Bob51 Seaman
Joined: 13 Jan 2005 Posts: 156 Location: Belfast
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Posted: Tue Apr 19, 2005 7:21 am Post subject: Another nice tale with an ethical conundrum for GenrXr |
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GenrXr,
Haven't been here for a while. Spotted this story a short time ago while reading the South China Morning Post. Reminded me of the previous story with a "good" atheist and "the poor Jewish girl".
Here we have the bad Communist, the poor Chinese (communist) girl, and the "good" fascist. Alternatively, we have a bunch of people caught up in a larger situation; some behaving very badly, some going along with the crowd and one anomaly. Thought you would be interested.
Bob51
GenrXr wrote: | Bob51,
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honestly trying to share with us what you believed to be a nice tale.
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The ability of people to recognize good and evil while at the same time not believing there exists a God, something of a higher authority then the individual. A individuals anthropocentricity as the view of the world.
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So he helped a young jewish girl by finding a home for her and then keeping his mouth shut while making a new identity for her. Damn, kudos for you. Pretty damn easy in my book.
Yet, here we have a story of a nihilist who helped the poor jewish girl 60 years ago. A guy who is such a nonconformist he couldnt stand to bear witness to god
GenrXr Out! |
Former sex slave haunted by memories of wartime torment
Yuan Zhulin: "I can't forget"
Haunted by violent memories of her time as a wartime sex slave for Japanese troops, Yuan Zhulin, 84, says it is impossible to sleep at night.
As she sits awake in the dank and spartan room she calls home in Wuhan city, the memories of atrocities committed against her ravage her mind.
She is not alone. Up to 200,000 other women across the region were forced into wartime sex slavery during Japan's conquest of Asia, although the number still alive to tell their story is rapidly dwindling.
"I can't forget the past. It's always on my mind," said Ms Yuan, who was 17 when troops arrived in Wuhan, promptly renamed her Masako and forced her into prostitution.
"More than 10 Japanese soldiers waited outside my room every day," she said. "They had no patience when waiting outside. They would kick the door with their boots and they would scare me to death and I cried and cried. After the 10 soldiers had left I couldn't even sit, it was so painful.
"I'm a little embarrassed talking about this but many of us couldn't even walk."
After an abortion endangered her life, she had to continue serving soldiers despite pain so excruciating that she was eventually given medicine.
"But after taking the pills I could never get pregnant again."
Less than a year after she arrived at the brothel, Ms Yuan and some other young women hatched an escape plan, but were frustrated by the electric wire surrounding their prison. They were caught and beaten to within an inch of their lives.
"They kicked us and bashed us, and there is still a scar on my back and it's still very painful," she said. "My bones were broken."
Things took a mild turn for the better when one sympathetic Japanese soldier promised to come to her aid. "He left my room without sleeping with me. He knew that I was suffering. He was a good man. He told me to wait for him to one day come and take me away."
In the meantime, another Japanese officer took a liking to her round-faced good looks and made her his concubine.
But six months later, the kind Japanese soldier kept his word, helping to end her 18 life-altering months in the brothel.
"We had nothing, life was hard, but better than living in there," she said of the ensuing relationship with the man that lasted until the end of the war.
It was a Chinese woman named Zhang Xiuying, however, who initially tricked Ms Yuan and a handful of other women into a life of sex slavery, by promising employment in a hotel as a maid, giving them a small advance.
Desperate to feed her newborn child, Ms Yuan accepted. After the Japanese arrived and she was forced into a brothel, she never saw her child again.
"My poor little baby. She was so pretty and our neighbours would drop by my place to see her, and she just died like that," she said. "You can tell how much I hate the Japanese."
According to official Chinese estimates, 35 million Chinese were killed or injured in the Sino-Japanese war between 1937-45.
Ms Yuan travelled to Tokyo in 2000 for a lawsuit brought by Chinese comfort women, but the court ruled against them |
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