A lot of good arguments are destroyed by the introduction of unwanted facts. 
Iâm well aware of all that (4 Semester physics before I switched to CS, though forgotten basically all but the basics in the 12 years since then) my point is, that there were hints about long term ill effects of radiation before WW2.
I know it was impossible for the folks in the manhatten project to actually predict the effects with any precision or understand the underlying biological principals, but they definatly couldâve known there would be such effects.
For that point it matters little, whether the actual poisoning was a long period low radiation or short period high radiation effect.
There is a juristic term in german which i fail to translate precisely
(Schaden Billigend in Kauf nehmen)
it basically means that you accept the potential of damage to a person due to your action. It usually applies in cases of tort of negligence (hope this ones right).
This was basically the case here with the radiation part, for the other effects there comes your argument from our other conversation to which I agree: it was war and a legitimate military target.
Do not confudse the concentration camps witht the death camps ( that was relatively small namber).
And one detail
Here in this thread http://www.ww2incolor.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3667&page=3 in my post #42 you could see the photo of Burkanau camp ( the nearest to the Aushwith death camp)
this is the photo form the RAF aircraft in 31 may of 1944.
As you could see there is NO ANY mass graves, bonfiers ,ang giant crematoriums.
And Britains concluded - there vere nothing special in this camp.
I/m sure the britis air intelligence had also the simular photos of Auswitz and other âsuspectâ places. However - the resault is zero.
In fact if they just found something - there was rise the Emourmouse propogandic walve in the allies press - Garmans mass killed a pioples in the death camps ALREADY in the 1944 . But no.
So do you really think that the some of Germans who lived near - was too blind to notice that even the allies command did not see after the special recognizing by the military inteligence;)
Most of my family was in London during the war, being bombed. Indeed, my father spent the first year or so of his life under V-1/V-2 bombardment (note here that the bombardment of London started before any UK bombardment of German cities, so you canât use the âthey started itâ arguament against the UK in this instance). Iâm a little hazy on this (their experience of war is something none of my relatives talk about - Iâve only picked up snippets in odd places) but I would be very surprised if none of my relatives were killed or injured during the Blitz.
Despite this, and despite the Germans not having the âjust causeâ justification that RS is advocating in relation to Allied bombing of Japan, I have not once claimed that the German bombing of London was illegal.
Oh your famaly surrived the V-1/2 and bombing. Sorry i didnât know it.
However i think you are wrong - althought the London was the legitime military target being the capital , the terroristic germans bombing and cynical application of V-1/2 was absolutly ILLEGAL.
Coz the Hitllerâs wishes were obvious - to intimidate the British population with the political purposes through the continious terror.
Honestly speaking the Hoering, Hitler and whole Luftwaffe hight command should be judged for this terror.
But all we know whe i did not happen;)
The allies themself lead the terroristic stradegic compain agains the GErmans cities - WITH the SIMULAR AIMS but with MUCH MORE SCALE.
You might, arguably, have a point there - as mentioned before Iâm rather ambivalent about the uses aerial bombing was put to in WW2. However, the US/UK are at least prepared to admit that they carried out aerial bombing and express regret at the casualties caused - even if they are not prepared to apologise. Japan on the other hand refuses to even admit that it carried out crimes in the Far East (see for instance Japanese school textbooks on the Rape of Nanking), let alone express regret or consider an apology.
Well and where we could read the Japanes school textbook?
Could you get as the link?
Incidentally, Iâm ambivalent at best about apologies for acts done by generations no longer alive (e.g. current demands for Europe and the US to apologise for the Atlantic Slave Trade) - IMHO they are nothing but meaningless grandstanding. The only thing future generations owe is IMHO the acknowledgement that wrongs were committed and a commitment not to do the same thing again. IMHO Germany has very clearly done that over WW2, and the West has more or less done so over Area Bombing (if not quite to the extent that I would like to see - they have moved away from it, but never quite acknowledged the damage it did to noncombatants, at least officially). Japan has rejected war - to an even greater extent than Germany - but has done nothing else.
absolutly agree with you today the so called âappologiesâ are nothing but meaningless grandstanding. Unforttinatelly this grandstanding is the lovely method of the political soap provocation in the Poland, Baltic states and ets. (BTW this actions are hitly supported by the west- is this meaningless grandstanding too;)
But i have to say you that the Japanes not deny the war at all.
They ONLY refused the some of the popular Western and Chinas propogandic clushes about the scale of violence in Asia.
I know for the sure that for instance th Chinas figure of victims in Nankin are rather speculative and overstimated. As i said if we deny the Goebbels propoganda about Dresden ( 250 000 of killed) why we need to believe the Communist Chinas propoganda?
Ummm⌠you keep ignoring the fact that it seemed to work. Japan surrendered almost immediately after the second bomb, but it was a very near run thing. There was what came very close to a coup (put down after some fighting) by factions of the Army (IIRC) who wanted to continue the war. Given the rationale cited by the Emperor (something like the âwar situation having turned not necessarily to Japanâs advantageâ), it seems unlikely that this surrender would have taken place without all the Allied wins in the Pacific and SE Asia, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, the bombing campaign and both nuclear bombs.
You absolutly right the Japane surrender was inpossible without the military defeat of Japanes army by the US.
However i could not agree that the âJapane surrender alsmost immediatelly after the second bomb was droppedâ. simply coz i might also sy that they surrended immediatelly after the declaring the war of USSR in 8 aug of 1945. So there is no the any confirmation that the bomb had REAL imfluence at this decision to capitulate.
More plausible reason i thing - the UNDERSTANDING the full military hopelessness of Japane in aug in 1945.
Sorry about the delay, just noticed this one.
Not sure about modern day Germany, but in the UK there is a mechanism to monitor exactly that. These are the Independent Monitoring Boards, more normally known as Prison Visitors. Members of the public who visit prisons on a regular basis and perform a function similar to that provided by the Red Cross to PoWs.
Sure there were. The problem is, what sort of radiation? Alphas and Betas are both ionising radiation, and this type of radiation was known to be dangerous. Gammas are very weakly ionising, but so is cosmic radiation etc. and it was unclear if this was dangerous (remember that for a long time radioactive substances were used in tonics, at health spas, etc. as they were considered to be good for you).
The majority of damage caused by radiation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was by Neutrons, and at the time there was very, very limited experience with them. They are of course very, very dangerous (fast neutrons have the health effects of alphas but are also very penetrating) but there was no reason to think so at the time. Even today, all the knowledge about the health effects of neutron exposure is based on the experimental data from Hiroshima and Nagasaki
You just canât treat âradiationâ as a homogeneous whole - the various particles have very different effects and must be treated differently. My watch for instance contains a source of low energy Beta particles and is utterly safe. If it was a neutron source of the same activity Iâd only get close enough to suspend it in a bucket of water before legging it and contacting a specialist disposal company.
Hang on a second here. As Iâve mentioned, the casualties due to fallout were somewhere between very few and zero. Thus, all or almost all casualties with radiation related injuries were those exposed to the Gammas and Neutrons from the bombing itself. In what way are they morally any different from the civilians in the same area who were killed by the thermal or blast effects. Indeed, what is the difference between someone who is instantaneously turned into a crispy critter by neutron flux and one who has the same thing happen to them due to the thermal pulse? Something doesnât stack up with your arguament there.
Ummm⌠sort of. There were some camps that were purely for extermination purposes, and were based mainly in Poland. However, that doesnât mean that the concentration camps within Germany didnât suffer horrendous death rates, particularly late in the war (the same applied to Soviet PoW camps within Germany).
My understanding is that by this point the Western allies were pretty clear in knowing what was going on with the Holocaust. However, they decided not to publicise this for tactical reasons - if they had admitted to knowing about it, the public pressure to âdo somethingâ would be immense and they felt this would distract them and possibly lengthen the war. While I have moral issues with this stance (much as I have with the decision by Pius XII that speaking out might make things worse after he realised what was going on), they do at least in part have a valid point.
Towards the end of the war however the allies decided (collectively or individually, Iâm not sure) that the propaganda to be gained from the camps as they were liberated was more valuable than the risk of effort being diverted. Hence for instance the massive publicity the British Government gave to the liberation of Bergen-Belsen (not an extermination camp or even one of the worst ones, but it received a LOT of publicity in the UK in 1945).
At what point does it become legitimate to use the Devilâs tools to fight the devil? Itâs a valid question but not one I have an answer to.
Very little of the details about the Rape of Nanking for instance come from the Chinese Communists. Oddly, most of what we know comes from American Missionaries who were there at the time and thus protected by their status as US citizens. The rest of it mostly comes from âtrophyâ photographs taken by the Japanese troops and accounts written by them, either contemporary diaries or postwar accounts.
The US missionaries can be at least partially discounted - they could be argued as biased against the Japanese, although it must also be said that in their belief system lying is wrong and would be punished after death. However, I see no reason for the Japanese wartime photographs and diaries to be fabricated.
You would have to look at the minutes of the Japanese cabinet meeting where the decision to surrender was made to be sure. However, the timeline does suggest a connection.
Hiroshima - 6/Aug/45
USSR declares war - 8/Aug/45
Nagasaki - 9/Aug/45
Japan Surrenders - 15/Aug/45
My personal opinion is that it was the two effects combined which led to the surrender. It is worth noting that the decision to accept some sort of surrender rather than a cease-fire in place (which was what they had previously only been willing to accept) took place on 9/Aug/45 suggesting that there was little or no link to the Nagasaki bombing as they would be unlikely to have clear information on that in time for the cabinet meeting.
The following quote is quite interesting:
(my bold)
However, in his message to the armed forces (âRescript to the soldiers and sailorsâ) issued two days later he doesnât mention the nuclear bombings at all and instead cites the Soviet entry into the war.
My personal guess is that both factors (Soviet entry to the war and nuclear bombing of Hiroshima) were important, and that the Nagasaki bomb did not affect the Emperorâs decision to surrender but may have helped undercut support for continuing the war among the die-hards. Citing the nuclear bombing in his message to Japanese civilians and the Soviet entry to the war in his message to the armed forces is simply playing to the audience - in both cases, he mentions the one important to them and glosses over the one they donât care about.
Iâm not sure that Auschwitz is particularly relevant to mainstream Germansâ knowledge of the camps. It was in Poland.
Camps within Germany are more relevant.
The English and Americans were aware of the existence of death camps from about 1942, and very well aware by 1944, but it wasnât used for huge public propaganda purposes.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4175045.stm
http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/WW2timeline/beschloss.html
http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=605 Relevant stuff is towards the end
http://www.tsukurukai.com/
http://www.tsukurukai.com/05_rekisi_text/rekishi_English/English.pdf
http://zonaeuropa.com/20050328_2.htm
The first link is the Japanese Society for Textbook Reform, which has been leading the charge to revise Japanâs textbooks backwards, which were made a little more realistic in the 1990âs as a result of challenges and court actions by Saburo Ienaga and others. I thought there was an English version but I canât find it.
The second link is an English translation of part of the Societyâs text.
The third link gives some examples of how the Society is revising things backwards. For example
Topic #7: Japanese War Losses
In the section on âThe Disaster of Warâ in the 2001 edition, the losses of Japan were listed next to the other countries victimized by Japan, with a long description about the great Tokyo air raid.
In the 2005 edition the losses of the nations victimized by Japan are not mentioned at all while Japanâs losses are listed with âthe victims of the two totalitarian ideologies.â Emphasis was given to: âNear the end of the Second World War, the United States launched indiscriminate air raids on Tokyo and other cities and dropped atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Meanwhile, Soviet Russia tore up the Japanese-Russian Neutrality Pact and invaded Manchuria and committed looting and violence against Japanese civilians including forcible relocation of about 600,000 Japanese into Siberia where 10% of died from forced labor.â
Thatâs enough to see how these dangerous clowns want to sanitise Japanâs actions and present Japan as the innocent victim of American fire and nuclear bombing. Their one sided victimhood bleating makes me want to puke.
The textbook issue is not well understood outside Japan. It is usually presented as if school textbooks are still mandatory and as if there is only one version permitted, as was the case before and during the war and for a long time after.
This is not the case now. Only a small proportion of schools have taken up the Societyâs revisionist text, as schools are now free to choose from a range of books. That doesnât mean that the other books in use are frank descriptions of Japanâs actions.
Interesting, I donât know how this is handled over here, but I assume there is something like it. But incidentally this could be inspired by the experiences during the nazi reign. I am pretty sure there were no such institutions pre WW2.
As I said, I know about the differences of biological activity (? Biologische Wirksamkeit in german) of the various forms of radiation and particle movement. And my point was never about the fallout, this must have been a misunderstanding from my original post.
It is about nonlethal (at least at first) exposure which instills long term sickness in various forms to the survivors.
As you said, there was little to no experience with fast neutrons and gamma radiation but you wouldnât need to be a prophet to know, that everything is poisonous, itâs just a matter of dosis (as we know this doesnât only refer to radiation or particle exposure). And you would only need to ask the next doctor, that if you take a less than directly lethal dosis of whatever poisonous material there is it will nevertheless with high probability have significant negative (long term) effects on your health.
And that is why I said the thing about âSchaden in kauf nehmenâ.
And the fact, that nearly all experimental knowledge about fast neutrons health effects is based on that experience somehow even supports my ârabbitâ argument.
There were in the UK for over a century before WW2, even if not formalised. See this article about Elizabeth Fry.
How is this different to any other delayed wartime injury however? There was a man near me who died a month or so ago from the delayed effects of a wartime injury. Blast and burns, as caused by conventional weapons of the time, are quite capable of producing delayed lethal effects. Mustard Gas, which was used in massive quantities in WW1 tends to kill itâs victims over years or decades postwar, and they never fully recover. Again, this is a weapon that was at the time accepted.
Ummm⌠only if the US knew or should have reasonably suspected that fast Neutrons were in any way as dangerous as they turned out to be. As I mentioned, what evidence was available to them at the time suggested that they were not.
Hey, in Germany of course :mrgreen:
Werenât we talking about KZ?
Ok, if you see it that way, then of course there is no difference in quality.
But as you surely know chemical warfare was pretty much nonexistent during ww2, even Hitler (though only because of personal experience) practically banished it for combat use, though the germans had toxins by that time afaik that were more sophisticated than anything the allies held in their arsenal (Hearsay only, has anyone detailed knowledge on that topic, btw? )
So they were not exactly regarded as an accepted weapon probably precisely because of such long term ill effects.
The Germans developed the first G-series nerve agents (Tabun and Sarin) immediately prior to WW2. Roughly 10,000 tonnes of Tabun was produced during the war, and a small amount of Sarin was also produced before the Soviets overran the factory it was being produced in.
Tabun and Sarin are both Organophosopates, and related to the insecticide DDT. The Germans noticed during the war that all references to Organophospates had disappeared from the Allied press, so assumed that the Allies had found the same chemicals and were hiding the fact. In fact of course they were trying to keep quiet about DDT.
This created a situation where the Germans thought both sides had Nerve Agents, while the Allies didnât know any such agents existed so instead stockpiled Lewisite/Yperite and Phosgene. Germany thought the Allies would have the advantage due to their better artillery/airpower, while the Allies thought the Germans would have the advantage as attacking in protective equipment is a major handicap over defending in it. All in all, deterrence worked for a change.
Anyone that believes that the US govât was in any way aware of the exact and long term consequences of nuclear fallout should view the following, and should also bear in mind that a significant number of its own citizens were exposed to varying levels of fallout from tests conducted in the American desert southwest during the 1950s:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_6xlfP9mXQ
There was a great series in the New York Times about this subject printed sometime in the late 1990s.
Relying on my memory (deteriorating due to brain cells being made extinct by alcohol), some of the information indicated that the FDR wanted to keep the news of mass killings of Jews largely under-wraps because he didnât want the War to turn into a âcrusade to save the Jews,â which would have been unpopular is large swaths of anti-Semitic America. Tactically, it was also reasoned that the Holocaust, was soaking up huge resources, and there wasnât really much the Allies could do anyway, other than win the War as quickly as possibleâŚ
Also, several NYT stories on the mass murder of Jewish civilians from WWII (and Russians, Belgians, etc.) were cited. So, some news actually got out into the press as early as 1942, the stories were largely ignored as sensationalist, or because people generally were more interested in the conduct of the War than they were of hearsay from occupied territoryâŚ
And, in one of historyâs great ironies, a German Reichs Diplomat, John Rabe:
From the Washington Post: December 11, 1997
âŚA surprising wealth lies in the archives of the Yale Divinity School, which tracked the American missionary presence in China before and after World War II. But her most surprising discovery was in Germany. There she located the diary and papers of John Rabe, an improbable hero whom she calls âthe Oskar Schindler of China.â
Rabe, the son of a German sea captain, had lived in Nanking selling telephones and electrical equipment to the Chinese since 1908. Bald and bespectacled, he was a pillar of the German community. He was also a passionate Nazi, but, from his surviving writings, one more interested in socialism than ethnic cleansing.
When Chiang Kai-shekâs Nationalist Chinese Army withdrew from Nanking late in 1937, Rabe headed the international committee that negotiated the Nanking Safety Zone â a neutral area of the city where foreigners and Chinese civilians would be safe from the pillaging of the oncoming Japanese.
As a prominent Nazi, he theoretically had leverage with Germanyâs Axis allies, but once the slaughter started, his protests had little sway with the Japanese. The army intended to so terrorize the former Nationalist capital that no village in China would resist occupation.
Rabe saved thousands of Chinese by sheltering them in the safety zone, but it proved far from an impenetrable area. âYesterday,â he protested to the Japanese embassy in one note, âseveral women at the Seminary were raped right in the middle of a large room filled with men, women and children!â He wrote of finding the mutilated bodies of Chinese women beneath Japanese posters that proclaimed: âTrust Our Japanese Army â They Will Protect and Feed You.â
Rabe wrote Hitler in a vain effort to halt the sack of Nanking and so impressed other foreigners with his humane efforts that even those repulsed by Nazism wrote that they would âalmost wear a Nazi badgeâ in his honor.
But when he was recalled to Germany in February 1938 and persisted in his efforts to publicize the Japanese atrocities, he was arrested by the Gestapo.
Rabe survived the war and died in 1950. But not before the people of Nanking, learning that he was near starvation in postwar Berlin, collected thousands of dollars to help him. The mayor of Nanking even flew to Switzerland to collect food and deliver it to Rabe.
âŚ
[i]The rest of the article here
Well those are indeed tragically comical.
But isnât it the same US government/army command (true other actors) that still uses DU ammunition in masses despite at least hints, that that might not be such a good idea afterall without further investigation?
The US âWe should use tactical nukes to blow holes in cave roofsâ government??
The US âLetâs kick Saddams ass because of womdâ government?? (not meant as bashing)
So honestly I am always very careful when it comes to this âThe government caresâ argument and this doesnât only apply to the US, but basically any government. There was for example here in germany an incident with army radar operators who practically had a cancer guarantee by sitting in front of their monitors (sometimes in the seventies). This was known to the defence ministry for quite awhile before they actually came up with the idea to do something about it, after some former operators sued the government for compensation and the press stirred up some dirt. Or the latest incidents in our Vattenfall Nuclear Reactors, which were only leaked in droplets. Theyâre trying to cover up whatever whenever possible, at least one could get the impression. Here f.e. it was for political reasons as part of the government intents the change the politics about nuclear power production and this didnât exactly suit their purpose.
There are far to many humans in the governments for me to believe they are somehow immune to all the human shortcommings such as egoism, stupidity, ignorance and all others
I thought those were three of the essential character traits for politicians, along with, for example, hypocrisy, no sense of shame, overweening ambition, and an essentially sociopathic personality.
Iâm not being entirely facetious here.
If you have people like that running things, they find it a lot easier than the rest of us to make decisions that get a lot of people hurt or killed or that deny them justice. Hitler, Stalin, Tojo, Saddam, Pol Pot, Idi Amin and others on a very long list spring to mind, but thereâs a few less obvious candidates, with Churchill at the top of my list for mongrels who look like pedigreed champions. Still, you need a mongrel to run things in a war.
Yes yo right pdf - the most of death-camps were in the Poland.
However if even the Poles was not even suspected about mass killing - how could GErmans even knew it?
My understanding is that by this point the Western allies were pretty clear in knowing what was going on with the Holocaust.
How could you prove it?
I doubt the allies EVEN suspect of the existing of Death-camp. The confirmation - see photo above;)
ONLY after the liberating those camps we found the several thousands of bodies that perished possibly from the famine and sickness - nothing more.
Moreover after the libareating of the Auswitz the Red army suddenly found - the several handreds of prisoneres ALIVE. Gemrnas even did not try to liqudate them.
And ONLY after war ending we have supposed - it were death-camps. COz the millions of peoples moved throught here and then they dissapeared.
However, they decided not to publicise this for tactical reasons - if they had admitted to knowing about it, the public pressure to âdo somethingâ would be immense and they felt this would distract them and possibly lengthen the war.
You please do not slander the RAF command pdf.
DO not repite this provocating point ( i hope you know who from itâs comming) about the âdastardly RAF command that all knew but nothing didâ.
Is this pleasure for you - to blaim the own state?
IF EVEN IN THE PHOTOS OF AUSWITZ-BERCENAY extermination complex ( the most biggest according the theory of Holocaust) THERE WERE NOTHING that could prove the existing of the mass murdering. Allies simply NOTHING saw in this photos.
Instear if you please - you better find for us the more photos of the ot other camps.
I know for sure recently the Britain opened those photos that immediatelly call the scandal . Could we see this?
At what point does it become legitimate to use the Devilâs tools to fight the devil? Itâs a valid question but not one I have an answer to.
Yes it legitime - to use the devilâs tools if you,ve lowed til the delils level
Very little of the details about the Rape of Nanking for instance come from the Chinese Communists. Oddly, most of what we know comes from American Missionaries who were there at the time and thus protected by their status as US citizens. The rest of it mostly comes from âtrophyâ photographs taken by the Japanese troops and accounts written by them, either contemporary diaries or postwar accounts.
Sorry but iâm strongly doubt that the American Missionaries widely presented in the each mass execution and carefully calculated the figures.
Most of what we know from the NAnkik comes fron the Chinas surrvived civilians, but the unhuman character of the violence - whe could learn from the Japanes soldierâs photos and diaries.
But there were never the exact figures of victims. China told about 250 000. However how i think we could not trust for this ONLY coz this convenient for us?
The US missionaries can be at least partially discounted - they could be argued as biased against the Japanese, although it must also be said that in their belief system lying is wrong and would be punished after death. However, I see no reason for the Japanese wartime photographs and diaries to be fabricated.
You right, however there is no the any exact statistical calculations in the japanes sourses exept the particular terrible causes.
You would have to look at the minutes of the Japanese cabinet meeting where the decision to surrender was made to be sure. However, the timeline does suggest a connection.
Hiroshima - 6/Aug/45
USSR declares war - 8/Aug/45
Nagasaki - 9/Aug/45
Japan Surrenders - 15/Aug/45
My personal opinion is that it was the two effects combined which led to the surrender. It is worth noting that the decision to accept some sort of surrender rather than a cease-fire in place (which was what they had previously only been willing to accept) took place on 9/Aug/45 suggesting that there was little or no link to the Nagasaki bombing as they would be unlikely to have clear information on that in time for the cabinet meeting.
The following quote is quite interesting:(my bold)
However, in his message to the armed forces (âRescript to the soldiers and sailorsâ) issued two days later he doesnât mention the nuclear bombings at all and instead cites the Soviet entry into the war.
Well thanks for the francness here pdf.
You support the my point.
My personal guess is that both factors (Soviet entry to the war and nuclear bombing of Hiroshima) were important, and that the Nagasaki bomb did not affect the Emperorâs decision to surrender but may have helped undercut support for continuing the war among the die-hards. Citing the nuclear bombing in his message to Japanese civilians and the Soviet entry to the war in his message to the armed forces is simply playing to the audience - in both cases, he mentions the one important to them and glosses over the one they donât care about.
Well my payback - i agree with you - the reason were combined of both things.
Cheers.
Befor all i want to tahnk you for the quite interesting infor ( as always).
Sec i want to confvince you - iâm your friend , not Japanese;)
I just wonder of some your points.
First polit- you constantly bring the Garmany as the ideal examples of self-repentance after WW2.
May i ack yo the question?
who did force them to do this?
Who hunged the Nazy?
Who forced them to forbid the any ultra-national parties right after the war?
Who told them what they have to do, who ordered them to accept the anty-nazy laws, and lawâs that forbit even the discussions of the Nazy crimes?Who orderd them to pursue the any who deny the death-camps?
And who force them to admit the Theory of Holocaust ( although even some of us doubt in this) that let the some of groups to extort the billions of marks from the Germany ( althought the GErmany has already payd the cotribution for the all states that were occuped).
Who did all this?
WE.
So i strongly doubt it was voluntary for the GErmans - ONLY finished idiot could admit the things that make from his country the âWorld EVil Centreâ. But the GErmans did it.
Becouse THEY SIMPLY HAD NO CHOISE.
Thatâs the only reason my friend.
To the contrast the Japane - who saved the relative independence after the war- they try to resist to make the SAME form the Japane.
I know you right - they made a lot of worst things - nobody even doubt it. ANd we have right to demans the appologies from them. But we have NO right to be the morons to deny ( or justify ) the own crimes toward them.
Second this that i am not able undertsnad - you present the Chines/Korean as the âinnocent victimsâ of the Japane. True the mas killing of the woman and children is disgusting. Those âcruel action of supprestionâ was a sign of Japane special punitive units but not of all Imperial army.
However do you ever know about behaviour of the Chinas/ Koreans toward the own population during the civil war in China in the 1948-49 and during the Korean war?
Did you see the photos of Whole villiages whose population were executed buy the Koreans and Chinas - the resault of the âsuspicionâ for the enemy.
They killed all - the woman and children.
So in this way i sometimes the "victimsâ were even worst toward the own population then the Japanes.
And one more story .
Iâve read about the Soviet-Chinas conflict in the Damanskij island in 1971.
During the first of the attack the Chines dastardly shoted from ambush the soviet platon and took the few soviets POWs. After the soviet come back and the forced the Chines to move backward - they returned the bodies of the brutally tortured to death the soviets soldiers.
They droped it from the helicopter to the soviet territoryâŚ
So my frined HAVE no illusions about âInnocents pesefull Chiniesâ
Cheers
Iâm not disputing Allied, primarily American with a lot of support from Britain, responsibility for the way Japan turned out.
America and Britain ran a successful de-Nazification program in Germany and pretty much got rid of the old regime and re-educated the people. In Japan, apart from a few fairly unimportant executions so far as dismantling the nationalist militarist regime went, they just left the same crew pretty much in place and left them to educate the Japanese about the war.
You donât kill a two metre snake by chopping off a millimetre of its tail. You break its back or cut off its head. America and Britain did the former in Japan and the latter in Germany, with entirely predictable results in Japan.
The Japanese problem for America and Britain was further complicated by the desire to contain Soviet and Chinese communism, which the Americans never really grasped at the time were two entirely different and incompatible movements.
As a rabidly anti-communist regime since the early 1930âs, the Japanese fascists were just what the doctor ordered for America and Britain when they decided to wind up the war crimes trials in 1948.
FWIW, Australia kept going longer, but we werenât as closely involved in the grand strategies of the major powers.
If you want to read a somewhat badly written but nonetheless informative book on how America and Britain went soft on Japanese war crimes and covered up going soft 1947-50, read James Mackayâs âBetrayal in High Placesâ, Tasman Books, Auckland, New Zealand, 1996. Itâs based on documents which the Allies wanted destroyed but copies of which were retained by a New Zealand war crimes investigator.
I think itâs got a long way past that.
Theyâre (in the sense of the nation as represented by most post-war governments as distinct from individual Japanese people) not even going to admit what they did, let alone apologise for it and, more importantly, atone for it.
They should be treated internationally on that basis, with private contempt and private suspicion about the ever-present risk of resurgent militarism and nationalism, whatever may occur in open diplomatic discourse.
If they donât wake up to themselves and donât stop pissing off growing China with their denials and provocations, they might find out that itâs (a) best to apologise when youâve done the wrong thing; (b) itâs best not to keep digging the hole deeper; and (c) having pissed off one nuclear power and got nuked, itâs a really stupid idea to keep pissing off another one that has millions more unresolved reasons than the first nuclear power to still want to balance the ledger for things that, on Asian time scales, happened only a month ago.