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JerryHatake
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08 Aug 2008, 6:10 am

The Japanese soldiers have slowed began to tell their tales about these inhumane acts but their government wants to censored it for some reasons. The Japanese government must fear repercussions towards them or something about its past to the public. I know because there was a film done Nanjing by the Japanese who interviewed the actually soldiers who were there and the government looked down on the film.


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Ishmael
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08 Aug 2008, 7:22 am

Well, I was wrong about Turkey... Got confused with WWI...


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MissPickwickian
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09 Aug 2008, 12:48 am

JerryHatake wrote:
The Japanese soldiers have slowed began to tell their tales about these inhumane acts but their government wants to censored it for some reasons. The Japanese government must fear repercussions towards them or something about its past to the public. I know because there was a film done Nanjing by the Japanese who interviewed the actually soldiers who were there and the government looked down on the film.


All six powers committed war crimes. Some were more spectacular than others, but we're better off admitting that everyone had their fingers in the pie.

Japan was responsible for the horrific Rape of Nanking, where thousands of Chinese civilian women were dragged out into a town square and simply raped. The Japanese also performed ghastly medical experiments on American POWs, most of them involving deliberate infection with diseases like yellow fever and plague (WWII really was the "Lead Age" of medical ethics). There was also the whole Bataan Death March thing. Yeah, war is hell.

I think Americans avoid talking about Japanese war atrocities because we feel bad about going overboard with our frankly racist demonization of all things Japanese during the war. It's kind of like how the German government always tries to be extra sweet to Jews these days. It's the joy of guilt!


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09 Aug 2008, 1:16 am

Just bringing up the rapes of thousands of women in Nanjing is one of the many atrocities committed there. I have also read of them spraying crowds with gasoline and lighting them on fire, and marching thousands of young boys and men to the outskirts to be shot. I also have a book with photos and Japanese news paper clippings- a few charming examples of Japanese soldiers brutality include-

Photos: (I should add that all are either gruesome enough or obscene enough that I think posting them here would violate the ToS)
Burying hundreds of people alive
Mutilating womens bodies in countless obscene ways
Using civilians for bayonet and target practice
Mass be headings and display of the heads
Among others...

However those here that have argued about how implicit the Japanese might have been should be interested to know that much of these was in fact reported back in Japan. I have a photo of a newspaper talking about two Japanese officers who engaged in a be heading spree to see who could kill one hundred men first, though their tallies as reported were 105 and 106.

Additionally to that, as many as 25,000,000 Chinese disappeared from certain regions of China. And don't get me started on what they did to Korean women...

All told, most realistic estimates of the Nanjing massacre, or Rape of Nanjing, are of at least 400,000, and at most 1,000,000. All done in about two months time. So who is worse, really, the Germans, who's population was kept in the dark, or the Japanese in WW2?

In fact, various western powers *including* Nazi Germany's diplomats in Nanjing set up an International Safety Zone- check out the story of John Rabe, the hero of Nanjing, who also happened to be a member of the German Nazi party. Irony, at its best, no?



T-rav20
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09 Aug 2008, 3:02 am

MissPickwickian wrote:
I think Americans avoid talking about Japanese war atrocities because we feel bad about going overboard with our frankly racist demonization of all things Japanese during the war. It's kind of like how the German government always tries to be extra sweet to Jews these days. It's the joy of guilt!
Absurd. The interning of the Japanese is hardly one of the prouder moments in american history but doesn't even come close to a "war crime" Paranoid? Absolutely! They were loyal americans and showed zero signs of loyalty to imperial Japan. Idiotic? You Bet! The conditions in the internment camps bred exactly the sort of discontent the government was trying to avoid, but to compare it to the systematic murder of eleven million people is just... ridiculous.


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MissPickwickian
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09 Aug 2008, 7:39 am

T-rav20 wrote:
MissPickwickian wrote:
I think Americans avoid talking about Japanese war atrocities because we feel bad about going overboard with our frankly racist demonization of all things Japanese during the war. It's kind of like how the German government always tries to be extra sweet to Jews these days. It's the joy of guilt!
Absurd. The interning of the Japanese is hardly one of the prouder moments in american history but doesn't even come close to a "war crime" Paranoid? Absolutely! They were loyal americans and showed zero signs of loyalty to imperial Japan. Idiotic? You Bet! The conditions in the internment camps bred exactly the sort of discontent the government was trying to avoid, but to compare it to the systematic murder of eleven million people is just... ridiculous.


I didn't. I was just making a point about WWII-related guilt and how there's more than enough to go around.

Anyhoo, that's why Americans are soft on Japanese war crimes. Guilt.

Never said anything was directly comparable to anything else except in guilt-creating capacity.


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Ishmael
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09 Aug 2008, 7:44 am

The germans did bad, the Japanese did bad, but both did bad generations ago.
Most people in those countries want to move away from what their grandparents' generation did.


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T-rav20
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09 Aug 2008, 8:34 am

MissPickwickian wrote:
I didn't. I was just making a point about WWII-related guilt and how there's more than enough to go around.

Anyhoo, that's why Americans are soft on Japanese war crimes. Guilt.

Never said anything was directly comparable to anything else except in guilt-creating capacity.

Ahhh, That clarifies it.
As for the guilt; I don't think enough people even know about the internment camps for there to be some sort of national complex about it. In the end I think it really just comes down to PR - these folks didn't have any. The POWs who survived didn't want to talk about it, China was busy falling apart, and the western powers were all getting googly-eyed about the Com-block, so it all just got swept into the backroom of history and ignored.


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MissPickwickian
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09 Aug 2008, 9:56 am

Ishmael wrote:
The germans did bad, the Japanese did bad, but both did bad generations ago.
Most people in those countries want to move away from what their grandparents' generation did.


And I respect that.

I hate the "slavery" aspect of being a southerner.

But no ugly past should be entirely ignored.


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JerryHatake
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09 Aug 2008, 11:33 pm

^That is actually true about the War between the States in the South point of view when the North forgets about it. Though I don't know if I had family in the war but in respect both sides were bad to one other noted in POWs camps.


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Ishmael
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10 Aug 2008, 7:01 am

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And I respect that.

I hate the "slavery" aspect of being a southerner.

But no ugly past should be entirely ignored.


True, the past should never be forgotton - but, neither should it be remembered as anything but history.
When people try and form more personal, emotional connections with wars and conflicts of ages ago... well, then you get the middle-east, eastern-europe, etc.


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MissPickwickian
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10 Aug 2008, 10:58 pm

Ishmael wrote:
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And I respect that.

I hate the "slavery" aspect of being a southerner.

But no ugly past should be entirely ignored.


True, the past should never be forgotton - but, neither should it be remembered as anything but history.
When people try and form more personal, emotional connections with wars and conflicts of ages ago... well, then you get the middle-east, eastern-europe, etc.


You're right.


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Prof_Pretorius
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11 Aug 2008, 5:38 pm

The Middle-East really has a lock on never forgetting. The fuss lately that was made over the word "crusade" is a good example.


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