Posted on 03/04/2007 2:53:43 AM PST by LibWhacker
Tokyo and Kyoto were both in range of American planes--if the United States was seeking the most deaths, and the largest societal impact, those two cities could have been hit instead of the two which were.
As the article points out, you also take into account quality, not only quantity. Both were huge war crimes, and a blot on human civilization.
ping
Luckily, (as much as it could be considered lucky), the Philippines was under American control and had close ties to the United States. After the war, the Philippines received the second largest reparations from Japan (after China), more than Korea, French Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, Burma, etc.
Hey, everyone in the world is exactly the same. We all want the same things. Some choose means to those ends that are a little different from others, but how can we judge unless we've torn livers out of living logs and infected them with syphillis and frozen and thawed them until their limbs rotted off? And aren't we destroying the whole planet with our CO2-belching SUVs and factories producing trivialities and doing cosmetic testing on poor bunnies who could otherwise have been out frolicking in a coast to coast forest with wolves and foxes and other loving brothers and sisters of their Earth mother Gaia? We who refuse to ratify the Kyoto Accord are the true enemies of mankind! Leave these poor Japanese alone who were only following the orders of their emporer-god. They were following the dictates of their faith and nobody should criticize anyone else's religion until it is Christianity, the only religion that has brought misery and suffering to the world and caused it to be the dark and unhappy and diseased and polluted and poor and cruel place that it is.
Not all Asian countries are the same. However, in general, your point stands.
The Japs and Nazi's were unbelievably cruel. It's hard to imagine that they came to power simultaneously.In the book, "Flyboys", there were numerous stories of how the Japs participated in cannibalism, particularly of American POW's. It's no wonder that the Chinese hate the Japs.
It is sort of similar to that continental/island rivalry in western Eurasia (as opposed to eastern Eurasia) with France and Britain (without the Entente Cordiale (spelling?) and the alliances in the two world wars (before Vichy France for WW2).
My dad was in Korea and he never really talked about the war, but years after he died, my mom told us that he said that after what he saw there, there can be no God. And he was there for only a few months.
The World Wars were a large impetus for the victory of atheism/agnosticism in Europe--though it had been gaining in momentum since the end of the Enlightenment (which had actually started out decently--it was when they abandoned its values of reasoning and questioning just about everything that it went astray).
I'm familiar with the rape of nanking.
"At the same time, there's no comparison between the genocidal policies of the Nazis*, and the classic imperialistic bent of the Japanese"
There are a few parallels. The Japanese saw themselves as both the "big brother" to the rest of Asia and as the pinnacle of the human race - and they would brutalize anyone to prove it.
What is amazing is how sanitized this stuff is from the history books. I have heard stories of Japanese tourists going to Singapore and being absolutely shocked that they are treated rudely. They have been taught that the Japanese troops were greeted all across Asia as liberators of the victims of European exploiters.
I once read that about 1/3 of American POWs died in Japanese captivity, while only about 3% captured by the Germans did. As shown by this article, the Japs had no regard at all for international agreements like the Geneva Convention. I have to wonder if there isn't some correlation with the fact that Japan has been more resistant to the spread of Christianity than almost any other country outside the Islamic world. Christianity still had some hold over many individual Germans.
They're digging a home in hell for some of these people because there is no place low enough there for them yet.
The numbers that you cite are correct, not just for Americans but for the British and Australians as well. Interestingly enough, apparently the Dutch colonial POWs of the Japanese suffered only? a 20% mortality, attributed to their better knowledge and practice of tropical medicine. My generation,I was a child during WW II, still thinks of them as JAPS, now a pejoritive term
There were atrocities by Americans against Japanese as well. Charles Lindbergh traveled extensively in the South Pacific during the war, and recorded atrocities in his "Wartime Journals". He recorded instances of body part collecting. Gold teeth collecting, and other barbarities against the dead. He also recorded the fact that there were virtually zero Japanese prisoners. The story has been perpetuated since the war that the Japanese "fought to the death", prefering to die in battle rather than be captured. Lindbergh says that American soldiers did not allow surrender. We killed them all. Lindbergh told of an order from a commander to give day passes to soldiers who brought in live Japanese prisoners, because they needed prisoners for intellegence gathering. They were suddenly swamped with prisoners. But as soon as they stopped giving out day passes for live prisoners, there were no more prisoners.
Granted, this is not as barbaric as what the Japanese did. It was a brutal war, and Americans returned at least some of the barbarity shown us. Except for Lindbergh, this story is virtually unknown.
Tokyo and other cities were not chosen for nuclear raids because they had already been nearly wiped out by earlier B-29 firebomb raids that killed many more people than the nukes did. We wanted to assess what damage a nuke would do, so we used them against cities that had virtually no previous damage.
FYI, a greater percentage of Americans in Chinese captivity died during the Korean War than did GI's captured by the Japanese during WWII. A sobering statistic.
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