Kanao Inouye : victim & victimizer : the CULTURE OF ENTITLEMENT

Michael Marshall

Life, real life, is real complex.

Before WWII, all Japanese-Canadians were daily subject to subtle and not-so-subtle racial discrimination.

As well as random acts of kindness from some in the white majority.

Usually the Japanese-Canadians bore this hostility in silence, but that does not mean they forgot.


Finally all , from grandmothers to babies, were 'interned' - most, at least for a time, inside barbed wire camps - but all were interned informally, in the sense their freedoms were gravely restricted.

What happened to them all was broadly similar but interestingly, their reactions were as individual as all humans are.

Some like David Suzuki felt the sting of oppression and of being a 'victim' and swore they'd try their darnest to see no one else ever felt that too.

Others like Kanao Inouye , the Kamloops Kid, kept their cool - while in Canada .

 Kanao even felt racial discrimination from the authorities in Japan,  because they did not fully trust this semi-westernized individual.

But when Kanao was forced to be a Japanese conscript, though a Canadian citizen, he morally chose to fully enter into his new role.

His other choice was to do as little as possible to harm those under his care and later plead he only acted under extreme duress.

Instead, he became infamous for sadistically mistreating Canadians and Europeans generally, letting them know this was payback time for his life back in Canada.

He become a full time, professional, victim and now he was going to dive into the profitable Culture of Entitlement , full tilt.

His country and his fellow citizens owed him for all those years of abuse.

They couldn't give him money or a formal apology - but by God, they'd  give him their blood.

Yes he was a victim, but even those who freely acknowledged this had little sympathy for Kanao,because he had simply gone far too deep into his cult of Entitlement and Redress.

Finally, in 1947, he was hung in Hong Kong, the only Canadian* hung for treason.

*(Louis Riel, (like Lord Haw Haw) was also hung for treason in a trial that still leaves most legal scholars very uncomfortable. They have strong doubts whether or not he could be charged with treason, if he wasn't truly a subject of Canada.

 Inouye's case was so clear cut, because of his repeated claims that he was a Canadian, such that no lawyer has ever objected to his conviction, only his sentence.)

If you are going to make a career of being a victim - be it in journalism or in politics - please be a victim - show sympathy for others who also suffer - please don't become a victimizer and a bully instead ...

Canada's der HUNGERPLAN 2012: Oda to starving Chads : 'let'em drink $16 orange juice'

Michael Marshall

If  Bev "The Odious" Oda had been in that glass box in Jerusalem  fifty years ago, Hannah Arendt might have instead termed her famous book "THE BANALITY OF EGO".

Mrs Oda likes to present a grandmotherly figure at international aid conferences .

Her 'backgrounder' is always widely circulated to remind delegates from other nations that her family was interned during WWII for simply having her grandparents born in Japan, so that she knows the hardship of war and strife firsthand.

Forget the kindly old grandmother act.

In fact, Mrs Oda has turned her taxpayer-thickened backside on the starving poor of sub Saharan Africa.

Instead she has directed the greatest proportion of Canada's ever shrinking aid money to countries so well able to feed themselves that they have become tempting targets to the Harper government's drive to secure free trade agreements with middle income nations world wide.

Foreign aid from Canada is now less something we should gratefully do as a moral duty 'to be our siblings' keeper'  (as the mission statement of  THE COMMENSALIST reminds us) and more a grudging weapon of seduction in a ballet of free trade negotiations.

Worse, Canada has never given as big a percentage of its GDP to foreign aid as have many countries from Europe, who themselves experienced WWII hunger (and post WWII food aid from abroad).

Our excuse was that our economy wasn't in good shape, but that when it was, we'd up our share.

But in fact, while Prime Minister Harper boasts to the world that Canada's economy is the best in the world, at the same time he cuts, not ups, our foreign aid.

It is the struggling countries of Europe that have maintained or upped their foreign aid.

It burns the conscience of anyone with a heart, instead of a limitless expense account and a limitless ego, to see pictures of the hundreds of babies from Chad starving to death each day.

But Bev Oda, Canada's minister to the world's starving poor, instead morally chooses to Donald Trump her way through a conspicuously extravagant lifestyle ---- at the taxpayers' expense.

The "$16 glass of orange juice scandal" is just the latest
in a long list of unbelievable expense account rampages - and they are just the ones we have been lucky enough to find out about.

By way of contrast to Oda's behavior, David Suzuki's family was also interned,  also at the Canadian taxpayers' expense, during WWII .

 But he hasn't spent his life taking his revenge on Canada's taxpayers, but instead has spent his life doing good, here at home and abroad.

Why can't his fellow internee and fellow sansei, Bev Oda, take a page from David and learn to 'turn the other cheek' on what the Canadian taxpayers did to her family , 70 years ago ?

Instead of kicking and slapping her way through the Canadian Treasury, like some latter day Kamloops Kid .....