the most notorious and little known war crimes in human history. (Manchukuo means the Empire of Manchus, for which the Japanese had installed the dethroned Qing Dynasty emperor Puyi, who was of Manchu ethnicity, as its figurehead ruler.)
The secret unity, based in Pingfang (which Western researchers often call Pinfan) just outside Harbin, the largest city of Manchukuo, and in what is today's Heilongjiang province, not only carried out human vivisections behind its high walls and produced vast quantities of germs to spread all over China, but also acted as an evil core for what the late US historian Sheldon H. Harris called "factories of death" that it had set up across Japan-occupied Asia.
The Russians, who acquired Karasawa's affidavit during their interrogations, soon brought it to the attention of the International Prosecution Section (IPS) of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), convened in April 1946 in Tokyo to try Japanese war criminals.
"We do not consider that the evidence now available is sufficient to justify an assurance that any of the accused can be associated with this activity by any of the criteria adopted by the Court with reference to atrocities and prisoners of war offenses," was the reply on Dec 13, 1946 from Frank S. Tavenner Jr, US associate prosecutor of the IPS.
Tavenner's phrase "Any of the accused" covered, among others, General Yoshijiro Umezu, who, between 1939 and 1944, was commander of the Kwantung Army that controlled Manchukuo, and a direct superior and chief supporter of Ishii. The army, together with the imperial army's military police army Kempeitai, ruled with an iron fist. The latter kept Ishii's laboratories supplied with captives-the Manchurians in Karasawa's affidavit, referred to internally as maruta, a Japanese word meaning logs, by those who performed vivisections.
The affidavit was never produced as evidence, nor was the man allowed to testify during court proceedings of the IMTFE, ostensibly modeled on the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg that tried Nazi war criminals.
Yet the affidavit was constantly brought up in written communications not only between the Americans and the Russians, the latter pushing for its inclusion in the trials, but also among the American prosecutors of the IPS, the military intelligence officials under General Douglas MacArthur's occupation authorities and those in Washington.
One of these declassified documents, kept at the US National Archives in College Park, Maryland, was an intelligence report dated Aug 1, 1947 and circulated within the State-War-Navy Coordinating Sub Committee for the Far East. (The State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee, a precursor to the US National Security Council, was a US federal government committee created in December 1944 to look at political and military issues related to the occupation of the Axis powers once World War II ended.)
The report, titled Interrogation of certain Japanese by Russian prosecutor, includes four appendixes. The Karasawa affidavit appears in Appendix A-"facts bearing on the problem". Elsewhere, the conclusion of the report is unequivocal:"The value to the US of Japanese BW (biological warfare) data is of such importance to national security as to far outweigh the value accruing from 'war crimes' prosecution."
This document can be found in the six-volume Compilation Of Historical Documents On Japanese Biological Warfare During WWII, published in 2019 and coedited by Wang Xuan, a Chinese researcher, and her Japanese counterpart Shoji Kondo.
"Imperial Japan's employment of biological weapons in China was full-scale, and unprecedented in human history," Wang, 69, said. "Its unspeakable cruelty can be glimpsed from the devil's deal, struck between Unit 731 scientists and the Americans who coveted their information."
Ishii said that if the Americans could provide him and his associates with documentary immunity from prosecution for war crimes, much more would come their way. This would include "photomicrographs of selected examples of 8,000 slides of tissues from autopsies of human and animals subjected to BW experiments", as listed in Appendix A.
Sheldon Harris and the Chinese translation of his Factories of Death. [Photo provided to China Daily]
"Most distressing is the fact that the ultimate disclosure in the mid to late 1940s of Japanese BW human experimentation did not appall those individuals who were apprised of these criminal acts," wrote Harris in the preface of his groundbreaking book Factories Of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-1945, and the American Cover-up. "Instead, the disclosure whetted the appetites of scientists and military planners among both the victors and the vanquished."
During Harris' research for the book in the late 1980s, he located in the Dugway Proving Ground Library three of the "20 huge autopsy reports relative to their (the Japanese's) experiment with humans". The Dugway Proving Ground, about 140 kilometers southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah, is a US Army facility established in 1942 to test biological and chemical weapons.
The Harris book, which Wang describes as "the very first comprehensive scholarly research that brings to light the American cover-up", was first published in 1994. The history professor at California State University, Northridge, would spend nearly all of his subsequent waking hours adding to it. A revised edition was published in 2002, shortly before he died in August that year.
Now, 20 years later, the Chinese version of the 2002 book is finally reaching shelves in China. Wang Xuan, who was closely involved with the translation of the 1994 book into both Japanese and Chinese, is also the chief translator of the revised 2002 edition.
Jeanne Guillemin and the Chinese translation of her Hidden Atrocities. [Photo provided to China Daily]
The Chinese translation of another book on the same subject, Hidden Atrocities: Japanese Germ Warfare and American Obstruction of Justice at the Tokyo Trial, is also coming out, five years after it was published and a little more than two years after the death of its author Jeanne Guillemin, a medical anthropologist and senior fellow in the Security Studies Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Wang, who met Guillemin and her husband, the renowned American molecular biologist Matthew Meselson, in China in 2005, wrote the preface for the Chinese version.
"This coincidence, coupled with the sad deaths of the two scholars, both in their mid-70s, only serves to remind me of the physical and emotional toll taken of them as they wrestled with the dark truth," Wang said.
The Tokyo trial, which opened in May 1946, seven months after Japan surrendered and six months after the Nuremberg trials opened, proceeded in what Guillemin called "a radically different geopolitical context", one in which the United States, through General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, "ruled securely".
Yet it was what had been going on between the surrender and the opening of the trial that set the tone for the eventual miscarriage of justice.
In an interview with the Japan Times in 1982 Ishii's eldest daughter Harumi, then 57, said the first thing MacArthur did when he arrived in Japan on Aug 30, 1945 was to "inquire about my father".
No wonder so, according to Guillemin, even back in May 1944, MacArthur had already been informed of the discovery in a captured document of "a diagram of a Japanese Mark 7 experimental bacillus bomb, likely for anthrax and similar to munitions being developed by the United States and Britain". A US intelligence report dated Dec 15, 1944 included "a detailed map of an affiliate of Unit 731 located in Nanjing, called the Tama Unit (Unit 1644)".
In fact, two days before MacArthur arrived in Japan, Colonel Murray Sanders from Camp Detrick, Maryland, was already in Japan seeking out former Unit 731 scientists.
Sanders was to be followed by another three investigators from Camp Detrick (later Fort Detrick), the center of the US biological weapons program until 1969. These included Lieutenant Colonel Arvo Thompson, Sander's immediate successor.
Their investigations, mainly from a scientific point of view as military intelligence, were carried out simultaneously with the one done by the International Prosecution Section (IPS) of the IMTFE and the one by the Legal Section under the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (General MacArthur), both focused on the Japanese BW activities as war crimes.
A conflict of agendas was to erupt between what Harris dubbed "war crimes investigators" (the IPS prosecutors) and "BW/CW investigators" (Sanders and his successors). The latter, Harris wrote, "would brook no interference" from either "the issue of war criminal responsibility" or "medical or scientific ethics".
Around early March 1946, Thomas Morrow, US associate prosecutor of the IPS who was put in charge of investigating Japanese aggression in China, met Thompson and another investigator who was with G-2, the military intelligence division under MacArthur's occupation command. Morrow's request to interview Ishii, who had faked death before being located by MacArthur's intelligence, was turned down.
Then in a memo on June 4, Joseph Keenan, a Harvard graduate who had reportedly been handpicked by President Harry Truman to fill the role of IPS chief counsel, told all his staff at the IPS that a central interrogation center had been established under the control and direction of G-2, headed by Major General Charles A. Willoughby, a die-hard anti-Communist who would become a Cold War warrior. It was merely one month after the start of the Tokyo trial on May 3, 1946.
For those familiar with the entire trajectory of events, this arrangement, which in effect placed any further war crimes investigation under the control of US military intelligence in Tokyo, would be followed, later in trial, by directives from Washington to MacArthur that declared "information obtained from Ishii and associates on BW will be retained in intelligence channels and will not be employed as 'war crime' evidence."
Daniel Barenblatt and the Chinese translation of his A Plague Upon Humanity. [Photo provided to China Daily]
In March 1946, while Morrow was being denied access to Ishii, Thompson was having extensive interviews with the man and his subordinates. In the same Japan Times interview, cited in the 2004 book A Plague Upon Humanity: The Hidden History of Japan's Biological Warfare Program by Daniel Barenblatt, Ishii's daughter Harumi recalled that Thompson "said he had come as an emissary for President Truman" and "literally begged my father for top-secret data on the germ weapons". (The Chinese translation of Barenblatt's book was published in 2016.)
Head of the Chinese Prosecution Hsiang Che-chun (Xiang Zhejun) speaking during the court proceedings at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. [Photo provided to China Daily]
For a month between March 12 and April 12, 1946, Morrow and David Nelson Sutton, US associate prosecutor and assistant to the Chinese Division of the IPS, were in China on a fact-finding mission. They were guided in this effort by Hsiang Che-chun (Xiang Zhejun), who had arrived in Tokyo in early February as head of the Chinese prosecution team and was behind Morrow's thwarted attempt to pursue the war crime.
On April 23, Sutton submitted to Keenan his final report, titled Report from China: Bacteria Warfare.
For Wang, her encounter with the Sutton report at the National Archives in Maryland in October 2010 was overpowering. "There I sat, amid the hushed quietness of the room, with tears running down my cheeks. Laid out in front of me were documents prepared by the Chinese prosecution for pursuing the Japanese BW war crime responsibility-they, and those before them, had really tried to bring those monsters to the bar. And I saw my hometown, listed in the documents as one of the places the Japanese had attacked with plague."
Among other things, enclosed in Sutton's report to Keenan is a report written by Peter Z. King (Jin Baoshan), a public health official with China's Nationalist Government, in late 1941. Citing the repeated appearances of low-flying Japanese aircraft dropping considerable quantities of "wheat grains, pieces of paper, cotton wadding and some unidentified particles" and the subsequent outbreak of bubonic plague in those areas, mostly plague-free until then, the report established a direct link between the four plague outbreaks and their subsequent spread in the provinces of Zhejiang and Hunan in 1940 and 1941 with Japan's biological warfare.
King's report was widely distributed in the spring of 1942 when China's foreign ministry notified all Allied embassies and legations that Japan's germ attacks were "ruthlessly in violation of the principles of international law and the principles of humanity". That protest fell on deaf ears.
During Sutton's trip to China, he interviewed King and, at his urging, spoke to W. I. Chen, a Chinese epidemiologist, and Robert Pullitzer, a plague prevention expert. Both were on site in Changde, Hunan province, soon after the plague started in November 1941 and wrote investigative reports corroborating King's claim. And both, like King, were more than willing to testify in court.
None was given the chance. In the last sentence of his report's covering letter to Keenan, Sutton wrote: "As the case now stands, in my opinion the evidence is not sufficient to justify the charge of bacterial warfare."
Wang was not impressed. "If this is not sufficient evidence, then the Chinese prosecution should be facilitated with access to chief suspects, instead of being withheld all information the US army investigators had been accumulating from Ishii and his associates," she said. "The Chinese prosecution had managed to come up with no less adequate proof for an indictment compared with other cases ongoing at the court. The nature of the crime deserves a thorough investigation."
It needs to be noted that Sutton, before being assigned assistant prosecutor at the IMTFE, was a civilian officer at the US Department of Defense with no background in biology, Wang said.
"I believe more information is needed if we are to interpret his actions, decisions and standpoint," said Wang, who met Hsiang, the Yale-educated Chinese prosecutor, in the late 1970s. Wang's father worked with Hsiang in the 1940s at the Shanghai High Court before the latter was appointed to the IMTFE.
By the time Wang stumbled upon the Sutton report in 2010, it had been three years since the end of a decadelong lawsuit in which she took a group of BW survivors from the attacked places in King's report to Japan, demanding compensation from the Japanese government. Wang's own paternal uncle died from bubonic plague following an airborne attack in Zhejiang in 1940."About 400 people, one-third of the population of my ancestral village, died," she said.
They died in unspeakably horrible conditions, as Patrick Tyler, a reporter for The New York Times, wrote in his 1997 story: "Their screams sundered the night from behind shuttered windows and bolted doors, and some of the most delirious victims ran or crawled down the narrow alleys to gulp putrid water from open sewers in a vain attempt to vanquish the septic fire that was consuming them."
According to Wang, the last time the Chinese prosecution appeared in Sutton's court working diary was on May 11, 1946, eight days after the start of the trial.
In this diary the assistant prosecutor said that two days earlier he found a note on his desk from Judge Hsiang. With the note, Hsiang had attached several translated pages of testimony from a Japanese soldier named Osamu Chimba (in Guillemin's book he is erroneously called C. C. H. Hataba due to a mistake from the original document), a former member of Unit 1644 (Tama Unit), a satellite of Unit 731 in Nanking (Nanjing).
The cover of one of the three human experiment autopsy reports Sheldon Harris discovered at the US Army's Dugway Proving Ground Library. They were provided to the Americans by Unit 731 scientists as a bargain for war crime immunity. "A" refers to anthrax. The report was originally kept at Fort Detrick, whose investigators conducted extensive investigations with Unit 731 scientists. [Photo provided to China Daily]
Having deserted out of revulsion of his troops' "true, inhuman mission" in 1944-the only one to do so among the Japanese BW troops' 12,000 personnel, Chimba spoke about "a great scourge" inflicted on the Chinese provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangxi in May 1942 by Ishii and his scientists, whose powerful weapons, apart from plague, cholera, typhoid and dysentery bacteria, included anthrax.
The confessions of Chimba met with a similar fate as all other incriminating evidence-Sutton focused his attention on prosecuting the Japanese for the atrocities of the Nanking Massacre and "almost nothing concerning BW surfaced at the Far East International Military Tribunal's war crimes trials", Harris said.
However, in September 1946 the highly incriminating revelations of Major Karasawa and three other Soviet captives were brought to the attention of the Americans by those from the Soviet Division of the IPS, who demanded to interview Ishii for a potential war crimes trial.
If anything, this only served to convince the Americans of the value of their prize find and the need to keep him for themselves, away from the Russians with whom the decisionmakers in Washington believed they had entered a competition to develop the most powerful biological weapons.
"Up to that point, Ishii had consistently lied about the issue of human experiments, largely denying the fact that they had ever been conducted," Wang said. "Armed with the affidavits provided by the Soviets, the Americans, believing that they could exploit Ishii's fear of the Soviets to their own advantage, confronted the sly general, who then seized this opportunity to put forward his demand for the bargain-immunity from 'war crimes' in documentary form for himself, superiors and subordinates."
On May 6, 1947 MacArthur sent a top-secret radiogram to the War Department's General Intelligence Division, requesting action by the Joint Chiefs of Staff on an immunity agreement for the Unit 731 scientists.
In it, MacArthur said the affidavits from Karasawa and his superior Major General Kyoshi Kawashima had been "confirmed tacitly by Ishii", who "claims to have extensive theoretical high-level knowledge including strategic and tactical use of BW on defense and offense, backed by some research on best BW agents to employ by geographical areas of the Far East and the use of BW in cold climates".
The final deliberation from Washington is laid out bluntly in the Aug 1, 1947 intelligence report for circulation inside the US State-War-Navy Coordinating Sub-Committee for the Far East.
"This Japanese information is the only known source of data from scientifically controlled experiments showing the direct effect of BW agents on man... any war crimes trial would completely reveal such data to all nations, it is felt that such publicity must be avoided in the interests of defense and national security," the report said, noting at the same time that:"Experiments on human beings similar to those conducted by the Ishii BW group have been condemned as war crimes by the International Military Tribunal for the trial of major Nazi war criminals."
Shiro Ishii, head of Unit 731. [Photo provided to China Daily]
Showered by the Americans with gifts, Ishii, who at this point was regularly entertaining his US guests at home parties, encouraged his associates to speak freely with the investigators, who for their own part were occasionally shocked but often impressed by the candor of the Ishii scientists about the use of humans-Chinese, Koreans and Russians-in their research.
In August 1945, five days before Japan's official surrender, Ishii received a hand delivered message from Tokyo ordering him to eliminate all evidence of biological warfare "from the Earth forever". Yet before his escape home via Korea, before advancing Russian and Chinese troops, Ishii "managed to load three large wicker hampers with documents and specimens", Harris said. A large cache of salvaged biological warfare data and equipment was later sent from Pingfang to Busan, Korea and eventually to Japan.
What was put to instant demise were the lives of all remaining POWs-at least 3,000 had been experimented to death at Pingfang according to the confession by Kawashima but the actual number should be doubled based on the research of the Unit 731 Museum in Pingfang.
After the war Toshimi Mizobuchi, a veteran of Unit 731, said that on Aug 12, 1945, a fellow unit member came out of the Pingfang prisons and told him that he had "finished off 404 maruta (logs)", referring to the captives. The Russians later discovered in Pingfang a burned out compound with desperate pleas still discernible from scorched prison walls.
In a 1999 story by a New York Times reporter Ralph Blumentha l, Mizobuchi is depicted as "a vigorous 76-year-old real estate manager living outside the Japanese city of Kobe" who is "organizing this year's reunion for the several hundred surviving veterans of Unit 731". Ishii, before his death in 1959 of throat cancer, attended such reunions regularly with his former subordinates, a number of whom went into medical practice after the war.
On Nov 12, 1948, the IMTFE concluded. Of all the victims of the Imperial Japanese Army's biological warfare, the Tokyo trial records only contain the name of one-Kung Tsaoshang, who died of the plague attack in Changde in late 1941 and whose autopsy report, authored by Dr W. I. Chen, was passed to Sutton by King as part of the public health record.
"The delay in justice at Tokyo led to the denial of justice," wrote Guillemin in the final chapter of her book. Wang, who first went to Japan to study in 1987 before accidentally becoming involved in the decadelong lawsuit during her trip back home in 1994, had forcefully sought belated remedy.
On Aug 27, 2002, the Tokyo District Court admitted, for the first time in Japan's judiciary, that Unit 731 scientists had "used bacteriological weapons under the order of the Imperial Japanese Army's headquarters". That was four days before Harris, who spoke to the BBC about the court victory, died of a blood infection on Aug 31 in Los Angeles aged 74.
The remains of the once sprawling compound of Unit 731 in Pingfang, after most of it was destroyed by the Japanese at the end of the war in August 1945, in an effort to hide all incriminating evidence. [Photo provided to China Daily]
Although the same court ruled that postwar Sino-Japanese treaties prevented any compensation for the victims, its verdict was upheld by the Tokyo High Court in 2005 and by the Japanese Supreme Court in 2007, by which time 24 victim-plaintiffs had died.
"In 1998 Harris flew to Tokyo at the invitation of our Japanese lawyers' group, taking with him vast quantities of photocopied documents he had collected from US archives and elsewhere that could be of use to us,"Wang said. "I last met him in March 2002 in China, when I traveled with him and two US medical scientists to Zhejiang province to conduct research on victims of Japan's anthrax/glanders attack in 1942."
The same trip, the last one of Harris' 12 trips to China, also brought the three Americans to Wang's ancestral home in Yiwu, Zhejiang province, where a Tragedy Memorial Pavilion that listed the names of more than 1,000 plague victims in the county reduced them to tears. Wang led his guests through a gray-brick Buddhist temple with bare concrete floors, where in 1942 Japanese wearing white coats and masks dissected the infected villagers lured there by the lie that these men were doctors offering treatment.
The declassification of the Tokyo Trial documents, as well as intelligence documents generated by MacArthur's occupation authority and their communications with Washington, first started in the mid-1970s, following denunciation by the administration of President Richard Nixon of the offensive biological weapons program and improved relations with China.
In the late '80s and '90s more and more world media became interest-ed in Unit 731 history as an increasing number of repentant former unit members decided to come forward. Against this backdrop Harris published the first edition of his book in 1994, painstakingly combing through all declassified information, which he then augmented with the knowledge he acquired through special contacts within the US military and government.
Among those Harris inspired was Barenblatt, who, for his 2004 book, traveled to China and Japan many times, and had many long phone conversations with Wang, whom he called "one of the primal forces of nature".
The research also took Barenblatt, Harris' and Guillemin's fellow Harvard graduate, to a New York library where he discovered "a fragile old tome" with the title Materials on the Trial of Former Servicemen of the Japanese Army Charged with Manufacturing and Employing Bacteriological Weapons. The last time the book, a partial transcript of the 1949 war crimes trial of their captured Japanese medical scientists and military officers held by the Russians in the Siberian city of Khabarovsk, was checked out by anyone before Barenblatt had been in 1979.
Death factory－an aerial view of Unit 731 in Pingfang during its full operation. [Photo provided to China Daily]
At the Khabarovsk trial, which met with derision and denial in the West-Keenan, the IPS chief of counsel, denounced it as a Russian "show trial"-12 Japanese, including Karasawa, were convicted of conducting biological warfare or performing inhuman medical experiments. Karasawa, whom Wang believed was the first to speak about human experiments, was sentenced to 18 years' imprisonment and committed suicide when it was announced that he was to be released and repatriated to Japan with the other Japanese POWs in 1956.
In the preface of his revised edition, Harris cites a bill passed by the US Congress in 2000 that "mandates all government agencies to disclose any information held concerning actions of the Japanese Imperial Army that would constitute a war crime".
That work, by a government Interagency Working Group (IWG), did not start until May 2003, nine months after Harris' death. Lasting until March 2007, the declassification yielded 100,000 pages of materials on Japan's war crimes. Yet "there were still a lot of loopholes in the name of national security or to that effect", Barenblatt said.
In an email to China Daily, Yang Daqing, a history professor at Georgetown University who had acted as an IWG consultant, said: "Involved government agencies including the CIA sent their heads of their own in-house archives. While we historians could ask them to look for documents on certain subjects, these government officials shared with us what they found.
"We never heard that there were documents that could not be declassified. In theory those documents may exist, but I had no way of knowing."
In 2006, Barenblatt traveled to Changde, Hunan province, the site of a major Japanese plague attack in 1941, which led to more than 7,000 deaths. There, he met Yoshio Shinozuka, who worked at Unit 731's headquarters in Pingfang, where the germs spread in Changde were cultured and tested on victims.
One of those who had come to their conscience, Shinozuka testified in 2000 at court on behalf of the 180 Chinese led by Wang in their compensation lawsuit. Two years earlier in 1998, while trying to attend a photo exhibit on Unit 731 held in the US, he became the first former member of the unit who was turned away from entering the country.
In Changde for a conference on Japan's biological warfare, Shinozuka told Barenblatt how he, then 20 years old, helped prepare for dissection an "intelligent-looking man" who had been "systemically infected with plague germs" and whom he knew because "I had taken his blood once for testing".
"As the disease took its toll, his face and body became totally black. Still alive, he was brought on a stretcher by the special security forces to the autopsy room," said Shinozuka, who later washed the man's body with a rubber hose and a deck brush, under the watch of the chief pathologist.
"Shinozuka told me he'd never forget the glare of hate his victim directed at him as they were cutting into him," Barenblatt said. "One can't help but think what the victim must have been thinking toward the end of his life, that the world has got to know this."
