Last week, eight 15-year-old Singapore students at a school band leadership camp named their team 'Hitler' because they claimed they admired Adolf Hitler's leadership qualities. They considered him 'cool' and 'handsome' and a good leader of the German nation, even though he was evil.
Following the not-unexpected hue and cry from the Western press, they are now required by the Singapore education minister to research on what Hitler had done.
The minister stated that since they weren't thinking or aware of the dark aspects of World War II (WWII) history, rather than berate them, he prefers for them to present their research findings to their schools. I must congratulate said minister for a sensible and constructive approach.
One Western writer to the Singapore press bemoaned his disappointment with the teachers and students attending the camp. To him, they seemed either ignorant of or unconcerned about the evils of Hitler. He criticised the students' history teacher for limiting his only adverse comment on Hitler to the Nazi leader's military error in invading Russia.
He wondered why no mention was made of Hitler's responsibility for the millions of deaths in a world war, as well as the systematic murder of millions of innocent Jews. The answer - to Easterners (like us) - is quite plain and obvious to see, though of course one must not fail to recognise the evils of Hitler and Nazism.
The fact of those Singaporeans' ignorance, lack of concern or apathy towards Hitler and Nazism is no different to the majority of Westerners' ignorance, lack of concern or apathy towards Japanese WWII atrocities or the provocative visits by the Japanese prime minister (PM) to the Yasukuni shrine.
That shrine houses the remains of executed Japanese war criminals, war criminals not unlike the Nazi variety, who were responsible for the most barbaric atrocities against the Chinese, Korean and other Asian people during the last war. The visits to the shrine by the foremost Japanese politician have been tantamount to official acceptance of their evil war records. It could be likened to the German Chancellor laying a wreath at Hitler's tomb, if one exists.
From time to time, whenever the Chinese and Korean people raised Cain over such visits or Japanese rightwing attempts at historical revisionism of its army's wartime conduct in their school textbooks, Western bloggers would without fail criticise the Chinese for not letting go of the past, or for going over the top in their anger against what they see as harmless and legitimate visits to a war shrine by the Japanese PM.
Inexplicably, several even defended the Japanese PM's visits or the more sinister historical revisionism of the Japanese school textbooks, either through ignorance of what the Japanese had barbarically done during WWII or through a lack of empathy with the victims of Japanese atrocities.
So why should the Singapore students be different from those adult bloggers? Only the Dutch and some older Australians seem aware of the evils of the Japanese WWII army.
One Western blogger argumentatively asserted that only Chinese aged 80 and above may have genuine cause to be angry at the Japanese. Could anyone possibly beat this asinine comment? Unbelievable as it may be, the answer has in fact been yes, because another averred that the PM's visit to the Yasukuni shrine was a sincere demonstration of 'peace'.
Then to finish off, many of those Western bloggers would attribute the whole uproar to either Chinese jealousy of the better-off Japanese conveniently leaving the Koreans out, or the argument would have collapsed like a house of cards - or a Chinese government manipulating the Chinese people's outrage to divert attention from China's domestic problems again, the Korean involvement was quietly tucked away out of sight.
There has been hardly any note of sympathy or understanding for the Chinese outrage, or revulsion and concern or anger at the Japanese PM's provocative visits or the attempts at historical revisionism to obscure Japan's evil past.
It has been precisely this Western apathy or lack of sympathy that explains why the East is not so different from the West. So, why should that Western writer be puzzled about Singaporeans, whose grandparents, relatives and family friends suffered untold miseries at the hands of the Japanese military, showing the same lack of concern towards Nazism as Westerners had shown towards the Japanese WWII evil?
