“winners write the history books”, etc. For instance, what about Russian steadfastness in WWII - admirable or not? In light of the subsequent history of the USSR vis-a-vis territorial expansion and genocide?
It wasn’t just or even mainly hypocrisy I was pointing out. There was nothing uniquely evil or inhuman or alien about the Japanese in WWII. Really. They committed horrible atrocities, no argument there. And they were tenacious in their resistance (sometimes suicidally so), again, no argument there, either. But they were not unique about that, either. It hearkens back to the war-era racism of cartoonish “beastly” “Japs”, to vilify the Japanese resistance to defeat as particularly “wicked” or “stubborn” - loaded terms which don’t actually add anything to the argument about the use of the Bomb, but act only as an appeal to emotion.
Summary execution of prisoners is wrong and illegal. The massacre, if it occurred, should have been treated as a crime.
That said, I agree with the OP that there’s a strong case that the perpetrators were acting under temporary insanity caused by previous crimes committed by the victims.
It wasn’t a ‘final destination’ type camp like Auschwitz, no, but they did ‘exterminate’ the sick and conduct horrific medical experiments. The conditions were horrible. Talk about violating the Geneva Conventions.
Please don’t make Dachau into something it wasn’t.
In an earlier post, I said we weren’t much better but that was a bit of an overstatement. I should’ve said we weren’t innocent.
No, there’s nothing so inherent about being Japanese that makes you evil, but it’s arguable that culture and religion play a part in your international politics and war policies. To me, all parties in WWII (or any conflict) have to them a unique nature. Your argument sounds like the same thing would’ve happened with Americans had we been given the chance. I disagree. While Americans did (and do) commit ‘war crimes’ such as rape, theft, etc., I really do believe the differences boil down to how we view things - namely (and I hate to sound like a soundbite here) our ingrained principles of liberty.
No, that’s not my argument. Different things would (and did) happen with Americans and their Allies- Taking Japanese trophy skulls, for instance, or collecting their ears or teeth. Shooting unarmed prisoners in their tens of thousands. That sort of thing.
Again, this boils down to special pleading for some uniqueness to the Japanese psyche. There’s no “ingrained principles of liberty” that are uniquely American. There’s no overarching collectivist imperative to Japanese culture that completely overwrites individuality, either. That’s just racist propaganda.
I’m not arguing that there aren’t cultural differences between America and Japan, far from it. But those cultural differences don’t erase the essential humanity of both sides, which is what this level of special pleading for the unique evil of the WWII Nazis and Japanese amounts to.
And again, notice the subtle racist overtones - some are perfectly willing to allow that it was Nazis, not all Germans, who committed the worst atrocities in the West, but we make no such distinction for the Japanese. There’s no equivalent in popular culture for the SS/Wermacht distinction, so of course all Japanese soldiers are murderous brutes. Never mind that the Wermacht did its fair share of butchering, actually, and many hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers just fought and died without doing anything remotely resembling atrocity.
What?? Me making it into something it wasn’t?
Next you’ll accuse me of whitewashing what went on in Dachau.
My point, which keeps being skipped, is that they murdered THE WRONG PEOPLE!!!
They didn’t kill “Nazi scum that where just before shoving Jews into the oven”.
Again, the original guards and staff had fled!
They killed newly posted guards and WOUNDED combat soldiers.
This is exactly why there are rules and why there must be due course of law.
Do you want your police just shooting anyone, they think are criminals, when they arrive on the scene?
No, you want them to make arrests and let a court decide what should happen to them. That is the civilised way.
And this is exactly what took place. The IG investigated and reported, which resulted in charges being laid where appropriate, which the appropriate authority (Patton) then dismissed.
That is no different than a prosecutor using prosecutorial discretion to not proceed with a charge, and is very similar to an executive granting clemency.
Whether or not one agrees with the outcome, and whether or not one agrees with the process, the simple fact remains that there was a formal legal process process and it was followed.
I think Latro meant that the Nazis should have received due process before any decision to execute them was made; he wasn’t saying that the prisoners and GIs who killed them were denied that.
Hang on now, you’ve claimed all this happened before the Geneva Conventions.
Care to admit that you were entirely wrong about that before now using it to bolster another argument?
I’m still waiting on you to provide any evidence whatsoever that we
Either Convention Between the United States of America and Other Powers, Relating to Prisoners of War; July 27, 1929 (Geneva 3) or Laws and Customs of War on Land (Hague II); July 29, 1899 Chapter II On Prisoners. Again, since violating occurred regularly as a matter of policy you surely will have no problem finding a cite for it. Or you could do the decent thing and admit that you were 100% incorrect there as well.
I’ve been loathe to point out who dismissed the charges and have to play devil’s advocate, but Patton was really not the right man to be doing this. During the invasion of Sicily 71 Italian and 2 German POWs were killed in two separate instances following the capture of Biscari airfield. When told about this by his subordinate Omar Bradley, he recorded his reaction in his diary:
Bradley refused his advice and charges were brought.
Its hard to see Bismarck or Frederick the Great approving of Hitler’s foreign policy not to mention the Holocaust. Hitler’s Nazism was a break with tradition in many areas (though not all) while Japan’s bushidoism was a fanatical appeal to tradition.
The reports are conflicting but even after the a-bombs and the Russian entry into the war there still were officers who tried to launch a coup to stop the surrender from happening.
Way to miss the point I was making. War ‘rules’ make one thing legal and not allow another even though the chances of being correct in the latter case are higher than in the former.
Not Americans - their Allies. It was the Americans doing the tooth-pulling and skull-boiling, though.
You really think either of those guys would be opposed to territorial expansion? Or give a fig for Jews?
German - no, better to say European - Antisemitism was nothing new. Nor was the idea of slaughtering Jews, that was an old occupation. All the Nazis brought to it was a mechanical efficiency. The Holocaust was certainly a significant genocide, but it was hardly sui generis.
Made-up tradition. The term “bushido” gets co-opted in the 1880s to become something it really wasn’t, historically (I find a close parallel is the Victorian re-invention of the Age of Chivalry). Again, just because a word gets quite deliberately co-opted by the State for propaganda purposes, does not render it indicative of any actual cultural reality.
Yes - the cadre of people in power who were going to lose their power (and probably be tried for war crimes) - you can see how they might have had more realistic, immediate motivations beyond “bushido”, right?
Certainly they did both were tolerant of other religions and considered the Jewish people to be just subjects like anybody else-virtually any statesman from the 19th Century would have been horrified by the Holocaust-they were horrified by the Terror in France and this was exponentially bloodier, and eviller.
And while Friedrich the Great and Von Bismarck wanted territorial expansion they were intelligent enough to realize that going to war against practically the rest of the world wasn’t the way to go about it.
I believe it has been pointed out that while the old religious anti-Semites such as the Inquisition or Luther simply wanted Jews to convert and didn’t mind converts the new anti-Semites were against and hated anybody with Jewish ancestry.
You mean like all the Japanese soldiers who died in kamikaze attcks? I don’t see any self-interest there.
Maybe not the Holocaust, but considering Bismarck’s machinisms in foreign policy, I doubt he would have had THAT much of a problem. Do you know anything at all about how the German Empire was formed? Mr. “Blood and Iron” himself?
