Also it's pretty cute that those americans are offended by what Japan did when USA has by far done the biggest list of bad things during the last 50 years
Japan opposes comfort women statue in Sydney - Page 13
Forum Index > General Forum |
Fatalize
France5210 Posts
Also it's pretty cute that those americans are offended by what Japan did when USA has by far done the biggest list of bad things during the last 50 years | ||
hypercube
Hungary2735 Posts
On April 06 2014 03:10 Darkwhite wrote: There are Japanese who try to downplay the horrors of Nanjing, and right in this thread here you have an American saying bombing Japan wasn't all that bad, it was a necessary and right thing to do. I have yet to see anybody in this thread denying Imperial Japan was responsible for atrocities. What people are doing is pointing out the odd double standard, where people seem to fail to recognize that practically every country in the world has a very similar tradition of biased historical interpretation. The nuclear bombs is only one salient example. Here's what the French were doing in Asia, a few years after the Japanese invasion of China: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Indochina_War Guess what: throughout that war, the US Navy and US Air Force supported France to quell the Vietnamese war of independence. Because France were allied with the United States, with a carte blanche to terrorize the Vietnamese population. If you can find an official apology from France, then you're better with Google than I am. There is double standard, and the people who are in a habit of defending their country's crimes from a misplaced sense of national pride are acting immorally. The solution is to call them out, just as the Japanese are being called out. | ||
AnachronisticAnarchy
United States2957 Posts
On April 06 2014 03:19 Fatalize wrote: Every country denies things they have done in war, no point in building this statue. Also it's pretty cute that those americans are offended by what Japan did when USA has by far done the biggest list of bad things during the last 50 years Remind me of the time we systematically tortured and killed tens of thousands of POWs. Or the time we went into a town of thousands and did things like kill women by inserting multiple long metal rods up their vagina and letting them bleed to death, or carving open pregnant women, taking out their fetus and then throwing it on the ground so hard it went splat. Remind me of the time we did that kind of thing to thousands of people in that town. How about that time we did human experimentation, with an emphasis on harmful experiments, on thousands of civilians from captured territory? Or the time we ordered our navy to kill every single POW they had. Do not even think to compare what we have done with what Japan did in WW2. | ||
m4ini
4215 Posts
Do not even think to compare what we have done with what Japan did in WW2. Do not even think to downplay what the US did. See what i did there? Your country has massacres, torture etc on their hands as every one else, some things (like bombing of civilians, women and children) in a scale that nothing even comes close. Not to mention, american scientists were pretty interested in that research in particular, curious, isn't it. Obviously you want to profit of that, as long as you can shift all the blame towards another country and point fingers. | ||
Dangermousecatdog
United Kingdom7084 Posts
| ||
Taf the Ghost
United States11751 Posts
On the first level, placing a statue for something that happened, in Korea, in Australia strikes me as a local political group pulling strings. Here in the States, this issue occasionally gets mentioned by a Congressmen with a large Korean community in the district, along with the Armenian Genocide for a similar politician with a large Armenian community. And, as the end of the original article makes pretty plain, this is a local political issue more than anything else. I'll actually give them credit for pushing a subject that you know is going to piss off a section of 2chan. You're guaranteed to get nasty letters/messages. It's actually one of the most classic tactics around right now. Think of how often any "controversial" story has the line "I got death threats" attached to it. It's quite common now because the tactic works. That doesn't remove the truth that it happened, but for a lot of those backing the statue, it's hard not to read some uglier racial aspects into it. And that's the topic no one really wants to touch. The Japanese haven't pulled off the same trick the Germans have with regards to WW2 and our new "historical apology" world. (Having Hilter dead & East Germany around allowed the rest of Europe to "accept" the apology. Plus offload their own culpability in a lot of things that happened) Japan, for various cultural & religious reasons, couldn't and didn't go that way. But, in the region, there was no way to "sufficiently" apologize anyway. It just doesn't work that way over there. Because it's not like these issues don't stretch back hundreds of years. The low-level racial hatred aspects go back to wars from hundreds of years ago. Which shows how well certain Korean & Chinese political movers have used various issues from WW2 to get someone in Japan to respond in an inappropriate manner. It's actually pretty brilliant on a lot of levels. It's not like China is still under an authoritarian regime or Korea was until fairly recently (1987 to be exact) with brutal & horrific pasts. This isn't a point to say "let bygones be bygones", but there's zero room for anyone in Asia to play "woe is me!" on any of these topics. For the last thousand years, they would have conquered each other if given the opportunity, Japan just happens to have a massive, naturally defended border (i.e. the Sea of Japan & China Sea), making an invasion a really, really hard push. Now, if you want a really fun time? Try suggesting a monument to the dead from the Great Leap Forward ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward). Then we're talking about tens of Millions dead. Oh, the Chinese would throw one monster conniption on the topic. Thus, the point. | ||
jrwh
United States37 Posts
On April 06 2014 03:19 Fatalize wrote: Every country denies things they have done in war, no point in building this statue. Also it's pretty cute that those americans are offended by what Japan did when USA has by far done the biggest list of bad things during the last 50 years Where is this list? I'm not denying that USA does fucked up things, but your statement is useless, shitty, and stupid. Every country in the world has done things to be ashamed of, and it's impossible to tally all those things up and say "this one country has done more of them than any other." And that still wouldn't be an excuse to justify the "bad things" done by the countries that have "smaller lists." | ||
WolfintheSheep
Canada14127 Posts
Well, Poland maybe. France...well, there's the whole Treaty of Versailles issue, the occupation of the Rhineland, the attempt to economically drain Germany in order to solve the Great Depression (which, in part, led to the mass money printing that made the Mark worthless). Not to say that a total armed invasion was justified, but in an era where military conquest was still seen as a natural part of international relations, it was a very obvious conclusion. | ||
Darkwhite
Norway348 Posts
On April 06 2014 03:55 AnachronisticAnarchy wrote: Remind me of the time we systematically tortured and killed tens of thousands of POWs. Or the time we went into a town of thousands and did things like kill women by inserting multiple long metal rods up their vagina and letting them bleed to death, or carving open pregnant women, taking out their fetus and then throwing it on the ground so hard it went splat. Remind me of the time we did that kind of thing to thousands of people in that town. How about that time we did human experimentation, with an emphasis on harmful experiments, on thousands of civilians from captured territory? Or the time we ordered our navy to kill every single POW they had. Do not even think to compare what we have done with what Japan did in WW2. Gang rape and murder of civilians, cover up and exoneration of all involved: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre The Mtỹ Lawoi Massacre (Vietnamese: thảm sát Mỹ Lai [tʰɐ̃ːm ʂɐ̌ːt mǐˀ lɐːj], [mǐˀlɐːj] ( listen); /ˌmiːˈlaɪ/, /ˌmiːˈleɪ/, or /ˌmaɪˈlaɪ/)[1] was the Vietnam War mass murder of between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians in South Vietnam on March 16, 1968. It was committed by the U.S. Army soldiers from the Company C of the 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade of the 23rd (Americal) Infantry Division. Victims included women, men, children, and infants. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated. I guess five hundred people aren't enough, though? And if you want human experimentation, this is some of the stuff they didn't bother putting in your textbooks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation_in_the_United_States#Human_radiation_experiments U.S Army doctors in the Philippines infected five prisoners with bubonic plague and induced beriberi in 29 prisoners; four of the test subjects died as a result.[11][12] In 1906, Professor Richard Strong of Harvard University intentionally infected 24 Filipino prisoners with cholera, which had somehow become contaminated with plague. He did this without the consent of the patients, and without informing them of what he was doing. All of the subjects became sick and 13 died.[12][13] In a 1946 to 1948 study in Guatemala, U.S. researchers used prostitutes to infect prison inmates, insane asylum patients, and Guatemalan soldiers with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases, in order to test the effectiveness of penicillin in treating the STDs. They later tried infecting people with "direct inoculations made from syphilis bacteria poured into the men's penises and on forearms and faces that were slightly abraded . . . or in a few cases through spinal punctures". Approximately 700 people were infected as part of the study (including orphan children). The study was sponsored by the Public Health Service, the National Institutes of Health and the Pan American Health Sanitary Bureau (now the World Health Organization's Pan American Health Organization) and the Guatemalan government. The team was led by John Charles Cutler, who later participated in the Tuskegee syphilis experiments. Cutler chose to do the study in Guatemala because he would not have been permitted to do it in the United States. In 2010 when the research was revealed, the US officially apologized to Guatemala for the studies.[28][29][30][31] n 1955, the CIA conducted a biological warfare experiment where they released whooping cough bacteria from boats outside of Tampa Bay, Florida, causing a whooping cough epidemic in the city, and killing at least 12 people.[45][46][47] | ||
Falling
Canada10923 Posts
| ||
docvoc
United States5491 Posts
| ||
m4ini
4215 Posts
On April 06 2014 05:59 Falling wrote: It seems then darkwhite, from all your posts that as long as everyone is guilty, no-one is guilty? It is immaterial what USA has done insofar as this particular statue to do with Japan's actions in WWII. If people want to start putting up memorial statues on what US has done... or to turn it on myself, what Canada has done (residential schools, Japanese internment, the Somalia Affair, etc) I'm for it. But the fact that you can find a laundry list of events that have no memorial statue does not preclude putting up a memorial statue in Australia. It simply does not follow. If the US gets cited as "biggest ally critizising japan", i do think that it's fair to point out how big of a turd that argument is by showing the hipocrisy behind it (warcrimes, cover ups, ignorance, tampering with history direct or indirect). It's in this case not even about the statue by itself, but about the reprocess of past crimes which would need to happen beforehand. | ||
Darkwhite
Norway348 Posts
On April 06 2014 05:59 Falling wrote: It seems then darkwhite, from all your posts that as long as everyone is guilty, no-one is guilty? It is immaterial what USA has done insofar as this particular statue to do with Japan's actions in WWII. If people want to start putting up memorial statues on what US has done... or to turn it on myself, what Canada has done (residential schools, Japanese internment, the Somalia Affair, etc) I'm for it. But the fact that you can find a laundry list of events that have no memorial statue does not preclude putting up a memorial statue in Australia. It simply does not follow. If people criticize Japan for something, without giving the United States a similarly hard time for similarly heinous war crimes, it shows they aren't applying a fair standard, but are playing favorites or have been misled by the same sort of historical revisionism Japan tends to be accused of. Criticizing Japan for murdering civilians while giving the slaughters of Dresden, Hiroshima&Nagasaki and My Lai a free pass weaves a narrative of good versus evil, breeding exactly the sort of nationalism and animosity which brings about terrible conflicts in the first place. | ||
coverpunch
United States2093 Posts
On April 06 2014 05:59 Falling wrote: It seems then darkwhite, from all your posts that as long as everyone is guilty, no-one is guilty? It is immaterial what USA has done insofar as this particular statue to do with Japan's actions in WWII. If people want to start putting up memorial statues on what US has done... or to turn it on myself, what Canada has done (residential schools, Japanese internment, the Somalia Affair, etc) I'm for it. But the fact that you can find a laundry list of events that have no memorial statue does not preclude putting up a memorial statue in Australia. It simply does not follow. He is clearly making a different point about the moral indignation and self-righteousness that many people in this thread seem to be pushing. We should flip the hypothetical. If Vietnam asked Japan to build a memorial to American atrocities during the war (right next to the Agent Orange that we told Japan we never kept there), would it go unopposed politically or without hate mail? I doubt it. | ||
Falling
Canada10923 Posts
On April 06 2014 06:28 Darkwhite wrote: If people criticize Japan for something, without giving the United States a similarly hard time for similarly heinous war crimes, it shows they aren't applying a fair standard, but are playing favorites or have been misled by the same sort of historical revisionism Japan tends to be accused of. Criticizing Japan for murdering civilians while giving the slaughters of Dresden, Hiroshima&Nagasaki and My Lai a free pass weaves a narrative of good versus evil, breeding exactly the sort of nationalism and animosity which brings about terrible conflicts in the first place. Well there's something to about being topical and actually focusing on something. We sit down to deal with any one ill, but before we can proceed, we suddenly need to talk about everything. Focusing narrowly on on ill does not intrinsically deny or diminish other ills. I think it is actually helpful. Tell me if this sounds familiar: Person A: you did 'x' Person B: well you did 'y' Person A: well if you want to bring up 'y' we should really talk about when you did 'z' and so and so forth. It's the ever shifting blame game that you are trying to present. And I guess unless countries suck it up like Germany, that's the way it goes. But if Australia wants to remember those that were suffered terribly in that particular time period, I don't see why not. It doesn't stop anyone else from putting up a memorial over the victims of Agent Orange. It doesn't even tacitly support American behaviour on My Lai. It has nothing to with My Lai for or against. | ||
Nyxisto
Germany6287 Posts
On April 06 2014 06:28 Darkwhite wrote: If people criticize Japan for something, without giving the United States a similarly hard time for similarly heinous war crimes, it shows they aren't applying a fair standard, but are playing favorites or have been misled by the same sort of historical revisionism Japan tends to be accused of. Criticizing Japan for murdering civilians while giving the slaughters of Dresden, Hiroshima&Nagasaki and My Lai a free pass weaves a narrative of good versus evil, breeding exactly the sort of nationalism and animosity which brings about terrible conflicts in the first place. It pretty much was as good vs evil as it gets in history. If someone from Germany can admit that then there's really no need for people abroad trying to relativize the crimes the Nazis committed. The US didn't commit 'heinous war crimes'. The bombing of Dresden is probably as controversial as it gets and basically nothing compared to what the Nazis and Japanese came up with. | ||
Deleted User 183001
2939 Posts
http://www.aina.org/news/20120406022505.htm Like the Japanese are opposed to the comfort women statue in this thread, Turks in Australia (I forget whether or not the Turkish government opposed it) were heavily opposed to the Assyrian genocide monument before its construction, and have taken the pleasure of vandalizing it on a couple of occasions. Going off of the text of the vandalism, the Turkish logic here is: "Fuck the people we already tried to exterminate." Perfectly logical. I don't think many people on this forum know what Assyrians are (I come from an area with a bunch of them), but they're a group of closely-related culture/language groups of Christians from Iraq. In short, the Assyrian genocide was perpetrated in tandem with the Armenian and Pontic Greek genocides by the Ottomans/Young Turks and the Kurds. On April 06 2014 07:04 Nyxisto wrote: It pretty much was as good vs evil as it gets in history. If someone from Germany can admit that then there's really no need for people abroad trying to relativize the crimes the Nazis committed. The US didn't commit 'heinous war crimes'. The bombing of Dresden is probably as controversial as it gets and basically nothing compared to what the Nazis and Japanese came up with. I don't want to sound like I'm "rubbing it in" (I most certainly am not), but it's extremely hard to top mass deportation and mass murder, and no one came close to Germany/Japan in WW2 in that regard. Anyone who wants to argue against that can PM me with their rationale as WW2 is one of my favorite topics, and so this thread doesn't turn into WW2 discussion. | ||
chocorush
694 Posts
America in general has healthy opposition to wrongdoing, even if it's done by the majority - partially for better or for worse because of a national obsession with conspiracy theories of the government screwing everyone over being so popular around here. A lot of us here (and hopefully the same ones) would be just as critical of Americans making a fuss over someone making a statue in Australia commemorating victims of mass murder that Americans participated in. | ||
Darkwhite
Norway348 Posts
On April 06 2014 06:54 Falling wrote: Well there's something to about being topical and actually focusing on something. We sit down to deal with any one ill, but before we can proceed, we suddenly need to talk about everything. Focusing narrowly on on ill does not intrinsically deny or diminish other ills. I think it is actually helpful. Tell me if this sounds familiar: Person A: you did 'x' Person B: well you did 'y' Person A: well if you want to bring up 'y' we should really talk about when you did 'z' and so and so forth. It's the ever shifting blame game that you are trying to present. And I guess unless countries suck it up like Germany, that's the way it goes. But if Australia wants to remember those that were suffered terribly in that particular time period, I don't see why not. It doesn't stop anyone else from putting up a memorial over the victims of Agent Orange. It doesn't even tacitly support American behaviour on My Lai. It has nothing to with My Lai for or against. There's no way to avoid the so called blame game if you want to get rid of double standards. You need to compare similar cases and see if they're judged fairly. It's particularly relevant, seeing as Japan has apologized for its wartime aggression and been involved in precisely zero wars ever since, sort of unlike the United States. On April 06 2014 07:04 Nyxisto wrote: It pretty much was as good vs evil as it gets in history. If someone from Germany can admit that then there's really no need for people abroad trying to relativize the crimes the Nazis committed. The US didn't commit 'heinous war crimes'. The bombing of Dresden is probably as controversial as it gets and basically nothing compared to what the Nazis and Japanese came up with. Directly after liberating China from the Japanese in WW2, France and America went on to invade and (re)occupy Indochina: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Indochina_War . These are your good guys. | ||
imre
France9263 Posts
On April 05 2014 19:01 MWY wrote: Poland and France come to mind... :D I don't think if there were no statues the japanese government would suddenly change and regret the warcrimes either. So the statue doesn't really change anything but reminding people how ignorant the japanese government is. Why not simply ignore it? I also don't even get the point about denying the crimes. Doesn't it make you a bigger man if you stand to your (or as a statesmen, your countries) faults? If even those crimes are that shameful and they have some much pride, do they deny losing the war aswell? :D I also don't think that germans are that humble. The biggest factor in my opinion is that there is no "national pride" around here. At least in the minds of most of the citizens. And that's the luckiest thing that can happen to a nation. When you actually learn from your history. I personally think we apologize even a bit too much in the ww2 matter, like when a random german politician visits isreal, he always apologizes for the warcrimes everytime. But it's better than the other way around I think. well france has the problem of the legal state. (was the etat français, aka Vichy and Petain, France or not. The politc answer was no until the 90's on this matter) On April 05 2014 21:25 Acertos wrote: From what you tell me, it looks like in France we put way more effort in bashing our collaborators (civilians and politicians) than Japan does to all its garbage that committed crimes during WWII. Ironically we needed an american historian, Paxton, to start to look at the collaboration. | ||
| ||