Here’s a nasty little story from a far corner of the culture wars.

You’ve probably heard about the ”Comfort Women”—young women aged 14 to 20, mostly from Korea and China, forcibly conscripted by the Japanese military in World War 2 to serve in brothels for Japanese soldiers. By some accounts, the Japanese massacred large numbers of them at the war’s end to cover up what had been done.

It’s all made up, says a book that came out last month from Encounter Press, title The Comfort Women Hoax: A Fake Memoir, North Korean Spies, and Hit Squads in the Academic Swamp. Most of the women were Japanese, not Chinese or Korean; most were not forcibly conscripted. They were paid quite well for what they did, and there was no massacre.

The coauthors of the book are both academics: J. Mark Ramseyer of Harvard Law School and Jason M. Morgan of Reitaku University in Japan. They have documented their case scrupulously.

That counts for nothing with the guardians of orthodoxy, of course. A February 3rd report in The American Conservative tells us that Ramseyer has been denounced by Harvard colleagues, attacked in the pages of the New Yorker, and even expelled from his church. Morgan’s first Ph.D. advisor dropped him; her replacement tried to sabotage his career with negative letters of recommendation.

In South Korea, you can go to jail for saying that those who enlisted as comfort women “probably had a clear idea what they had to do.” In the U.S., you just get canceled. My review of the new book The Comfort Women Hoax: https://t.co/yRzzFaMA9g

— Helen Andrews (@herandrews) February 3, 2024

Apparently one factor driving the promotion of the false story was North Korea wanting to stir up anti-Japan feeling among South Koreans so that the South wouldn’t join forces with Japan against them.

If that’s right, then the woke enforcers are on the same side of this one as North Korea, the world’s most horrible, brutal totalitarian despotism. Why am I not surprised?