And how much have the victims and survivors of the Bataan Death March and their dependents received?

Posted by Guessedworker on Sunday, 10 April 2005 12:35.

On April 9th 1942 some 76,000 Allied forces, Philipino and American, surrendered to General Masahura Homma on the Bataan Peninsula. The following day they were force-marched from Mariveles, on the southern end of the Peninsula, about 100 kilometres north. Their destination was Camp O’Donnell, a prison camp in Nueva Ecija in the Philippine region of Central Luzon. They were denied food and water, bound, beaten or killed with impunity by the Japanese soldiers. Some were bayoneted when they fell from exhaustion. Others were made to dig their own graves and buried alive. Only 56,000 prisoners reached the camp. Of these, thousands died later from malnutrition and disease.

Now, it happens that last night, April 9th, I received an e-mail with a link to the website of the, of course, anti-semitic, fascistic, Hitlerian yada, yada historian, David Irving. The linked page was an old post reproducing a Haaretz article by Schlomo Shamir from April 24th, 2004. I have not, incidentally, been able to get the Haaretz search engine to dig up the original article. But I don’t doubt that Mr Irving, a man with first-hand experience of libel litigation, is citing it correctly. He quotes Mr Shamir thus:-

A table in an appendix to the Gribetz report states that compensation and benefits paid to individuals and institutions since 1953, comes to a total of $53,871 billion, of which 44 per cent went to individuals and institutions in Israel, 28 per cent to others in the U.S., and 28 per cent to survivors in the rest of the world.

The outstretched hand of the Holocaust industry has, if you look closely, something very like “Parasite” stamped upon it. It is a state of mind that never seems to change.

Tens of millions suffered and died in the Second World War. Not many groups nourish the memory daily and, perhaps not uncoincidentally, have found the ways and means to extract over 50 trillion dollars from the West. Or, come to that, the East.

Here’s a poem written from captivity in 1943 by Jesse Knowles, one of the Bataan survivors. He was rescued, like the survivors of Auschwitz, by the advancing Russians - albeit in his case it from a prison camp in Mukden, Manchuria. In August 1945 the U.S. Navy loaded Jesse and his fellow survivors aboard a ship for the voyage home at last. I hope he lived well thereafter, even if the Japs never coughed up a cent of guilt money.

“THEY”

Strange things were done under the tropic sun
By the men in Khaki twill
Those tropic nights have seen some sights
That would make your heart stand still
Those mountain trails could spin some tales
That no man would ever like
But the worst of all was after the fall
When we started on that hike

T’was the 7th of December in ‘41
When they hit Hawaii as the day begun
T’was a Sunday morning and all was calm
When out of nowhere there came the bombs
It didn’t last long but the damage was done
America was at war with the rising sun

Now over in the Philippines we heard the news
And it shook every man clean down to his shoes
It seemed like a dream to begin
But soon every soldier was a fighting man
Each branch was ready to do its part
Artillery, infantry, Nichols and Clark

And then they came on that Monday noon
They hit Clark field like a typhoon
That Monday night the moon was clear
They razed Nichols from front to rear
As the days went by more bombers came
And soon only a few P-40’s remained

Then the orders came and said retreat
That no man would be seen on the city streets
So across the bay we moved at night
Away from Manila and out of sight
Deep into the jungles of Bataan
Where 15,000 were to make a stand

Here we fought as a soldier should
As the days went by we spilled our blood
Tho’ the rumors came and went by night
That convoy never came in sight

April 7th was a fatal day
When the word went around that we couldn’t stay
That the front line was due to fall
So the troops moved back one and all

The very next day the surrender came
Then we were men without a name
You may think here’s Where the story ends
But actually here’s where it begins
Tho’ we fought and didn’t see victory
The story of that march will go down in history

We marched along in columns of four
Living and seeing the horrors of war
And when a man fell along the way
A cold bayonet would make him pay
For those four months he fought on bataan
Then they’d kill him ‘cause he couldn’t stand

The tropic sun would sweat us dry
For the pumps were few that we passed by
But on we marched to a place unknown
A place to rest and a place to call home
Home not that you might know
But home to man that suffered a blow

Then to O’Donnell Camp en masse
Some never back thru’ those gates to pass
In Nipa huts we lived like beast
Bad rice and camotes were called a feast

Our minds went back to days gone by
When our throats were never dry
Of our wives, our mothers, and friends
Of our by-gone days and our many sins
And about four thousand passed away
And how many more no man can say
For no tomb stone marks the spot
Where thirty to fifty were buried in lot
Piled together as a rubbish heap
The remains of men
Who were forced to retreat

Now I want to state and my words are straight
And I bet you think they’re true
That if you gotta die it’s better to try
And take them with you too

It’s they that took us that fatal day
It’s they that made us pay and pay
It’s they that counted us morn and night
It’s they that again we wanted to fight
It’s they that made us as we are
But it’s not they that’ll win this war
For the men in khaki will come some day
And take us back to the U.S.A.

Tags: History

Comments:

Posted by Effra on Sun, 10 Apr 2005 13:44 | #

A ‘Holocaust survivor’ nowadays seems to mean any Jew who lived anywhere on earth between 1939 and 1945. A ‘Holocaust victim’ is anyone who died between those dates.

Such is the march of historiography and education that I have spotted several recent allusions to Hitler’s master plan to kill every Jew on Earth. The Wannsee Conference’s section on invading the USA and Latin America and requiring them to hand over their Jews has not yet appeared on Nizkor, but I daresay they’re working on it. At any rate there are several European democracies where it would be unwise to doubt such an intention publicly, if one values one’s job, bank balance, liberty or personal safety.

Posted by Geoff Beck on Sun, 10 Apr 2005 15:51 | #

Did I not read that some Austrialian, if not British, soldiers recently tried to get compensation from Japan? As I recalled they were denied.

My point is why are the Jews given every scheckel demanded and other groups are denied? At least this is how it appears.

Well one reason might be, at least in the United States, money.
Look at where KANSAS SENATOR SAM BROWNBACK, and nearly every other senator and congressman gets his money:

http://www.wrmea.com/archives/May_2004/0405026b.html

Posted by JRM on Sun, 10 Apr 2005 21:19 | #

Europeans use commas instead of decimals. Thus 53 billion and change.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 10 Apr 2005 21:56 | #

JRM,

I am a European actually. So is David Irving. But it doesn’t matter. Irving quoted the figure of $53,871 billion directly from an English-language Haaretz article in which the European punctuation system did not apply.

Posted by Phil Peterson on Sun, 10 Apr 2005 21:59 | #

On a side note, this probably does not take into account what the US has spent on Israel by way of aid:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1209/p16s01-wmgn.html

Posted by Svigor on Sun, 10 Apr 2005 22:34 | #

Yeah, adding in the tribute to Israel brings the grand total to what, 100-150 billions? American states should have it so good.

Posted by Phil Peterson on Sun, 10 Apr 2005 22:47 | #

Since 1973, Israel has cost the United States about $1.6 trillion. If divided by today’s population, that is more than $5,700 per person.

This is an estimate by Thomas Stauffer, a consulting economist in Washington. For decades, his analyses of the Middle East scene have made him a frequent thorn in the side of the Israel lobby.

For the first time in many years, Mr. Stauffer has tallied the total cost to the US of its backing of Israel in its drawn-out, violent dispute with the Palestinians. So far, he figures, the bill adds up to more than twice the cost of the Vietnam War.

This of course does not take into account the cost of the Iraq war which has cost the US another half a trillion.

Posted by Effra on Sun, 10 Apr 2005 23:09 | #

I have read that America’s aid to Israel is as much as it grants to the whole of sub-Saharan Africa.

America has become generous to Egypt in late years, but that is on condition that Egypt doesn’t attack the One True Democracy in the Middle East.

Posted by JRM on Mon, 11 Apr 2005 06:26 | #

53 trillion doesn’t pass the smell test. Consider the federal debt is 7.8 trillion…and that debt is larger than any other debt out their. There may be some confusion because the Europeans also have a different definition of ‘billion’ than the Americans.
I don’t doubt the number is above 10,000,000,000, but putting in above the number for the US debt seems to be a lack of critical thinking.

I have some skepticism of claims saying that Israel has cost the US ‘x’ amount of money. One such claim I encountered added up the cost of loan guarantees at their face value. Loan guarantees should be added up at their factional perceived default value….the difference in credit spreads between US and Israeli debt. So far the actual cost of loan guarantees has been zero, because Israel hasn’t defaulted on its debt. It might in the future. Who knows….
But the gist of the CS Monitor’s article is correct, tens, maybe hundreds, of billions in aid have been given to Israel.

On a side note: The US Treasury isn’t the only one who has been suckered. I understand that Jews who bought ‘Israel bonds’ lost money in real terms….as did the patriotic British who bought bonds to support WWII’s cost.

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 11 Apr 2005 09:10 | #

JRM,

You are asking me to apply critical thinking to the Gribetz Report, as quoted by Haaretz. But “Special Master Judah Gribetz” comes with a certain pedigree in these matters:-
http://www.treas.gov/press/releases/ls876.htm

I do agree, though, that the sum the Report allegedly quotes is unbelievably big ... bigger than any telephone number, bigger even than my mortgage. But in the end, and notwithstanding the accountant’s penchant for strict rigour, the charge is one of parasitism. If a behaviour is rewarded, one will see more of it. In this case, the behaviour has been rewarded beyond the fantasies of Croesus. Why? The Northern European disease of Official Guilt, I suspect.

Posted by DissidentMan on Mon, 11 Apr 2005 18:15 | #

JRM wrote:

So far the actual cost of loan guarantees has been zero, [...].

JRM, AFAIK this is outright wrong. Has “our ally in the middle east”, (i.e. Israel), actually, you know, paid the US any of the money “loaned” to it? It’s my understanding that much of the loans given to Israel are eventually forgiven by the US congress, which means that “loans” to Israel are actually grants in practice.

The biggest unofficial additional subsidy comes in the form of US loans to Israel subsequently forgiven by an act of Congress. That is, every year Congressmen engage in an ingratiation-frenzy to show that they are “friends of Israel,” and this often entails forgiving loans. It is difficult to determine the sums involved, but this practice explains why Israel is overjoyed to obtain loans—these will eventually be forgiven in any case. As Stephen Zunes stated, ” 85all past U.S. loans to Israel have eventually been forgiven by Congress, which has undoubtedly helped Israel’s often-touted claim that they have never defaulted on a U.S. government loan.” [note 2]

—from US Aid to Israel: Feeding the Cuckoo by Paul de Rooj

Posted by JRM on Mon, 11 Apr 2005 22:11 | #

Dissentman,
Interesting link. I didn’t know past loans had been forgiven.

Posted by Svigor on Tue, 12 Apr 2005 20:50 | #

It’s been mentioned already, but it bears repeating: the money we send to Egypt and Jordan is as much a grant to Israel as the rest. What that money buys is very precious to the Israeli lobby; it allows Israel to hide and a crowd and rubs the sheen of particularism off the money we give her.

Posted by Geoff Beck on Tue, 12 Apr 2005 22:15 | #

DissidentMan:

Hey, but we got our very own holomocaust memorial in Washington DC.

BTW: This link is working again,
————————————————————
http://www.vho.org/GB/c/DC/gcgvcole.html

Note:

User Name: visitor
Password: download

Posted by Phil Peterson on Tue, 12 Apr 2005 23:35 | #

It never ceases to amaze me how so few people ever notice that.

Posted by Ron Lewenberg on Sun, 17 Apr 2005 00:13 | #

I fail to see what Israel has to do with the obvious wronging of victims of the Empire of Japan.

Soime people here obviously hold a rather nasty grudge.
While Israel should recieve no funding from the US, the figures cited here are preposterous. The Saidi-funded WRMEA is hardly an unbiased source, n

The debt financing is somewhat hard to enumerate. For instance, “loan guarantees”, which amount to the US co-signing ISraeli loeans are ccounted as donations. The same sloppyness is carried over to counting actual loans. Even those loans that are never repaid, but rolled over seem to be counted every time they are rolled over. That is a huge accounting error.

The US has interests in Egypt other than Israel. The fact is that the Egyptian army is training to fight ISrael, but the US gives Egypt M1 Abrams tanks, F-16’s, etc. This is not in Israel’s interests.
Rather it serves to prop up the regime of Hosni Mubarak, who many feel would be replaced by an Islamist regime.

The same is true in Jordan/Palestine.

I am a Jewish Zionist. My concern is clearm. Whene the overridding fixation of others posting here?

Posted by Thurman Woodfork on Sun, 02 Oct 2005 20:02 | #

I won’t comment on the Holocaust controversy, but it may interest some of you to know that Jesse Knowles, author of the poem ‘They’, is still living, He was a victim of Hurricane Rita, and his home was dstroyed. He is presently in a hospital, but expected to recover.

T. P. Woodfork