Oct 13 2007
Ken Burns and “The War”: ‘Prostitution Rape’ is War’s Big Dirty Secret
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[”The latest research by the underground women’s rights organisation the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) reveals that as many as 25,000 Afghan women worked as prostitutes in 2001 - 5,000 of those were in Kabul alone - with stark predictions that the number will rise as women and girls resort to selling themselves to escape poverty.”
South China Morning Post, April 9, 2006]
by Dr. Suki Falconberg
10/13/07
In the October 3 Cyrano’s Journal/Thomas Paine’s Corner, I wrote a letter to Ken Burns, creator of the PBS series The War, criticizing him for omitting the many women forced into prostitution by WWII (and by all wars, for that matter). I’d like to respond, with some additional thoughts, to some of the readers who responded to me…
First, I’d like to thank Robert Farrell, Kenneth, B. Lenner, Bolo, and MeganM for their compassionate and intelligent responses and contributions. I’d also like to ask the ex-military man, Kenneth, more about what he has seen. He writes: “I have been throughout the world; the amount of prostitution that is in lock-step with the U.S. military is mind-boggling.” Please let me know, Kenneth, if you know anything about the situation in Korea (which I mention in the article below) and if ‘the pact’ (also mentioned below) still holds.
One reader asks for verification that almost 100% of the GI’s in Japan after WWII took advantage of the sex slaves in the comfort stations set up for them. This fact comes from John Dower’s Embracing Defeat. Dower is an emeritus historian at MIT. Another verification is the 200,000 Amerasian children abandoned by GI’s. Pearl Buck reports this number when she visited Japan in the decades after the war. 200,000. To rape that many children into these prostituted bodies indicates a high amount of usage. That is enough rape-thrust power to send a space shuttle to the outer planets. Since girls who slept with GI’s were outcasts (despite the vulnerability and destitution that led to their sexual exploitation) and so were their children, lying down with the soldiers was hardly a voluntary act on their part. ‘Rape’ is what was done to their bodies—despite the girls being labeled prostitutes to justify the act as innocuous—rape produced those 200,000 unwanted children. Hence, my conclusion that almost every GI in Japan was a rapist. Which brings us to a really big question: Why have those vets who are still alive not been tried and punished for this crime?