U.S. has a history with 'comfort women'

[struggle4progress]

Monday, May 9, 2005
By JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN

SHOULD HISTORY textbooks make you love your country? Most people would say yes. And that's why textbooks inevitably distort the past - even here, in the good old United States of America. <snip>

Consider the recent controversy over history textbooks in Japan. Last month, Chinese and Korean protesters took to the streets to condemn a new set of Japanese junior high school texts. The books omit mention of "comfort women," the roughly 200,000 females - mostly from Korea and China - whom the Japanese forced into sexual bondage during World War II.

But scour the textbooks that Americans use in schools, and you won't find any serious discussion of our own comfort women. I speak, of course, of female African-American slaves. <snip>

You do the math. Between 1850 and 1860, the number of blacks in slavery rose by about 20 percent. But the number of enslaved "mulattoes" - that is, technically those with one white parent and one black parent but actually any mixed-raced slave - rose by a remarkable 67 percent, as historian Joel Williamson has calculated. To put it most bluntly: black slaves were getting lighter in skin, because white owners were raping them. <snip>

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[funflower]

1. This really bothered me when I visited Monticello

How could Jefferson (or anyone else) enslave his own offspring?

[struggle4progress]

2. With Jefferson, the word "hypocrite" should come frequently to mind.

[Carolab]

3. I was just there and wondered about that too.

Among other things--like the fact that I was standing at the home of the founding father of our democracy, which is crumbling at our feet.

I swear I could hear him spinning under that huge monument as we drove by the cemetary on the way out.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

4. I've read diaries of Union soldiers

who witnessed white men "considered pillars of the community, deacons of their church" who had one black female slave with a number of mulatto offspring. They found it shocking and morally repulsive. (The one diary was placed in book form called "All For the Union", but I forget the author's name).

[TomPaine77]

6. "All For the Union"'s Author

Elisha Hunt Rhodes, of the 2nd Rhode Island Infantry Regiment.

[Hello_Kitty]

5. The Phillipines

When I was in the Navy I heard numerous stories of the women who sexually serviced the sailors at Subic Naval Base. LBFMs they were called. Little Brown F__king Machines. The U.S. government was aware of, condoned, and aided in the exploitation of these women. It was considered R and R for they guys.

[TomPaine77]

7. The US Military and Its Sex Slaves Today

If you have read the Canadian journalist Victor Malarek’s recent book The Natashas (2004), then you know that since the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, probably in excess of one million Eastern European women and girls alone have been lured, coerced or kidnapped from their countries and forced to perform sex with strangers for little or no remuneration. Many of these young females are beaten or tortured into compliance, while many others have been murdered because they’ve refused to submit to such treatment. Large numbers have committed suicide during or after their captivity. Many of those released after they have outlived their usefulness to their captors die or will have greatly shortened lives due to injuries, illness or diseases such as AIDS and Hepatitis C. Many of these women are kept in off-post brothels, or are forced to turn tricks near U.S. military posts in Bosnia, Kosovo, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. Germany is the worst national perpetrator of sex slavery in the western world, with a legalized prostitution industry of 400,000 women a year, an estimated two/thirds of whom are unwilling trafficked slaves. Coincidentally or significantly, the nexus of German prostitution is in the Frankfurt-am-Main area, which is also the site of numerous U.S. military bases.
Malarek wrote at length about U.S. military and contractor sexual abuse of young Eastern European and East Asian females in Bosnia, South Korea and Kosovo, and how the U.S. military command in Kosovo not only knew about, but tacitly encouraged the sex slave trade, as a way of placating Kosovar Albanian warlords/sex traffickers. He described these off-post brothels as packed with off-duty American servicemen and civilian contractors every night. According to Malarek, US servicemen customarily refuse women and girls the right to use their clients’ cell phones to call home, police or an anti-trafficking hotline, even though such requests make it obvious that these women and girls are being held against their will. The bruises and cigarette burns on the bodies of the females are likewise obvious. Clients not only customarily refuse to help their victims, but often tell the girls’ pimps about their requests. The pimps then beat, torture, rape or murder the females in retaliation.
And both Malarek and the American journalist and writer Robert Kaplan, the latter in his recent book Imperial Grunts, have said that the United Arab Emirates have large numbers of Eastern European prostitutes. I’ve confirmed this on the website of the anti-sex trafficking and women’s rights NGO La Strada (lastrada.org), which says that the UAE is now one of the top destinations for sex slaves. I have read that the United Arab Emirates and Qatar are the favorite “R and R” destinations of U.S. servicemen in Iraq. It is pretty easy to guess why U.S. servicemen would go to these destinations, and it is also easy to see, based on the facts about the sex trafficking industry, how the majority of young women in these foreign countries are not there by choice. A recent Stars and Stripes newspaper article described the human waste of the sex slave trade near a large U.S. Army base in South Korea. This seems especially damning, since The Stars and Stripes is the official, though non-governmental, newspaper of the United States armed forces.