2020-06-03
Belgium is the country that produced Baron Albert d’Anethan, the Minister Plenipotentiary to Japan who was not deceived by black propaganda.
Once again, I would like Belgium to see through the barbarity of China, which hides behind pandas, massacres ethnic minorities, and deprives its own people of freedom.
The following is a chapter I found on the internet on 2014.4.10 and published the next day.
Belgium’s Baron d’Anethan
Can Belgium Once Again See Through China’s Barbarity?
2014.4.10, msn Sankei News
I had the thought that the origin of the word “panda” might be “propaganda,” which also means the manipulation of international public opinion.
The “panda diplomacy” displayed in Belgium at the end of March by Chinese President Xi Jinping, 60, during his tour of Europe was eerie enough to invite such a misunderstanding.
The classification that calls the “good side,” based on information rooted in facts, “white propaganda,” and the “bad side,” which conceals false information, “black propaganda,” makes one think all the more of the panda, characterized by its black-and-white patches.
As Japan has already experienced, adorable pandas make people feel close to China and arbitrarily foster a peaceful impression.
However, Belgium is the country that produced Baron Albert d’Anethan, the Minister Plenipotentiary to Japan who was not deceived by black propaganda.
Once again, I would like Belgium to see through the barbarity of China, which hides behind pandas, massacres ethnic minorities, and deprives its own people of freedom.
I want to see the pride of modern Europe, which is sensitive to human-rights repression.
Baron d’Anethan’s Insight
Baron d’Anethan stayed in Japan for the long period from 1893 to 1910.
During that time, he completely saw through and trusted the character and disposition of the Japanese people.
During the First Sino-Japanese War, 1894 to 1895, he possessed the insight not to be deceived by black propaganda that threatened to drive the Empire of Japan into international isolation.
The crisis was caused mainly by the spread of fabricated articles in American newspapers.
At the time of the occupation of Port Arthur, they reported that “the Imperial Army massacred 60,000 noncombatants, women, and children of the Qing Empire. Only 36 escaped.”
Baron d’Anethan, who understood the military discipline of the Imperial Army, must have instinctively sensed the obvious dubiousness of the figure of 60,000, even in light of the area and population of Port Arthur.
He began an investigation and sent a report to his home country.
“Japan is considerate toward the wounded and sick, the Red Cross carries out its work perfectly under the patronage of Her Majesty the Empress, and the Geneva Convention, which Japan also joined in 1886 for the purpose of protecting the wounded and sick in land warfare, is being observed.”
“According to what I heard directly from Viscount Labrie, the French military attaché who was present at the scene, those killed were soldiers who had taken off their uniforms, and it is not true that women and children were killed. The residents had evacuated before the occupation, and those who remained were only soldiers and arsenal workers. The Japanese soldiers, while looking at the corpses of comrades who had been brutally treated, somehow limited themselves to taking the enemy prisoner.”
Qing soldiers killed soldiers of the Imperial Army, cut up their bodies, and hung them from trees and eaves.
Certainly, Imperial Army soldiers continued fighting while still carrying their fury over these outrages.
On the other hand, Qing soldiers who had begun to collapse and flee threw off their uniforms, broke into private homes, and changed into civilian clothes.
They were “plainclothes soldiers.”
These plainclothes soldiers waited for opportunities to escape, hid in private homes, and shot at soldiers of the Imperial Army.
Dr. Nagao Ariga, 1860 to 1921, an international law scholar who accompanied the army as a legal adviser, denounced this by saying that “Qing does not observe the laws of war at all,” and in the Public Notice of Wartime International Law: Regulations for Land Warfare during the First Sino-Japanese War, also judged execution by shooting to be lawful.
Some foreign newspapers misreported the return fire against plainclothes soldiers disguised as noncombatants as a “massacre.”
A Great Lie Posted About Uotsuri Island
On the eve of the Russo-Japanese War, 1904 to 1905, European newspapers also reported that “Japanese hatred toward foreigners is increasing, and if Japan and Russia fight, foreigners in Japan will be massacred,” but Baron d’Anethan sent out a rebuttal to this as well.
“Hatred or hostility toward foreigners does not exist in Japan. Foreign women travel throughout Japan alone, or accompanied only by a maid. Foreigners in Japan will be completely safe, just as they were during the First Sino-Japanese War, even if the country enters wartime.”
After the outbreak of war as well, he issued a report correcting false reports that Russian prisoners of war were being abused.
“Six hundred and one prisoners from a warship sunk in a naval battle were rescued by the Japanese military. Two dead were buried according to the Russian Orthodox faith. The service was conducted by the ship’s chaplain, whom the Japanese military had immediately set free in accordance with the Geneva Convention.”
More than a hundred years later, in 2012, the Chinese ambassador to Belgium contributed an article titled “Why Is Uotsuri Island Chinese Territory?” to a French-language newspaper, French being one of Belgium’s official languages.
The Senkaku Islands, including Uotsuri Island, are Japanese territory, but the article begins with the ambassador saying that he “found a map drawn by a colonel of the French Joint Staff at the bookstore Schwilden on Galerie Bortier Street in Brussels.”
The map supposedly proved that “China had already discovered and administered Uotsuri Island at the beginning of the 15th century.”
From there, the article endlessly stitched together historical facts and developed a great lie.
Of course, it followed the usual course, with “the massacre of Chinese people” and “Yasukuni Shrine, where Hitler is enshrined,” also appearing.
However, the closing killer line, “a moving anecdote about a Chinese woman studying abroad during the Second World War,” was an extremely effective production, though whether the propaganda was black or white, genuine or false, was not clear.
The story was that the woman “saved 97 citizens who had been taken hostage by the Gestapo, the secret police, in retaliation for the assassination of a senior German military officer, by mustering all her courage and wisdom.”
Europe Being Drawn In
Thus Europe tells itself to weaken its humanitarian and security vigilance toward China, and is drawn into China’s attractive economic and financial power.
Mr. Xi inspected the Belgian factory of the “Swedish” automaker Volvo, but Volvo had been acquired by a Chinese automaker in 2010.
He also concluded new major business deals in each country he visited, including a sales contract with France totaling 2.57 trillion yen, including the purchase of 70 Airbus aircraft.
The nightmare in which Europe’s arms embargo against China, continued since the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989, is lifted over the heads of Japan and the United States is right before us.
Mr. Xi, who is probably secretly laughing at Europe as it strives to wipe away its guilty conscience, justified state-wide inhumanity in a speech in Belgium by saying that China “will not imitate the systems of other countries.”
At the headquarters of the EU, the European Union, which he visited for the first time as Chinese president, he called for “strengthening cooperation between the two great civilizations, China and the EU, question mark.”
However, the “civilization” of the EU and the “non-civilization” of China are incompatible.
At the 2013 Belgian painting competition held in January, “Unnecessary Death,” a work on the persecution of the Chinese qigong group Falun Gong, won the grand prize.
It is a work in which the eyes of a mother holding her daughter, who died from persecution, speak of tragic grief.
There are criticisms of Falun Gong, but the artist’s sharp criticism must be introduced.
“Falun Gong members are illegally arrested, beaten, abused, and subjected to cruel torture. That period is long and brutal. The cracks, painted in the background of the painting, symbolize the future in which the Chinese Communist Party destroys itself in the process of committing crimes.”
In the artist’s backbone, I recognize the DNA of Baron d’Anethan, who sleeps in Zoshigaya Cemetery in Tokyo.
I cannot wait for that “self-destruction.”
Hiroyuki Noguchi, Senior Political Writer