The documentation today ranges from court rulings and diaries to journal articles and sites on the World Wide Web. The linkage is between the 1942 Battle of Bataan and the value of liberty for the individual.

The metaphor of Bataan as Filipino heroic defense of free choice and national sovereignty was occasioned by a foreign kingdom’s ruthless pursuit of prestige, power, bacchanalia and profits.

Japan was guilty of naked aggression, having "delivered no declaration of war, and to the British Commonwealth of Nations or to the Commonwealth of the Philippines, no document of any kind." [Annex 6, Appendix A, Section 9, "Japan, the United States of America, the Commonwealth of the Philippines and the British Commonwealth of Nations," Judgment of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (1948)]

Japan’s criminal war of aggression in the Far East became generalized on December 8, 1941 when it raided Pearl Harbor, Hong Kong, the Philippines and other areas in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, but its armed expansionism began in 1910 in Korea, hence to China in 1931 and 1937.

In the 1920s, despite the inroads of liberalism and socialism, Japan was strengthening its machinery of war capitalism. The 463-strong Japanese Parliament of 1922 was dominated by members who represented vested interests and were tainted by corruption and scandal. The Seiukai Party, with 281 delegates, stood for the property owners and multi-millionaires, supported the Japanese occupation of Siberia, but opposed universal suffrage. The Kensekai Party, with 109 delegates, founded by Prince Katzura as a party of the bureaucracy, became a campaigner for the industrial and commercial magnates like Mitsubishi. The Kokuminto Party represents the shipping magnate, Katzura, and is an adherent of the army clique. There was also a naval clique that stood "chiefly for the expansion of Japan in the direction of the Southern Islands." Finally, there is the so-called Kenrioto, founded by a Prince who followed the German State system and controlled the whole Government apparatus. These factions of the ruling castes battled for budget and the attention of the three million voters (out of 60 million inhabitants). [Sen Katayama, "Foreign Policy of Japan," November 18, 1922]

The ambitious greed of the Japanese military, corporations, bureaucracy and aristocracy turned millions of vote-less Japanese men into cannon fodder.

With appeasement policies, the Western democracies defaulted, leaving the militarist states of Italy, Germany and Japan to flex their muscles and strangle their own liberals as well as the colonized nations in Africa, Oceania and Asia. While the governments of Great Britain, France, USA and the Netherlands parlayed with the Axis, the conscience-stricken citizens of the West acted. For instance, the wharfies of Port Kembla in Australia refused to load pig iron onto a steamer bound for Yokohama, believing that shipments of metal fuelled the Japanese invasion of China. This strike of Australian waterside workers was supported by Chinese seamen, gardeners and shopkeepers. [Drew Cottle, "Australia and the rise of fascism," May 2005]

The importance of citizen action against totalitarianism cannot be undervalued. As Hitler commandeered German state organs, fascist bands also marched on the streets of Paris in 1934, but social democratic workers counter-struck with a general strike that later brought French Socialist Party leaders and other groups into a united anti-fascist movement.

Building on the traditions of European bourgeois revolutions, the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence in Hanoi on September 2, 1945 began and was peppered with citations from the American Declaration of Independence as well as the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. More to the point, the Vietnamese proclamation faulted the French colonizers for handing over Indochina to the Japanese fascists. Result: "From Quang Tri province to the North of Vietnam, more than two million of our fellow-citizens died from starvation."

Be that as it may, the Vietminh League urged an anti-fascist alliance with the French, rescued them from Japanese jails, and protected French lives and property.

As the French lost effective control, the Japanese then capitulated to the Allies, and native Emperor Bao Dai abdicated, the Vietnamese thus won independence for their fatherland.

The same tenacity was displayed by Filipinos at Bataan, among other battlefields. Trapped in a dense, mountainous, jungle combat zone, the Filipino army of brave but raw volunteers fought with insufficient arms and supplies against a veteran enemy that was equipped with naval and air cover. While both sides were beset by tropical diseases, the Filipinos were subject to American commanders who were new to the area. Worse, the highest-ranking Allied officer, Douglas MacArthur, left behind his own Filipino-American army in the field for the relative safety of the GHQ in Australia.

It was March 11, 1942 when the top commander was "evacuated" to the rear. The defenders of Bataan kept up the fight until exhaustion, hunger and thirst, dwindling ammo, and the improbability of rescue and re-supply compelled their American officers to sue for ceasefire.

The halt in hostilities should have brought relief. Instead, the remnants of the USAFFE were funneled into a "march of death."

"Blinded by hate, the conquerors took sadistic revenge...They went into an orgy of manslaughter. Whole battalions and regiments were marched off to secluded spots and mercilessly machine-gunned. For a while, Pucot River, from whose water the men had literally drawn their last ounce of strength, became incarnadined with the blood of the sacrifice to Japanese hate."

"The surrender of Bataan is one of the grimmest episodes of the whole war." [Manuel E. Buenafe. Wartime Philippines. Manila: Philippine Education Foundation, Inc., 1950, pp. 123-124]

Since the defenders of Bataan stalemated the most reactionary, most terroristic, most chauvinistic, most racist and most imperialistic regime of Japanese capitalism, it was not far-fetched that Japanese soldiers resorted to barbarism as a penalty for the hard-fighting Filipino cadets and constabularies.