Hiroshima Anniversary

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
141

Push, the easiest way to understand the average Japanese of the late 1930s and early 1940s is to imagine them as the average North Koreans of today.

Uninformed peasants, kept in the dark about the rest of the world by a megalomaniac, militaristic government with a monopoly on the news media. In other words, completely unlike us in America.

I certainly wouldn’t make any excuses for the Rape of Nanking, or any other atrocity committed by the Japanese (look, Push, I’m acknowledging that the Japanese did bad stuff! Must have been because you challenged me, you old sonofagun. Not really. I’ve blasted the Japs for Nanking and Shanghai and Manchuria and Taiwan and Bataan, to their faces, in their own language, for the last two decades) but let’s face it: soldiers do atrocious stuff in war. As any real combat veteran will attest, if he’s totally honest.

As Mr Kodiak so eloquently put it, “war changes things,” which is true. It also changes people, and if those people are uneducated peasants who have been conditioned to believe that their enemies are subhuman and inferior, the atrocities will be that much more atrocious.

Of course, I’m sure that had the Japanese won the war, far from denying these atrocities for years in history books and school textbooks (as they did for decades), they would hold the “Nanking Incident” up as a somewhat sad, but absolutely necessary step in the establishment of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. All’s well that ends well, and all that. What’s a few hundred thousand civilians dead, if it meant the safety and prosperity of Japan and the region?

But to get back to your point, and in the spirit of my “latently famous objectivity” (by which I assume you mean that the fame of my objectivity just hasn’t yet manifested itself), I present Omocha-bako Shiriizu Daisanwa Ehon Sen Kyuhyaku Sanjuroku Nen (Toy Box Series, Episode 3, Picture Book 1936), an interesting little propaganda anime film circa 1934, courtesy of the Japanese government, intended to show the good children of Nippon just what horrible, horrible people those dirty rotten Yanks are.

You may not get all the cultural and historical references, but I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you.

142

[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
Oh, ultimate heart-ache.[/quote]

Is that supposed to be FDR?

I’m not sure that the portrait captured the great man’s essence quite as well as this portrait captured that of Prime Minister Hideki Tojo.

144

[quote]Varqanir wrote:
As Mr Kodiak so eloquently put it, “war changes things,” which is true. It also changes people, and if those people are uneducated peasants who have been conditioned to believe that their enemies are subhuman and inferior, the atrocities will be that much more atrocious.

.[/quote]

So with that summary, one could assume that a invasion of the japanese homeland would have been a complete diaster for everyone, after all the politcally correct dribble that has been shown on this thread it comes to this.

145

[quote]Dustin wrote:
I speak from experience, people have tried to kill me, and I have tried to kill them. Hurting
people is easier then you think.

Please tell me you are not in the military.[/quote]

Thats what you do in the military, you kill.

146

[quote]pushharder wrote:

I understand what you’re saying but I bet the Japanese, if able, would pluck your beating heart from your chest and feed it to their dogs if they heard you compare them to the Koreans.[/quote]

No, they wouldn’t.

The Japanese are clever enough to recognize the similarities of prewar Japan to present-day North Korea, and it’s a characterization I’ve heard from several Japanese.

There are, furthermore, enough cultural, linguistic, and ethnologic similarities between Japan and Korea that the fact that the two peoples are essentially the same race separated by a narrow spit of ocean is pretty obvious to anyone willing to look.

Even the current Japanese emperor, Akihito, has acknowledged that the Imperial family tree has Korean roots.

[quote]No, your objectivity lies “dormant”, i.e., “present and capable of becoming though not now visible.” This post of yours classically represents your style and you know it. You typically throw something out there like you did with the Taliban remarks and now once again with the above quasi-America bashing.

Then after someone calls you out you clarify your position and take some kind of faux-affront that your pure as the driven snow motives were ever questioned.

[/quote]

Affronted? Nah. Amused, at best.

Surely you must recognize I do this primarily for your benefit, Push. I like to watch you get all flustered and use big words. :stuck_out_tongue:

147

[quote]aussie486 wrote:
Varqanir wrote:

As Mr Kodiak so eloquently put it, “war changes things,” which is true. It also changes people, and if those people are uneducated peasants who have been conditioned to believe that their enemies are subhuman and inferior, the atrocities will be that much more atrocious.

.

So with that summary, one could assume that a invasion of the japanese homeland would have been a complete diaster for everyone, after all the politcally correct dribble that has been shown on this thread it comes to this.
[/quote]

A disaster for everyone except the Russians, who would have waited until around December 1945 (by which time our bitter guerrilla war in the mountains of Japan would have been going on for nearly 5 months) to declare war on Japan and invade Hokkaido and Aomori.

Once we had pushed the Japanese government to capitulate, we would then have to contend with the Russian occupation and ownership of northern Japan, and the reality of a Soviet Union with year-round ports on the Pacific Ocean.

148

[quote]aussie486 wrote:
Varqanir wrote:

As Mr Kodiak so eloquently put it, “war changes things,” which is true. It also changes people, and if those people are uneducated peasants who have been conditioned to believe that their enemies are subhuman and inferior, the atrocities will be that much more atrocious.

.

So with that summary, one could assume that a invasion of the japanese homeland would have been a complete diaster for everyone, after all the politcally correct dribble that has been shown on this thread it comes to this.
[/quote]

Kudos to all Australians – they have ALWAYS had our backs…a true country full of men with steel balls.

Seeing how the Japanese were just off the Australian coast in '41 through '43, it would have been normal to want to kill them all. Who wouldn’t?

The bombing of Japan WAS right and moral. No one wanted the war but them and a lot of people died just because the Japanese wanted them that way. In that time and circumstance, I’d have danced a happy dance over every dead Japanese soldier.

149 
    Well there you go, after 64 years according to World News , Ichiro Fujisaki Japans Ambassador to Washington apologised in Texas ''for the tragic experiences of the American survivors of the Bataan death march''.
 
   20,000 thousand US serviceman died during the March.
150

About time.

My grandfather very, very nearly missed going to Bataan. A lot of his friends never came back.

152

[quote]pushharder wrote:
Au contraire, I see you do this frequently when and where I am nowhere to be found.

So are you telling us that Varqanir the Simple Semanticist plies the oceans of T-Nation strictly to lure poor ol’ easily flustered Push from his lair and engage him in a game Show-Me-Some-Big-Words-Baby?

And how can you say you do this for my benefit when you say you are the one who gets amused? :stuck_out_tongue:

[/quote]

Doing something “for the benefit” of somebody simply means doing something in order to interest them, not necessarily that it will be beneficial to them. The fact that you responded the way you did proves to me that you were interested.

And usually, no plying of the T-Nation Oceans is necessary. All I have to do is obliquely say something not entirely complimentary to the Yuuuuuuunited States of Amerigo Vespucci, or else something not entirely critical of one of our imagined enemies, and there you appear out of nowhere, guns a’ blazin’ and flags a’ wavin’, defending the sacred honor of the hallowed Homeland, and expressing outrage at the audacity of the blasphemer.

Yeah, it’s amusing. So I do it. :slight_smile:

153

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

I’m not sure that the portrait captured the great man’s essence quite as well as this portrait captured that of Prime Minister Hideki Tojo.[/quote]

No need. We’ve already established that Americans were racist imperialists - in fact, we didn’t even need to prove it, we simply start with the rebuttable presumption that they are, by your lights.

The more important issue is whether the precious, precious Japanese could possibly lower themselves to the standard of Westerners, who invented colonialism and the dehumanizing of people they were at war with, natch.

Apparently, amazingly, the Japanese did so. But how can this be?

How can your darling “Other” - the unstained Noble Savage, in this case, imperial Japan that attacked Pearl Harbor - have stooped to the level of the dehumanizing Americans?

This, of course, requires explanation only after you justify your first point: the idea that somehow America’s attack on Japan was a holy war to wipe out Japanese heathens.

156

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

All I have to do is obliquely say something not entirely complimentary to the Yuuuuuuunited States of Amerigo Vespucci, or else something not entirely critical of one of our imagined enemies, and there you appear out of nowhere, guns a’ blazin’ and flags a’ wavin’, defending the sacred honor of the hallowed Homeland, and expressing outrage at the audacity of the blasphemer.[/quote]

Awesome - so you want to be Lixy when you grow up.

157

[quote]pushharder wrote:

I’m not sure that “obliquely” is the proper “big word” to use in this instance.[/quote]

Feel free to look it up.[quote]

And it is probably good that you hang around with your uncomplimentary verbiage.

This rotten but hallowed Homeland of yours and mine surely deserves the sting of your whip and the condescension of your commentary. You know…just to keep it “in line” and offset the “guns a’ blazin’, flags a’ wavin’” simpletons who defend its “sacred honor.” You are indeed the Great Counterbalancer.[/quote]

Always happy to help.

159

[quote]Chushin wrote:
Varqanir wrote:

There are, furthermore, enough cultural, linguistic, and ethnologic similarities between Japan and Korea that the fact that the two peoples are essentially the same race separated by a narrow spit of ocean is pretty obvious to anyone willing to look.

Even the current Japanese emperor, Akihito, has acknowledged that the Imperial family tree has Korean roots.

Whoa there, partner.

That picture you’re painting has enough rose color in it to make the rest of the elements present quite hard to see, no?

You and I both know how badly the Koreans are treated – to this day, and the extent to which they are seen as inferior.

Not to mention the aside that any Zainichi Koreans that I’ve met here have been adament that Japanese and Koreans are NOT the same race.
[/quote]

Sure I know how bad they’re treated. And I know there’s still a lot of bad blood between the Koreans and the Japanese for injustices and atrocities stretching back past 1917 all the way to Toyotomi Hideyoshi.

But frankly, the zainichi Koreans can deny it all they want. The fact is that the Japanese are by and large the descendants of the original zainichi Koreans, who displaced the indigenous Jomon peoples and established the cultures we now know as Yayoi and Kofun.

Even the Heisei emperor admits this, for Pete’s sake.