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posted by
cmn32480
on Thursday May 12 2016, @03:37AM
from the history-is-in-the-culture-of-the-teller dept.
from the history-is-in-the-culture-of-the-teller dept.
An interesting phone interview with Carol Gluck, a professor of Japanese history at Columbia University.
"The Japanese ignore everything before Hiroshima and the Americans ignore everything after Nagasaki."
On Tuesday, President Obama announced his decision to visit Hiroshima, Japan, the site where the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb in August 1945. Obama will specifically visit Memorial Park, which commemorates the event; he will be the first sitting American president to do so, although he does not plan to offer any sort of apology. The bombing of Hiroshima killed around 100,000 people; three days later, tens of thousands more were killed after the United States bombed Nagasaki.
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How Japan and the U.S. Remember World War II
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You attempt things that you do not even plan because of your extreme stupidity.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 12 2016, @06:12AM
This video explains why everyone from the Japanese, to Germans, from US to Russians, and esp. the British all have fucked up and wrong view of WWII. In Japan it was called the War Guilt Information Program. [youtube.com] A censorship and propaganda campaign that is still felt today.
The same reason that the German National Socialists are so heavily vilified still today -- If the Germans weren't vilified so severely then their people might rise up against the Allied war atrocities, such as letting armies of Russian Cossacks rape villages of women and girls (as they were want to do near the end of the war) rather than send in General Patton (who pleaded this case himself to prevent such warcrimes).
If you think the Nazis were simply evil and sought world domination then you're a fool. They thought all peoples should have their own nature and culture. There were Blacks and Arabs and even Jews fighting in the 3rd Reich. Desire for a homeland for Germans does not demand eradication of all others. Quite the opposite. National Socialists thought that the world would be most prosperous with healthy competition between nations and cultures.h They recognized that monocultures breed extinction, and that's why today's Globalists are destroying Europe: They're able to paint any nationalism as "Evil Nazis" because of the War Guilt Information Program and other post-war propaganda campaigns which make such labels seem far worse than they should be.
In truth, everyone did heinous shit in WWII. Everyone should be ashamed of the actions that took place, if they would actually look into them. Such as the firebombing of Dresden and other cities: The indiscriminate fire bombing of non military targets; Entire cities engulfed at once in huge fires which generated their own wind. The fires burned so hot that fleeing civilians were stuck in melted asphalt. Bodies were found in cellars rendered into fat, the flames above turning their concrete into ovens. The destruction in many cities was more complete than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki -- But you don't hear Americans talking about how US Airmen had such low morale after having to commit to those things.
Enemy troops are fair game: A driver in a jeep - zap him. A soldier running through the snow - zap him.
But we weren't always scrupulous about our target.
Atrocities were committed by both sides. That fall our fighter group received orders from the Eighth Air Force to stage a maximum effort. Our seventy-five Mustangs were assigned an area of fifty miles by fifty miles inside Germany and ordered to strafe anything that moved. The objective was to demoralize the German population.
Noboby asked our opinion about whether we were actually demoralizing the survivors or maybe enraging them to stage their own maximum effort in behalf of the Nazi war effort. We weren't asked how we felt zapping people. It was a miserable, dirty mission, but we all took off on time and did it. If it occurred to anyone to refuse to participate (nobody refused, I recall) that person would have probably been court-martialed.
I remember sitting next to B[..] at a briefing and whispered to him: 'If we're gonna do things like this, we sure as hell better make sure we're on the winning side." That's still my view'"
- Yeager, Chuck & Janos, Leo: "Yeager - An Autobiography" (1985), pp. 62-63
Even General Patton came to his senses and realized, "We defeated the wrong enemy."
My point is that Americans, Brits, Japanese, and Germans alike -- indeed, most of the world -- all have an extremely flawed view of WWII. Contrary to the Hollywood propaganda messaging, it wasn't a war with a clear delineation of Good vs Evil. Hitler was on the cover of Time Magazine twice for the German Miracle of saving the economy from corrupt centralized banking cartels, cleaning up the lying media, and suppressing Socialist terrorists in bombing. WWII was fought to prevent the eradication of debt based currency, to make an example of Germany which had eliminated usury and freed itself from the shackles of currency owned by bankers via using a money owned by the people.
All wars are Bankers Wars. [youtube.com] For example: The main reason the American Revolution was fought was because British banks demanded the colonies not use colonial currency but only that which was sanctioned by England and her Banks. "Taxation without Representation" was done because Bankers screwed the English and so they tried to extract taxes from their colonies. The American Civil War was fought not to end Slavery, but because the President wanted our nation to be able to print its own currency, and so the Bankers threatened and instigated war (not to mention assassinated Lincoln for printing Greenbacks, and J. F. Kennedy was killed after proposing the same thing).
I put it to you that if you don't know how the USA illegally embargoed Japan and forced them to retaliate or starve, then you shouldn't be talking about how anyone remembers WWII in Japan. You're regurgitating propaganda if you're not talking about how the Jews around the world (at the behest of their bankers) called for boycotts of German goods and vowed to starve Germany out of existence, then declared war on Germany before WWII had even began. You're hurting yourself if you're not talking about how the Zionist led Bolshevik communists were using their connections in the Jewish community to bring about riots and terrorist acts, forcing the Germans to build concentration camps to deport Jews (and no country would take them because at least 47 other nations had already expelled the Jews throughout history due to their bankers corrupting society). If you don't know how bad the Typus epidemic was then rather than see how the National Socialists saved Jews by shaving their heads, forcing them into showers, delousing their clothes with Zyklon-B, you'll believe some nonsense about "Evil Nazi deathcamps". You'll ignore that Allied bombing destroyed supply lines, caused starvation and helped the lice carrying Typhus to spread into epidemic levels. You'll believe the Auschwitz communal shower is a "gas chamber" even though the chimney was added on after the war, for greater psychological impact.
Many people read what I wrote and balk at mention of Jews. However, you must realize they were victims of their own Banking elite who sacrificed their own tribe, yet again. If you're not talking about how the Bankers caused WWII and their media outlets continue to spread false information on the war, then you are only helping History to repeat. And it is! LOOK! Golden Dawn is rising in Greece. Hard line right wingers have taken over Poland. Donald Trump is a Nationalist, and successful because he is promising to save the victims of Globalism from its clutches, just as Hitler once did. Hitler was not evil either, or so many would not have rallied around him. If you're still looking at history through the foolish caricature of "Evil Axis Powers" vs "Virtuous Allies" then you can not recognize the problems as they rise. You will ignore the decades of small abuses that lead up to a great purge. You will look at a politician and think, "Well, she's not gassing Jews in gas chambers, Hitlery Clinton isn't as evil as a real Nazi".
The propaganda will backfire! You will be lulled into a false sense of security because you're not seeing the atrocities as being nearly as bad as the horrors described in WWII propaganda. You won't see it coming when the same divisive "oppressor / oppressed" rhetoric is used against your culture and you're the one in the concentration camp. Don't be taken in by the scaremonger's fear porn. Do you really believe "Holocaust Survivors" who claim Nazis masturbated people to death with machines? Clearly embellishments have occurred.
TL;DR: Everything most people know about the Great Wars is wrong. [imgur.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 12 2016, @06:33AM
> TL;DR: Everything most people know about the Great Wars is wrong. [imgur.com]
Frankly your post reeks of crazy. So much crazy that it seems pointless to put much effort into addressing it. But that link to an imgur page makes for low-hanging fruit. On that page is an allegation that Anne Frank's diary was ghost-written but someone else because "significant portions were written in ballpoint."
Well, simply googling that claim turned up a very through debunking. [annefrank.org] One short excerpt:
The origin of the "ballpoint myth" is the four-page report that the Federal Criminal
Police Office (the Bundeskriminalamt or BKA) in Wiesbaden, which was
published in 1980. In this investigation into the types of paper and ink used in the
diary of Anne Frank it is stated that "ballpoint corrections" had been made on
some loose sheets. The BKA’s task was to report on all the texts found among
the diaries of Anne Frank, and therefore also on the annotations that were made
in Anne’s manuscripts after the war. However, the Dutch investigation by the
Forensic Institute in the mid-1980’s shows that writing in ballpoint is only found
on two loose pages of annotations, and that these annotations are of no
significance for the actual content of the diary. They were clearly placed between
the other pages later. The researchers of the Forensic Institute also concluded
that the handwriting on these two annotation sheets differs from the writing in the
diary "to a far-reaching degree." Photos of these loose annotation sheets are
included in the NIOD’s publication (see The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised
Critical Edition, 2003, pages 168 and 170). In 1987, a Mr Ockelmann from
Hamburg wrote that his mother had written the annotation sheets in question.
Mrs Ockelmann was a member of the team that carried out the graphological
investigation into the writings of Anne Frank around 1960.
Based on that simple, easily verifiable fact being false, it seems likely that all the crazy sounding stuff you wrote is at least as wrong.
It is ironic that the link telling us what we know is wrong is to something that you 'know' which turns out to be so utterly wrong.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Thursday May 12 2016, @12:40PM
Ah, good morning, Soylent's resident Nazi true believer!
I agree that our respective national perceptions of WWII are heavily skewed by propaganda. It's dangerous to reduce Hitler and the Nazis to cartoon cutouts the way Hollywood and other forces have, because it blinds people to how easy it is to slide from policies based on reasons to abject evil. They think, well, there's no way we could ever turn out like the Nazis because they were the personification of Satan, whereas we are reasonable people who are responding rationally to real issues. When it comes down to it, the step from rational policies to atrocity can be ever so slight, almost imperceptible. Look how easily the United States has utterly abandoned its fealty to its own Constitution and the rule of law, setting up places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and total police state surveillance through the NSA, CIA, and FBI. American citizens are disappeared in numbers into black sites in Chicago [theguardian.com], where they are tortured and held without access to counsel.
It's also hard to argue the pernicious, persistent evil that is the international banking system. Those people are utterly amoral and corrupt and must be rooted out. The Unaoil scandal, the Panama Papers, LIBOR-rate fixing, drug cartel money laundering, subprime mortgage crisis, and many, many other scandals (and none of those are older than 10 years, BTW), prove that.
But the way you interleave apologia for Hitler in all that is sinister. It's not that we should condemn him and the Nazis less, as you wish, but that we ought to condemn parties like Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton more. It's not to displace all moral culpability onto international bankers or some other party, as you wish, but to recognize that we all bear responsibility to cleave to honor and moral rectitude rather than succumb to mindless terror. Even if all we can individually do is to speak up, we all must. The answer to moral depravity is not to call, "Everybody does it, so it's OK," the way you're doing here and the way, say, the NSA's defenders have, but to denounce and oppose it vehemently everywhere. Excusing it makes you an accessory to the crime.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Thursday May 12 2016, @02:34PM
"Everybody does it, so it's OK," the way you're doing here and the way, say, the NSA's defenders have, but to denounce and oppose it vehemently everywhere. Excusing it makes you an accessory to the crime.
Hear, hear.
Or the common refrain "hey, your country is doing it, too; you can't criticize us for doing it." To which I often say, "I wish my country wasn't doing it either."
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Thursday May 12 2016, @09:46PM
Or even worse. "You are committing war crimes too."
No, I am not committing any war crimes. And I have been voting against the establishment in my country that has been for the past 2 administrations.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Thursday May 12 2016, @02:50PM
And indeed, painting Hitler and the Nazis as cartoonishly inhuman monsters is a good way to fail to notice when other people try to do what they did.
By all appearances:
- Hitler was a very bitter paranoid drug addict, angry about the loss in WW I and his completely failed career as an artist, who was on a mission to Make Germany Great Again.
- Goebbels was a flat-out sociopath, out for what was best for Goebbels, not for anyone else, and hitched himself to Hitler because that seemed to be profitable. But he also seems to have had a homicidal-suicidal streak along the same lines as Reverend Jim Jones of the People's Temple.
- The early Nazis (the S.A. in particular) were bullies who wanted a chance to beat people up without consequences. Those kinds of people are never hard to find, anywhere.
- The professional officers in the German military (Rommel, Paulus, etc) were mostly following their orders, but do not seem to have been fans of Hitler. The feeling was mutual. But of course, they followed Hitler's orders, in part to try to save their own necks.
- The early part of the war was fought by the established German army, and that again was mostly professional soldiers following orders.
- The later part of the war was fought mostly by conscripts. Those guys mostly just wanted to somehow get through alive.
- The real fanatics were the S.S., who did in fact want to kill as many Jews as they could get their hands on. Some of them, of course, were just the sort of bullies that had joined the S.A. earlier.
They weren't nuts (at least, at first). They were evil bastards who made it legal to be an evil bastard and illegal to not be an evil bastard. There's a difference.
As to what to do about Nazis and Nazi-like people, at the very least, you refuse to cooperate [businessinsider.com] (that guy was killed, in part because he refused to salute Hitler).
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday May 12 2016, @04:09PM
As to what to do about Nazis and Nazi-like people, at the very least, you refuse to cooperate (that guy was killed, in part because he refused to salute Hitler).
Do you have a link to an actual page about that guy?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday May 12 2016, @04:34PM
Read all about August Landmesser [csmonitor.com], the man in that photograph.
I actually had it somewhat wrong: He wasn't killed for it. However, the Jewish woman who he was trying to marry died in a concentration camp, and he was drafted and MIA.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday May 12 2016, @04:24PM
The list you laid out is important, because it reconnects the roots of Nazism to its banal, reasonable origins. But I would reiterate that sociopathy was not unique to the German High Command, and in fact obtains in American government to an alarming degree today. Nothing structural remains between the everyday of American society now, and the pathological path that was Nazi Germany then.
There are no massive protests against the NSA on the streets of America today. Nobody is decrying the massive gap between exit polls and reported vote tallies in the 2016 Presidential primary races.
I wish Soylentils and everyone else would read and process what you're writing, because it's important. We're skittering about on the surface of a perception bubble that's about to burst.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Thursday May 12 2016, @04:43PM
Not entirely true. There are two differences that matter quite a bit:
1. Americans for the most part have enough to eat. The Germans during the rise of the Nazis didn't. That made the Germans more susceptible to the more despicable aspects of Hitler's rhetoric, because hungry people can't think straight (I know, I've gone hungry for financial reasons before).
2. The opposition is much more organized and unified. Hitler only got about 35% of the vote when elected into power, and only ended up in charge because the remaining 65% was fractured among 5 other parties. By contrast, there's typically only 1 opposition party in the US government, so they're much more able to act as a unified force to stop someone with that much of a fringe idea.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 12 2016, @11:40PM
Hitler only got about 35% of the vote
Yup. 37.27 percent.
Note also that over a quarter million voted None Of The Above or had their ballots rejected.
Hitler [...] ended up in charge because the remaining 65% was fractured among 5 other parties
Actually, the number of parties in the German election in July 1932 was **61**. [wikipedia.org]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 12 2016, @02:29PM
delousing their clothes with Zyklon-B
while they were still wearing them
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Thursday May 12 2016, @09:41PM
You are just insane. I am not sure if anything in your post is true aside from, "history lies", which everyone with half a brain already knows.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh