[!--QuoteBegin-IronDuke+Aug 7 2005, 07:00 PM--][div class=\'quotetop\']QUOTE(IronDuke @ Aug 7 2005, 07:00 PM)[/div][div class=\'quotemain\'][!--QuoteEBegin--]They are trying to ignore their barbaric past, which was worse, in many ways, than that of the Nazis.
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Duke... that sentence is against the law in Germany.
Anyway, the problem we are being faced with is the relativity of war and actions that arose of it.
We are confronted in this case with the history of a war whose atrocities in many ways exceed anything that has ever been done before, and, in many cases, what is imaginable by our state of mind.
Imperial Japan and nazi Germany commited a number of crimes that leap out of the broad mass of atrocities commited in human history. Auschwitz, Nanking, Death Railway, the Waszawa Ghetto and other names form the tip of an iceberg of unspeakable shape. Both are guilty of starting a war that cost the lives of tens of millions.
The Allies reacted by firebombing too many Japanese and German cities to mention, grinding German lands with a massive destructive force, and, finally, by dropping the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Is someone worse than someone else here? We like to say yes. It is easier that way. The Second World War was a chain of action and reaction. It is true that Japan and Germany were those who started the chain, with their invasions of China and Poland respectively. However, the Allied actions were planned in advance. Great Britain and France surprised Germany by declaring war on them in reaction of their invasion of Poland. Japan was enraged by the embargo the USA had set on them. They reacted by invading France and bombing Great Britain, and bombing Pearl Harbor respectively. We know the story.
How should we judge them? Judging the Axis' actions is easy. Germany commited the worst atrocities ever seen on the European continent, and considering the high intellect the country likes to present itself with out- and inwardly, what they did is simply unexplainable. To put it in simple fourth-grader language, they should have known better.
What about Japan? In the Sino-Japanese War, Japan was driven by hatred towards China, in their expansion into the Pacific, it was hybris, and finally, in the war against the USA and Great Britain, it was fanatism. I know the Japanese have got a different state of mind than, let's say the Germans do, which arises from mostly cultural differences from the west. Chivalric codes had only been formally abandoned fairly recently, and killing men in face-to-face combat might still have been considered as something honourable- but by any means, massacres such as those commited in China are against any rule a Japanese should follow.
The Allies reacted mostly by using methods on a similar level as the Axis. They systematically bombed civilians. Even US Army members admit that their actions in East Asia were particularly gruesome, which mostly arose from the fact that the Japanese aren't "white" (a patriotic and proud army member told me once, and was very unhappy about it).
Can we judge? Can we say the atrocities of the Axis were worse than those of the Allies, or can we say the Allied atrocities were worse? The honest answer is: No. We are not to judge. We are to deal with it, and we are to ensure that things like these never happen again. We must remember our dead. We must be like a phoenix that rises from the ashes to become a better mankind.
[!--QuoteBegin-somedude+Aug 8 2005, 12:34 AM--][div class=\'quotetop\']QUOTE(somedude @ Aug 8 2005, 12:34 AM)[/div][div class=\'quotemain\'][!--QuoteEBegin--]Giving us the shit for the bombs huh? Does PEARL HARBOR mean anything to these "anti-American" dickholes over there?
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Excuse me while I leave my path of carefully articulated and thought out writing to say: Fuck you.
