By Mar-Vic Cagurangan
Variety News Staff

THE people of Guam are poised to lobby the U.S. Senate for the passage of the war reparations bill, but they are facing a competition with bloggers in the U.S. who oppose the legislation.
H.R. 1595, known as the Guam World War II Loyalty Recognition Act, which passed the House of Representatives two weeks ago, has drawn objections from users of the RedState (www.redstate.com), an online coalition of freedom of speech advocates.
“I don’t give a rip if the money is coming directly from the Japanese. Or the Norwegians. Or anybody else for that matter. The problem I’ve got is that the majority can find the time to vote to pour money on a 60-year-old issue (I’m trying to be kind here) but they can’t seem to find the time to vote for a clean bill to fund today’s military in combat,” reads one blog entry.
The war claims bill seeks to appropriate $126 million for Guam to compensate its people for the sufferings that they went through during the Japanese occupation.
“We’re paying Guam for Japan’s sins now? Are these freakin’ people insane? Washington, D.C. is awash in so much money, the nutcases cannot find enough ways in which to spread around the confiscated spoils,” reads another comment.
The whole page, dedicated to the war claims bill, contains exchanges among a number of RedState users, who narrate their efforts to call the Congress “to stop this madness.”
Another entry is titled “For the Legacy of These Men, You Should Call Congress and Stop This Bill,” followed by a list of every serviceman who died liberating Guam.
“These are the heroes of Guam. The men of the United States military who rescued Guam from the Imperial Japanese. These men shed their blood that Guam might be free,” it says.
Another blogger spoke on Guam’s behalf, saying the bill is meant to be “loyalty recognition, not war reparation.”
“We fought to retake control of Guam and the rest of the Mariana Islands mostly so that we would have good airbases from which to bomb Japan (the Enola Gay flew out of Tinian, an island in the Northern Marianas).
“Rather than beef up the military forces in Guam in preparation for the war, our government made a decision to abandon it to certain capture, should war break out,” the blogger writes.
“This isn’t ‘reparations’ (which connotes paying for harm one has caused oneself); it’s simply taking care of your family... These are not foreign citizens. We’re not paying money to Korea or China for damage done to their citizens by Japan. The bill proposes modest payments to people whom we assumed a duty to protect way back in 1898. In the aftermath of the war, we made payments to other Americans who suffered during the war, but not to the inhabitants of Guam. I’m not sure that it’s too late to rectify that mistake,” the entry reads.