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“PAYING HOMAGE TO A SPECIAL GROUP OF VETERANS, SURVIVORS OF BATAAN AND CORREGIDOR” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H3993-H3998 on July 12, 2001.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
PAYING HOMAGE TO A SPECIAL GROUP OF VETERANS, SURVIVORS OF BATAAN AND
CORREGIDOR
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2001, the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher) is recognized for 60 minutes as a designee of the majority leader.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, today I rise to pay homage to a very special group of American veterans. As all veterans, these World War II survivors have sacrificed and have suffered for their country. But this special group is different.
This group that I would like to call attention to tonight are men who continue to fight for justice even though these many years have passed since the close of World War II. These are men who fought and paid an enormous price for our freedom and for the peace and safety of the world, yet today, I repeat, continuing to struggle for justice to their own cause.
Instead of fighting the emperors of Japan which they fought during the second World War, these brave veterans are now forced to fight lawyers, the lawyers of Japanese and international business giants, companies like Mitsubishi, Matsui and Nippon Steel. Instead of battling in the jungles, instead of battling on the islands in the South Pacific, these veterans are battling in the courtroom.
Mr. Speaker, the greatest irony about what is happening today about the veterans of whom I speak, while they battled for our freedom in the Second World War, and today, as they say, they are battling lawyers of some of the biggest Japanese companies, the greatest irony is that these American heroes have the United States Government not on their side, but on the side of their adversary. They find themselves arguing against representatives of their own government.
Let me make this clear. Some heroic veterans from World War II were trying to find justice for their cause, men who put everything on the line and, as we will find out, were held hostage and prisoner of war by the Japanese, these men now in seeking justice for their cause are having to argue against their own government. Their own government is now engaged in a legal process to thwart their efforts.
This is the story of the American survivors of the Bataan Death March in Corregidor. These are some of the most heroic of America's defenders during the Second World War. When they were captured, they were forced to serve as slave labor for private war profiteering companies, Japanese companies during the Second World War. These men, these prisoners of war, these American heroes were deprived of food, medicine and clean water. These large Japanese companies, whose own work force was away fighting the war in the Japanese uniform, these corporations used our POWs as work animals. These Japanese companies, knowing that they were violating the international law, used our American soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines whom they had captured in the Philippines and other places around the Pacific, but mainly the Philippines, they used these people and often worked them to death. The standards they had to endure violated the most basic morality, decency and justice. It also violated international law.
Instead of righting wrongs and admitting that violations had been made and violations of law existed, like German companies have done since the end of World War II, and the German companies have tried to close that chapter by giving compensation and recognizing the violation of rights that took place by their companies to the people whom they wronged, the Japanese corporations have ignored the claims of these American heroes.
And why should they not? These large Japanese corporations ignore the pleas of American survivors for justice. Why not? After all, the United States State Department has sided with the Japanese and is working against our former POWs that were held by the Japanese during the Second World War. This is a travesty.
Mr. Speaker, if the American people knew what was going on, I am sure there would be a wave of protest and indignation that would sweep this country, a wave that would sweep right into the State Department and perhaps sweep out these individuals who are siding in a battle against America's most heroic defenders.
Dr. Lester Tenney, a survivor of the death march, a survivor of slave camps, says, ``I feel as if I am once again being sacrificed by our government, abandoned not for the war effort, as in the past, but for the benefit of big Japanese corporations.''
Dr. Tenney is right. In the hours following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese attacked U.S. installations in the Philippines. A U.S. contingent there made up of our military forces retreated to the Bataan Peninsula and made their historic standing. They held off the Japanese military juggernaut while the United States had been crippled in Pearl Harbor, and gave us time to rally America, and gave us time to, and gave us time to organize an offensive to take back the territory that the Japanese had taken.
Our defenders in Corregidor and on the Bataan Peninsula bought time for the whole United States, and they bought time at the greatest risk to their lives. Our government at that time was forced to make a heart-
tearing decision, and that decision was that they were going to have to sacrifice our brave heroes in the Philippines. MacArthur was pulled out, and our troops were left behind. And they were sacrificed because the planners in Washington, D.C., knew full well that much of our strength in the Pacific had been destroyed at Pearl Harbor, and if we tried to save these brave heroes on the Bataan Peninsula, we would have risked so many other military personnel. If we lost that battle, the entire war would have been lost. The risk was so great that it was impossible for us to go to save them.
Yet these men and women, these brave defenders stood their ground and fought a heroic battle. As the song of the day went, their song, the battling bastards of Bataan, no mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam.
After the fall of Bataan, after these men were overwhelmed and American-Filipino troops were captured, they were forced to walk more than 60 miles to their places of captivity, to the prison camps and concentration camps in which they were held. That 60-mile march is known in history as the Bataan Death March. They were denied water, beaten; and during the march, hundreds of them, many of them fell, and many of them were bayonetted to death. Some of them were cut to pieces, at least a few beheaded by Japanese officers who were practicing with their samurai sword.
Let us remember at that time the Japanese culture reflected the view that any warrior who survived a battle and was on the losing side of the battle, any warrior who survived and surrendered was unfit to be considered a human being.
{time} 1815
The Japanese treated our prisoners as less than human beings. They treated them as animals and they murdered them. Over 650 to 700 Americans died on that 60-mile march, the famous Bataan Death March. These were truly heroes, and their sacrifice inspired our Nation. The outrage that swept across our Nation gave us strength to fight against the Japanese militarist thrust in the Pacific and to stand up to the Nazis in Europe, because we saw the heroism of these men. And then, after enduring this hell and taken out of sight of the American people, our prisoners of war that were being held by Japan there in the Philippines, many thousands of them were taken from the Philippines in what are called hell ships. These hell ships took our prisoners to Japan and to Japanese-occupied territories like Manchuria, they were packed into the cargo hold of these ships, and our POWs struggled just to grasp a little air in temperatures that reached 125 degrees. It is estimated that over 4,000 Americans died aboard these ships that were transporting them to, as I say, other Japanese-held territories, especially the islands of Japan itself and in Manchuria.
Our POWs struggled to survive in the harshest conditions imaginable. These heroes were forced to toil beyond human endurance, in mines, in factories, in shipyards, in steel mills. Yes, they took the place of the Japanese men who were away serving in the Japanese military. This was in itself a violation of international law. But the jobs that these prisoners were given, these American heroes were given by the Japanese and the treatment they received was well beyond just a violation of international law; it was a crime against humanity.
They worked the most dangerous jobs, the most terrible conditions, and were treated like animals. They were treated worse than animals. The Japanese would not have treated their animals as they treated our prisoners. Company employees would beat them and harangue them. They were starved and denied adequate medical care. They suffered from dysentary, scurvy, pellagra, malaria, diptheria, pneumonia and other diseases. One of our prisoners of war had his leg amputated because it was crushed in a rock slide, and it was amputated by another American POW, the only doctor who happened to have survived this long, and that doctor amputated that leg without anesthetic. The rations that they were given were unfit for human consumption. Our POWs were reduced to skin and bone, looking very much like the prisoners in Auschwitz and in the concentration camps in Europe.
Today, while many of those survivors, of course, died during the war and after the war just from the complications, and today those who managed to survive over these many years have many health problems that relate directly to their slave labor and the conditions that they were kept in during the Second World War. When you hear the survivors tell their stories, it raises the hair right in the back of your neck and sends chills down your body.
Frank Bigelow, 78 years old, from Brooksville, Florida, was taken prisoner at Corregidor. Mr. Bigelow was shipped to Japan where he performed labor in coal mines owned and operated by Mitsubishi. Now, this is a name that we have heard. Mitsubishi. ``We were told to work or die,'' Mr. Bigelow recalls. Injured in a mining accident and, as I mentioned a moment ago, it was Mr. Bigelow who had his leg amputated without anesthetic by a fellow POW. At the war's end, though Mr. Bigelow was 6'4", he weighed just 95 pounds when he was liberated.
Lester Tenney, 80 years old, of La Jolla, California, became a prisoner at the fall of Bataan in April of 1942. He survived the Bataan Death March and was transported to Japan aboard a hell ship. In Japan, he was sold by the Japanese Government to Mitsui and forced to labor for 12 hours a day, 28 days a month in the Mitsui coal mine.
``The reward I received for this hard labor was being beaten by civilian workers in the mine and constantly humiliated,'' said Dr. Tenney. These are just a couple of stories. The horrors that they suffered at the hands of these Japanese corporations, who were making a profit off the work they were doing for the war, the horrors that these men suffered could fill books; and let us in those books and in this recalling what happened not forget who it was who was doing this. These were Japanese corporations. Many of these same Japanese corporations still exist today.
The case of our POWs is clear. These facts cannot be denied. Their claims cannot be dismissed or just simply explained away. And that is why it makes it even more difficult for us to understand why our State Department refuses to assist these American heroes, these veterans of the Bataan Death March, these men who stood at a time when it took such great courage and endured the unspeakable for us, and now our State Department will not stand with them. In fact, it is standing against them.
It makes it hard to fathom when you think about this why the State Department is doing this when you consider that in Germany, in Nazi Germany, where so many people were wronged and we know about what happened in the concentration camps there and how horrible that was, the Germans have tried to compensate those people, especially German corporations, have tried to compensate those people who they wronged during the war. They have tried to close the book. That is what should happen.
But instead, on the other side of the world, our American heroes have been denied justice by these Japanese corporations. And while our government has encouraged the repayment by German corporations and especially in the case of, for example, Swiss bankers who were ripping off the Holocaust survivors from the deposits that their families had made and the huge German insurance companies, while we have encouraged that and tried to side with those victims, our own State Department and our government are siding against our defenders who were captured by the Japanese and mistreated in a very similar way.
The lawyers for the State Department have allied themselves with the war profiteers, these Japanese corporations who made enormous profits in supplying Tokyo's war efforts, and they have allied themselves against the American victims. Let me just say that their excuse for what they are doing is that they are claiming that the peace treaty that we signed with Japan bars our veterans from these claims. Let me note that that is nonsense. It is total nonsense. If any claims are barred, it is claims against the Japanese Government by American civilians. There is nothing in that treaty that bars our heroic POWs from suing the Japanese corporations that treated them like animals, that violated their human rights and committed war crimes in doing so.
The argument by our State Department is an argument in which our own government is bending over backwards to try to find an excuse for this great violation of rights of our greatest heroes; they are bending over backwards to try to find an excuse when, in fact, these people deserve us to be doing everything we possibly can to try to find the arguments on their side.
These people are not going to be with us for very long. These people might not be with us for another 10 years. They are dying off every day. They are older men. And our government is trying to do its best to try to find arguments, to try to undercut their claims against the people who violated their rights, the Japanese corporations that treated them like slave labor during the war. We should be paying honor to these men, and we should be doing everything we can to help them rather than put roadblocks in their way. The State Department should be ashamed of itself.
First, as the State Department has elsewhere conceded, the waiver of claims by U.S. private citizens against private companies of another country is not merely unprecedented in history, in the history of the United States, it is not recognized in international law and raises very serious constitutional and fifth amendment questions.
What we are talking about here is that there is no State Department waiver of the rights of private citizens to sue people who have violated their rights and they have a just claim. There is no right of our government to waive that, the rights of our citizens. Now, they maybe can waive the rights against a government, but they certainly cannot waive a claim against a corporation that still exists.
By the way, let us remember this: a corporation is a legal entity. If that corporation made mistakes in the past and it is the same corporate entity, it has responsibilities for what the actions of that corporation took in years past. I do not care if it was during the war or during peacetime. A Japanese corporation bears the same responsibility as an individual bears a responsibility. That is why you have corporations. They take upon themselves that legal responsibility.
A close look at the history of the 1951 treaty that we have that ended the war with Japan reveals that the negotiators considered treaty language which would have permitted POW lawsuits against Japanese companies, those same Japanese companies that had used them as slave labor. But that reference was deleted in the final draft after a demand by other Allied powers was made to that agreement, to that wording to the U.S. delegation.
Now, what does that mean? What is going on here is that we considered actually putting something in the treaty that specifically permitted them. Well, the argument was that we can't constitutionally prevent them from doing it, anyway, so why are we putting this in the treaty that could probably be a cause of concern for the Japanese?
And why were we so concerned about the Japanese in 1951? What was that all about? Well, 1951 was another era. And I am afraid that in 1942 when America had to abandon these heroes on the Bataan Peninsula and leave them to their fate and let them be captured and murdered and tortured and worked like slave labor by the Japanese, when we abandoned them to that fate, we abandoned them a second time. That was because again America's security was in jeopardy. America's security was in jeopardy because during the Cold War we needed Japan on our side. And perhaps that was the motive at that time of our government and of the State Department and of people who were concerned about our country, and perhaps these survivors of the Bataan Death March can understand that.
Because at that time had the world witnessed a Japan going towards communism, it would have shifted the balance of freedom and democracy in the world and the whole Cold War might have ended a different way. It might have caused the loss of millions of American lives if just that balance of power in Japan would have been shifted. So maybe we needed to bend over backwards to prevent the Japanese at that time, and I just say maybe.
{time} 1830
There is no excuse like that today. The Cold War is over. We should not be bending over backwards today. If we do not move forward today to permit these American heroes to at least redress their grievances and to receive some compensation and to find justice, if we do not act now, we are abandoning them for the third time.
They were abandoned in Bataan. They were abandoned after the war. Are we going to abandon them again? Are we going to watch them slip away quietly without knowing how much the American people appreciated what they did for us? How will they know how much we appreciated it if we are turning our backs on this claim, this legitimate claim they have against Japanese corporations who worked them as slave laborers while all around the world other peoples have been able to sue those corporations that violated their human rights during the Second World War and how other people, in fact, have been able to sue Japan and those corporations for what they did to them.
No, the only people left out will be the survivors of the Bataan Death March. This is an insult. It is absurd. It is insane. It does not speak well of our State Department. It does not speak well of us if we let it happen, and we should not and we will not let that happen.
The treaty in 1951 also includes a clause which automatically and unconditionally extends to the allied powers any more favorable terms than that granted by Japan in any other war claims settlement. Japan has entered into war claims settlements with the Soviet Union, with Burma, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands and others. These same rights that we are talking about, that we are asking for our own people, have already been granted to the people of other countries. Yet, the State Department in our country continues to work against our heroic Bataan Death March survivors' right to seek justice in the courts against the Japanese corporations that worked them during the war, even though other countries and other peoples have received justice and the book has been closed on their cases.
On the public record to date, the State Department simply ignores these people's claims, these brave heroes' claims, or tries to obfuscate the facts. Several weeks ago, Fox News on the Fox News Sunday program, a news program on the weekend, it was probably more like 2 months ago now, Colin Powell, our Secretary of State, promised to review the State Department's erroneous and unyielding stand against the Bataan Death March survivors. He provided a little bit of hope that the survivors may well be able to obtain justice at long last.
I have yet to hear, and that might have been 6 weeks to 2 months ago, I have yet to hear from the Secretary of State. I would hope that the bureaucrats over at the State Department get this message tonight. We expect the Secretary to pay attention to this issue, and we expect that our country and our government to be more concerned with these claims than they have been in the past and that we expect them to be on the side of our people rather than the side of these Japanese corporations.
We have a Japanese prime minister who has visited this country. We have had exchanges with the Japanese government going on. We have a new ambassador that is being appointed to Japan, Howard Baker. This issue should not go away. This issue should be something that our representatives bring up with representatives of the Japanese government, and that we should change the rules of engagement, so to speak, so that our heroes can at last receive justice.
Of the more than 36,000 American soldiers who were captured by the Japanese, only 21,000 made it home. The death rates for American POWs, this is an important statistic, the death rate for American POWs was 30 times greater in Japanese prison camps than in German prison camps.
I met recently with a member of the Japanese Embassy staff, and he said that it was unfair of me to compare the Japanese in World War II to the Germans and to the Nazis and that is just not the case. I told him, I said with all due respect, sir, the Japanese militarists of World War II, of which this gentleman's generation he was not part of that generation, committed the same type of atrocities and war crimes as did the Germans, and it is very comparable what the Japanese did to the Chinese people, for example, but also to every prisoner that they captured.
Again, I reminded this young man from the Japanese Embassy that his generation does not bear responsibility for this. He was not even alive. But those Japanese corporations that existed at that time and were involved in that behavior do bear legal responsibility, and that the Japanese people today, our efforts to receive justice for these American POWs, we in no way mean it as a slap in the face against the Japanese people of today. The Japanese people of today have a strong democracy and they have around the world proven themselves to be a force for good, but during the Second World War these were not the same Japanese people. They had different values. They had different values and they were a different people. They were told at that time they had been trained from youth to be militaristic and to brutalize anyone who was weaker than them, especially soldiers who surrendered.
Even though the Japanese companies profited from the slave labor, these companies have never even offered an apology, much less repayment to our POWs. Today, as I say, there are fewer than 5,400 surviving POWs. These survivors are pursuing justice not just for themselves but for their widows and for their families of these POWs who died prematurely because of the conditions that they lived under during the war. The POWs finally have a chance for justice and we should not, we cannot, abandon them again.
The gentleman from California (Mr. Honda) and myself have introduced a bill. It is the Justice for POWs Act of 2001. It is H.R. 1198, and there are over 100 of my colleagues now who have cosponsored this bill which will grant our POWs from the Bataan Death March the right to sue those Japanese corporations that tortured them and worked them as animals during the war. Our legislation gives them that right to seek legal redress against those companies.
Mr. Speaker, I would at this time be happy to yield to my friend, the gentleman from La Jolla, California (Mr. Issa), from southern Orange County and northern San Diego County.
Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I rise and came here with the profound desire to speak just a few moments in support of the very courageous legislation of the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher). I, like the gentleman, was not alive and did not participate in World War II but what I do understand, having dealt with people from around the world and especially in Asia, that this is exactly the kind of a bill that Japan, for their own sake, needs to make sure is paid.
The people of Japan are very interested in face. They are also a people who never fail to pay a just debt. This is a just debt. When people work in any capacity, they need to be paid. No Japanese employer, not Mitsubishi, not any of the heavy industry companies that we are talking about here today, not one of them would fail to pay a worker for a day's work. This is the only time in which these companies have gotten labor for which they have not yet paid.
I absolutely support the legislation of the gentleman. I commend him for something that has been long overdue for bringing it to the forefront. I am pleased to be one of the cosponsors; and I look forward to pushing this through the Congress to, in fact, remind the Japanese people that this is the only way they will put the war behind them is to pay the debts that they know they owe, have the corporations pay what they need to pay, with interest, and move on. That is what we do in a civilized society.
Japan is now one of the great nations of the civilized world, and we need them to free themselves of the burden of this past debt. I want to thank the gentleman for yielding, and I want to thank the gentleman once again for authoring this bill with the gentleman from California
(Mr. Honda). And I look forward to seeing it on the floor and enacted.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from California (Mr. Issa), I might add, is one of the great entrepreneurs as well as patriots here in the Congress. I would like to ask him a question. I have no corporate background myself, but I made several times the point that corporations do have responsibility for their actions. Even though it happened a while ago, a corporation would still have legal responsibility for the actions in the past?
Mr. ISSA. Here in America, we have unlimited and permanent liability. There are cases on the American books where a lathe maker who made products in the 1930s had to pay for damages caused to a worker in the 1980s. That is not always considered fair, but corporations understand that one of the advantages they get for that pride of having a plaque that says 50 years or even 100 years in business is in fact that they have to have paid off all of their debts, including the ones that have not yet arisen.
That kind of obligation is understood here in America and very much understood in Japan. As a matter of fact, it is probably more understood in Japan.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, let me also note, and it is important for us to make this point because not only are we talking today to the Japanese people and to the American people, we are talking about our relations between our countries and I do not want anyone to think that the American people or even this American thinks less of the Japanese people and that this is in some way anti-Japanese. The co-author of this bill, the gentleman from California (Mr. Honda), is one of two Japanese Americans who is a Member of Congress. The gentleman from California (Mr. Honda), during the Second World War, his family was interned during the Second World War here in the United States. The gentleman from California (Mr. Honda) is certainly not anti-Japanese whatsoever, and I do not consider myself anti-Japanese at all.
I, in fact, lived in Japan when I was a younger person, and I visited Japan on numerous occasions. My family has many Japanese friends. This in no way is an attack on the Japanese people of today. What we are suggesting in H.R. 1198 is that there is a debt to be paid. Japanese corporations, as the gentleman from California (Mr. Issa) has just stated, have a legal debt to pay and our State Department and our government should not be thwarting these heroic Americans in trying to go to court and receive justice that they deserve for being treated like they were by Japanese corporations during the Second World War.
However, the Japanese people themselves did not commit these crimes today. The Japanese people of today did not commit these crimes, and I do not believe that they personally should be held responsible at all. In fact, as I say, over the last 20 years, Japan has worked with the United States to promote democracy. Japan has had a democratic system. We have a relatively free press, and we have had a situation of freedom of religion, et cetera. And Japan has played a very positive role in this world; but during the Second World War and in the beginning decades of this century, that was not the case.
Now, many people probably wonder why I got involved in this in the first place. If I do not have a grudge to bear against the Japanese people, which I do not, and I acknowledge they are wonderful people and it is a wonderful country, I acknowledge that today and I have many Japanese friends, why am I doing this?
{time} 1845
Why am I the author of H.R. 1198? Well, I can tell you, it is a very easy answer, but it requires a little story. I was married about 3\1/2\ years ago to the love of my life, Rhonda Carmony, who is now Rhonda Rohrabacher. Rhonda's father, my wife's father, passed away about 5 years ago of cancer, and at our wedding someone else had to give her away because her father had passed away.
You might say the grand old man of Rhonda's family is a man named Uncle Lou. Now, Uncle Lou is a survivor of the Bataan Death March, who was taken by the Japanese to Manchuria and worked and lived in a slave labor camp, in a concentration camp in Manchuria, until the closing days of the war when he was liberated, and Uncle Lou told me the stories, and I met with Uncle Lou's friends who told me the stories of their ordeal.
These men, who are probably some of the most heroic people I have ever met, told me of the conditions they were kept in, and then they told me that they were unable to sue these Japanese corporations who had used them as slave labor, and they were unable to find justice through the legal system because our own State Department was thwarting them.
My goal is not to humiliate the Japanese or to make the Japanese feel bad, even though in the past they did bad things. The Japanese people did bad things in the distant past, and that was another generation. My goal is to do justice for Uncle Lou and those 5,400 American heroes who survived the Bataan Death March. That is what our goal is.
Before they pass away, let us give them justice. We need to pass H.R. 1198. We need to pass H.R. 1198. It needs to come to the floor for a vote, and we need to do justice by these men and give them a thank you, a thank you for what they did for our country.
Mr. Speaker, there is nothing that would help Japanese-American relations more than to close this chapter in an honest and honorable way. Nothing would be better for Japanese-American relations than for us to pass H.R. 1198 and to have these Japanese corporations then seek to find a settlement with our American POWs and just close the chapter. Let us finish this. Let us end it in an honorable way before these men die.
I would ask my colleagues to join me in requesting our leadership to bring H.R. 1198 to the floor. I would hope that people would talk to their Members of Congress and get them to support my bill, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher's bill, H.R. 1198.
Now, when we talk about Japan and we talk about how we reacted and how we react today and are we going to do what is right, those same decisions, we are right now trying to close this chapter, but let us learn from this chapter in history. We need to learn from this chapter in history because some other things are going on in this town that go right back to the lessons that we should have learned by the sacrifices of these men in the Bataan Death March and our soldiers who gave their lives, the men and women who gave their lives and put their lives on the line during World War II.
You see, Uncle Lou was captured in the Bataan Death March, but my own father, who passed away 3 years ago, my father was part of the Marine military. He was a pilot during the Second World War who took part in the liberation of the Philippines. So my father helped push the Japanese out of the Philippines, and Uncle Lou was captured there when they took over the Philippines in the first place.
That generation is passing away. My father fought during World War II, and during the Cold War, he was in the Marine Corps, and there are a lot of lessons to learn from that generation. We owe so much to that generation.
Next week, or sometime soon, I am not sure if it will be on the calendar next week, we may be voting on a waiver that will grant normal trade relations to Communist China. We need to learn from the lessons of history. We need to remember the sacrifices of our brave defenders, like Uncle Lou, and, yes, my father as well.
It seems the more things change, the more they stay the same. During the 1920s and 1930s, a militaristic Japan was the primary threat to peace and freedom in Asia, and, yes, as part of its alliance with the Nazis in Europe, that Axis power, that Axis alliance, was the greatest threat to freedom and peace in the world. They were about to usher in a new dark age and destroy or put freedom wherever it was under threat.
During the 1920s and 1930s, and, by the way, Japan could have gone either way at the turn of the century, and we did not support the democratic movement in Japan. They were murdered, and the internal politics in Japan, the militarists kept control of Japan and murdered the democratic opposition there, and by the second decade of that last century, in the 1920s, Japan emerged as a militaristic expansionist power in the Pacific, and they emerged as a potential enemy of the United States because of that.
The Japanese, as I say, were the primary threat in Asia. They were a fanatical tyranny in the 1920s and 1930s. They were racist. They thought they were racially superior and had a right to dominate all of Asia. As I say, they were militaristic, they were beefing up their military, and they were expansionists. They were taking control of islands and fortifying them all over the Pacific as they built up their own military into an offensive power.
Last, which is an interesting comparison, they were also involved with trade with the United States. They were a wealthy power. They had a very strong economy and a high standard of living, and they depended a great deal on trade with the United States. In fact, the Japanese were engaged in a lot of business with American corporations, and we provided them, at a great profit to these American corporations, I might add, we provided them with steel and oil and scrap metal, and, yes, even some of our aerospace companies were involved with working with the Japanese. All of this, if it rings true a little bit when you think about the comparisons about what has been happening with the Communist Chinese, it is rather frightening.
Yes, there have been reports of, and we know now that some of America's aerospace corporations are actually cooperating with them, and one of our companies is actually trying to develop a manufacturing unit that would help them manufacture their equivalent of the B-17, a long-range bomber.
This is incredible now. What American corporation would do this at a time when the Japanese were the biggest human rights abuser in the world by what they had been doing in China and to the people that they had subjugated, and that they were militaristic and a threat, and they were dictatorial, with no sight of liberalization? Why would we let American corporations guide American policy while that was going on?
That is with precisely what was going on then, and that is precisely what happened, and that is what is precisely happening today. The Communist Chinese are the greatest threat to peace and freedom in Asia today, and, in fact, I would say in the world today, because they are allied with the worst and most evil forces in the world, just as the Japanese militarists were during the 1920s and 1930s.
The Chinese Communists are a fanatical tyranny. Those ruthless individuals who control Communist China will let nothing get in their way or nothing threaten their power. They are a fanatical tyranny, just like the Japanese militarists of World War II and before that. If you watch the Chinese military marching along, one can only be reminded of the Japanese troops that marched in that very same arrogant fashion.
Yes, the Chinese who control Beijing today are racist. They believe that they have a superior race and that they have a right to dominate all of Asia. And, yes, of course, they are militaristic.
The worst part of their military expansion, however, is that the United States of America, in permitting the economic rules of engagement in which we interact with Communist China, is permitting the Communist Chinese to have an $80 billion annual trade surplus with the United States. With this $80 billion of hard currency, what is being done by the Communist Chinese? What is being done is they are building up their military. They are acquiring weapons systems that will enable them to incinerate Americans by the millions in terms of their nuclear weapons capacity and their missile capacity. But they are also obtaining weapons that will permit them to sink American aircraft carriers and shoot down American airplanes and to kill American military personnel.
They are not only militaristic, however, they are also expansionists, just as the Japanese were expansionists. Take a look at what the Japanese claimed. They had a map of the coprosperity sphere. We have Chinese maps which show they, too, believe there is a coprosperity sphere, and guess who is in the center of it? And it is a far greater area of control that the Chinese have in mind than the Japanese.
The Chinese have in mind that they control the entire South China Sea, that they control all the way up to the shoreline of the Philippines and of Indonesia and of Vietnam and Southeast Asia. They have a right to control all of Tibet and the greater expanses of Asia and Southeast Asia, and they have a right to the great Siberian areas of Russia.
This is an expansionist power. These are people who are mad with power, just as the Japanese militarists were in the 1920s and 1930s. And just as the Japanese militarists were fortifying islands with their military weapons and their capabilities during the 1920s and 1930s, China is in the process of doing that now.
In the Spratly Islands, which are an island chain that are claimed by five different countries and are 600 miles away from China, but about 100 miles away from the Philippines, and also mainly claimed by the Philippines, Chinese Communists are in the middle of an island grab, and what they are doing is sending their warships there, and they have already built fortifications.
Let me add that I, this Congressman, Dana Rohrabacher, tried to visit the Spratly Islands. For years I tried to visit the Spratly Islands and was prevented from doing so by roadblocks that were put up by who? Who do you think put up those roadblocks so as a Member of Congress, as a Member of the Committee on International Relations, that I would not be able to see what the Communist Chinese were doing in the Spratly Islands? Who put up those roadblocks? My gosh, the same company that is preventing our POWs from suing the Japanese. It is called the United States State Department.
So when I finally got to the Spratly Islands on an old C-130, I might add, from the Philippine military, it was the only one that could fly, I managed to fly out in an old C-130. I had Skunk Baxter with me and a couple of staffers and some folks from the Government of the Philippines. The pilot did not even have a GPS. That is how poor the Philippines are, they did not have a GPS system in the only C-130 flying, and they had a Radio Shack GPS system.
But we made our way to the Spratly Islands. We came out of a cloud bank, and there were three huge Chinese military warships, and what we saw in the Spratly Islands was the Chinese fortifying those islands with military fortifications. This is somebody else's country and somebody else's territory, and they are fortifying it, and they have Chinese warships in the lagoon. Those Chinese sailors were rushing towards their guns, and we did not know if they were going to try to shoot us down or what, and they did not, and we finally escaped that international incident.
Since that time, guess what has happened? We have let them get away with it. We have let them not only lay their claim, but actually build forts there.
Now what have they done? They have done the same thing in the South China Sea, in the Paracel Islands down off of Vietnam.
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They have also, I might add, since that time begun to send their naval war vessels right up to the coast of the Philippines. A few weeks ago, Chinese war ships were within a short distance from the coast of the Philippines. This is an expansionist power. This is a power that threatens. This is the world's worst human rights abuser. As Japan was the world's worst human rights abuser in the 1920s and 1930s, the Chinese are the same with us today. They are expansionist, they are racist, they are militaristic. Yet we have a trade status with them that permits them an $80 billion surplus.
Now, why do we do this? Within the next couple of weeks, why will this body vote to give that kind of country Normal Trade Relations with the United States? I repeat that: Normal Trade Relations. Should a communist dictatorship have Normal Trade Relations? Should a fanatical tyranny that is racist, the world's worst human rights abuser, a country that is expanding its military power, an expansionist in its territory, is this the kind of country that we want to give Normal Trade Relations to?
Mr. Speaker, I believe in free trade. I am a Republican free-trader. But I believe in free trade between free people. If we try to do it the other way around, we are doing nothing but bolstering the regime in power in these dictatorial countries around the world.
How long ago was it? Just a few short weeks ago that 24 military American personnel that were being held hostage by this very same Communist Chinese Government. They, in fact, forced an American surveillance aircraft that was in international waters out of the air in an attempt to murder those 24 American service personnel. Instead, the plane made its way to Hinan Island, luckily; and then they were held hostage for 11 days. That was not so long ago. And now, within a very short period of time, the elected Members of this body are going to vote by a majority to give Normal Trade Relations to that government. That does not make any sense.
Not only were they holding hostage our American military personnel, but we actually have several Americans who are being held right now as we speak, or at least legal residents of the United States, who are being held hostage or being held prisoner by the Chinese, and we are basically talking about giving Normal Trade Relations to a country that is holding Americans, or at least legal residents of our country, holding them illegally, committing torture.
There was a young lady and her daughter who came to our hearing of the Committee on International Relations. Her husband, who is a doctor, a Ph.D., is being held by the Communist Chinese, and her daughter and this lady were begging us: please, please, demand that they bring back my husband, and he is an academic. He is an academic.
The Communist Chinese today are doing what? They are murdering Falon Gong people. Falon Gong, by the way, is nothing more than a meditation cult. I mean, they meditate and they have yoga; and they are being imprisoned by the tens of thousands and hundreds of them are being murdered in jail, hundreds of them. Many of these women, they are being tortured, not to mention Christians, of course, who, if you do not register like the Jews did with the Nazis, if you do not register, you get thrown in a gulag. What happens in China? What happens in China when you get thrown into the gulag? Yes, right back to World War II. Guess what? Their prisoners are worked like animals.
Mr. Speaker, I would suggest that we should not be granting Normal Trade Relations to a country like this. And when those prisoners are executed, and thousands of them are, China is the execution capital of the world, what does this ghoulish regime in China do? It sends doctors, their doctors out to harvest the organs from the bodies of the prisoners that they have just executed.
Mr. Speaker, I say it is time that we learn our lessons from history, not grant Normal Trade Relations with China, and to make sure we stand up for the rights of our own people and the freedom and dignity of our ex-POWs.
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