George Takei on Threads:

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Post by @georgehtakei

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"SNIP.......

My aunt and baby cousin died from the blast in Hiroshima, their bodies found burned in a ditch. She was trying to shield the infant. We must never forget the many innocents who perished.

.........SNIP"

George Takei

[Lovie777]

1. Never again................

[AZLD4Candidate]

7. Rape of Nanking. . .never again. Unit 731. . .never again.

[ismnotwasm]

10. Oh god, did you see that horror movie "Unit 731"

Freaking terrible

[AZLD4Candidate]

12. No. I went to it in Dongbei here in China, as well as worked at the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall

The Japanese get so upset over the atomic bombing, but seem to get silent about their war crimes and atrocities.

[Coventina]

17. That's mostly true of every nation. n/t

[AZLD4Candidate]

21. So that makes it right? You are dismissing 30 million Chinese murdered by Japan?

Tell me you're not doing that. Because your responses to me are extremely flippant and dismissive.

I guess my wife's family's history means nothing.

[Coventina]

24. I'm not dismissing anything. I'm merely stating the fact that most nations

don't like to address their worst atrocities toward others.

Much less do anything approaching true reparations.

The USA is no exception.

Nor is Japan, nor is China, for that matter.

[AZLD4Candidate]

26. Now that the red herring is stated, what should China do about the Japanese invasion?

They were invaded, brutalized, had land stolen from them, and if it weren't for the US, would have gone the way Ukraine would have gone if we didn't get involved.

I don't care what most nations do. We're talking about how Japan ignores its WW2 past in Asian nations and had no problems when they were doing the brutalizing. When the war came to their shores, they still cry about it.

When they were murdering people in other countries, Japan was quiet during WW2. When the atomic bomb was dropped, that was the crime. NOT all the things that led to that.

So, if you want to continue down this rabbit hole, please do. This entire topic is my doctoral dissertation.

[Coventina]

28. By all means, declare war on Japan until you feel they've been punished enough in your mind.

I won't stop you.

[AZLD4Candidate]

36. Not my war. My wife on the other hand. . .that wound is still open

[Coventina]

45. Well, it certainly seems like your war on this thread.

I'm very sorry to hear that your wife is still suffering from that atrocity.
In no way am I saying that the horrific acts done were in any way OK.

I do wonder, though, if your wife's great-grandmother would be happy to know that her descendant is still carrying that pain?

My mother was raped, not as an act of warfare. Just a frat boy who thought dinner and a movie was the price for her body.
Oh yeah, and he attended a Christian college, so yeah, Christians, am I right?

My mother never told our father she was a rape survivor, the shame was too intense for her. She never told a single soul but my sister. My sister only told me after her death.

I've used that knowledge to campaign against rape all my adult life. But I don't hate all men for it. Even if such an attitude would be fair. I've tried to use my mother's pain and shame to work some good in the world.

[AZLD4Candidate]

52. To answer you question: Yes, she would be. It's a different culture and mindset between China

and the US.

She's angry at how her GGM lived in shame for her entire life and blamed herself. "If I didn't go to the store, it never would have happened."

[Coventina]

57. Well, I'm sorry to hear that. Your wife should be entitled to her own life.

But, I guess I feel that way because I was born in the US.

I'm grateful for that!

[AZLD4Candidate]

59. Your ethnocentrism is showing. You're talking down another culture because it isn't American.

I think we're done.

[Coventina]

61. OK then.

[Alexander Of Assyria]

2. Today I discovered an American suggesting Japan build nuclear weapons. Cause, you know, China!

[ExWhoDoesntCare]

3. You're learning this only today?

Japan openly admitted more than two decades ago that they could have a nuke ready to go in a few weeks.

They have debated going nuclear for a very long time now.

[roamer65]

5. If the American nuclear umbrella ever disappears for them, they will.

Within a few months.

[Alexander Of Assyria]

8. Mythical thinking. Many nations don't have a nuclear monster on a chain watching over the yard.

Or watching the neighbours yard…And these nations still there…

Japans not really a neighbor though, unless take away Pacific Ocean.

[Torchlight]

11. It does not follow.

Also, diplomatic neighbors are not predicated in any great measure on proximity or borders.

[slightlv]

4. What's the old saying...

Just because you can do a thing, doesn't mean you should do a thing?

When will people learn from history and history's mistakes? Or even recognize history's mistakes? We're still arguing over that. (SMDH)

You see, this is where I part company with a lot of my male friends, and I do have a lot of them in my group. I swear with women in positions of authority, instead of men, there would be less war and more avenues of cooperation. Not completely. I'm NOT that naive. Just look at how many women are in the republican party; and women against women have always been our own worst enemies at times.

However, overall, women are nurturers, builders, and caregivers. We work for the betterment of all through cooperation and channels of fair and mutual benefit. We build societies and communities. I make the point that "Growth" may not happen as fast as it might happen in male-dominated societies because female-ruled societies are generally not as competitive, winner take all based. There are major differences in the two types of societies. But I think, after living in a patriarchal world I would give my eyeteeth to have a chance to give the other side a chance for a change. I believe it would be a gentler, slower, more tolerant, kinder world.

Of course, like I said, there are exceptions to every experiment. I doubt seriously republican women would find that type of world to their liking. But who knows? They've been ruled and indoctrinated by the male patriarchy for so long, what would happen if they suddenly found themselves free of all those chains? Would they continue to be the mad harrions they are now? Or would they eventually become the women they were always meant to be, before they became testosterone ruled? Weird way of looking at nature vs nurture, eh? One things for sure... I'm too old to ever find out for sure; that is, unless my hope for reincarnation bears out! (LOL)

[calimary]

64. As a mom, I'd say "Growth" goes hand-in-hand with "Nurture."

If we do that with our own little ones, why can’t we do that as a community? Or as a society?

[AZLD4Candidate]

6. My wife's great-grandmother was gang raped by the Japanese Imperial Army as they marched

to Nanjing to commit the Rape of Nanking, where they spent six week committing mass genocide, mass rape as a weapon of war, and following the insane policy of "Loot All, Burn All, Kill All," developed by Hideki Tojo and sanctioned by Hirohito, enforced by his uncle General Prince Asaka on a defenseless, unarmed, and surrendered population of Nanjing.

I don't see you saying "we must never forget the many innocents who perished" in China at the hands of an illegal invasion of a country that posed no threat to Japan.

George, I love you, but the Japanese government, army, and people had no problems when the Japanese were unleashing brutality all over Asia:

1: Addicting children to morphine by lacing candies with opium.
2: Human experimentation in Unit 731 in Harbin
3: Executing prisoners of war
4: Using rape as a weapon of war against the Filipinos, Chinese, Koreans, Taiwanese, and Singaporeans
5: Summary executions used to build spirit and morale
6: Massacring 300,000 Filipinos in five days in the Manila Massacre
7: Lacing the farmland of Zhejiang and Jiangxi with disease spreading pathogens so the Chinese would starve due to famine
8: Parit Sulong, Banka Island, Bantann Death March, Nanjing, the razing of Shanghai after it surrendered, etc.
9: Sneak attack on Pearl Harbor

War is hell, and Japan had no problems with the war when they were winning.

The Department of War estimated that an invasion of the Japanese home islands would mean 10 Japanese dead for every one American KIA. . .and the DOW was estimating it would take one million American lives to take the Japanese home islands.

After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was a conspiracy to kidnapp Hirohito and fight until the last Japanese person was killed defending Japan.

This was the enemy that single-handedly unleashed a war in Asia that was the worst in Asian history. Where, Mr, Takei, is your remorse for what Japan did to those innocents that perished at Japan's hands?


Massacre on the Qinhuai River


Seven year old boy with five bayonet wounds that died in a hospital three days later

Mr. Takei, where is your remorse and remembrance for these Japanese actions? Or does it only matter to you that the US dropped the bomb on two cities?

[Johnny2X2X]

14. Thank you

The Japanese get off easy in most WWII stories. They were every bit as evil as the Nazis were and in some cases more so. They too were committing genocide and conducting horrific experiments on prisoners.

Their country at the time was a cult and they killed tens of millions of civilians during WWII.

That being said, Hiroshima and Nagasaki did kill innocent civilians who were just going about their day and had nothing to do with the atrocities that Japan was engaged in.

One thing I think most agree on is that invading mainland Japan had to be avoided at all costs. Whether the nukes is what prevented that invasion is all that is usually up for dicsusion.

[AZLD4Candidate]

16. What did Shanghai did when Japan bombed it in 1933? What did China do when Japan sabotaged

its own train line to start the invasion of Northeast China?

What did China do when Japan kidnapped two of its own soldiers to start the offensive in 1937 at the Marco Polo bridge?

What did my wife's great grandmother do to the Japanese except walk home from the store? What did my neighbors in Nanjing do to endure six weeks of savagery?

Sorry, Japan did everything to make that war worse. When it came to their shores, they complained. They bombed Pearl Harbor and cheered. Doolittle did his raid and those pilots were called terrorists by the Japanese.

I have so little empathy for Japan during those years and whatever happened. They had no problems brutalizing all of Asia but when it hit their shores, they never stop crying about it.

If they didn't want it to happen, they shouldn't have started a war and invaded other nations. They shouldn't have murdered over 30 million chinese poeple from 1937-1945.

[Coventina]

18. I'm sure George's personal history has something to do with his take on the subject.

As HE HIMSELF as a CHILD was jailed merely for being of Japanese descent.

Personal experience has a way of coloring how you see the world.

[AZLD4Candidate]

20. My wife hates Japan with every fibre of her being. You can understand why.

Her grandmother hates them with every fibre of her being. After all, her mother was gang raped by them simply for being Chinese in China in 1937.

[Coventina]

23. Yes, I get it. But at the same time, in order to live together peacefully going forward,

those hatreds have to take a back seat to tolerance and diplomacy.

I hate the Chinese for causing the extinction of many species in the name of "medicine."
I hate the Japanese for whaling.

My personal hatred and disgust is not what should lead foreign policy and diplomacy.

[AZLD4Candidate]

25. Japan denies they used rape as a weapon of war, denies the rape of nanking, denies unit 731, and

not only teaches in their school they didn't do it, but honors those that committed war crimes at the yasukuni shrine in tokyo.

every time I hear this, I think to myself that a rape victim needs to "get over it" and learn diplomacy and tolerance. The Chinese were victimized by the Japanese, and the Japanese still deny a majority of their crimes, going so far as to honor those that do it.

Sorry. . .until Japan comes clean and admits everything, my wife's and her family have the right and well justified to loathe Japan and the Japanese.

When I was 14, I was beaten near to death by six good Christians who wanted to finish the job Hitler started because he missed "the Jew." There's a reason I am suspicious of Christians after all the anti-semitism thrown at me.

Victims don't need to to forgive. Preps need to be punished and reminded of their shame forever. Works in Germany, but Japan gets a pass. After all, who cares about the Chinese?

While Japan was brutalizing China, we in the US were doing everything to enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1881.

My personal hatred and disgust is not what should lead foreign policy and diplomacy.

My mother is fully blooded native American (Mohawk father/Tuscarora mother). They need to get over it too, right? Their hatred and disgust is not what should lead policy and diplomacy? I'll remind my former students of that on the Tohono o'Odham Nation in Arizona.

[Coventina]

27. You are putting words in my mouth that I never said.

I have NEVER told a victim they need to get over it.

I would never want ANY atrocity to go unacknowledged.

Heck, I think the US should give Hawaiians their nation back, in addition to all the native American tribes.

So please stop attributing statements and beliefs to me that I do not have.

[AZLD4Candidate]

35. Then don't tell victims they need to get over their personal hatreds.

My wife grew up listening to these stories. First hand accounts.

[Coventina]

40. I apologize if somehow I was not clear enough.

All I meant to say is that GOVERNMENT POLICY and DIPLOMACY cannot be run on personal hatreds.

Individual people are free to feel and act however they want, as long as it does not harm others.

We allow the Neo-Nazis to exist, and even to march, as long as they do not harm or threaten others.

And before you say it, NO I am not saying your wife is a Neo-Nazi!! I'm just saying she is free to hate and avoid any Japanese person she wants, as long as it doesn't descend to threatening or harming them.

My family history is littered with both victims and perpetrators of atrocities. One branch of my family were slave-owning Confederates. Another branch were fighting for the Union. Another branch of my family were raped, murdered, and run off their land by an occupying force. Another branch were rapers and murderers.

I would drive myself crazy to try and figure out the pieces of me I should hate, and which pieces of me I should admire. So, I'm just me. I'm a product of this messy, unfair world and all I can do is try and be a source of good in the face of historical evil and injustice.

[AZLD4Candidate]

43. Here's the difference. When Nazis march in the US, the are shunned.

When pro Japanese WW2 actors march in Japan to the Yasukuni Shrine, they are honored for "remembering Japanese history heritage."

When KKK morons fly the Stars and Bars and claim it's history, we all look at these pricks and say "you're a jackass."
In Japan, it's accepted as Japanese heritage and. . .catch this, what Japan did in WW2 isn't even taught in Japanese history classes. They call it "patriotic education." Ron DeSatan is trying to do the same thing and he's going to court to defend it. In Japan, there is no court battle. It's the narrative no one challenges.

How do I know? I've been in Japanese classrooms living here in Asia. The CCP does the same crap here in China. We get pissed and criticize the CCP for doing it, but Japan gets a pass.

I give Japanese apologists for WW2 no quarter. Takei portrayed himself as an apologist with his tweet. He now deserves to get lacerated and raked over coals for it.

[Coventina]

48. Simply being against the use of nuclear weapons does NOT make him an apologist

for all of Japan's war crimes!!

That is not at all a fair statement to make!!

How do you even make that huge leap of non-logic!?!?!?!

Takei is a US Citizen living in the US, he does NOT march to Japanese shrines, he is NOT responsible for what is or is not taught in Japanese classrooms!!!!!

[AZLD4Candidate]

53. When he posts about other Asian nations being brutalized, I'll change my tune.

His poorly worded TWEET makes him sound like an apologist.

[Coventina]

54. In your world, I guess

[LexVegas]

55. As you have seen here, Japanese lives are valued more highly than other Asian countries. nt

[AZLD4Candidate]

58. Well, especially in the US. My wife's life was so worthless in the US, her country's people were

denied immigration rights from 1881 to 1943. Even today, there is a well ingrained anti-Chinese attitude in immigration, which is why my marriage certification has been denied now four times and my wife was deported trying to rejoin me in January 2021 because they claimed her valid visa was wrong.

Chinese lives are just like Jewish lives. . as Paul Newman said in the movie Exodus "our blood is more worthless than day old cabbage. When push comes to shove, they will turn on us. We Jews have no friends."

[Hekate]

81. AZ, my husband worked with a German his own age here in the US. He did not carry hatred forward...

My husband’s parents were both Holocaust survivors — very, very few members of their respective families came through the war. Yet here he and the German were, far away in time and place from events that happened before either of them were born. My husband chose to not carry hatred forward.

America is different from either China or Japan, in that America’s population consists of people from all over the planet, and sooner or later the intelligent among us must learn to leave ancestral hatreds behind — while still acknowledging the facts of events that came before, in another country. Otherwise we might as well be in historic Appalachia among the Hatfields and McCoys.

Your wife is choosing to hate an entire people “with every fiber of her being,” due to a crime her great grandmother experienced as terrible in its own way as the tortures of Auschwitz. It’s easy enough to do when you live in a place where nearly everyone looks like you & reflexively shares your opinion of events that occurred nearly a century ago at this point. What will happen if you and your wife manage to get to the US and find yourselves with neighbors and co-workers who are Americans with Japanese names? She is certainly entitled to her opinions, but at a bare minimum I encourage you to be sympathetic to her hereditary trauma without carrying it forward yourself.

[AZLD4Candidate]

82. I've said that to her many times. You can't blame today's Japanese for the sins of their grands

Different culture, different mindset. Can't put Americna values on a different cultural mindset. It's like complaining about the weather.

She doesn't hate Japanese Americans. He hates JAPANESE. Japanese Americans didn't brutalize her family The Japanese did.

She understands the difference between Japanese and Japanese American. . .just like she understand the difference between her and a Chinese American.

I'm Jewish. . .My mother is full blooded Native American. We have trauma too. I lost family in the Holocaust. My mother wasn't considered a full American citizen until 1978 when Carter signed the law.

I am extremely sympathetic. I wrote an award winning screenplay about the Nanjing Military Tribunal of 1946 in Jiangsu when I worked as a historian and docent at the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall.

Her grandmother has related to me the story of what happened to her mother. It made it into my screenplay.

[llashram]

9. neverforget

and forever fight the use of tactical as well as other nukes for ANY REASON presented by Any government on planet Earth! Thank you, Mr Sulu...

[AZLD4Candidate]

15. I will say it again. . .Japan is awfully quiet about all the murder they did in Asian countries

during WW2. They flat deny the Rape of Nanking.

Never forget Japanese genocide against Asian countries.

[Johnny2X2X]

38. I think you're bringing light to something that needs it

The Nazis have undergone more of a reckoning both practically and historically than the Japanese IMO. Their crimes have been exposed for all time in countless movies and books that saw wide audiences. Everyone knows about Auschwitz, the average person can recount in great detail the crimes of the Nazis and even the names involved. And as a country, Germany has accepted resonsibility and memorialized the atrocities of WWII.

Japan's crimes are more unknown for some reason, but they are at least equally horrific, and maybe even more so.

[AZLD4Candidate]

41. That's because of the Cold War. The US gave them passes, Chiang Kai Shek did the same

in the 1950s in his quest for international legitimacy, Mao Zedong also gave Japan a free pass.

Every time I hear someone whine about the atomic bomb, all I do is mention all the war crimes the Japanese did and ask a simple question: You think if they didn't start the war, the would have been nuked in two cities?

They wanted that war from 1931 forward. . .they got everything their war (and it was THEIR war) got them. Two vaporized cities, a destroyed economy, a famine, destroyed international prestige.

The Japanese have been allowed to deny their actions. . .Germany was not.

Everyone knows Josef Mengele. . .most don't know Unit 731. Most know the Warsaw Ghetto. . .few know about the Rape of Nanking.

Most know about malmady massacre. . .few know about the manila or singaporean massacres.

[Johnny2X2X]

51. Agree that their crimes were horrific

But those crimes still have no bearing on the innocent civilians who died from the A Bombs. Just like the crimes of the Nazis do not excuse the terror inflicted on German civilians after WWII was ended. No one says, the Russians gang raped thousands of German women and children after the war, but that's OK because Auschwitz.

War is hell, but there were millions of Germans and Japanese civilians who were still innocents that had nothing to do with the atrocities their leaders and their armies were committing. It's OK to say killing innocents is wrong, no matter what country those innocents were from and when it happened.

So I can think that the crimes of Japan in WWII need a full accounting and desreve way more attention, at the same time I can feel compassion for civilians who were just going about their lives in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when a terrible force rained down on them from above ending their lives.

[AZLD4Candidate]

56. Unfortunately, doing my PhD dissertation on this topic, those civilians cheered when Japan

brutalized civilians in other countries. When it came to their backyard, they stopped cheering and started crying. And have been crying ever since.

[democrank]

13. Recommended

Just awful

[LexVegas]

19. Fuck Takei, whoever that is. nt

[AZLD4Candidate]

22. I won't say that, but he seems to be silent about Japanese war crimes, rape, genocide, human

experimentation, forcing opium on children, and the brutality of Japan during that war.

Japan even honors those that did it at the Yasukuni Shrine. I've been there. The general in charge for the Rape of Nanking, Matsui Iwane, is HONORED there!!!!

[Hekate]

30. George Takei is an American by birth, a Nisei who was interned at the age of 6 in an American...

… “relocation center.” He has his own history to tell, and that was part of it. He has never, as far as I know, been an apologist for the activities of WWII Japan.

You can easily look up his life and activities instead of cursing him from afar.

.

[Coventina]

32. Thank you. This thread is really embarrassing.

The flogging of an American citizen for an opinion MANY have, and all but blaming him for atrocities committed by a country his ancestors had LEFT is just not a good look.

[AZLD4Candidate]

37. Then posting "never forget Hiroshima" puts him in the forefront of it.

Again, never forgot the loss of innocents in the atomic bombing, but he is ignoring the loss of innocents in most Asian nations Japan invaded.

Again, between 1937-1945, the Japanese killed over 30,000,000 Chinese. Only four million were active soldiers. When Japan was brutalizing China, the Japanese cheered. When it came to their shores, all they've done is say "Hiroshima was wrong." But everything they did is right by extension.

He worded his tweet very poorly. And he deserves to be called out on it.

[Hekate]

63. It's worse than embarrassing. The ignorance on display on all sides is too much this year...

I used to try to educate and inform in the annual guilt-and-blame-fest by trying to educate and inform, but this thread is spinning off in too many directions to even get a grip on. It’s disheartening.

[Coventina]

65. Yeah, this thread has been seriously hijacked.

I only clicked on it because I enjoy what George Takei usually has to say.

War is hell, sometimes necessary, but still hell.

There really are no winners, we all lose. A choice between bad choices is still a bad choice, even if it's less bad.

It seems like nobody wants to acknowledge that.

I foolishly thought that humanity had learned some lessons after WW I that punishing an entire people for the actions of their government & military is not the best way to foster peace in the future.

It seems like not even DU can absorb that lesson.

*sigh*

[LexVegas]

66. Who got punished? Japan's victims? nt

[AZLD4Candidate]

34. My wife's great-grandmother was gang raped by the Japanese Imperial Army as they marched

through Jiangsu laying waste to everything they came in contact with. What happened in the US is inexcusable, but if he's going to post about Hiroshima and the innocents that were killed there, he's awfully silent about what Japan did in China, Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, Hong Kong, etc.

He opened the door. . .I'm wondering where he stands on Japanese atrocities if he's going to go into "never forgot Hiroshima." Where does he stand on Japanese human experimentation in Harbin? Japanese executing Singaporeans for having dark skin or tattoos?

[LexVegas]

42. This is why I say that Takei can fuck right off. nt

[treestar]

47. that was unjustifiable but

bombing of Hiroshima another thing. Japan was an aggressor in that war. One can debate it, but not with Japan as victim in the scenario.

Whereas the interning of Japanese-Americans isn't debatable.

He's defending Japan here, not Japanese-Americans. Which is odd because the camps were due to fear of their taking Japan's side. There was also some fear regarding German Americans.

[LexVegas]

50. "He's defending Japan here, not Japanese-Americans." Exactly. nt

[AZLD4Candidate]

60. That's why I am attacking his Tweet. It sounds like a Japan apologist looking for sympathy

not a Japanese American attacking our concentration camp policy in ww2 (I refuse to call them internment camps）。

I am not attacking George Takei. . .I'm attacking his message. Politically and personally, George Takei is a national treasure.

But with this tweet, he is 100% wrong is completely ignores Japanese brutality against everyone not them from 1931-1945.

He also forgets that the Japanese government brutalized Japanese people too. But I guess that brutality is okay based on his tweet.

[LexVegas]

67. You're being too kind to Takei. He knows what he is doing. nt

[johnp3907]

68. We know what YOU'RE doing.

[Sky Jewels]

62. He played Sulu on Star Trek.

He is a commentator and has a huge following. A liberal guy. Gay. Anti-racist and anti-sexist.

[stuck in the middle]

29. Why I love a country that once betrayed me George Takei

Fuck Takei, whoever that is. nt

[Hekate]

31. See post 30. Meh, I'll paste it here

George Takei is an American by birth, a Nisei who was interned at the age of 6 in an American...

… “relocation center.” He has his own history to tell, and that was part of it. He has never, as far as I know, been an apologist for the activities of WWII Japan.

You can easily look up his life and activities instead of cursing him from afar.

[treestar]

49. Isn't he here talking of the victims of Hiroshima?

As if the US bombing was wrong?

[stuck in the middle]

69. There's a lot at hatred...

… here in this thread directed towards an infant.

[treestar]

72. what infant?

[stuck in the middle]

74. George Takei's baby cousin.

what infant?

My aunt and baby cousin died from the blast in Hiroshima, their bodies found burned in a ditch. She was trying to shield the infant. We must never forget the many innocents who perished.

[treestar]

75. every warmongering nation has infants in it

nobody is attacking that infant. The nation did wrong and it came under attack and had to be defeated.

There were German infants bombed too.

There were Jewish infants killed by the Germans. And the Japanese killed other peoples' infants too. So there's no need to pull the baby card.

WWII was horrible. But it occurred because of the aggression of Germany and Japan.

[stuck in the middle]

80. George Takei's cousin...

…is very specifically being made a target of hate here in this thread.

[Hekate]

70. War itself is wrong. I don't blame my country (America) for trying to end WWII, even this way...

But I bring a certain knowledge base to any discussion, and it seems to be dying out in the general US population. It’s not just that my undergrad major was Asian and Pacific History, and that Dr. George Akita was an outstanding professor of Japanese history at University of Hawai’i, where I grew up. Dr. Stephan led my senior seminar on Japanese history — the Greater East Asia War, as the Japanese named it. Nobody was making apologies for Japan’s behavior in the war.

WWII was my parent’s war. Their personal stories were sparse — Dad volunteered, memorized the eye chart in advance or he would have been rejected, served in Arizona. Mom worked in a defense plant for awhile. Neither made anything of their own experiences.

*But my mother pointed out every neighbor or friend who was a survivor of the Holocaust. Told me about the Jewish refugee boy in her Colorado high school who had witnessed great piles of books burning in the street outside his home.
*Told me about the Relocation Camps (as they were called then) and how horribly unjust they were to Americans of Japanese Ancestry.
*In one neighborhood where we lived there was a woman who survived starvation and horror in a prisoner of war camp run by the Japanese Army in the Philippines. Mom told me her story as well.
*My mother’s cousin who became a doctor served in combat in Germany. As he and his company slogged toward an enemy emplacement they located the gunner — a 12 year old German boy conscripted by the Nazis who had frozen in abject terror and could not pull the trigger. They rescued him. For the rest of her days my great-aunt had masses said for the welfare of that boy in gratitude for the life of her own son.
*Mom told me about the Rape of Nanking, and the photo of a toddler abandoned by a railroad track that just about undid her.
*My US Congressman and then Senator for many years in Hawai’i was Daniel K. Inouye, a Nisei who lost his right arm while fighting in Italy in the 442nd.

Mom was not telling me these events to inspire hate — but to say, Never Again.

The war against the Axis had to be won. America made plenty of mistakes, but we stopped that war. I will never apologize for that.

There were books aplenty in my parents’ house, both fact and fiction about WWII. When I was old enough I read them. But more importantly for a child just learning to read was LIFE magazine — — in which I saw my first photographs of the immediate aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the dead, the dying, the maimed, the cities blown to matchsticks.

Imagine how sick I felt several years ago to be informed by a DUer that all information and all photos of the carnage had been suppressed by the US government. That was a bald-faced lie. Knowledge of the effects of The Bomb and radiation were widespread, there were photographs of the dead and injured and of the destruction in books and magazines, and the whole genre of science fiction had a nuclear apocalyptic thread running through it. There was an anti-nuclear bomb movement in this country from that point on.

It’s taken me all day to finish this, what with interruptions here at home. But I will cut and paste this if needed.

[treestar]

73. We learned about the atomic bombing in school

and the effects of it, down to detail. People who would have just vaporized. People who became sick. I don't think they tried to teach us to think of it as right or wrong. This was back in the 70s, way before the politically correct era, and they did tell us about it, at least in my school district.

A lot of times today we will say we have a problem with the government, not the people. But there's a point. It has to be considered seriously, but there's just a point where if your leaders are that horrible - I don't think the US is innocent, but it is not close to as guilty as WWII Germany and Japan.

[Hekate]

78. This I agree with. I try to hold balance if I can, but never false equivalence. We, our country,have

….fallen greatly in my estimation since BushCheney, and gods know since Trump. “We used to be a country that never officially sanctioned torture, for instance, and now we do,” wrote a journalist who captured my feelings about BushCheney’s war, and that was only one item in a long and disheartening list.

But we are not (yet) Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. We still have a chance to pull ourselves back.

[stuck in the middle]

33. 'At Least During the Internment ...' Are Words I Thought I'd Never Utter

Fuck Takei, whoever that is. nt

‘At Least During the Internment …’ Are Words I Thought I’d Never Utter

I was sent to a camp at just 5 years old — but even then, they didn't separate children from families.

by George Takei

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/06/19/at-least-during-the-internment-are-words-i-thought-id-never-utter-family-separation-children-border/

Imagine this scene: Tens of thousands of people, mostly families with children, are labeled by the government as a threat to our nation, used as political tools by opportunistic politicians, and caught in a vast gray zone where their civil and human rights are erased by the presumption of universal guilt. Thousands are moved around to makeshift detention centers and sites, where camps are thrown together with more regard to the bottom line than the humanity of the new residents.

That is America today, at our southern border, which asylum-seekers and undocumented migrants alike are seeking to cross. But it is also America in late 1941, in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, when overnight my community, my family, and I became the enemy because we happened to look like those who had dropped the bombs. And yet, in one core, horrifying way this is worse. At least during the internment of Japanese-Americans, I and other children were not stripped from our parents. We were not pulled screaming from our mothers’ arms. We were not left to change the diapers of younger children by ourselves.

Photos of children in cages and camps today so strongly evoke the wartime past that former First Lady Laura Bush drew a stark parallel in an op-ed in the Washington Post. “These images are eerily reminiscent of the Japanese American internment camps of World War II, now considered to have been one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history,” Bush wrote. She reminded us that there are dark consequences to such camps for their residents: “This treatment inflicts trauma; interned Japanese have been two times as likely to suffer cardiovascular disease or die prematurely than those who were not interned.”

When a government acts capriciously, especially against a powerless and much-reviled group, it is hard to describe the terror and anxiety. There is nowhere to turn, because the only people with the power to help have trained their guns and dogs upon you. You are without rights, held without charge or trial. The world is upside down, information-less, and indifferent or even hostile to your plight.

snip——(more at link)

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/06/19/at-least-during-the-internment-are-words-i-thought-id-never-utter-family-separation-children-border/

[Torchlight]

39. Sounds serious

Good luck.

[stuck in the middle]

44. IN THE KING OF PRUSSIA: THE TRIAL OF THE PLOWSHARES 8

IN THE KING OF PRUSSIA: THE TRIAL OF THE PLOWSHARES 8 takes us back to 1982 with Emile de Antonio's portrayal of the Plowshares 8 civic disobedience at General Electric's nuclear weapons plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. The group included Molly Rush, co-founder of the Merton Center. Posting of this cliip celebrates the April 13 visit of Martin Sheen, who plays the judge in the movie, to Pittsburgh, Pa and the Thomas Merton Center. YOU CAN'T HUG A CHILD WITH NUCLEAR ARMS!!!

The Hammer Has to Fall - Charlie King

[stuck in the middle]

46. Plowshares Movement History

A history of the Plowshares movement from 1980 to 2009, compiled from the records of many friends by Ardeth Platte OP and Susan Crane.

[Hekate]

71. This is such a disturbing thread, that I will say this and move on...

War itself is wrong. I don't blame my country (America) for trying to end WWII, even this way...

But I bring a certain knowledge base to any discussion, and overall knowledge of WWII seems to be dying out in the general US population. It’s not just that my undergrad major was Asian and Pacific History, and that Dr. George Akita was an outstanding professor of Japanese history at University of Hawai’i, where I grew up. Dr. Stephan led my senior seminar on Japanese history — the Greater East Asia War, as the Japanese named it. Nobody was making apologies for Japan’s behavior in the war.

WWII was my parent’s war. Their personal stories were sparse — Dad volunteered, memorized the eye chart in advance or he would have been rejected, served in Arizona. Mom worked in a defense plant for awhile. Neither made anything of their own experiences.

*But my mother pointed out to me every neighbor or friend who was a survivor of the Holocaust. Told me about the Jewish refugee boy in her Colorado high school who had witnessed great piles of books burning in the street outside his home.
*Told me about the Relocation Camps (as they were called then) and how horribly unjust they were to Americans of Japanese Ancestry.
*In one neighborhood where we lived there was a woman who survived starvation and horror in a prisoner of war camp run by the Japanese Army in the Philippines. Mom told me her story as well.
*My mother’s cousin who became a doctor served in combat in Germany. As he and his company slogged toward an enemy emplacement they located the gunner — a 12 year old German boy conscripted by the Nazis who had frozen in abject terror and could not pull the trigger. They rescued him. For the rest of her days my great-aunt had masses said for the welfare of that boy in gratitude for the life of her own son.
*Mom told me about the Rape of Nanking, and the photo of a toddler abandoned by a railroad track that just about undid her.
*My US Congressman and then Senator for many years in Hawai’i was Daniel K. Inouye, a Nisei who lost his right arm while fighting in Italy in the 442nd.

Mom was not telling me these events to inspire hate — but to say, Never Again.

The war against the Axis had to be won. America made plenty of mistakes, but we stopped that war. I will never apologize for that.

There were books aplenty in my parents’ house, both fact and fiction about WWII. When I was old enough I read them. But more importantly for a child just learning to read was LIFE magazine — — in which I saw my first photographs of the immediate aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the dead, the dying, the maimed, the cities blown to matchsticks.

Imagine how sick I felt several years ago to be informed by a DUer that all information and all photos of the carnage had been suppressed by the US government. That was a bald-faced lie. Knowledge of the effects of The Bomb and radiation were widespread, there were photographs of the dead and injured and of the destruction in books and magazines, and the whole genre of science fiction had a nuclear apocalyptic thread running through it. There was an anti-nuclear bomb movement in this country from that point on.

It’s taken me all day to finish this, what with interruptions here at home. But I will cut and paste this if needed.

[applegrove]

77. I too grew up hearing about the War. My dad's father went off to fight in his early 40s.

Last edited Tue Aug 8, 2023, 10:05 PM - Edit history (2)

WWII. He felt it was his duty. He had been to military college before law school and had a brother who fought in WWI and was a victim of PTSD. My grandad had to rescue him and his young family back in canada and help them move and live on a farm. His brother was a brilliant inventor and could have had a brilliant career save for the ptsd. Instead he invented genious farm equipment for his use only. Such a wasted life. War is about wasted lives. Anyhow, Dad was 11 to 15 when his dad was at war. 13 to 15 when his father was overseas. He dealt with it by being proud and reading war history. And by swimming. Did I mention the swimming coaches wanted him to stop going to his private school and go to a U of Toronto school that specialized in sports. He didn't go but still he almost broke the Canadian record in the butterfly at 17. His coaches wanted him to only practice that but his favourite stroke was the front crawl (freestyle) so he practiced both. That meant extra hours in the boarding school pool.That was my Dad's experience of war. Old enough to know what war could mean to his Dad and family and young enough to have an outlet in sports. Not many 45 year olds were in the artillery. Grandad got wounded twice by "friendly fire", he once got run over in his jeep by a polish tank at the front, but kept going back to 'his men'. Dad graduated and signed up for a summer stint in the Navy. This is how war was presented in our house. Something you fight from happening but something that happens. And there is pride in making the world safe again and a brotherhood and sisterhood in telling all the stories. And you don't talk about the horrors like we do today and in this thread. Textbook case of sublimation but that is how people coped back then and why some willingly went off to fight or chose careers in the military. Turn a negative emotion into some positive emotion. My dad did not join the military but he read military history his whole life. My grandad's best friend after the war was an admiral. I don't know if they talked about the horrors amongst themselves. My dad swam every day in his retirement till he was in his early 80s.

[Hekate]

79. TY for this, applegrove

You go because you must, yes