Rising Sun* has reported a post.
Reason:
For some of the reasons outlined in my reported post, I don’t think J.A.W. should be banned.
He has a blunt, unfortunate and idiosyncratic way of expressing himself, but in this case I think he made fair points which were overwhelmed by Ardee’s personal comments about knowing a rape victim.
I’ve acted for scores of rape victims, and have one closer to home than anyone could ever want, but the emotion is irrelevant to what I see as J.A.W.’'s legitimate, if not always clearly expressed (unlike the lucidity inherent in my often drunken and rambling posts) comments.
Go through what he said and, in my view, it’s not worth a ban.
Post: Anybody can see that enslaved prostitutes were necessary
Forum: Japanese Military
Assigned Moderators: pdf27, George Eller, Nickdfresh, Rising Sun*, tankgeezer, flamethrowerguy
Posted by: Rising Sun*
Original Content:
With due respect to TG and Nick, I think that if we all review J.A.W.'s original comment “How many millions of unwilling male conscripts have been subjected to worse ordeals, the world over…” it may be accepted that he has a fair point.
We can argue about whether rape or other things are the ‘worst’. That’s all a matter of opinion and experience.
Rape, like everything else in life, is not the worst thing that can happen to anyone, unless they think it is. That is not to diminish the profound effect of rape and other sexual offences upon some victims, but it’s a fact that different people have different abilities to deal with bad things that happen to them.
Being bayoneted to blood Japanese troops at Nanking or being herded into Nazi gas chambers to satisfy the Nazis’ crazy racial ideas, or just being gassed for any reason, rates a lot higher on my list of ‘worst’ than being raped. Then again, I haven’t been bayoneted, gassed or raped. But I know which I’d choose if I wanted to live.
I’d suggest that the worst thing for the Korean enslaved prostitutes, conveniently and entirely inaccurately called ‘comfort women’ to diminish the fact that they were usually sex slaves, was not that they were raped but that they were enslaved and rendered powerless to resist repeated rapes or just sexual acts resigned to their position as captives. Powerlessness is an element for victims in many rapes, but there is a world of difference between one instance of rape in the victim’s otherwise undisturbed world and being kidnapped out of the victim’s otherwise undisturbed world and subjected to whatever the victim’s captor’s choose to do to her, or him, for years as a sex slave.
A conscript is in no different position to the latter situation as a captive kidnapped by the state from his or her otherwise undisturbed world and subjected to whatever the conscript’s captor’s choose to do to her, or him. The only difference is the treatment to which they are subjected and the extent to which it is regulated by law, as military conscription is usually, but by no means always, imposed by the law of the state.
It can be argued that the treatment of women enslaved for sexual servitude by armies or anyone else (and plenty of criminals are doing it now with women from Asia and Eastern Europe within walking distance of many of the people reading this forum in the West) is worse than conscription for military service.
The difference is that enslaved prostitutes, whether for military or other exploiters, were and are invariably outside the regulations which tend to protect military conscripts in soundly organised military forces.
Then again, major nations and their mighty and highly regulated military forces can inflict systematic and sustained harm upon conscripts (and even volunteers) which can force them to suicide, which suggests that the experience for some can be at least as bad as that of enslaved prostitutes, as in Russia
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1998445,00.html
and even in Australia for some volunteers http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2003/s932846.htm
Coming back to the original issue of Japanese attitudes to Korean ‘comfort women’ (a euphemistic term which like so much of conservative Japanese politicians’ obfuscation seeks to avoid reality and the moral condemnation Japan’s WWII leaders and their current successors richly deserve), it’s again not so simple.
There is no doubt that in some cases Koreans sold their children into Japanese sexual slavery through deception or venality, as do some parents in modern Asia and notably Thailand and its surrounds to modern sexual exploiters, but the fact remains that Korea was a ruthlessly exploited Japanese colony in which Koreans were routinely conscripted into Japanese service of various kinds.
Koreans conscripted into Japanese military and related service were, by the standards of the racially superior Japanese, of little worth and at the bottom of the pile, and mistreated accordingly. Which goes some way to explaining that it was often Koreans who were the worst abusers of Allied POWs.
However, the mistreatment of the Koreans by the Japanese supports J.A.W.’s comment about mistreatment of young male conscripts by Japan in WWII, among many nations then, before and since.
But if one wants to see the worst example to support J.A.W.’s comment, I’d suggest that it’s hard to go past kidnapped African child soldiers who are required to murder friends or family members to survive, to qualify them to survive and kill others as conscripts in unregulated forces.
It’s a matter of opinion, but is it worst to be raped once at a party in London aged 20 and get on with life or to be enslaved as a conscripted child soldier at age 8 and to have to murder your sister or mother so you can fight some bullshit local tribal war under the command of some bullshit butcher for the next 10 years and engage in unmitigated and unjustified butchery of innocents for that decade?
Or to be sent to Vietnam for a year or twonto fight the people who live their to support a corrupt administration (in Vietnam) to no good purpose?