Care to address, any time soon, how desecrating inanimate corpses is equivalent with live vivisection without anesthesia, and such? Or just going to fall back on your tired old claim that any American who actually uses the facts is a racist?
Yah, didn’t think so.
So, because the Soviets were cruel pricks, that excuses what the Japanese did?
:rolleyes:
No no no, because the Soviets did horrible things, Americans are racists if they know that the Japanese did horrible things that the American army didn’t.
QED.
No, I thought my point was obvious. Any Spaniard who questions the brutalities that were committed by anyone else at any other point in time is nothing but a racist xenophobe, and likely a fascist and a Nazi sympathizer to boot. What, you don’t recognize your own logic?
I’m a Spaniard who recognizes the brutalities committed by anyone, regardless of country of origin and obviously including my own – however I also hold that neither the Conquistadores, nor the Inquisitors, the anti-Napoleonic resistance or Franco, to name but a few, held any kind monopoly on cruelty, evil bastards that they all were. Kind of the same logic I am using to come to the same conclusion about The Japanese.
Hope that helps. Or not.
:::shrug:::
Hmm. Well, first I would be very hesitant to draw any conclusions about a people or nation based on how its soldiers acted in a war. War brings out the very best extremes and the very worst extremes in human nature. We’ve all had bullies in our neighborhood growing up, right? From the guys that shook younger kids down for their lunch money, to guys that liked beating up others just for shits and giggles, to guys that were downright scary - one memorable kid on my block in grade school loved blowing up frogs with firecrackers. It is very easy to imagine people already that bent going seriously bent when faced with the hellacious environment of war - the US is not without its own shameful actions in the past. I think how frequently or on what scale it occurs depends largely on how successful the army in question is in ensuring its more capable and mentally stable officers get promoted - one thing that has definitely not changed in Japan: they make horrible managers/leaders, because they only manage up, not down.
There is no equivalent to Nazi Germany, and as silly as it is to try and determine which atrocity was ‘worse or better’, I don’t think there is any doubt that what Nazi Germany did was on a whole different scale. Why? Because Japan during the war was pretty indiscriminate: they simply believed themselves superior to everybody else. Germany, on the other hand was able to consciously say, ‘we are going to exterminate the Jews’. Think of the enormous time, effort, and cost involved in designing, building, and then implementing the entire killing machine. I think we have to make a key distinction between structural mass killing with the aim of extermination of a race, and crude brutality reflecting psychology of war and other factors. To a large extent, the worst aspect of Japan’s colonialism was to deprive Koreans and other Asians from their tradition and identity, to try and “Japanize” them. Impermissible though it was, and while still based on racism, it is still very different from extermination of a race. Nazi Germany had the will for extermination and readiness to implement it mechanically.
The Nazis’ treatment of the Jews changed over the course of the 1930s and 40s according to various reasons, and became radicalised by 1941/2 into an attempted globalization of industrial scale murder (genocide is not an adequate term), which attempted to include Japan as an accomplice. I don’t believe the Nazis were especially exercised in enlisting the Japanese as active and willing partners in this policy, however. Moreover. this policy against the Jews (and other groups) was on a completely different scale and type of ‘execution’ than the Japanese war crimes, which were either of the violent and out of control type (Nanjing), death by starvation and overwork type (Thai-Burma Railway), or mad scientific experimentation and medical torture type (731). The Nazi’s ‘indulged’ in all three of the latter types, too; but the Japanese did not set up a continent wide network of specialist concentration/labour camps and death factories linked together by a sophisticated web of administrative and transportation infrastructure. Let me say that I have no interest in making the Japanese that took part in criminal behaviour in Asia look good … they were beasts … And I am not so much talking about numbers; it is the type of killing and the manner in which it took place which is important in distinguishing between the sanity-madness of the administrative efficiency of the Nazis in the execution of uncontrollably large numbers by mild-mannered bureaucrats of the Eichmann type; and the (bestially primitive?) rage, ignorance and sadism of the Japanese soldiers. The former, I would argue, is a more serious crime. The manner of the development and execution of Nazi policy can be deduced through a careful examination of the proceedings of the Wannsee Conference in Jan 1942, for example, which put an official seal on the ‘Final Solution’. I don’t believe there are any qualitative equivalents in Japanese behaviour and treatment of Jews, or any other people, with events such as Wannsee or the construction of Auschwitz and its network, which stretched far into Russia, all the way to the Atlantic coast, and north and south to the Baltics and Balkans.
The construction of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death factory, the organisation of its associated administrative and transportation systems, as well as the management of the human remains, was of a type and on a scale quite unlike anything that the Japanese did in the Asia-Pacific, including 731 and Nanjing. Moreover, Auschwitz was not the only place where this was occurring - it was just the largest and most sophisticated part of a very complex series of hub and spoke networks, and was the logical culmination of a policy that had been taking place across the European continent for some years. Poland provided the space and privacy to be able to do this, and Poland also had a large number of Jews among its population; hence the situation of most of the death fac0tories there (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmo etc.). However, there were also many other facilities where Jews were detained, enslaved, murdered, or transported for murder on a systematic basis across the whole of Europe. Many of the eastern facilities were purpose-built, however others were not. These latter facilities were located more commonly in Central and Western Europe where it was easier simply to convert existing structures into functioning parts of the continental network for systematically managed massive-scale murder. That is not to say that specialist ‘green field’ facilities were not constructed in Central and Western Europe too (the Ravensbruck detention and transportation facility for women near Berlin, eg.). Drancy near Paris, intended originally as a modernist community made up of apartment blocks for middle-classed Parisians escaping to the suburbs, is a good example of the Nazi’s sadistic brutalist efficiency in converting existing structures into facilities for managed death, however. There were many others, some of which were operated by the Death’s Head Division of the SS (Totenkopf) while others were operated less ‘efficiently’ by less ‘specialised’ units of the Wehrmacht, or were operated with differing degrees of brutality because of their location and the nationality of the detainees: Alderney in the Channel Islands, Terezin (Theresienstadt) in what was then Czechoslovakia (originally a fortress town), Amersfoort detention and transportation facility in the Netherlands (originally a base for the Dutch army), and at Bolzano and Trieste in Italy (the latter being originally a food processing plant).
We need to knock on the head attempts to somehow cut Japan and Germany from the same cloth and to argue as a consequence that the present day Japanese government need apologise and make amends in the same way that Germany has tried to do. The circumstances and manner of what occurred were qualitatively (and quantitatively) very different from each other, with historical, cultural and geographically separate roots, that we could even say that they were not engaged in the same conflict, despite the countries officially being allies (more or less for reasons of expediency on the part of the Nazis who, I suspect, despised the Japanese in private) and the conflict as a whole being labelled as a single ‘World War’.
Finally, for those that like to think that Japanese are sub-human and that ‘something like that could never happen in the US’ - I give you the Tuskegee experiment, which happened in the US, over a span of FOUR DECADES. And none of the so-called ‘researchers’ could even blame the psychologic stress of war.
I really don’t understand what your point is in this discussion. The OP was wondering why all the focus is on Germany and the Holocaust when Japan did some pretty horrible things that don’t get the same airplay. Most responses are either attempts to answer why the Japanese military in WWII was the way it was, or why we don’t here as much about it. You come in and say everyone is horrible so why even ask the question.
Look, I think we can all agree that all atrocities are bad. But not all atrocities are the same. They take different forms and have different causes. If your answer (because they were human) was correct, then everyone, every day, would be doing horrible things to others. Most of us think there is more to it. We think that trying to find out the causes of a set of atrocities can help us prevent future ones. Knowledge can be a kind of immunization. I don’t know if it has ever been tried but I would be interested to know how subjects in a Milgram-like experiment would react if they were aware of the original experiment and its implications.
I’m afraid I still don’t see the relevance. In this thread, what atrocities are people ignoring? What atrocities are people inventing?
I think his point is that a LOT of countries did horrible things during that war, not just in the distant past but contemporaneously with Japanese atrocities. He seems to be condemning ALL war BECAUSE these sort of things occur so frequently during wars.
I didn’t get the impression that Red Fury was excusing Japanese war atrocities. I don’t remember a post where he said “what the Japanese did was ok because…”
It may not sit too well with folks like me who want to believe that we have been visited with uniquely unspeakable horrors, it makes what happened in Nanking seem somehow less horrific if we recognize that it was not an isolated historical incident.
It would be very convenient for me to believe that the Japanese were somehow genetically or culturally sociopathic. It would be convenient for me to point to the fact that the bayonetting of babies was not the result of a breakdown of discipline but a deliberate effort to engage in things like bayonetting babies, forcing parents to have sex with their children, bayonetting pregnant women, raping nuns, all that stuff.
But the fact of the matter is that total war is fucking inhuman. Anyone engaged in total war would rather win the war dirty than lose the war with grace and while these things don’t always happen, they seem to happen most frequently during these sort of wars.
Yeah, Red Fury probably jumped the gun by calling people racists. There is plenty about what the Japaneses did that deserves to be criticized forever regardless of any other fact.
It poisons the well to start with the premise that anyone that disagrees with you has some character flaw or is being intentionally deceptive or anything like that. It might help the debate is Red Fury just retracts the part of his argument that implies that anyone that disagrees with him is being racist at least until he can establish the racist intent.
Not quite. My point all along has been that there’s nothing indigenous to The Japanese that made/makes them especially evil. That’s all.
Facts is, depressing as it might be, that yes, everyday horrific things happen all over the world. Obviously there’s a matter of scale, thus a Gacy or a Dahmer won’t gather near the same amount of global outrage as the rampaging actions of an army at war. As far as understanding the causes in order to prevent them in the future, one can be hopeful yet remain a realist – again, although not on the scale of the Great Wars, you only need look around the globe to realize that there are acts of unspeakable cruelty going on as we speak. The Balkans, Congo, Rwanda, Iraq and NK to name but a few.
As for your suggestion of a repetition of The Milgram Experiment under your provisos, I’d be interested as well. Knowledge vs peer pressure & authority. Would that I could venture a response…alas I can’t.
BTW, have you watched The Experiment in either its original German version or the American remake? Based on The Stamford Prison Experiment, I think they give a pretty accurate account of the hive-mind mentality.
The ones not committed by The Japanese. And I don’t think I’ve said anything about “inventing” others…though I may be wrong. If that’s the case, my apologies.
Excellent post, DragonAsh.
TY
No problem. No doubt an overbroad statement, but still applicable to some posts/posters in the thread.
Retracted in the whole.
You mean, the post where he points out that your argument is full of shit and that there are qualitative and quantitative differences that make various behaviors in war different?
Or are you simply referring to the last tiny bit of his post where he equated tuskegee with the Japanese conduct, maybe getting you a bit distracted by the use of the word “subhuman” which is just a strawman that you invented in this thread in any case so that you could sling around your hilarious “racist!” charges at anybody who disagrees with you?
Apropo of nothing my hunger for bait has greatly diminished; if not altogether disappeared.
Seasons Greetings.
Ah, I see, you are being sorely baited by being asked to show how damage done to corpses is equal to live vivisection without anesthesia, or how someone saying that there are qualitative and quantitative differences in atrocities in equivalent to your claim that they’re all fungible and a (now an unidentified but still slandered) group are racists for claiming that there is a qualitative and quantitative difference.
Obviously, you are sorely trolled.
You should probably report it to the mods.
Except – this thread is specifically about the attrocities committed by the Japanese. To hand wave it away saying, “yeah, well THEY did it too!” or, “well, they were humans, and humans do such things!” does a disservice to the victims of these attrocities.
If you want a start a thread about “what makes HUMANS so cruel”, go for it. This is about “what made the Japanese of WWII so eager to commit such actions?”
Wait, what? I don’t understand what you’re trying to say at all. People are ignoring the atrocities not committed by the Japanese? That doesn’t make any sense. How does the Orwell quote fit here? You singled out a line where he said that people tend to automatically believe bad things about their enemies, and disbelieve bad things about their own side. I’m trying to figure out how that applies here. Are you trying to say that people in this thread are denying that the Allies committed war crimes? I don’t see anyone saying that. Or are you saying that the Japanese really didn’t commit these war crimes? I can’t make heads or tails out of what your point is supposed to be in this thread.
You are correct, Sir. Obviously I make no sense at all.
To you.