Except that the US forces imprisoned men it caught doing it, and the Japanese institutionalized rape by offical order.
Because THEY WERE! And thats not down playing Stalin atrocties. Compared to almost any regime in history Stalin’s regime absolute unmitigatingly horrendus, but NOT the Nazis. I mean the COVER STORY for the holocaust was it was just a Stalin-style mass expulsion.
But that irrelevant to the case in point. Given all we know about the Nazi war machine, and the genocide that was occuring in occupied eastern europe, its is absolutely impossible for any rational, moral, person NOT to side with the defenders of Stalingrad, rather than the attackers. Even given what we know about Stalins atrocities.
Again, it must be pointed out that Stalins atrocities primarily directed against HIS OWN TROOPS, the defenders in Stalingrad not only had to face one of the most brutal (and effective) military machines the world has ever seen, but a political hierachy that seemed just as commited to killing them as the enemy.
I’ve heard that it was case-by-case with the Japanese army. There was no army-wide policy and it defaulted to the generals in each region. Some generals encouraged their troops to commit atrocities and terrorize the local population. Other generals felt that they were representives of what was supposed to be a higher civilization and held their troops to a high standard.
The Soviets were responsible for 61,911,000 deaths. The Nazis were responsible for 20,946,000 deaths.
Look, this is getting tiring. The soviets might have been really bad in other instances but here we’re talking about Stalingrad where they were 100% in the right. Other things are just plain irrelevant.
America has done many evil things and that does not mean America is/was always wrong. In each case a person/people/country can be in the right or in the wrong without regard to whether they were in the right or wrong in other cases. Every country and every culture have done things which were wrong and even evil. That does in no way mean they were not right in other instances. If anyone had stolen Hitler’s wallet it would still have been wrong.
If you say it is acceptable to things which are otherwise wrong to bad people then all you need as a justification to steal or kill is to justify in your mind that you are doing it to bad people. It then becomes very convenient to find Jews are bad or Muslims are bad or Microsoft is bad or big business is bad… it allows one to steal or kill with a clear conscience.
The Soviets were in power for seventy years, the Nazis were in power for less than 12, and in control of the areas where their genocide was commited for just 3 or 4 years. So yes, they WERE a order of magnitude more brutal than the Soviets, the genocide they committed in just a couple of years is COMPLETELY unprecedented, and uniquely horrific, in the history of mankind, and nothing the soviets did can compare to that.
And again, as your own figures demonstrate, the vast majority of the victims of their crimes WERE THE VERY PEOPLE, the ordinary soviet citizens, who resisted the Nazis so fiercely.
wiki "*Comfort women
Main article: Comfort women
The terms “comfort women” (慰安婦, ianpu?) (or “military comfort women” (従軍慰安婦, jongun-ianpu?) are euphemisms for women in Japanese military brothels in occupied countries, many of whom were recruited by force or deception, and regard themselves as having been sexually assaulted and/or sex slaves.[45]
In 1992, historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi published material based on his research in archives at Japan’s National Institute for Defense Studies. Yoshimi claimed that there was a direct link between imperial institutions such as the Kôa-in and “comfort stations”. When Yoshimi’s findings were published in the Japanese news media on January 12, 1993, they caused a sensation and forced the government, represented by Chief Cabinet Secretary Kato Koichi, to acknowledge some of the facts that same day. On January 17, Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa presented formal apologies for the suffering of the victims, during a trip in South Korea. On July 6 and August 4, the Japanese government issued two statements by which it recognized that “Comfort stations were operated in response to the request of the military of the day”, “The Japanese military was, directly or indirectly, involved in the establishment and management of the comfort stations and the transfer of comfort women” and that the women were “recruited in many cases against their own will through coaxing and coercion”.[46]
The controversy was re-ignited on March 1, 2007, when Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe mentioned suggestions that a U.S. House of Representatives committee would call on the Japanese Government to “apologize for and acknowledge” the role of the Japanese Imperial military in wartime sex slavery. However, Abe denied that it applied to comfort stations. “There is no evidence to prove there was coercion, nothing to support it.”[47] Abe’s comments provoked negative reactions overseas. For example, a New York Times editorial on March 6 said:[48]
These were not commercial brothels. Force, explicit and implicit, was used in recruiting these women. What went on in them was serial rape, not prostitution. The Japanese Army’s involvement is documented in the government’s own defense files. A senior Tokyo official more or less apologized for this horrific crime in 1993… Yesterday, he grudgingly acknowledged the 1993 quasi apology, but only as part of a pre-emptive declaration that his government would reject the call, now pending in the United States Congress, for an official apology. America isn’t the only country interested in seeing Japan belatedly accept full responsibility. Korea and China are also infuriated by years of Japanese equivocations over the issue.
The same day, veteran soldier Yasuji Kaneko admitted to The Washington Post that the women “cried out, but it didn’t matter to us whether the women lived or died. We were the emperor’s soldiers. Whether in military brothels or in the villages, we raped without reluctance.”[49]
On April 17, 2007, Yoshimi and another historian, Hirofumi Hayashi, announced the discovery, in the archives of the Tokyo Trials, of seven official documents suggesting that Imperial military forces, such as the Tokeitai (naval secret police), directly coerced women to work in frontline brothels in China, Indochina and Indonesia. These documents were initially made public at the war crimes trial. In one of these, a lieutenant is quoted as confessing having organized a brothel and having used it himself. Another source refers to Tokeitai members having arrested women on the streets, and after enforced medical examinations, putting them in brothels.[50]
On 12 May 2007, journalist Taichiro Kaijimura announced the discovery of 30 Netherland government documents submitted to the Tokyo tribunal as evidence of a forced massed prostitution incident in 1944 in Magelang.[51]
In other cases, some victims from East Timor testified they were forced when they were not old enough to have started menstruating and repeatedly raped by Japanese soldiers.[52]
A Dutch-Indonesian “comfort woman”, Jan Ruff-O’Hearn (now resident in Australia), who gave evidence to the U.S. committee, said the Japanese Government had failed to take responsibility for its crimes, that it did not want to pay compensation to victims and that it wanted to rewrite history.[53] Ruff-O’Hearn said that she had been raped “day and night” for three months by Japanese soldiers when she was 21.
To this day, only one Japanese woman published her testimony. This was done in 1971, when a former “comfort woman” forced to work for showa soldiers in Taiwan, published her memoirs under the pseudonym of Suzuko Shirota.[54]
There are different theories on the breakdown of the comfort women’s place of origin. While some sources claim that the majority of the women were from Japan, others, including Yoshimi, argue as many as 200,000 women,[55] mostly from Korea and China, and some other countries such as the Philippines, Taiwan, Burma, the Dutch East Indies, Netherlands,[56] and Australia[57] were forced to engage in sexual activity.[58]
On 26 June 2007, the U.S. House of representatives Foreign Affairs Committee passed a resolution asking that Japan “should acknowledge, apologize and accept historical responsibility in a clear and unequivocal manner for its military’s coercion of women into sexual slavery during the war”.[59] On 30 July 2007, the House of Representatives passed the resolution, while Shinzo Abe said this decision was “regrettable”.[60"*
Pit me, Sailor, or drop it. I don’t post here at your sufferance.
The numbers each regime killed, and the citizenship of the victims, is irrelevant. The Soviets were as monstrous as the Nazis. Assigning them the moral high ground at the battle of Stalingrad defies their well-documented history and smacks of having a worldview shaped by too many episodes of The Lone Ranger.
The battle at Stalingrad was pivotal. The Soviets won it. Neither of those two things requires any “good guys.”
When one rabid dog attacks another rabid dog, you don’t have good v. bad. You have two dangerous, diseased creatures tearing at each other. Which one bit first doesn’t matter.
As was said upthread:
Doing otherwise downplays the scale of the Nazi atrocities in Eastern Europe. The length of the Nazi regime is DIRECTLY RELEVANT to the case in point, the end of the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe, and the end of their crimes, did not sponteaneously happen in 1944 and 1945, it happened as I direct result of the sacrefice of the Soviet people. That the Nazi regime only had two or three years, not seventy plus, to carry out their genocidal plans, was a DIRECT RESULT of the Russian victory at Staligrad (and other battles on the Eastern Front). Give that it is impossible for any rational person not to give them the “moral high ground”, regardless of the atrocities that were carried out by the Soviet regime.
:rolleyes:
:rolleyes:
Those were some well thought out and convincing replies, sailor.
Bravo.
Those countries were all involved in plans for D-Day, were they? I quoted you when you were talking about the invasion, not overall victory. Anyway my point was that there are handy terms that encompass all the countries on the list that I made that don’t involve insulting the memory of hundreds of thousands of casualties who were fighting under George VI but happened not to be English.
I wrote “would have invaded France and beaten Germany”. Plenty of countries sent troops that fought against Germany even if they didn’t land on the beaches on June 6. Although there were in fact troops from twelve different allied nations that participated in the invasion (Australia, Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States)
Battle of Stalingrad - 1,798,619 casualties.
Battle of Verdun - 976,000 casualties.
From here.
