This will end badly

[cpxxx]

GScholz, with due respect you are not comparing like with like. Perhaps it's you being naïve or perhaps more. In recent years there has been an attempt to somehow rehabilitate both the Nazis and Imperial Japan by dredging up examples of Allied atrocities and war crimes. A classic example being the red herring of the link to British war crimes wiki page on this very forum.

Yes of course no country has clean hands when it comes to atrocity. But two wrongs don't make a right. Both the Nazis and Imperial Japan stand out for their brutality and fanaticism, their attempts at genocide and the countless individual acts of brutality by their military often face to face on helpless non combatants. You cannot simply say they were merely doing their duty when their actions were not that of honourable soldiers. But of killers and sadists.

The Kamikazes were victims of the regime they served but to honour them is also to honour the regime that sent them out to die and kill.

I know full well that that wars are not black and white. But unless we are careful we end up making no judgement on the actions of men in war. Suddenly we have a moral equivalence and then anything goes. Allied excesses are no excuse for the actions of the Japanese. It's as simple as that.

[GScholz]

How many died building the statue of liberty?

Depends on if you count the soldiers who sacrificed their lives for it to be built in the first place...

[MiloMorai]

Depends on if you count the soldiers who sacrificed their lives for it to be built in the first place...

There was almost 140,000 French killed in the Franco-Prussian War.

[ReVo]

Depends on if you count the soldiers who sacrificed their lives for it to be built in the first place...

Funny you should say that considering Americans at the time didn't really even want the statue.

[GScholz]

Cpxxx, again you seem to want to judge every Japanese or German soldier for the collective actions of their nations. I cannot subscribe to that way of thinking, and you show the typical hypocrisy that is so common in the west. To the victims it makes little difference if they were burned to death in their own home by the SS or burned to death in their own home by the Allied air forces. You can argue that one side represented a better political system and moral values more inline with your own, although one of the Allies was also a horrible dictatorship that systematically murdered 7 million of its own people in the "Holodomor". State sanctioned racism was present on both sides, and the atrocities committed by all combatants in WWII were monstrous in the extreme. The only thing that differentiates them are numbers, or as Stalin would put it: Statistics. If "collective guilt" is really your point the every rape and murder, every atrocity committed by the Soviets during WWII, and after WWII, was made possible by the vast support they were given by the Western Allies. No one's hands were clean in WWII and I find it extremely hypocritical for one side to point fingers at the other when their own hands are drenched in the blood of innocents.

The Kamikaze did not bayonet women and children. Nor did they set women and children on fire. When they did kill, their victims were invariably uniformed combatants, and at sea there was no "collateral damage" either. In most cases they only managed to kill themselves. In many ways they were some of the most honorable warriors in a very brutal and dirty war.


It's all about perspective...













Waffen-SS memorials in Eastern Europe and Ukraine

[Oldman731]

To the victims it makes little difference if they were burned to death in their own home by the SS or burned to death in their own home by the Allied air forces.

If you restrict your analysis to this perspective, then there is no difference between an auto accident and a murder.

Waffen-SS memorials in Eastern Europe and Ukraine

Seriously?  Seriously?  Time to get some plane tickets and spray paint.

- oldman

[GScholz]

If you restrict your analysis to this perspective, then there is no difference between an auto accident and a murder.

Intent. Firebombing a city cannot be described as "accidental".

[Arlo]

IF you have Netflix watch the Documentary on the Kamikaze..  Most of them volunteered to  go to there death because they didn't want to lose face. 

Japanese culture didn't produce American mothers.

"Just because Johnny Tanaka flies off a cliff doesn't mean you have to."

[GScholz]

Seriously?  Seriously?  Time to get some plane tickets and spray paint.

Yup. In Latvia they even have a "Legionaries Memorial Day" celebrating their SS volunteers. What you must understand is that in these countries the Russians were the invaders and the Germans were in many ways considered liberators.

[Oldman731]

Intent. Firebombing a city cannot be described as "accidental".

Thank you.  Intent is also what distinguishes firebombing enemy cities from locking women and children in the town church and setting it on fire; or setting out to rape, torture and massacre the population of a Chinese city, for example.

- oldman

[GScholz]

Not really when the intent of the fire bombing is to kill and terrorize the civilian population. The Allied air forces just had better tools for the job.

[Oldman731]

Yup. In Latvia they even have a "Legionaries Memorial Day" celebrating their SS volunteers. What you must understand is that in these countries the Russians were the invaders and the Germans were in many ways considered liberators.

Which brings back an Oldman memory....

When I was a junior in high school...1968-69...I had a stately, if somewhat elderly, Estonian woman as my German III teacher.  Behind her back we called her "the Frau."  Her father had owned a car dealership, until the Russians occupied Estonia in 1940 and expropriated it in the name of the People.  The Frau herself escaped to Germany and lived in Nuremberg during the war.  Her brother drowned when the Russians sank the Wilhelm Gustloff.  After the war the Frau found her way to England, and then, somehow, to sunny Orefield, Pennsylvania.

We had a school assembly one day which featured what became a heated, nearly-violent discussion of race relations.  The German III class immediately followed the assembly.  We were all very excited, of course.  The Frau entered the room with a smug expression on her face.  One of the kids politely asked her what she thought of the assembly.

"In Europe vee haf no racial problems," the Frau replied.

Now we certainly were not the brightest students in America - it was Orefield, Pennsylvania after all - but even we recognized that there were problems with that statement.  "Well...what....what about...the Jews...?" someone finally asked.

And the Frau instantly became angry.  In retrospect, thinking on it now, it was the only time I ever saw her get angry.

"You must understand," she said.  "The Jews owned everything!"

That made quite an impression on me then.  It has stuck with me all these years.  While it plainly should not be the foundation of a generalization of how the Oldman views the population of the Baltic States, I'm afraid that it is.

- oldman

[GScholz]

Antisemitism was rampant in the whole of Europe at the time... and, perhaps to a lesser degree, in America. Many Jews who perished in the death camps had tried to get to America, just to be denied access. The German passenger liner St. Louis sailed from Hamburg in 1939 carrying 937 Jewish refugees bound for Cuba. The majority of refugees had applied for US visas, and had planned to stay in Cuba only until they could enter the US. They were denied to make landing in Cuba. The German captain then set course for America. Sailing so close to Florida that they could see the lights of Miami, the US government denied them entry. The St. Louis sailed back to Europe on June 6, 1939. 254 of the passengers died in the Holocaust; 84 who had been in Belgium, 84 who had found refuge in Holland, and 86 who had been admitted to France. The St. Louis was but one ship of many.

Germany must take the blame for the horrible atrocities they committed against the European Jewry, but the whole world shares some of that blame for we all failed them. That's also why the state of Israel exists today.

[Rich46yo]

The Kamikaze did not bayonet women and children. Nor did they set women and children on fire. When they did kill, their victims were invariably uniformed combatants, and at sea there was no "collateral damage" either. In most cases they only managed to kill themselves. In many ways they were some of the most honorable warriors in a very brutal and dirty war.

Some may have, some certainly would have, and all sure as heck would have if ordered to. You cant compare the atrocities of the Axis with the actions of the western Democracies. I wonder how many of those kamikazes made one last trip to the rape camps, filled with female Korean and Chinese slaves, for one last throw before going Boom!

None of this matters tho. Its "History" and must be recorded. All of it.

Thing is in Asia they think different and this is a very controversial and emotional subject there cause they think different then we do. They have concepts of "face", "low/High positions", are very sensitive to status and racism. And most of all have a need to revere ancestors. Many folks of other Asian countries will see this as another Japanese ploy to legitimize the legacy of their for fathers. I know most of you know this. I think the more windows we have to look into the face of that terrible war the better off we'll all be.

[GScholz]

You cant compare the atrocities of the Axis with the actions of the western Democracies.

I can, and I do. I call a spade for a spade. I don't call "actions" atrocities only when the wrong nation did it. The Nanking massacre was an atrocity. The bombing of Dresden was an atrocity. Countless atrocities were committed by all the major combatants. I do compare them because they're all off-the-scale in brutality and disregard for human lives. The only reason the majority of the senior officers in the Allied air forces weren't hanged after the war is because they were lucky enough to be on the winning side.