A message I sent to a racist

                                                  

On September 17, 1997, I received a message via the internet from a man who called himself Nich0las. He said that he despises any man who would marry a Japanese woman.

I should point out that in 1975; I met a Japanese woman when I was participating in several sessions in the United Nations Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. I later married her and at the time of this writing, we have been married 41 years and have two daughters and five grandchildren. We are happily married.  My youngest daughter married a black man and until he died of a heart attack, they were happily married. He gave my youngest daughter four daughters and a son. They are also very happy and none of their schoolmates teases them because of the mixed races.  

Enclosed in this article is the response I sent back to the racist the day after I received his racist rant 

I was just as horrified as you were when I learned about the atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers from the beginning of the attack on Manchuria until the end of the Second World War. You and I and everyone else have a right to condemn that kind of conduct during war time. And you mentioned that the Allied soldiers found in the POW camps in the Japanese mainland were starving. That’s true but so was most of the Japanese populace by the end of the war. They couldn’t feed themselves, let alone the Allied soldiers they captured.

Stalin permitted 30 million people in Russia to starve to death before the Second World War began. If I had married a Russian girl, would you have told me about the atrocities committed by the Soviets?

Nazi Germany committed the same kinds of atrocities on the same kind of scale. For example, did you know that when the German army entered Russia, the SS lined up Russian Jews and Gypsies, men, women, children and small babies being carried in their mother’s arms and machine-gunned them to death? In one location, it took several days to kill all 50,000 of them. The executioners worked 24 hours a day murdering their naked victims. Do I need to tell you of their medical experiments? What about the times when they went into villages and put the men, women and children into churches and locked the doors and then set the churches on fire, burning the villagers alive. Do you remember reading about those atrocities?

If while traveling in Germany after the war, I fell in love with a young German woman who wasn’t even born until after the war, and I married her, would you be reminding me about the atrocities of the Germans?

Are you aware that American whites lynched over 5000 blacks in a hundred-year period up to the 1930s? The lynching included burning them alive, sometimes very slowly. In one incident in this century, white citizens went into a black community in Florida and murdered over 50 blacks, some of them being tied to telephone poles and burned alive. If I had married a young white woman from Florida who wasn’t even born when that terrible event took place, would you be reminding me about the atrocities committed by white Americans against black victims?

How would you feel if I married an American girl who had an ancestor in the last century who rode into an Indian village as an American trooper and helped in the massacre of the hundreds of women and children? How would you feel if I married an American girl whose brother was one of the soldiers who raped and then massacred the hundreds of women and children and even babies in Mai Lai in Viet Nam?

Why did you feel compelled to remind me about the atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers when you learned that I had married a Japanese woman who wasn’t even born until six years after the war had ended? 

The answer is obvious. You are a racist. You hate the Japanese and you hate anyone who would even marry a Japanese woman. But as I said in an earlier post, thousands of American soldiers who had very good reason to hate the Japanese, lived in Japan after the war ended and they saw the Japanese people in a different light. They saw them as caring individuals who had beautiful manners and customs and, I might add, they recognized them as being extremely brave. In fact, President Truman 0rdereds the dropping of two atomic bombs on them because he realized, as did his General Staff, that if the American Armed Forces attempted to take Japan in any other way, as many as one million American soldiers would die in the attempt. That is because the Japanese people would have fought to the death. That is dedication to one’s country that is very hard to surpass.

I am afraid that you have to look at the peoples of the world, not as they were but as they are now. Unless you are prepared to do that, you will simply be another redneck who sees things as they were and not as they are.

Needless to say, I didn’t get a response from the racist.

Racism is a plague on humanity. I despise anyone who is a racist. I will admit however that after the Japanese Empire attacked many nations in the Far East and the United States in 1942, we all hated the Japanese and referred to them as Japs, slant-ryes and Nips. But after the war, we all began realizing that the Japanese (not the war criminals) were and still are very decent people and extremely intelligent.

As time moves on, we all adjust to the era we live in. It is a human trait in all of us.