I’ve only seen it once, but I think the fictional ‘The Fighting Seabees’ is relevant to this discussion.
I really think people think it’s noble/heroic/etc when it’s their guy, and cowardly/disgusting if its the other guy. Lack of premeditation helps, but does not seem to be necessary.
There are lots of other movies, once you look for it. In recent times, most notably “Independence Day”.
There’s a crucial difference between suicide bombing and throwing yourself on a grenade.
There’s a difference between throwing yourself on a grenade and carrying the grenade into the bunker, which was more like John Wayne was doing.
I’ve been saying too. However I don’t agree it’s a crucial moral difference, as some posts have said or implied. You didn’t say, maybe you think it obviously is (or obviously isn’t) so doesn’t need to be said.
Here’s where at least previous posts IMO have conflated what I see as basically different things: the cause and the tactic. And again I’d say set aside suicide attack in irregular warfare where the target of suicide attack is seldom organized opposing military forces.
IMO regular national military forces subjected to suicide attack by other national military forces have no basis to say they are the victim of a moral wrong. I think in case of US attitude that the kamikaze were doing something wrong, in a way they wouldn’t have been wrong if using conventional antiship bombing tactics, comes down to left over ‘us v them’ from the Pacific War itself. The kamikaze attacks were effective (compared to conventional antiship air attack by the Japanese, by that point in the war), and what was more effective killed more Americans. Understandable in the moment the USN and US public would fee the tactic itself was somehow wrong. But IMO hard to logically justify that view now without conflating it with Japan’s overall cause, or Japanese battlefield/prisoner atrocities which aren’t directly relevant to kamikaze v conventional air attack.
I think there’s more room to argue the suicide attackers, the individuals, are the victims of their own side’s system. Although again I see a propensity to exaggerate the coercion employed against Japanese suicide attackers. Mainly it’s what those men wanted to do, given their beliefs and what they’d learned all their short lives, if they could help their country’s desperate situation.
Also I see exaggerated accusations of self dealing/corruption against Japanese military leadership, again respect of kamikaze, not Japan’s overall war policy. For example commanders of Army Air Regiments or Naval Air Groups had no political role nor were they IMO corrupt and self dealing simply in going along with the organizing of special attack units. It’s what they also believed was necessary to try to save their country. The policies which led Japan to that situation, and caused such harm elsewhere, are really a different issue. Related in a way certainly, but not directly part of the same moral calculus. There’s nothing inherently morally wrong AFAICS in suicide tactics in a just cause against legitimate targets, or it needs to be argued why there is, without going off on tangents. If the cause isn’t just, non-suicide tactics don’t make it just. If the targets aren’t legitimate, other tactics don’t make them so.
But John Wayne didn’t die in the explosion, he died because he was shot. It says so right in your post. That means his death wasn’t certain - in other words, the chance that he wouldn’t be shot was greater than zero. That’s the difference between taking a risk and killing yourself.
And even if his death were certain, it isn’t like he woke up that morning and decided to die. He only did what he did because there was no other option. If he could have thought of some way to kill the enemy without dying, you bet your ass he would have tried it.
I think he died in the explosion. As I said, it’s been years since I saw it. I don’t recall the details, maybe he was planning to jump off at the last minute, but being shot bollixed that up. I just recall that it looked to me that he set things up for a royal explosion and drove the dozer into (HUGE) fuel tanks. It’s arguable whether he could have pulled off a successful dozer attack on the fuel tank without being caught in the explosion, but hey, it’s fiction, and anyway, maybe he thought he could.
You still have to explain to me how the heirs of that evil coward Russell didn’t have to pay the airforce back for crashing that perfectly good (only needed a bit of missile unjamming) fighter jet into that poor flying saucer…
I know these are fictional stories, I don’t want to make light of real events where people lost lives or suffered. I just could tell when I watched ‘Independence Day’ that no one in the crowd thought of him the way Americans think of Japanese kamikaze.
I think that there are some conversations where it’s easy to blur lines if you talk about it too much.
The US is not and has not been a paragon of virtue throughout its history. And it may well be reasonable to say that the Japanese was just a bit behind the times on the morality of Colonialism and that they had a genuine concern in regards to the spread of Communism in Eastern Asia.
But, that all said, the use of Kamikaze is not something that you can really defend. By the point that they were introduced, Japan had reasonably lost and was simply continuing to fight on the basis of machismo. Using the Kamikaze wasn’t like, “Oh no! The Americans are going to come conquer our land and enslave our women!” It was, instead, “Crap! We miscalculated our ability to conquer others’ land and enslave their women! Quick, do whatever it takes to try and save face! …What? Oh? Throw some of our more stupid devotees into suicide missions? Great! Anything!”
There was nothing that the deaths of these men was for or which could be hoped to be accomplished, and it’s probably certain that a lot of people, directly under the top command, would have realized that it was a pointless use of life and yet they went with it.
Nobody here is calling the kamikaze pilots themselves evil or cowards. They just weren’t heroes; in fact, they were barely soldiers.
What the Japanese showed in WWII was that if you both dehumanize the enemy AND inculcate your military from childhood on with a “culture of death,” bravery–an unreliable commodity–becomes largely irrelevant.
The Allies and the Germans also dehumanized the enemy, but the Japanese were unique in their effectiveness in virtually eliminating the fear of death. The kamikaze and the kaiten were not individual decisions but part of an overall strategy, particularly in the desperate last months of the war. If you effectively remove fear of death from the equation, is a kamikaze pilot or a kaiten still brave?
The Germans and Allies dehumanized the enemy. By eliminating the fear of death; inculcating an absolute, unquestioning obedience, he Japanese managed to dehumanize their own troops even to themselves. Given the same circumstances, any nation could do the same. I can’t be the only one who finds that chilling.
Islamic terrorist groups are trying to do this same thing today, but I don’t think it’s working as well. I sincerely doubt that most of ISIS’s troops are actually unafraid of death. I think they, like most people, would do virtually anything to avoid it, or else we’d be seeing far MORE suicide attacks from them.
I accept the now customary formality of stating the obvious that the US (along with every other political entity in human history) isn’t perfect. It’s really nothing to do with the point as I see it though.
The argument that futile military resistance is immoral is more to the point. However it
a) it should logically apply as much to military action that isn’t suicide tactics. IOW under that argument why was it any less wrong for the Japanese to continue conventional air attacks on US ships than ‘special’ attacks? Which they did, and some US ships were sunk or very badly damaged by those right to the end. For example the carrier Franklin in the strikes on the Japanese Home Islands in March 1945, a famous case of saving an extremely badly damaged ship never fully returned to service: hit by a conventional dive bomber not a kamikaze.
b) it’s very hard to define when further resistance becomes a futile waste of life other than in hindsight. Think of all the cases where one side won all the battles but eventually gave up or backed off on its war aims, with that country sometimes being the US. Again considering as in a) that futile resistance which causes loss of life in non suicide tactics isn’t by any logic I can see worse that futile resistance via suicide tactics.
Not unique in *being *racist - unique in being “pumped up” in racism and nationalism by official sources was the definite implication of “Not quite the same”.
The only failure here is yours, in not knowing when to apply the correct logical fallacy. The exceptional nature of the Japanese racist and jingoistic indoctrination was *your *initial stance. Pointing out that it isn’t, is hardly a tu quoque. It’s a response. If I said *you *have a history of making racist propaganda, that would be a tu quoque. You are not the WWII American government.
That wasn’t what I posted, however it should be obvious from a cursory knowledge of history (and subsequent links, as you appear to need them) that both the racist indoctrination by military and political leaders in Japan and ensuing war crimes* do not remotely compare to Allied attitudes and actions.
Tu quoque fail continues.
*more victims of the “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere”, which was touted as an antidote to the imperialists.
So, that’s “I didn’t say it was unique - but it totally was, though!”…
Well, yes, as long as you keep using it wrong, you are going to keep failing at it. No need to sound so proud, though.
Do you agree that the Japanese in WW2 made more use of torture, rape, sex slaves, POW brutality and civilian executions than U.S. forces? If so, what motive other than extra racism do you ascribe to that?
Now, now, we mustn’t mention Japanese atrocities during WWII because, y’know, Japanese-Americans were interned in the U.S. and there were demeaning cartoons of Japanese in the media. It’s all the same.
Likewise, Admiral Halsey urging troops to “kill more Japs” is equivalent to Japanese military leaders ordering soldiers to use members of “inferior” races for target practice.
Yes
A cruel culture, regardless of race. Japanese didn’t have any problems treating other Japanese quite cruelly, either, within living memory of WWII.
Note I’m not saying Japanese culture is inherently cruel, just by virtue of being Japanese. I’m saying the culture that arose post - ooh, let’s say Sengoku-jidai - was not a very humanist one, and this was exaggerated and exacerbated by Meiji rule and then the military junta pre-war.
I’ll just note that at least you seemed to have dropped the baseless tu quoque accusations. However, you seemed to have dropped them in this mound of straw…
This betrays a fundamental understanding concerning the situation and the end of the war and the thinking of the Japanese military leadership.
The military leaders were well aware that Japan lost, that their country would be completely changed. They believed that this change was completely unacceptable to their vision of Japan. This vision was embodied in the term kokutai, which defies simply translation into English. It was often translated as “national polity” but probably “national identity, essence and character” better captures the meaning.
Kokutai was used by the leaders of Japan to propagate the idea of the divine nature of the Emperor and Japan’s unique position, superior to all other races and a nations.
The loss of the kokutai was one of the reasons for the hardcore militants in resisting the call to surrender, even after the atomic bombings and the Soviet entry into the war.
The leaders were desperate, and had deluded themselves into believing their own faulty reasoning. Enough of the fanatics truly believed that if they imposed a sufficiently large enough cost to the Allies, that they could end the war on acceptable terms, including avoiding an occupation by the Allies, maintaining the political system, and preserving the kokutai. For them, they really believed that there was a point in the sacrifice.
Calling their actions “saving face” is simply absurd. They were fighting for their vision of the Japanese way of life, and was willing to sacrifice the entire nation in the process.
Of course, as the military leaders, they had the most to lose’ themselves.
What gets me is there were so many GOOD Japanese. For example all the crowds that came out to meet Helen Keller in 1937.