Aung San of Burma

Four years ago or so, war came to our country. And with it Japanese military fascism. Then in order to feed its war machine, our people were made to suffer and slave in various untold ways. Tens of thousands of our country people were forcibly sent to work on the Burma-Siam Railway and from 30,000 to 80,000 of them died in the most callous circumstances imaginable. We are now treading the ground which buried underneath the curses and groans of those thousands of dead. We enter upon this ground seared by this colossal tragedy with profound feeling and searching thoughts. We are filled with bitter sorrow that it should ever have happened. And we burn with sheer indignation over such wrongs as had been wrought by the Japanese Fascist barbarians against our nation and humanity. Nevertheless we may take comfort in the fact that Nemesis had already taken them to task. Our people also had risen as a man and avenged themselves on the Fascists. This is but an inevitable and inexorable law of Karma - that as a man sows so shall he reap and that if any individual or nation oppresses or exploits another and violates natural and social justice in that way that individual or nation shall pay for that sin against justice and humanity. The world has thus been visited upon several times for so much that men and nations have sinned against one another. So long as injustice and oppression and exploitation of man by man and nation by nation continue the world must come time and again to fall into the grips of Nemesis. This then is the stern moral law which events have impressed upon the world so emphatically, and this is how I read the writing on the wall and the signs of the times.

Today, when we have come here in revered memory of those thousands of our countrymen and Allied Personnel who verily were made to slave to death, we all must have felt that never never again may the world find a place for the existence of human slavery and exploitation in any form. As we offer our prayers in our sacred communion with the souls of those dead, we must pray not merely for them but for the world that humanity may rise above all limitations and find deliverance none too long. And as thus we pray, let us also vow to ourselves that we will not rest and remain complacent till we have completely rid this earth of such cancer of Fascist barbarity, whatever its variants as degrade humanity and perpetuate oppression and exploitation.