30 September 2003

Storm of Protest

The BBC World Service got me going early this morning. Some Baroness who is serving in the EU Parliament sniffed about the rights of the detainees at Gauntanamo Naval Base. I don't know the nature of her title. It is possible that it is hereditary, though there is little entitlement left in the old blood. There are far more titles nowadays, created by the Government out of the artistic and commercial classes. There are even Labor Party Barons. Someone has to fill up Lords, after all, if one is about the destruction of that House. This particular noble lady appeared to be of that irritating class that lives in a state of perpetual denial. She does not believe that the detainees would cheerfully have slit her throat, if they had the chance, nor that they will cheerfully arrange to do so in the future.

Regardless of her proper moral position on Prime Minister Blair.

Poor Tony. He has to give one of those speeches tonight to the annual Labor Congress. He is going to have to explain how he is going to move forward and play coy with his partnership with the Yanks. He is going to face a firestorm of resistance. The rank-and-file feel betrayed by the PM's apparent obfuscation on the question of Iraqi weapons, and his resolution in putting down the Baathist thugs. There is a vast depth in the sea of resentment to the American unilateralism. I feel for them. It must be awfully daunting to be so absolutely wrong on so many issues. I'm pleased they have found one that is simple enough to put on a placard.

Which is to say that they have a point, of a sort. Apparently the Fabians, the legendary gaslight socialist alliance of another George, this one Bernard Shaw, have created a game similar to Bingo. Players have little cards with the current political buzzwords randomly inscribed. As the Prime Minister ambles through the speech the players will be poised with little pencils.

If the words "solidarity" "compassion" "values" "progressive" and "progress" are on the card and in the words, the player wins. There is a prize to the intellectual who leaps to their feet during the oration, shouting: "Bingo!" I am thinking of playing myself, if I could find a velvet jacket and suitable foulard. I didn't have the energy to write the BBC and tell them that the bureaucrats in Washington, those of us with buttocks and bladders of steel, have been dong this at meetings for years. We just settle up after the meetings.

The rivers of history refuse to stay in their banks today. The Times reported a delayed storm from China. The anniversary of the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, the real start of the Second World War, occurred on the eighteenth of September, 1931. But there are plenty of anniversaries in the occupation, which at its height encompassed two-thirds of the Republic of China. The Rape of Nanking, the most memorable atrocity in the occupation happened in 1937. The world was not looking in that direction, being hypnotized by the expansion of the Germany. But Japan's military adventure in China could have cost over ten million lives. Maybe thirty, according to some activist historians. It is hard to quantify and the numbers are too large to comfortably accommodate. The occupation was brutal, too. Civilians were routinely executed, women raped and others forced into servitude as "Comfort girls" for the imperial troops. The massacre at Nanking alone may have killed three hundred thousand.

So the story in the Times about the storm of protest in China was about some bizarre activity on the day of National Humiliation. Authorities arrested several local officials who had colluded with a large tour group of Japanese tourists to hire all the available ladies of the evening in the southern town of Zhuhai. As many as 400 Japanese frolicked with as many as 500 local workers. Details remain sketchy, but there was "an outpouring of invective" against Japan on China's Internet chat sites. Nearly 90 percent said the Japanese had conducted the sex tour to deliberately humiliate China. Apparently it was the scale and the timing of that enraged the authorities in Beijing, and the Government decided to stage a spontaneous storm of disapproval.

But there are protests and there are protests. As much as I appreciated the one from China, the best one happened right here in Washington. The networks even picked up the story because the protest was one conducted in the U.S. Army, specifically by te Third U.S. Infantry, the Old Guard, trusted with the security and decorum of the Arlington National Cemetery. When Hurricane Isabel was approaching the coast the Department of Defense did the prudent thing. It sortied the Fleet and flew the aircraft out of harm's way. This being a more sensitive and caring DoD, regardless of its situational lethality, the leadership of the Old Guard advised the elite Tomb Guard that they could stand down the watch on the ramp next to the Tomb of the Unknowns, pending the abatement of the gale.

They refused.

Soaked to the skin, marching the precise and meaured tred, they patrolled through the night. No tourists, not officers to watch them. The kids from the Third say that guarding the Tomb is not just an assignment, it is the highest honor that can be afforded to a service person. One kid was quoted as saying "I've got buddies getting shot at in Iraq who would kick my butt if word got to them that we let them down. I sure as hell have no intention of spending my Army career being known as the goddamn idiot who couldn't stand a little light breeze."

The Tomb has been patrolled continuously, day and night, since the dedication in 1930.

In my mind, that is a storm of protest.