Rape of Nanking, the forgotten Holocaust

[Guest lazyphil]

<<We could just as easily have consigned aboriginal people to the role of a servant class, like Mexicans in California,>>

 

Good post but the above puzzles me abit, if you're talking about Hispanic Mexicans that is which you must be??, I dont think Aztec desended Mexicans work in the US. On the subject of Mexicans, why dont they speak English and insist on spanish as their chosen language in the USA, I dont recall the Spanish immigrants to the Americas learning to speak the native tounge of the Maya or Incas etc, the immigrant Spanish has an appalling human rights record in Guatamala up to the present day....according to Newsnight anyway ::......I think the Hindu caste system in India is revolting as some of the horrible crimes against peoples of the British Empire, its a vile backward fucked up system but because its India it gets said this is the way its always been.....

[khunsanuk]

Hi,

 

"I dont recall the Spanish immigrants to the Americas learning to speak the native tounge of the Maya or Incas etc"

 

That's because they had no intention of living amongst them. Their mind was on conquest, not immigration.

 

Sanuk!

[Guest]

>>>How many countries, let alone former colonies, have been able to reconcile their 'modern' populations with their original inhabitants ?<<<

 

 

 

are white australia and aboriginal australia really reconciled?

have the perpetrators ofsome of the injustices, such as the child kidnappings, have been taken "to justice"?

 

anyhow, i just tried to point out here that singling out japan (and other non-western cultures) as more cruel than others is a completely flawed position. we, western culture, have far more dirt accumulated over the millenia than any other culture.

[gobbledonk]

are white australia and aboriginal australia really reconciled?

have the perpetrators ofsome of the injustices, such as the child kidnappings, have been taken "to justice"?

 

'No' on both counts - our PM refuses to say 'sorry' on behalf of the (non-aboriginal) Australian people, and I'm not aware of a single criminal case against an individual, although there have been class action suits against government and religious arms.

 

If you wish to read more on the land rights granted to our aboriginal people, this is a start .

[Guest]

dunno, but coming back to STH's basic hypothesis which singles out japan as cruel and resilient to demands of an apology for it's history, and extrapolating on the imagined moral superiority of the western culture - well,... i don't really see much of a moral difference between japan and, in this case, australia.

[MaiLuk]

>>anyhow, i just tried to point out here that singling out japan (and other non-western cultures) as more cruel than others is a completely flawed position. we, western culture, have far more dirt accumulated over the millenia than any other culture. <<

 

Well the nanking episode seems to contradict this. The numbers estimated are 300,000 but of course may be flawed. In any event, the japanese were ruthless. To say that the west is *more* ruthless is a stretch. All cultures seem to have drowned themselves in blood at some point, and likely will again.

 

Which begs the question: We are all human regardless of culture. Is the killing just part of human nature?

[Guest]

i don't really like to go down the number game in qualifying moral actions. nangking is one of the outrageous events of human nastyness, and so are many others, such as the treatment of aboriginess in australia, of indians in the US, of jews in nazi germany, etc.

 

 

>>>Which begs the question: We are all human regardless of culture. Is the killing just part of human nature?<<<

 

it appears so.

 

i always wonder how some hypothetical alien race might view us humans - as the most dangerously aggressive race nature ever came up with? but then, maybe that fictional alien race is far more extreme than us. who knows?

[gobbledonk]

i don't really see much of a moral difference between japan and, in this case, australia.

 

The difference, as I see it, is that white Australia is acutely aware of the injustices doled out to aboriginal people - we didnt (or couldnt...) return to our island and pretend it never happened. How many Japanese kids have history texts which detail atrocities committed by their military forces in WWII ?

 

Whatever our failings, Australian historians have made no attempt to gloss over the sins of the past, and dramatisations such as The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith have been part of school curriculums for over 20 years. Whether this has resulted in a more tolerant, compassionate society remains to be seen.

[Lusty]

pattaya127 said:

our family has vietnamese friends who saw what the japanese did in their country, and to this day, they can't taste japanese food, or very little anything japanese. the memories come back. I doubt these are about isolated events. All our countries have shown cruelty, but there is something about men martyrising others, one by one, on the scale of a city, for months.

 

i think japanese have a hard time themselves to comprehend the atrocities, and there is still a lot of denial, which lies behind the unapologetic attitude, i'd say.

 

I saw a docu on the river Kwai bridge construction. They had old japanese soldiers, still alive, and the denial was painful. They insisted they treated the prisoners humanly, that they saw very few die, and if there had been careless manhandling, they would have seen it. I pity these souls, they spent all their lives trying to forget what they had been accomplices to.

I knew an old boy who worked on the Burma railway(died awhile back).He did manage to escape albeit briefly.When they caught him,they cut all his toes off with bolt croppers .

I'm sure I read somewhere that an incendiary bomb raid on Tokyo killed a 140,000 in one single night.More than both A bombs combined .

[thai3]

flyonzewall said:

. we, western culture, have far more dirt accumulated over the millenia than any other culture.

 

Not much to choose between the murdering of millions of Jews by the Germans, the millions of Russians murdered by Stalin and all the others by totalitarian governments.The Japs cannot really be singled out as babarians.-peter