[Buddha-l] War

[JKirkpatrick]

"When will there be no war? It's when you can see your enemy's
wounds, then you won't be able to pick up your gun," she said. 
 
Please read this. 
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/world/asia/06iht-taiwan.html?re
f=arts
 
Excerpts:
"While researching her book, Ms. Lung discovered that residents
of Changchun in the northeastern province of Jilin had not heard
of the People's Liberation Army's five-month siege of that city
in 1948, which resulted in between 150,000 and 650,000 people
dying of starvation. 

Instead, what they learn about in mainland Chinese history
textbooks is the P.L.A.'s "great victory" when it "liberated"
that city." 

"The Kuomintang, which lost 470,000 troops in the northeastern
battles and later fled to Taiwan, did not mention its defeat in
the textbooks of Taiwan, either. 

Ms. Lung wanted to tell this history through the tales or
ordinary people. 

She claims to make no political or moral judgment in her book.
There is no "right side" or "wrong side" in the stories, she
says. The Kuomintang troops, the People's Liberation Army and the
Taiwanese soldiers fighting for their Japanese colonial masters
are given an equal hearing. To her, those individuals were just
young people caught up in history. 

"In this book I don't care about who is on the right side, the
victorious or the defeated side. I just want to show you that
when you dismantle the apparatus of state, what's inside are
these individuals." 

"If we continue to be the unthinking cogs in a machine," she
said, "then how do you know whether these tragic misfortunes
would not be repeated?"