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snagglepuss

(12,704 posts)
Tue Aug 6, 2013, 05:27 PM Aug 2013

The grave injustice of COMMEMORATING victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki whilst forgetting [View all]

about the atrocities committed by the Japanese.

I first posted this back in 2009. The discussion that was sparked was at times brutal but was and remains incredibly enlightening. DU historians like The Magistrate were in fine form. One of the most jaw-dropping posts was by Statisical who wrote

It (nuclear weapons) was the fastest way to stop the Imperial Army, an Army that had exterminated 30 million civilians and was doing so at the rate of 500,000 per month.

An invasion likely would have worked but it would have resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths on both sides AND more importantly would have taken time, 3-4 months. Are 2 million Chinese civilians worth less than 200,000 Japanese civilians?

Another route would be continung the blockade. That would have killed 300-500 thousands Japanese civilians with little risk to Americans however blockades are slow and unpredictable. It could have taken 6-12 month or longer before the Empire collapsed. Is 6 million Chinese civilians worth less than 200,000 Japanese civilians?

There was no method to ending the war that wouldn't result in more civilians deaths. Pretending doesn't make it so.



As I said then. My thoughts are with the FORGOTTEN victims of the Japanese - the Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, Burmese, Vietnamese and Malay. I post this in their memory.

When I was younger I heard about the horrors the Germans inflicted, the post-war horrors inflicted by Stalin and the untold suffering of civilian casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It wasn't until some 15 years ago that I found out about the Japanese war crimes, their magnitude and their utter brutality.

I was shocked and angry that this story hadn't been told. I feel as angry now as I did then that collective memory is so selective. Why is it that some people's victimization is remembered and commemorated whilst the unimaginable suffering and victimization of many millions are largely forgotten.

What also galls me beyond belief is that the Japanese to this day refuse to fully acknowledge their guilt. They refuse to have their history taught in schools. Not all Japanese however are so quick however to gloss over their crimes. As you can read below a former mayor of Nagasaki "felt ashamed of the annual peace declarations he issued during his sixteen year term as mayor of Nagasaki "because they failed to include the point of view of Japan as an aggressor in the war.""

According to historian Chalmers Johnson "It may be pointless to try to establish which WWII aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimized. The Germans killed 6 million Jews and 20 million 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."

http://www.answers.com/topic/japanese-war-crimes


So for anyone who like myself is unaware of the magnitude of Japanese atrocities and the horrific brutality of their crimes during the period of Imperial expansion, the links below give some small sense of it.


GERM WARFARE EXPERIMENTS ON WOMEN,CHILDREN AND MEN"

it was the human experiments that distinguished Pingfan. Once, in an operation aimed at extracting plague-infected organs, which Kamada still finds it difficult to talk about, Kamada took a scalpel with no anesthetic, to a Chinese prisoner, or "log," as the Japanese euphemistically called their victims. "I inserted the scalpel directly from the log's neck and opened the chest," he told an Japanese interviewer, at the time anonymously. "At first there was a terrible scream, but the voice soon fell silent..

snip

"Today, a bizarre stone memorial that Kitano erected in honor of his experimental rats still stand in a disused rat cellar in China. It was more courtesy than he showed the victims of his experiments, who were
euphemistically referred to as "monkeys" in published scientific papers. The Shenyang medical school still has hundreds of slides of human brain cross sections, some of which were used in papers published by Sendai University with open references to the use of "fresh human brains."

Prof. Keiichi Tsuneishi, a Japanese historian of science, pieced together much of the Unit 731 story from scientific papers published by doctors, many of whom later agreed to speak to him. "They have no sense of remorse at all," he says. Instead, the doctors complained of wasting the best years of their lives on medical research that could not be continued after the war."

http://www.geocities.com/wallstreet/floor/9597/confessi...




RAPE OF NANKING

"Numerous atrocities were committed en route to Nanjing, but they could not compare with the epic carnage and destruction the Japanese unleashed on the defenseless city after Chinese forces abandoned it to the enemy."

snip


"Women were killed in indiscriminate acts of terror and execution, but the large majority died after extended and excruciating gang-rape...One eyewitness, Li Ke-hen, reported: "There are so many bodies on the street, victims of group rape and murder. They were all stripped naked, their breasts cut off, leaving a terrible dark brown hole; some of them were bayoneted in the abdomen, with their intestines spilling out alongside them; some had a roll of paper or a piece of wood stuffed in their vaginas" (quoted in Yin and Young, The Rape of Nanking, p. 195).

... Many young women were simply tied to beds as permanent fixtures accessible to any and all comers. When they became too weepy or too diseased to arouse desire, they were disposed of. In alleys and parks lay the corpses of women who had been dishonored even after death by mutilation and stuffing." (Yin and Young, The Rape of Nanking, p. 195.)

SNIP

... The Japanese drew sadistic pleasure in forcing Chinese men to commit incest -- fathers to rape their own daughters, brothers their sisters, sons their mothers ... those who refused were killed on the spot." (Chang, The Rape of Nanking, p. 95.)

SNIP

"Atrocious tortures were also inflicted on the captive men. "The Japanese not only disemboweled, decapitated, and dismembered victims but performed more excruciating varieties of torture. Throughout the city they nailed prisoners to wooden boards and ran over them with tanks, crucified them to trees and electrical posts, carved long strips of flesh from them, and used them for bayonet practice. At least one hundred men reportedly had their eyes gouged out and their noses and ears hacked off before being set on fire. Another group of two hundred Chinese soldiers and civilians were stripped naked, tied to columns and doors of a school, and then stabbed by zhuizi -- special needles with handles on them -- in hundreds of points along their bodies, including their mouths, throats, and eyes. ... The Japanese subjected large crowds of victims to mass incineration. In Hsiakwan a Japanese soldier bound Chinese captives together, ten at a time, and pushed them into a pit, where they were sprayed with gasoline and ignited." (Chang, The Rape of Nanking, pp. 87-88.)


http://www.gendercide.org/case_nanking.html



JAPAN'S REFUSAL TO ACKNOWLEDGE ITS WAR GUILT AND ATROCITIES

"One of the leaders of an influential and growing movement to deny Japan's war crimes and prevent Japanese children learning about Japan's war guilt and atrocities is Professor Nobukatsu Fujioka of the Education Department at Tokyo University. Fujioka chooses to ignore overwhelming evidence and claims that the Nanjing Massacre did not occur. He is harshly critical of Saburo Ienaga and anyone who believes that Japanese schoolchildren deserve to be told the truth about Japanese war crimes. "It's masochistic", said Professor Fujioka in 1997. "No other country in the world subjects its schoolchildren to such terrible history education. (They) are volunteering to show that Japanese people are ruthless".

According to Fujioka, Japanese troops were no more brutal than those of the United States. He claims that the American occupation forces brainwashed the postwar Japanese into believing that they had committed terrible crimes.

Fujioka is not a fringe radical. His distortions of history have wide support in Japan, not only from ultra-nationalist thugs and militarists but also from a new breed of better educated neo-Imperialists, including at least sixty-two parliamentary members of the ruling Liberal democratic Party (LDP), many academics, writers, journalists, businessmen, and sports figures. His books denying Japan's war guilt and countless atrocities are best sellers in Japan.

SNIP

In 1997 a former mayor of Nagasaki, Hitoshi Motoshima, told the newspaper Mainichi Shimbun ... that he felt ashamed of the annual peace declarations he issued during his sixteen year term as mayor of Nagasaki ..."The first thing to do is to apologise to China and others who were victims of Japan's aggression. Hiroshima and Nagasaki should pardon the atomic bombing and lead the world in reconciliation".
Following an unfortunate pattern of intimidation in Japan, Hitoshi Motoshima was attacked and seriously injured by a Japanese nationalist for speaking the truth about Japan's war guilt and war crimes."

http://www.users.bigpond.com/battleforaustralia/JapWarC...















http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x6249698























23 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
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you are brave to post this, snaggle grasswire Aug 2013 #1
Rather convenient that the Left has played into the hands of the TPTB snagglepuss Aug 2013 #3
The civilians killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki aren't real victims?? Violet_Crumble Aug 2013 #12
What BS. Where do I say they don't deserve to be mourned? snagglepuss Aug 2013 #20
but, but...none of that ever happened, we are told nadinbrzezinski Aug 2013 #2
No one says that usGovOwesUs3Trillion Aug 2013 #8
At this point, given the history of the war, quite posislby the ONLY just war nadinbrzezinski Aug 2013 #9
the context of this issue is that Japan was militarily defeated at that time (Summer 45) usGovOwesUs3Trillion Aug 2013 #13
No it was not, why the high command was very divided nadinbrzezinski Aug 2013 #16
there is no denying that Japan was militarily defeated at that time usGovOwesUs3Trillion Aug 2013 #19
The point is that we covered up their atrocities. Atrocities the world has never snagglepuss Aug 2013 #21
The Japanese did some horrible things in WWII it's true gollygee Aug 2013 #4
The problem is that if you go talk nadinbrzezinski Aug 2013 #10
Yeah for the sake of balance gollygee Aug 2013 #15
Well history should be taught not from the pov of the winner nadinbrzezinski Aug 2013 #17
Some stats of the hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians who died in both bombings quinnox Aug 2013 #5
... leftstreet Aug 2013 #11
Are you personally ready to be burnt to a cinder for the sins of the United States? CBGLuthier Aug 2013 #6
How is your comment related to the OP? snagglepuss Aug 2013 #23
There is enough blame to go around usGovOwesUs3Trillion Aug 2013 #7
I don't commemorate shit for them. The Link Aug 2013 #14
Technical Note: Most of Stalin's horrors were inflicted pre-war during the Holodomor HardTimes99 Aug 2013 #18
Excellent post, I'm glad you reposted this. MicaelS Aug 2013 #22
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