Remember our PoWs as well as hell of Hiroshima
As THE 70th anniversary of the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki approaches, it brings the yearly renewed sense of sadness for the loss of tens of thousands of lives. And that is right and proper.
It’s also, however, right to point out it will also be the 70th anniversary of how hope and relief flooded the Far East as it became apparent that Japan was on the verge of defeat.
The reign of the Imperial Japanese Army with its expansionist plans and inhumane treatment of the peoples it conquered was about to be brought to an end.
Japan invaded China in 1937-8 and in what became known as the Nanking Massacre slaughtered thousands of unarmed civilians.
In 1941, when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and entered World War II, the Allies were under no illusions as to their enemy’s ruthlessness and knew they were taking on a formidable foe.
Without supportive air power, Allied-held territories in the Far East fell to the Japanese and surviving British and Allied soldiers were taken as prisoners of war.
Gunner William Bradley, my father, was taken prisoner at singapore in February 1942. That April, he was sent to saigon in the first group to leave singapore as Japanese slaves.
Then he was sent to Thailand and the horrors of the Thai Burma Death Railway, working at Tamarkan (Kwai) and other jungle camps. He was forced to work in extremely hot and humid weather, experienced starvation, disease and torture, and saw fellow soldiers executed by the Japanese.
A third of the PoWs and 100,000 indigenous people working on the Death Railway didn’t survive. By 1945, my father weighed just six stone. His skeletal appearance was no different from that of any other surviving PoW.
When Japan surrendered, he and fellow PoWs all over the Far East were granted the gift of life when only days from death.
He had spent three years and nine months in a hell on earth where those with power put no value on a person’s life and withheld Red Cross food parcels and letters from family and friends.
Freedom came suddenly and unexpectedly, but was very welcome and most definitely deserved. so this year, when you remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki, spare a thought for those many thousands who survived a cruel, inhumane aggressor and especially those hundreds of thousands who sadly did not. SUSAN BRADLEY ROBERTS,
Cheshire.
All faiths have fanatics
HAzIK RAHMAN’s claim that there is no link between Islam and extremism (Letters) is naive or disingenuous. There are many factions in both Islam and Christianity, and to claim that one faction or sect represents the whole of the religion is false.
He tells us about the peace-loving Ahmadiyya community or caliphate. But there are factions in Islam that consider the Ahmadiyya community to be heretics, as their beliefs conflict with many other mainstream Muslim beliefs. The Ahmadiyyas believe the second Coming has already taken place, while most Muslims don’t.
I’ve come to consider religion as a genetic mutation in mankind; if you accept that hypothesis, you’ll find plenty of evidence going back to pre-history.
You could consider all religion as an attempt to influence humans to give the priest or leader influence over the rest of the community. Islam has as many different sects as Christianity and perhaps more. We could compare sunnis and shias to Creationists and Methodists. The simple fact is that the Koran has as many verses open to different interpretations as does the Bible.
Peaceful Muslims interpret the Koran in one way, while Islamic extremists interpret it entirely differently. But Christians and, I suspect, all other religions split in the same way. so claiming Islam has no link to extremism is like claiming Christianity has no link to the spanish Inquisition. RICHARD TOCKNELL,
Cheltenham, Glos.
Baroness’s next step?
HoW frustrating to read about Baroness Wilcox claiming £5,700 a month to walk to work (Mail).
Could I persuade her to walk another 15 minutes from her home to a playground in Pimlico, currently suffering from budget cuts despite the pre- election promises of this Government?
The playground is for the use of working parents in the borough, so young children are left there all day during the summer holidays.
It was recently decided to cut their breakfast and mid-afternoon snacks, so staff organised a fundraising fair to provide the essential food needed. Perhaps they could persuade the Baroness to part with some of her hard-earned travel expenses.
NAOMI MAHADY, Pimlico.
Driven to wonder
PEERs receive £300 a day just for turning up at the House of Lords (Mail). Coincidentally, £300 is exactly the same amount I receive in expenses, apparently the maximum I’m allowed to receive by law, the difference being that in my case it’s £300 a month. What do I do for this sum? During school term-time, I leave my house at 6.30am — in all weathers — and drive to the depot to collect a minibus. After picking up a passenger escort, I collect 12 children with special educational needs from their homes throughout Liverpool and drive them to their school.
I get back home by about 10.15am. In the afternoons, I do the whole routine in reverse, five days a week. For this, I receive £15 a day, of which about half is used to buy fuel.
I do, at least, have the satisfaction of feeling I’m doing something worthwhile in my retirement, but I can’t help wondering who makes these laws.
GERARD QUINN, Liverpool.
We’ve been carved up
As ALEx BRuMMER rightly says, it’s all very well standing up for the free play of market forces, but when it’s simply a case of letting foreigners strip us of our most productive companies, something is badly wrong.
These aren’t just our ‘crown jewels’; they’re the means by which we make our living. The truth is, of course — though no one dares mention it — that we aren’t operating in a fair market. Many of these asset-stripping foreign companies are backed by foreign governments, and it’s not always obvious what they’re up to.
In the past 50 years or so, there has been a huge reluctance by the British government to support major British industries.
It’s not just our chocolate factories, but our shipyards, steelmakers and heavy chemicals industries that have gone to the four winds — not because of market forces, but because foreign governments, most notably in Asia, simply decided to take them from us and backed their own companies to do so.
our government needs to stop mollycoddling the south- East financial services industry and put a bit of effort into protecting major employers throughout the rest of the uK. If it did, perhaps it wouldn’t have to worry about the sNP, ukip, sinn Fein and others who consider Westminster a closed shop.
ROBERT VEITCH, Edinburgh.
Main flaw of Marx
KARL MARx’s works, though difficult, are all based on one central idea: dialectical materialism.
Dialectics is a useful concept, but there has to be a transcendent dialectic because materialism is a false premise.
I’ve never met a Marxist who understood this. Certainly Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t. RICHARD LAVERSUCH,
Andover, Hants.