Fascist Barbarism by Gen. AungSan

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Burmese Relief Center--Japan
DATE:May 30, 1995
TIME: 7:33PM JST

In this 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, many
Japanese are presenting themselves as liberators of their fellow
Asians.  On the same blood soaked ground, Mon and other
peoples of Burma are again forced to toil to build railroads
(and pipelines).  Gen. Aung San's call to resist fascist
barbarism was never more timely.

(Address made by Honorable U Aung San, Deputy Chairman.
Counsellor to Governor of Burma and Deputy President of the
Burma Executive Council at the Memorial Ceremony for the
men who died in captivity at work on the Burma-Siam railway
(1942-45) held at Thanbyuzayat, Burma on December 18,
1946.)

FASCIST BARBARISM 

Four years ago or so, war came to our country.  And with it
Japanese military fascism.  Then in order to feed its war
machine, our people were made to suffer and slave in various
untold ways.  Tens of thousands of our country people were
forcibly sent to work on the Burma-Siam Railway and from
30,000 to 80,000 of them died in the most callous
circumstances imaginable.  We are now treading the ground
which buried underneath the curses and groans of  those
thousands of dead.  We enter upon this ground seared by this
colossal tragedy with profound feeling and searching thoughts. 
We are filled with bitter sorrow that it should ever have
happened.  And we burn with sheer indignation over such
wrongs as had been wrought by the Japanese Fascist
barbarians against our nation and humanity Nevertheless we
may take comfort in the fact that Nemesis had already taken
them to task.  Our people also had risen as a man and avenged
themselves on the Fascists.  This is but an inevitable and
inexorable law of Karma--that as a man sows so shall he reap
and that if any individual or nation oppresses or exploits
another and violates natural and social justice in that way that
individual or nation shall pay for that sin against justice and
humanity.  The world has thus been visited upon several times
for so much that men and nations have sinned against one
another.  So long as injustice and oppression and exploitation
of man by man and nation by nation continue the world must
come time and again to fall into the grips of Nemesis.  This
then is the stem moral law which events have impressed upon
the world so emphatically, and this is how I read the writing on
the wall and the signs of the times.

To-day, when we have come here in revered memory of those
thousands of our countrymen and Allied Personnel who verily
were made to slave to death, we all must have felt that never
never again may the world find a place for the existence of
human slavery and exploitation in any form.  As we offer our
prayers in our sacred communion with the souls of those dead,
we must pray not merely for them but for the world that
humanity may rise above all limitations and find deliverance
none too long.  And as thus we pray, let us also vow to
ourselves that we will not rest and remain complacent till we
have completely rid this earth of such cancer of Fascist
barbarity, whatever its variants as degrade humanity and
perpetuate oppression and exploitation.

published by Sarpay Beikman, 1st printing, 1971, circulation
24,000