Do you have some cites for this claim?
:dubious:
:rolleyes:
No, seriously. Show me where liberals have dismissed claims about the Japanese massacre and other attrocities committed by “non-whites”.
You’ve been around here long enough to know what the routine is-make a claim, be prepared to back it up.
Oh, so you have no cites for your claim.
.
The biggest reason, in my opinion, is that the entire thing was never forced out into the open for everyone to see and document, like the concentration camps were. This leads to the fog of deniablity that Sleel describes very well because so many records were destroyed.
It also may have ‘helped’ that most of the atrocities were carried out outside of Japan, so there are very few survivors living here to protest, fight for recognition and generally stir up troublesome memories. Protests from overseas are easier to wave away on the evening news with 30-second sound bite.
By interesting coincidence, there was a heated panel discussion on TV tonight (TV Tackle) that brought up the Rape of Nanking, with regard to whether or not it actually happened, what’s the evidence for or against (the discrepancies in Chang’s book were mentioned), and why Americans keep wanting to bring it up. Beat Takeshi was one of the panelists, perhaps because of the upcoming RoN movie. He mumbled a little about Sundance, but was mostly drowned out by the others, who argued very vehemently on both sides. While it’s disappointing that denial is taken seriously, it was an encouraging break from past silence to even see it being debated openly on prime time network TV.
Another factor, I think, is that Germany has admitted and atoned for what went on during the Nazi regime-in fact, it’s against the law to deny that the Holocaust happened.
Whereas, in Japan, there’s a huge stigma to even talking about it-they continue mostly to deny it, or claim it wasn’t so bad, someone else was to blame, etc. Those who do try to bring it up are are subject to harassment and persecution, it seems.
As for the USSR not getting attention, I would argue that they have-the commies were our enemies for so very long, though, that it almost became a parody, of sorts. People became jaded. (And keep in mind, sadly, that even prior to the Bolshevik takeover, Russia wasn’t exactly a bastion of freedom and democracy).
In other words: no.
I do not know anyoe who is unaware of the purges of Stalin or the huge numbers of deaths under Mao. Those get plenty of attention. (And where does your odd claim go when we look at Cambodia?)
The specific difference between Hitler on the one hand and Stalin and Mao on the other is that Hitler set out to destroy one people, completely, and was quite willing to deliberately murder many others because of who they were, not for anything they had done.
Stalin allowed his millions to starve because he considered them to be potential rebels and if they had suddenly shown that they all loved him, he might have let them have food.
Mao acted in a very similar way.
It matters not to a dead person whether they died because Stalin or Mao thought they were rebels or whether Hitler thought they were Untermensch, but when people on the outside evaluate the crimes, a systematic destruction of clearly innocent people (whose countries one had to invade to find them to kill) tends to look a bit nastier than repressive measures within one’s own country, even if those repressive measures wind up with a larger death toll.
Your post has some seeming contradictions and some weird claims and groupings.
It is pretty well established that Stalin had around 10 million killed, so I am guessing this is part of your Communist grouping. Of course most of these were probably “white” so in contradicts your second paragraph.
Can you maybe break out the numbers you are using for the ‘Communists killed at least seven or eight times as many people’?
Jim
The reason is quite complex, but I think the main reason is the legacy.
There is no visible impact today from Japanese war crimes. All the atrocities were independant events directed at relatively small separate identities.
The German situation, is largely remembered for the holocaust directed at millions of an identifiable people who were motivated to create their own country for their own protection causing an unrelenting crisis that affects our attention almost every day.
Nazi atrocities have gotten more attention in the West than Japanese war crimes partly because the Germans were “people like us”. The fact of Germany descending into barbarism despite a long history of being an enlightened Western nation holds a powerful fascination.
There’ve certainly been many war movies featuring the good guys against the Germans, but few focusing on German atrocities including the Holocaust.
Hollywood studios were slow to make any anti-Nazi films in the 1930s. Warner Bros. made one after some studio workers were killed in Germany, and was promptly denounced by isolationists in the U.S.
This and MrDibbles comment sound like the main reason to me. Out of sight, out of mind. How many thousands of American soldiers personally saw concentration camps versus the sites of Japanese atrocities? Also, as someone pointed out, there was an immediate war trial of Nazi atrocities versus the mediated surrender of Japan allowing many horrors to be swept under the rug (another reason to dislike McArther).
The “lets not talk about it” attitude of the Japanese towards anything unpleasant is also a factor. Also the fact that Japan and China are still much more closed to western scrutiny than Germany. To this day, five people killed by a bomb in Berlin is more news-worthy in the US than 500 getting bombed in Beijing.
Another factor is the Nazi’s own blunders. Apart from the record keeping mentioned above, there is the fact that the Nazi party was all about self promotion and spectacular presentation. All that attention came back to bite them in the ass when it came time to start passing out blame. And as someone said, the nazis made a bona fide attempt at actual genocide, whereas the Japanese were somewhat randomly brutal.
In summary, many different things have come together to make Auschwitz more famous than Nanking.
Some poeple noted this briefly, but I’d like to expand on the point: most Japanese atrocities were largely undocumented and witnessed only by people who had a difficult time getting word out. We were more or less allied with the Chinese at the time, but even so, illterate peasants (yes, that’s what they predominantly were, and I’m not saying that was a flaw in them) have a hard time getting the message out. By contrast, the European Jewry was well-educated, if not terrible wealthy on average, and were capable of speaking out more effectively. The Chinese didn’t have so many cameras and the “communication channels” which ran in the West simply didn’t go to China.
It may seem strange today, but rural China, and even urban China, was about as familiar as Mars to most people.
Might another reason be that after witnessing the devastation of two nuclear bombs in Japan, the US population felt/feels guilty, and so doesn’t harp too much on any of Japan’s indescretions?
…but they wre not as well publicized. Also, the japanese destroyed quite a lot of archival material, so proving guilt was difficult (the Germans were meticulous record-keepers). In addition, must of the atrocities were committed by the japanese Army, and many of the perpetrators were later killed in battle.
In the end though, the japanese NEVER really accepted the horrendous evil that they did-most of the psotwar generations NEVER knew what went on, because it was never printed in the history tectbooks. :o
So why the denial and avoidance in Japan? Why the lack of openess that we’ve seen in Germany?
Will Japan eventually open up regarding its past? If so, what will be the deciding factor?
Well, a LOT of it has to do with General Douglas McArthur, the defacto ruler of Japan (1945-1953). he made the decision to keep emperor Hirohito on the throne (despite the fact that Hirohito was as bad a war crimianl as Hitler!). To do this, McArthur propagated the fiction that hirohito had nothing to do with the war and the atrocoities-despite the fact that Hirohito knew of (and approved) all of the decisions to murder millions of Chinese civilians, and murder allied POWS. Instead, the fiction was propagated, that Hirohito was a kind (slighly befuddled) old man, who was a prisoner of the japanese Army high command, and issued orders (authorizing atrocities) under duress.
Hirohito was a guilty as Hitler-see David Bergamini “Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy” for full details of his crimes.
Really, in order for any historical fact to be remembered in the popular consciousness, it needs a lobby. The Holocaust has a lobby, and Japanese war crimes don’t. It’s as simple as that.
And to expand on that, because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and to a lesser degree, the internment camps in the US, the Japanese were quick to paint themselves as the victims of WWII.
And while the camps were completely wrong, and I feel for the innocent victims of the two bombs, that in NO WAY excuses or mitigates the crimes of the Japanese.
It might be a little high but it’s in the neighbourhood. This site lists the number of victims killed in various genocides. It puts the Nazi total at 20,900,000 - a credible number. Combining several genocidal campaigns carried out by various Communist regimes adds up to a total of 108,700,000 - a little of over five times as many as the Germans.
More arguable is whether or not such a total has any significance. The regimes of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Tito might have all been Communist but they had no direct connection. You could just as credibly add Stalin’s, Hitler’s, Pizarro’s and Queen Mary’s totals together on the basis that they were all part of the same “European genocide group”.
As for race, I have a hard time accepting it as a factor. The German war crimes were Europeans killing Europeans. The Japanese war crimes were Asians killing Asians. Any ethnic solidarity would seem to be balanced between the victims and the perpetrators. Anybody who would minimize the actions because of the skin color of the killers would at the same time be emphasizing these same crimes because of the skin color of the killed.
Stalin was also in power for a lot longer than Hitler, and the FDR administration tended to downplay his crimes, painting him as “Uncle Joe”, because he was our ally.
And maybe there was also some lingering feeling from WWI, when the Germans were also our enemies. (Although the Kaiser was a mere buffoon, rather than the evil shithole that was Adolf Hitler)