Rather than trying to refute the arguments of Kenzaburo Oe, the 1994 Nobel laureate in literature, a 91-year-old war criminal veteran of the Imperial Japanese Army tried to use the courts to force him to retract and apologize for information about the connection between the Japanese military and suicides by civilians during the fall of Okinawa.

In a closely watched ruling, the Osaka District Court threw out a $200,000 damage suit that was filed by a 91-year-old war veteran and another veteranÂ’s surviving relatives, who said there was no evidence of the militaryÂ’s involvement in the suicides.

The plaintiffs had also sought to block further printing of Mr. Oe’s 1970 book of essays, “Okinawa Notes,” in which he wrote that Japanese soldiers had told Okinawans they would be raped, tortured and murdered by the advancing American troops and coerced them into killing themselves instead of surrendering.

“The military was deeply involved in the mass suicides,” Judge Toshimasa Fukami said in the ruling. Judge Fukami cited the testimony of survivors that soldiers had handed out grenades to civilians to use for committing suicide, and the fact that mass suicides had occurred only in villages where Japanese troops had been stationed.

One more confirmation that the Japanese militarists who plunged Asia (and America) into war in the 1930s and 1940s were engaged in acts of unspeakable brutality and inhumanity. And also proof that there remains to this day an element of the Japanese population that does not want to deal with those historical truths.

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"You mean witches? We have 'em too. We just pronounce it differently." -- Brigadoon

I think we'll all concede that there are no witches, at least not in the traditional sense of the malignant figures used to scare children.

And I think we'll all concede that there were massive wrongs done in witch hunts centuries ago, with men and women unjustly condemned for witchcraft.

But do we really need a legislative acknowledgment of centuries-old wrongs against accused and convicted witches?

Three years ago, Debra Avery and her family were shocked to learn they were direct descendants of Mary Sanford, a wife and mother of five who was hanged in Connecticut in 1692 after being convicted of witchcraft.

On Thursday, they trekked to the state Capitol, in the same city where Sanford and several other convicted witches were executed, to ask state lawmakers to restore their relative's good name. Legislators are considering a resolution that states that those convicted and their descendants should be freed from the stigma of the witchcraft accusations.

Avery, a New Preston resident and an eighth-generation great-granddaughter of Mary Sanford, said it has become a personal mission.

"We talk an awful lot about Mary being with us. We talk about whether we are Mary exonerating ourselves," she said. "But Mary has become a big part of our life. We talk about her a lot. I think it's in the DNA."

According to legislative research, it is believed that nine women and two men were convicted and hanged in the mid-1600s in Connecticut for witchcraft. Others were banished, indicted or fled the colony.

Two women were dropped into water to see if they possessed evil spirits. If they sank, they were innocent. But if they floated, they were guilty because the pure water cast out their evil spirit. One was acquitted while the other was given a reprieve by the General Assembly.

Others were also acquitted of the alleged crimes.

"Freed of the stigma"? Come on -- how much of a stigma is there, really, in 2008 over witchcraft charges in the seventeenth century? Do we really need legislation to acknowledge what everyone today admits -- that those accused were innocent of any wrongdoing? What next? Reparations for the descendants of those accused?

Sometimes we just have to recognize that great wrongs were done in the past, and that nothing we do or say today can undo them. All we can do is learn from them and move forward -- and that is not accomplished by breast-beating over the ancient wrongs.

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Imagine if this solution to the issue of slavery and Civil War had been tried. How different would our history have been?

Barely a year into the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln suggested buying slaves for $400 apiece under a "gradual emancipation" plan that would bring peace at less cost than several months of hostilities.

The proposal was outlined in one of 72 letters penned by Lincoln that ended up in the University of Rochester's archives, which are now online.

In a letter to Illinois Sen. James McDougall dated March 14, 1862, Lincoln laid out the cost to the nation's coffers of his "emancipation with compensation" proposal.

Paying slaveholders $400 for each of the 1,798 slaves in Delaware listed in the 1860 Census, he wrote, would come to $719,200 at a time when the war was soaking up $2 million a day. Buying the freedom of an estimated 432,622 slaves in Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri and Washington, D.C., would cost $173,048,800 — nearly equal to the estimated $174 million needed to wage war for 87 days, he added.

The idea never took root. Six months later, Lincoln issued the first of two executive orders known as the Emancipation Proclamation that declared an end to slavery.

This would have eliminated the need to pass the Thirteenth Amendment -- slavery would have been at an end in the territory controlled by the United States. Would the Confederacy have responded positively to this development and perhaps considered peace and a return to the Union? Or would the war have continued on?

Of course, it is important to note that none of what Lincoln proposed would have ended the peculiar institution for those enslaved in the bulk of the South. It would not have ended the Civil War. And instead of dollars, America paid a high price in blood to end an evil that had been allowed to infect the nation for too long.

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