Re: How Long is Long Enough?
When I said they were greater I was thinking more in a numbers definition. As wikipedia so nicely provides:Notsure this is the case. The Japanese certainly made no bones about what they did...the Germans were more secretive and the true extent of the Holocaust was not revealed until the wars' end. The Allies certainly had their share...the fire-bombing of Japanese cities, Dresden, the "Bombs"...{all well debated topics, but not here, please}
It is of course hard to quantify atrocity, numbers dont really help much, if a city was nuked and 6 million died in the blast it wouldnt be equal to the holocaust just because it was of similar size. 6 Million killed in an instant, with barely a moment spent in pain before death, it's not the same as 6 million being hunted down, worked to near death before being murdered in gas chambers, all spread over a 3-7 year period. But when I look at some of the horrors of the pacific theater; that of decapitations, burying people alive, using chemical weapons, torturing POWs, cannibalism, it starts to look rather similar.Historian Chalmers Johnson has written that:
It may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimised. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million Russians (i.e. Soviet citizens); the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burmese, at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese. Both nations looted the countries they conquered on a monumental scale, though Japan plundered more, over a longer period, than the Nazis. Both conquerors enslaved millions and exploited them as forced labourers—and, in the case of the Japanese, as (forced) prostitutes for front-line troops. If you were a Nazi prisoner of war from Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand or Canada (but not the Soviet Union) you faced a 4% chance of not surviving the war; (by comparison) the death rate for Allied POWs held by the Japanese was nearly 30%.[39]
I fear you may have caught me in a case of hyperbole, while there are certainly examples of japanese people or organizations attempting to gloss over the atrocities, for example:Could you give examples of this? as I am not aware of any Japanese habit for glossing over events like Nanking, Bataan, Manila, etc.....
http://animestop.info/comfort-women-...t-prostitutes/
http://animestop.info/ishihara-our-k...-it-for-money/
They all come from the right wing fringe groups of the japanese political spectrum which, now that I think about it, is not a valid a reason to generalize about the entire culture. If it was; I could say that the americans have a unfortunate habit of regretting how the civil war freed the slaves, just from what Rush Limbaugh spews on his show every day.
They exist, much like the BNP, but like the BNP in Britain the influence of these radicals is not large enough to judge the country by and I was wrong to do so here.
Though it is somewhat disconcerting that the mayor in the second example was still elected in the capital 4 times in a row in spite of his somewhat "politically incorrect" views. The more I read about the man the more I think the comparison to rush limbaugh is appropriate
Originally Posted by Strike For The South
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