Whaling remains banned but still goes on

At the International Whaling Commission's annual meeting in Agadir 88 countries rejected a proposal to relax the whaling ban. But whaling will go on and the excuses will continue to be outrageous, writes the left-liberal daily La Repubblica: "The scientific justifications that Japan has given for whaling are nothing but a thin excuse the Japanese diplomats cling to at international conferences. They conceal a sense of a lost identity that has been pulverised in the course of a hundred years of trying to copy the West. The irony of fate has led the country of the rising sun to cling desperately to a symbol that isn't even its own. ... In fact it was General Douglas MacArthur, the commander of the US occupation troops in Japan, who started off the whalemeat mania at the end of World War II. The land of Moby Dick and Captain Ahab, which today is leading the crusade in defence of the whales, is the true origin of this grotesque deception."

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