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The Forum > Article Comments > Where Emperors dare not tread > Comments

Where Emperors dare not tread : Comments

By Tom Clifford, published 16/8/2013

But in 1978 the souls of 14 Class-A War Criminals (those who plan and conduct wars of aggression) seven of whom were hanged after the Tokyo trials, were enshrined.

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When they brutally attacked China, which was not at war with anyone, the Japs demonstrated themselves to be vermin. The expression of post-mortem respect for the worst of those engaged in that massive crime and its escalating downstream crimes demonstrated that many Japs are still vermin. The election of the blatantly unrepentant Abe as PM of Japan confirms it.

All Japs? To know which ones and how many you'd need to know who willingly served in their armed forces during the war, and who and how many supported the troops in thought, word or deed.

Months of thousand-bomber raids, and the violent occupation by justly vengeful Russians, did much to cleanse Germany of dreams of conquest. Germany seems to have learnt the lessons spelt out at Nuremberg. Pity the nations that brought Germany and Japan to heel haven't also learnt.
Posted by EmperorJulian, Friday, 16 August 2013 2:12:03 PM
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Yeah ... this all sucks big time. But so what.

The scourge here is the glorification of militarism, which unfortunately carries the inevitable by-product of glorifying war crimes. You can't separate the two. The only demarcation line is that the side that wins has the luxury of not having to atone for its war crimes or even admit that it committed any.

As for the double standards in why Germany's war crimes are treated differently from those of Japan, this has a lot to do with the highly influential role of the American Jewish lobby in Holocaust remembrance and also the fact that Germany was a long-time imperial rival of England.

While today's war criminals - Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Kissinger, Blair, Clinton (both B and H), Sarkozy, Obama et al - don't have shrines to their souls (although their PR teams are probably working on it), they are being duly worshipped in countless other ways.
Posted by Killarney, Friday, 16 August 2013 4:43:02 PM
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There is a real cultural problem underlying this. Japanese culture does not recognise 'guilt', only 'shame'. We Westerners expect the Japanese to be like the Germans and experience guilt for what they did and proceed to expiate it. That kind of thinking, with which I agree, being myself from the West, does not resonate with the Japanese. What is uppermost in the minds of most Japanese leaders is the 'shame' of having been defeated. People who to us are 'war criminals' are to them something in the nature of 'heroes' who were, unfortunately, defeated. This is not to approve the Japanese attitude; it only seeks to explain it.
Posted by tonyo, Friday, 16 August 2013 6:47:32 PM
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Trendy lefties have a child like belief that everybody on planet Earth is absolutely equal, and that everybody wants peace, and they all think just like us. Then along comes Tony Clifford with an article which plainly displays that Asians do not think like westerners at all.

The Japanese are a very intelligent and martial race who produced the bravest soldiers of WW2. The Japanese had noted that even small countries like Britain, Portugal, Spain, and Holland could become immensely rich world powers provided that they had an empire that they could exploit. This is what their military leaders had in mind when they seized a golden opportunity to grab some of the rich colonies of the western powers who were presently fully occupied with the war in Europe.

From the Japanese perspective, they were simply doing to the Europeans what the Europeans has already done to the Asians. Their call for a "Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere really struck a chord with the nationalist groups in these western Asian colonies who correctly realised that the Pacific war was really a race war. Many Asians welcomed the Japs as fellow Asian liberators from the whites, before they realised that the Japanese were infinitely more cruel and rapacious than the Euros. These nationalist groups then looked to the Euros as their liberators from the Japanese.

It is obviously beyond Tony Clifford's comprehension that the Japs consider themselves, and all of Asia, as victims of European aggression, and that they were Asia's liberators. The Japanese today consider men like Tojo to be true patriots who tried to make Japan a great country and they are sorry that he failed. The Japanese do not think that they did anything wrong by starting the war, any more than any other colonial power who did the same thing for the same reason.

Please note that while western European tertiary educated people think it is fashionable to always oppose the interests of their own people, Japanese tertiary educated people are still intensely patriotic and they think that their western counterparts are barking mad lunatics.
Posted by LEGO, Saturday, 17 August 2013 7:16:21 AM
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I think, from what I can infer, that Lego assumes that my surname is 'Clifford', which it is not. But that is a mere detail.

When I was an undergraduate I spent some time researching the reasons why Japan went to war (that includes her invasion of China, Manchuria, etc., not just what most Westerners would consider the beginning of the war, with the bombing of the American bases on Hawaii). With a father who had fought with the RAAF in WWII, I had been brought up with fairly predictable attitudes to Japanese aggression. But my researches changed my view considerably. I came to understand that Japan saw itself as having every reason to do what it did in the '30s, particularly in the light of European and American attempts to belittle a small but proud nation and deprive it of trade and raw materials. This, of course,combined with the Samurai tradition, officially repudiated during the Meiji restoration but still deeply embedded within the national Weltanschauung, to encourage the militarism of the '30s.

I'm not sure that Lego's position and mine are all that far apart.

Tonyo
Posted by tonyo, Saturday, 17 August 2013 8:30:51 PM
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It looks as if Lego has used the Jap issue as a prop to sneer at people who give a damn (redneck code word “trendy lefties”) and people who study to know what they’re talking about (redneck code “western European tertiary educated people”). The rest is an astounding muddle. The Japs are described as the bravest soldiers of the war, without managing to distinguish between honourable and dishonourable bravery – sacrificing oneself for an honourable or a dishonourable purpose. I guess that makes the killers who flew into the Twin Towers pretty brave. The muddle continues with the Japs conducting a “race war” against China for a decade before hitting the USA over the US blockade of the Jap war supplies – taking advantage of the British being embroiled in a war in Europe (which didn’t break out for eight years after the Jap rampage against Asians started in Manchuria) and millions of Asians (but not Lego) discovering that it wasn’t a race war against Euros at all.

In contrast, Clifford and Tonyo have turned up a genuine insight. Unlike Europeans (and nearly all other by the way), Jap culture knows no shame at having wronged others (“guilt”), only shame at having failed in a vile enterprise. This is familiar also in the criminal underbelly of European society. European street toe-rags know none of the shame of responsibility, only the shamed resentment at having failed or been slighted (“dissed”) or thought to have grassed. This anti-human Jap sociopathy accounts for the culture described by Tom Clfford. It also explains why even a couple of nukes could slow them down but not change a rat mind-set. It was criminal after the war to miss the chance of utterly humiliating them by trying Hirohito and having him beheaded in public by a despised Korean. In droves they still think they’re sons of heaven and dream of a new killing spree. Hence the thumping majority for Abe.
Posted by EmperorJulian, Sunday, 18 August 2013 12:46:44 AM
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