I don’t have a cite, but a psychiatrist I know says that although the ostensible reason for the development of Provigil is the treatment of narcolepsy, in fact there was never a real market for that and the military was at least partially involved in it.
I also remember reading the term ‘special forces popcorn’ in a Vietnam vet’s biography regarding stimulant use.
This thread should have begun and ended with “they’re human, and human beings are known to commit worse atrocities than this”.
The Japanese hardly come anywhere close to what China did to their own people, or what white settlers did to Native Americans, the Roman Empire, or the slave trade, the Mongols storming through Asia, Genghis Khan in China, oh man I can go on FOREVER with this.
“Why does a disease have a specific pathology?”
“The beginning and end of any answer is that they’re microbes, and microbes have done far worse. What this microbe does isn’t as bad as what Ebola, the Black Death or the flesh eating virus do, anyways.”
“Well, why did the European settlers in North America mistreat the native population?”
“They were human, and human beings have done much worse. Besides, what they did wasn’t as bad as…”
“Why did…”
“Others are similar, and it wasn’t as bad as…”
“Why…”
“Shut up”, he explained.
As I pointed out earlier, there is an aspect of ‘it steam engines when it comes steam engine time’, but throwing up our hands and refusing to analyze things at all, and pretending that we don’t even need a basic degree of curiosity for unique trends in history, is simply an abdication.
I don’t buy this kind of answer for a second. Nobody else at the time was doing what Japan was doing in World War II. The fact that even the Nazis were shocked by it says something about how uniquely scary it was at the time. Do you get what I mean here? What is the point of comparing things over hundreds of years of history when it’s well understood that human civilization undergoes changes about what is generally accepted to be right and wrong.
(This is in response to the post above the previous one by FinnAgain.)
Also, I am not aware of anything that whites did to Indians that equaled the Japanese war crimes. They did some very evil things, but they didn’t dissect people alive in an organized way in the name of “science”.
Bullshit.
The answer to the OP is that the Japanese culture (military culture, mainly) at the time helped breed a lot of sociopaths and gave them guns.
For some answers from the horse’s mouth, we see from soplatole’s link the following:
Bolding mine. It takes a sociopath to kill an entire village “for the thrill of it” or to burn a mother and her baby alive and stick around to hear the screams.
These were sociopaths, pure and simple. It looks like sociopaths are not simply born that way, they can be created by a culture and a certain upbringing and training.
That’s because the Chinese aren’t heading most of the Hollywood studios. If they had been, we’d have seen a gazillion movies about Japanese war atrocities.
This, over and over. Of course, saying so makes you an “America-hater” or worse, a “self-hating American” to use the parlance of a well known rabidebater.
Oh well…
This thread is so full of strawmen it’s fucking insane. Who in this thread has ever said that you’re an America-hater or any other such statement for believing one thing or another?
In other words Red, caught in such absurdities as equating damage done to inanimate flesh with live and anesthetized vivisection and claiming that the fact of Japanese troops not being fungible with other troops of the same time period, you would much prefer to change the subject.
Simply for the record, the “Grrr, America!” rhetoric is not because of the abrogation of judgment and knowledge that Jacquelope’s position represents, but the nonsense you’re trying to sell whereby you claimed that even a single poster in this thread was being racist, xenophobic or believed Japanese people to be “sub-human” if they argued that America’s conduct wasn’t fungible with Japan’s during WWII.
And as Argent points out, that’s not “America hating”, but screwing with a discussion in order to claim that Americans who realize that their country’s actions weren’t the same as Japan’s during WWII are racists and yadda yadda yadda.
Just to keep things straight and factual, as always.
– bolding mine.
A turd would smell as shitty if called by any other name.
Clear?
TTFN
So, to sum up, caught in such absurdities as equating damage done to inanimate flesh with live and un-anesthetized vivisection and claiming that the fact of Japanese troops not being fungible with other troops of the same time period makes one a racist, and arguing for a blatant moral equivalency while denying that you’re doing just that, you would much prefer to change the subject.
*And you will respond with complaints over how unfairly your bullshit argument is being dealt with, if someone points out that you are slandering Americans who dare to hold different points of view from yours if theirs are actually based on facts and reason… when after all you don’t hate America as a nation you just think that any American is a cryotp-racist if they don’t believe that live-vivisection is equivalent to desecrating corpses. *
In other words, you’ve got less than nothing.
If this was a class, your argument would have to stay late after class just to fail.
Oh piffle. That would make sense if the majority of the posts said ‘well their japs, they’ve always been that way, always will, that’s why we still have bases there.’ But that’s not how it’s been, the couple of posters that hinted at that were called out on it.
yeah, ok , so everybodies as full of shit as everybody else, everyone has blood on their hands, so what.
I think it’s established history that the axis powers commited war crimes that were an order of magnitude greater both in quantity and quality than those commited by the allies. If you disagree, now would be the time to put up some evidence.
OTOH, that doesn’t seem like the Japanese I know today, and it doesn’t sound like the samuri as I’ve read about them, and it doesn’t seem like the Germans I knew when I lived in Germany and it doesn’t seem the like Germans who participated in the christmas truce during ww1. So it begs the question, why did they go so far from what their previous governments had done and what was considered appropriate at the time. I’d like to know precisely because I think it *wasn’t *something intrinsic in those people, so maybe we could learn to avoid it.
Maybe you’d like it better if we asked the question ‘why did the allies show so much more restraint during ww2, then the axis?’
Good thing the Allied powers had the saintly Russians on their side.
Unlike such doves and saints like Spain which sent the 250th Blue Division to fight alongside their pals the Nazis and have the dubious distinction of remaining a fascist country ruled by His Excellency Generalísimo Don Francisco Franco until 1975?
Yet another example of an extremely cruel MF. Was he unique as well? Is that your point?
Much more at source.
And the relevance of the Orwell quote is…
Can we ever really call infants prisoners of war? I mean what threat to they pose that you would have to imprison them or their nursing mothers during war?
Oh, I dunno. Perhaps this bit?
Of course, that would never happen in the SDMB, the last bastion of unbiased free-thought.
Damuri Ajashi, hell if I know.
I’d like to see a cite for ANY of the following being down to the Native Americans.
(BTW, what WOULD happen if you removed someone’s stomach and connected the esophagus directly to the intestines? Just curious)
Is it anti-German to ask what made the Nazis so cruel? Does it mean I hate Germans when I say I can’t fathom what would posess someone to participate in the Holocaust directly? (Work in a concentration camp) You’d have to be a monster to do so.
The people who did these things are monsters. I am not saying that the Japanese people are monsters. But those people who actually did these things? Yes, they’re inhuman monsters. Just as Mengele and his ilk were.
Saying, “they’re human” doesn’t cut it. What made THESE HUMANS do such a thing? What part of their culture at that time created such an atmosphere? And fuck the whole “well, we did it too!” The fuck we did.
(I’ve often said MY only regret as far as the A-bombs were that Hitler wasn’t alive to piss his pants when he heard about the fucking things)