Having Mixed Feelings About Korean Comfort Women Debate

Korean Comfort Women

Mixed feelings? What kind of evil, anti-feminist cretin can you be having mixed feelings about the fact that the Japanese forced 200,000 Korean women into sex slavery during World War II?  An estimated 75% died either from disease or as wartime casualties having been sent to the front.  But please take a moment to hear me out.

I am sure this unspeakable horror took place, that Korean girls were snatched from their homes and sent to the war front as prostitutes for the benefit of Japanese soldiers. In fact, the actual details are probably more gruesome and graphic than even what angry but nevertheless polite Koreans are willing to put on paper.  However. . .  . 

There has throughout American history been an unspoken rule imposed on immigrants to this country.  They had to leave their ancestral, ethnic, tribal, nationalist grievances back in the old country.  Americans  resented being drawn into World War I because of European hatreds that went back to time immemorial. The American public would have sat out World War II had it not been for the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  But why should we overlook despicable crimes against humanity?

The answer is simple.   As a nation founded on slavery and genocide against the Native American populations we have our own Pandora's Box of homegrown grievances that we as a  society must settle.  My female ancestors suffered two hundred years of sex slavery on Southern plantations.   

When Americans take on the grievance campaigns of other nations that are not in any way tied to our own foreign policy behavior,  we do so from a place of moral arrogance and escapism.  How could the Japanese have done such unspeakable things to Korean women?  Within the past decade our nation invaded a country, and created an environment of such violent anarchy, that 250,000 civilian Iraqis have died.  A country with a rich two thousand year heritage has been ripped to smithereens. How comforting it must be for us to focus on those dastardly Japanese, who behaved so savagely towards the Koreans.