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punk rebel ecks posted:IIRC doesn't a majority of the Japanese public and government severely downplay or not even acknowledge their war crimes during WWII? For real, dawg, do you have even the slightest notion of the horrors the us has let loose in the last 100 years?
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# ? Aug 29, 2019 03:38 |
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# ? May 13, 2024 06:42 |
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A big flaming stink posted:For real, dawg, do you have even the slightest notion of the horrors the us has let loose in the last 100 years? List the major ones.
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# ? Aug 29, 2019 03:50 |
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punk rebel ecks posted:List the major ones. Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Brazil, the Congo, Vietnam, Korea (believe it or not, the North wasn't always the worst Korea), Iraq, the 1949 Syria coup, the 1953 Iran coup, Japanese internment camps, Reagan's AIDS genocide, two Klans, and whatever the gently caress is going on with that decades-old government child trafficking ring that keeps showing up. They've been pretty busy.
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# ? Aug 29, 2019 04:02 |
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I'm starting to think that punk rebel ecks's shtick of asking dumb questions in the country-specific threads is a deliberate gimmick rather than genuine naivete. Assuming it's sincere: stop doing that. Not only is it annoying, but D&D goons' answers to the kind of loaded questions you ask are likely to be incomplete and skewed anyway. Try reading news articles and/or books instead, while being aware that those are also incomplete and skewed, just less so than what you're getting from Internet randos. But I guess I'm also an Internet rando, so you're free to ignore me. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 04:21 on Aug 29, 2019 |
# ? Aug 29, 2019 04:09 |
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Darth Walrus posted:Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Brazil, the Congo, Vietnam, Korea (believe it or not, the North wasn't always the worst Korea), Iraq, the 1949 Syria coup, the 1953 Iran coup, Japanese internment camps, Reagan's AIDS genocide, two Klans, and whatever the gently caress is going on with that decades-old government child trafficking ring that keeps showing up. There's a part of Ian Buruma's book on Germany vs Japan war memory where he relates an anecdote of talking to a Japanese guy about Japan's invasion of China and how they should apologize more, and the Japanese guy says yeah well you invaded Vietnam and did basically the same list of horrible crimes and have never apologized, and this is presented as proof that the Japanese Don't Get It Also another thing to point out is that the dominant liberal interpretation of the Holocaust and the one the German establishment has adopted is that it was the summum malum of human history and non-comparable to anything else precisely because it had no rational motivation beyond a simple discriminatory xenophobia and hostility towards individual moral autonomy. Whereas stuff like European colonization, Native American genocide, African chattel slavery, etc, all had "rational" capitalist motivation and were therefore not as bad. The fact is the stuff Japan did doesn't really fit the Holocaust model all that well. It didn't invade China simply because of a liberal concept of racism-as-subjective-discrimination, it had ulterior geopolitical and economic motives. And the dominant explanation of Japan's WW2 crimes in postwar Japan was a Marxist one which saw them, along with European colonization, Native American genocide, chattel slavery, and fascism as a political phenomenon as simply the final and highest stage of capitalist exploitation and brutality, and not really through a liberal moral-autonomist lens. Meanwhile the liberal-moral-autonomist people in postwar Japan like Maruyama Masao didn't really care about China or Japan's other imperial victims all that much or at all, instead focusing on the dissenter within Japan This doesn't sit well with people like Buruma and the people writing the lovely op-eds about Japan's apologies or whatever. I read Buruma's book a while ago so I might be misremembering, but I also recall him basically acknowledging this and morally equating the Marxist and pacifist left in postwar Japan with the revisionist right. Which gets back to the opening anecdote, that the Japanese guy would compare the invasion of China to a lesser, just-part-of-liberal-capitalist-business episode like Vietnam and not the Holocaust is why they don't get it. The apologies that Japan has issued and the "official" "centrist" interpretation of Japan's past by more liberal LDP governments is the same exactly as that adopted by American liberalism towards America's past, that yes some mistakes were made, and we can acknowledge them individually, but in the long run our national project is still morally good and we have the arc of history on our side. Literally the same as Obama or Hillary. Japan Is Already Great Finally this feeds into a broader problem that the general refusal to take Marxism seriously really makes it difficult to understand Japan's 20th century history. Also the rest of East Asia. It's fascinating watching mainstream liberals look at Xi Jinping after 30 years of insisting that China's not really Marxist and it's just a show and beginning to wonder hey wait a minute does this guy actually take this stuff seriously? All that Marxism in China originally came through Japanese translation of course. Or take someone like Miyazaki. Most people know he's some sort of progressive, but he's not really a "liberal", he's a Marxist. The point of his movies is that Industrial Capitalism Is Bad. Not something the Atlantic Magazine or the New York Times would find very appealing icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 05:17 on Aug 29, 2019 |
# ? Aug 29, 2019 04:47 |
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Silver2195 posted:I'm starting to think that punk rebel ecks's shtick of asking dumb questions in the country-specific threads is a deliberate gimmick rather than genuine naivete. I always get divisive responses from my questions. Some people love them and tell me to keep them coming as they result in interesting discussions. Others say that I am dumb and annoying. I've learned not to really care what people think. I'm sorry if my posts annoy you, but you can always put me on ignore. If enough people in this thread say "Punk rebel ecks you are dumb, stop posting in this thread", I will leave. icantfindaname posted:There's a part of Ian Buruma's book on Germany vs Japan war memory where he relates an anecdote of talking to a Japanese guy about Japan's invasion of China and how they should apologize more, and the Japanese guy says yeah well you invaded Vietnam and did basically the same list of horrible crimes and have never apologized, and this is presented as proof that the Japanese Don't Get It Excellent post. However, I am a bit surprised as I was under the impression that you strongly dislike Communism and Marxism as you are often critical of it in some threads (including once in my own).
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# ? Aug 29, 2019 05:47 |
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rebel ecks punk you are dumb; do not stop posting
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# ? Aug 29, 2019 05:54 |
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icantfindaname posted:It's fascinating watching mainstream liberals look at Xi Jinping after 30 years of insisting that China's not really Marxist and it's just a show and beginning to wonder hey wait a minute does this guy actually take this stuff seriously? What has he done to make people think that? Sure he's authoritarian, but China has hardly abandoned "capitalism with chinese characteristics" on his watch.
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# ? Aug 29, 2019 06:17 |
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punk rebel ecks posted:Excellent post. However, I am a bit surprised as I was under the impression that you strongly dislike Communism and Marxism as you are often critical of it in some threads (including once in my own). I don't remember that? Marxism is Good, Actually, and the NYT and others of its ideological ilk are Not Marxist Charlz Guybon posted:What has he done to make people think that? Sure he's authoritarian, but China has hardly abandoned "capitalism with chinese characteristics" on his watch. I like this guy's analysis. Xi's China clearly isn't a pure Marxist utopia but the Marxist heritage is still definitely there and important https://andrewbatson.com/2018/06/28/there-are-laws-of-history-and-they-work-in-chinas-favor/ quote:This sounds very much like a conclusion that I also have come to: Xi Jinping’s thinking really comes out of a 19th-century social-science worldview. He has a high degree of confidence that objective laws governing the workings of society and the economy exist, that knowing these laws does not pose any particular philosophical or practical difficulties, and therefore that these laws form a solid basis for government policy (see my post “Reading the Communist Manifesto with Xi Jinping“). https://andrewbatson.com/2018/04/30/reading-the-communist-manifesto-with-xi-jinping/
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# ? Aug 29, 2019 06:45 |
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icantfindaname posted:I don't remember that? Marxism is Good, Actually, and the NYT and others of its ideological ilk are Not Marxist A big flaming stink posted:rebel ecks punk you are dumb; do not stop posting I can't figure out whether you like me or not.
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# ? Aug 29, 2019 07:47 |
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There are many parts of this analysis that I take issue with but the biggest oversight is that you do not even mention the role played by the atomic bombs in how the events of WWII are generally framed in Japan. If you will a "summum malum" that was unfairly and inexplicably done to them. Though, interestingly, the perpetrator itself is mostly muted in mainstraim discourse and the overall takeaway is a bland "we suffered a lot, war is bad and should never happen again". Btw this attitude is also reflected in the portrayal of, for example, the actions of Japan in South East Asia. Even very critical works like Fires on the Plain or the radical The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On focus more on the suffering of common Japanese soldiers than on anything done to the people they conquered. true.spoon fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Aug 30, 2019 |
# ? Aug 29, 2019 08:51 |
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punk rebel ecks posted:It was a while ago. In this thread you critcized the growth of the USSR. I also recall you saying in another thread of how Russia was already developing rapidly before WWI. You can be a Marxist without being a Marxist-Leninist.
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# ? Aug 29, 2019 17:55 |
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Moreover, you can be a communist without being a statist
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# ? Aug 29, 2019 18:06 |
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Silver2195 posted:You can be a Marxist without being a Marxist-Leninist. Venomous posted:Moreover, you can be a communist without being a statist Tell this to CSPAM.
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# ? Aug 29, 2019 19:00 |
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punk rebel ecks posted:IIRC doesn't a majority of the Japanese public and government severely downplay or not even acknowledge their war crimes during WWII? sorry, I find this series of turns (where you respond to a statement about Japan with a statement about the US, then when you get a reply about the US you ask a question about Japan) to be annoying. If you want to make comparisons, make comparisons: don’t just imply them by changing the subject.
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# ? Aug 30, 2019 03:33 |
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prisoner of waffles posted:sorry, I find this series of turns (where you respond to a statement about Japan with a statement about the US, then when you get a reply about the US you ask a question about Japan) to be annoying. If you want to make comparisons, make comparisons: don’t just imply them by changing the subject. Okay. The US acknowledges internment camps, native american genocide, and black oppression. Sure not to the extent that it should, but still does none the less. In contrast Japan seems to outright deny things like comfort women and that the emperor had any knowledge or control of what was going on in China or with their POWs.
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# ? Aug 30, 2019 04:45 |
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punk rebel ecks posted:Okay. The US acknowledges internment camps, native american genocide, and black oppression. Sure not to the extent that it should, but still does none the less. In contrast Japan seems to outright deny things like comfort women and that the emperor had any knowledge or control of what was going on in China or with their POWs. "They" in the sense of the government, in official statements, doesn't deny the sexual slavery thing, although individual politicians do deny it. I guess you have a point re: Hirohito's culpability, although that's in part because the US decided not to pin any blame on him. And I'm unaware of any official US government statement specifically using the word "genocide" with regard to Native Americans. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 05:20 on Aug 30, 2019 |
# ? Aug 30, 2019 05:18 |
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Silver2195 posted:"They" in the sense of the government, in official statements, doesn't deny the sexual slavery thing, although individual politicians do deny it. Oh, that's good to know. I was told otherwise by people. I guess they were "experts" on Japanese culture. Silver2195 posted:I guess you have a point re: Hirohito's culpability, although that's in part because the US decided not to pin any blame on him. Yeah, I watched a documentary and there was some politician who had an assassination attempt on him for just simply saying "Maybe the emperor might have knew?" back in the '90s. Not sure if it's still like that today. Silver2195 posted:And I'm unaware of any official US government statement specifically using the word "genocide" with regard to Native Americans. I guess "genocide" was a bit too strong to word it. Though there are higher ranking people in the US government who use that language. Either way, much if not all these things are taught in school. Again not well, but it's still covered by the vast majority of the country (exceptions are private schools and I've heard the state of Florida but I can't find evidence of that). punk rebel ecks fucked around with this message at 05:29 on Aug 30, 2019 |
# ? Aug 30, 2019 05:26 |
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punk rebel ecks posted:Oh, that's good to know. I was told otherwise by people. I guess they were "experts" on Japanese culture. Also true of Japan, I believe; the far-right revisionist textbooks that cause international controversies occasionally are used in only a small minority of Japanese schools.
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# ? Aug 30, 2019 05:30 |
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PRE try literally googling poo poo for even a moment before saying tons of dumb poo poo tia
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# ? Aug 30, 2019 05:31 |
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Silver2195 posted:Also true of Japan, I believe; the far-right revisionist textbooks that cause international controversies occasionally are used in only a small minority of Japanese schools. Unfortunately they’ve made gains though, used to be 1% now it’s like 5+% or something, need to check the actual numbers. Also even the ones that aren’t openly revisionist don’t address it as well as they should, but nonetheless the narrative which is often pushed that big old Monolithic Other the Mysterious Oriental Japanese Race as one all deny wartime crimes and aggression is dumb and honestly insulting considering the many voices in Japan that have been fighting for more attention for past crimes, and organizations like the teachers union which has been a bastion against the creeping far right nationalism seen in every industrialized nation
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# ? Aug 30, 2019 05:41 |
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As an aside anyone with even a passing interest in specifically Nanking and general war crime denial should Run not walk and pic up The Nanking Atrocity, 1937-38: Complicating the Picture (Asia-Pacific Studies: Past and Present). A second edition came out in 2017; I believe the Kindle edition on Amazon is the first edition but you can get a pdf or the new intro at the publisher website. It’s a really good overview of academic articles which cover a ton of various aspects of Nanking, the various voices in Japan, related subject, analysis using contemporary primary sources, etc. It’s essentially a must read for context to discussions where people really really rarely actually cite or have read actual academia around the subject.
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# ? Aug 30, 2019 05:51 |
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LimburgLimbo posted:Unfortunately they’ve made gains though, used to be 1% now it’s like 5+% or something, need to check the actual numbers. Rather than an orientalist thing, I think a lot of it has to do with other Asians. At least in China they very deliberately portray it whenever some far right demagogue backbencher diet rep says the Nanking massacre didn't happen as The Japanese Government Denying War Crimes Again and also All Japanese People Agree with Them Just Look at This Textbook. I'm not familiar with Korea they may have a different take but China really likes the monolithic portrayal.
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# ? Aug 30, 2019 06:11 |
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Silver2195 posted:Also true of Japan, I believe; the far-right revisionist textbooks that cause international controversies occasionally are used in only a small minority of Japanese schools. I see. Thank you. LimburgLimbo posted:PRE try literally googling poo poo for even a moment before saying tons of dumb poo poo tia I already stated that I couldn't find some stuff on Google. Don't appreciate the rude response.
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# ? Aug 30, 2019 06:29 |
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punk rebel ecks posted:I see. Thank you. fwiw a certain degree of rudeness is pretty endemic to these here forums, especially when politics is the subject. it will probably feel like a pain in the rear end, but when asking questions where you know that you don't have a lot of background, you may want to indicate that. posters On Here are, in my estimation, relatively wary of people who ask simple sounding questions about topics that are complex and controversial. (personally I think that's a reasonable if not always pleasant-to-others way to be)
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# ? Aug 30, 2019 14:59 |
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I see thank you. And thanks for your previous responses as well.
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# ? Aug 30, 2019 16:13 |
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Like mentioned before, I think the problem in how past crimes are engaged with in the Japanese mainstream lies more in the general framing and less in outright denial. I recently saw the documentary Boy Soldiers: The Secret War In Okinawa about the use of child soldiers in the battles of the Okinawa Islands. It also touches on complicity of islanders in some atrocities of the army and in the end connects these events to the present in an unusually explicit political manner. In the Q&A afterwards the director talked about how these events are relatively unknown and how Japanese audiences expressed surprise and shock (something promptly validated by a Japanese viewer at the screening I was at). The interesting thing for me is, that I almost cannot imagine a film about German atrocities during WWII that would get that kind of response from Germans. While there are probably many little known horror stories you can tell, none would elicit any kind of shocked surprise. They were Nazis afterall. icantfindaname's post made me reflect a bit on this. I don't want to derail this too much but if you guys are interested in the German approach as a contrast I could write up my rumminations.
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# ? Aug 30, 2019 17:46 |
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true.spoon posted:Like mentioned before, I think the problem in how past crimes are engaged with in the Japanese mainstream lies more in the general framing and less in outright denial. This is probably true. I would say that it's Germany that's unusual in this regard, though, not Japan.
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# ? Aug 30, 2019 17:54 |
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true.spoon posted:Like mentioned before, I think the problem in how past crimes are engaged with in the Japanese mainstream lies more in the general framing and less in outright denial. I'm not an expert by any means on the popular historiography of the Holocaust in Germany, but my understanding is that a lot of the institutionalization of Holocaust memory is a recent, really post-1980s thing. As of 1979 the broadcasting of the Holocaust TV series in Germany was politically scandalous, the LDP-equivalent centrist-conservative party (Merkel's party!) tried to pressure the public broadcaster not to show it, and the main tabloid newspaper of the German right called it trash and implied it was made by Hollywood to pander to an American Jewish audience https://www.jstor.org/stable/487971?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents https://www.nytimes.com/1979/01/21/archives/on-eve-of-airing-of-holocaust-west-germans-argue-its-merits.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/arch.../?noredirect=on The post-80s shift to basically all sides in German politics agreeing to make the Holocaust the center of the official national narrative also coincides with the disappearance of Communism, which is important because the anti-Communist aspect of Nazism/fascism no longer really had to be discussed or dealt with in as much depth. The non-Jewish Eastern European victims of Nazi Germany, particularly Soviet, don't have the same emphasis in the memory culture, pre and post 80s, and the Nolte-revisionist view that Communism and Nazism were morally equivalent is also actually not really revisionism but a well established part of the centrist consensus, and is enshrined legally. The same laws that ban Nazi party symbolism apply equally to the Communist Party. Unlike in Japan(!) the Communist Party in postwar West Germany was banned in 1956 and the suggestion that Die Linke, the leftmost party and partial successor to the East Germany SED, is in violation of the same laws is a regular part of the centrist discourse. Lots of Russians and Ukrainians were murdered by the Nazis, but, well, their own government was just as bad, so This ties back into Japan too, because the official view of at least part of the 1930s regime and their successors in the postwar like Kishi was that the war in China was a crusade to save China from Bolshevism. Kishi wasn't anti-Chinese or anti-Korean in a sense simplistically equivalent to Nazi anti-semitisim, he was anti-Communist in an environment where Communism represented an independent Chinese and Korean nationalism. Obviously he was still racist and thought Chinese and Koreans were inferior to Japanese, but he thought they ought to be part of a Japanese Empire and were rightful subjects of the Showa-Tenno. It's not until the 80s and beyond in Japan that the nationalist right finally drops that aspect and becomes outright and simplistically anti-Chinese and anti-Korean in a 単一民族 sense This is also a really good book on at least the academic-historical development of war memory in both countries. It doesn't cover the more mainstream/mass-media and education aspect though. One thing it points out is that academic historians in postwar Japan at least until the 80s were overwhelmingly Marxists, but they had very little influence on the mainstream textbooks which had the Ministry of Education endorsed "just a big box of depoliticized, decontextualized facts" approach, whereas West German academics, who were actually much more conservative, had much more influence on the the textbook and mass media narratives. In the early, pre-1960 postwar period straight up conservatives dominated the German academy, and then over the next 20 years or so more left-liberal types displaced them, who produced the historiography that placed the Holocaust at the center of Germany's 20th Century history. Then post-1980s the liberal hegemony in Germany continues, moving slightly to the right by clarifying that yes Stalin was just as bad as Hitler, whereas in Japan the Marxist hegemony collapsed and you have had a sort of standoff between remaining Marxists, liberals, and right wing revisionists https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520259447/the-quest-for-the-lost-nation icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Aug 30, 2019 |
# ? Aug 30, 2019 20:23 |
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The memory of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust have been contentious issues since the end of WWII. From the very beginning there were prominent politicians arguing for forgetting and reintigration for the sake of rebuilding the country but there were also prominent politicians arguing for collective guilt and shame and taking responsibility for the Nazis' crimes. This process was not easy or straight. For example one of the major grievances of the student movement was how the stablishment failed to properly deal with the Nazi legacy. However, and this cannot be stressed enough, in the end the fight was decisively won for an active and open engagement with the past. icantfindaname posted:Also another thing to point out is that the dominant liberal interpretation of the Holocaust and the one the German establishment has adopted is that it was the summum malum of human history and non-comparable to anything else precisely because it had no rational motivation beyond a simple discriminatory xenophobia and hostility towards individual moral autonomy. Whereas stuff like European colonization, Native American genocide, African chattel slavery, etc, all had "rational" capitalist motivation and were therefore not as bad. icantfindaname posted:I'm not an expert by any means on the popular historiography of the Holocaust in Germany, but my understanding is that a lot of the institutionalization of Holocaust memory is a recent, really post-1980s thing. As of 1979 the broadcasting of the Holocaust TV series in Germany was politically scandalous, the LDP-equivalent centrist-conservative party (Merkel's party!) tried to pressure the public broadcaster not to show it, and the main tabloid newspaper of the German right called it trash and implied it was made by Hollywood to pander to an American Jewish audience icantfindaname posted:The post-80s shift to basically all sides in German politics agreeing to make the Holocaust the center of the official national narrative also coincides with the disappearance of Communism, which is important because the anti-Communist aspect of Nazism/fascism no longer really had to be discussed or dealt with in as much depth. icantfindaname posted:The non-Jewish Eastern European victims of Nazi Germany, particularly Soviet, don't have the same emphasis in the memory culture, pre and post 80s, and the Nolte-revisionist view that Communism and Nazism were morally equivalent is also actually not really revisionism but a well established part of the centrist consensus, and is enshrined legally. Merkel (2015) posted:Radikal wird man, wenn man zum Beispiel die Singularität des Holocaust nicht anerkennt. (One must be considered a radical if one, for example, does not accept the singularity of the Holocaust). icantfindaname posted:The same laws that ban Nazi party symbolism apply equally to the Communist Party. Unlike in Japan(!) the Communist Party in postwar West Germany was banned in 1956 and the suggestion that Die Linke, the leftmost party and partial successor to the East Germany SED, is in violation of the same laws is a regular part of the centrist discourse. Lots of Russians and Ukrainians were murdered by the Nazis, but, well, their own government was just as bad, so Btw since you brought up a paper by Jeffrey Herf, you might be interested in his Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys, where he contrasts how East and West Germany dealt with the Nazi past. I haven't read it and am no expert either but apparently the approach of the GDR was kind of similar to the approach taken by Japan, with predictable results as far as the elimination of Nazi thought goes. To loop back at least a little to Japan: After thinking about all this, I don't think the German approach would work very well in Japan or most any country as it is really too closely connected to the enormity of the Holocaust. true.spoon fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Sep 2, 2019 |
# ? Aug 31, 2019 13:35 |
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true.spoon posted:It is possible that you can find quotes that might imply such a viewpoint but in this generality this is simply wrong. The Holocaust is indeed a summum malum for Germans (at least in mainstream ideology) but this is a ground truth and not a conclusion reached after arguing the fine details of motivations and cruelties. The singularity of the Holocaust is pretty dogmatic in Germany with all the good and bad that entails. Arguing the details would appear tasteless and asking a German to do so might make him suspect you to be a Nazi. That's what I meant. It's bad on a priori terms, not after comparing empirically to various other events in history quote:In fact, this very same Holocaust series was seen as a watershed moment in how the holocaust was discussed and perceived in mainstream culture. The series had high viewership and an overall pretty positive reception. This of course also means that yes, much of the culture of memory was yet to be established but on the other hand calls this Fair. I should also clarify that the hostility it did face shouldn't be exaggerated, certainly compared to Japan where you were literally in danger of being murdered by right-wing terrorists for suggesting that Hirohito may have made some mistakes into the 1980s quote:Nolte's views are absolutely not mainstream nor the consensus even in conservative (let alone "centrist") circles. Explicitly espousing his equivocations would be political suicide today: Maybe not in the full, extreme sense of the position, but the idea that Communism was a totalitarian system and thus bad for precisely the same reasons as Nazism, the suppression of a Kantian dignity-as-moral-autonomy, is not part of the consensus view? The idea that the specific crimes of Communism were worse than or even equivalent to the Holocaust is not mainstream, no, but the broader ideology/system of Communism is presented as at least in the same family as Nazism, in the terms of a genericized totalitarianism theory quote:Certainly, Verfassungsfeindlichkeit (going against the constitution) has been applied to both communist and fashist parties and symbols but this does not at all imply general equivalence in the sense you are using but only equivalence in that they are both against the constitution (which is likely true for hardcore communist views). Nowadays these laws are almost exclusively aimed at the right wing. Neither would I say that calls to outlaw Die Linke are a regular part of mainstream discussion. It does imply general equivalence because they're violating the same exact provision of the constitution, namely the protection of, again, human dignity in the Kantian sense. These days the laws aren't focused on the left, but back in the 50s, 60s and 70s they mostly were. The Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz being full of incompetent rightist wingers is a running joke in the German politics thread on these very forums Here's a good article from a while ago critiquing Winkler, who is basically the mainstream view https://newleftreview.org/issues/II113/articles/dylan-riley-metaphysicking-the-west quote:To loop back at least a little to Japan: After thinking about all this, I don't think the German approach would work very well in Japan or most any country as it is really too closely connected to the enormity of the Holocaust. I don't think we actually disagree on very much. The kind of equation between an amalgamated "everything bad the Japanese state did between 1868 and August 1945" and "The Holocaust" that most of the liberal commentariat tend to do with Japan doesn't work on the same theoretical basis as Germany because of the idea of the uniqueness of the Holocaust. (even though that stuff really was bad and should not be minimized!) That's my point. The stuff about anti-Communism in the BRD is sort of a diversion, sorry icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Aug 31, 2019 |
# ? Aug 31, 2019 18:48 |
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punk rebel ecks posted:Either way, much if not all these things are taught in school. Again not well, but it's still covered by the vast majority of the country (exceptions are private schools and I've heard the state of Florida but I can't find evidence of that). I suspect much of the reason the word “genocide” is rarely used in public schooling with reference to acts other than the Holocaust is the concerted campaign by zionists to keep it that way, which as a Jew whose family was decimated by it, I find especially shameful KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Aug 31, 2019 |
# ? Aug 31, 2019 19:03 |
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KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:I attended public schools in Massachusetts (which to be fair are the undisputed best in the country) and while the term genocide was generally not used, the facts and dimensions of Native American subjugation were very thoroughly taught at every level of schooling. I mean, even if the magnitude of the crimes as they occurred in the past are properly taught, you drat well better believe nary a peep is taught about the ongoing genocide in contemporary times
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# ? Aug 31, 2019 19:30 |
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icantfindaname posted:I don't think we actually disagree on very much. The kind of equation between an amalgamated "everything bad the Japanese state did between 1868 and August 1945" and "The Holocaust" that most of the liberal commentariat tend to do with Japan doesn't work on the same theoretical basis as Germany because of the idea of the uniqueness of the Holocaust. (even though that stuff really was bad and should not be minimized!) That's my point. The stuff about anti-Communism in the BRD is sort of a diversion, sorry EDIT: Sorry, just one more thing because I just read up on it: As far as I can tell the ban of the KPD was not based on the article protecting human dignity. Apparently the charges were some variant of treason and the accusation of being against the "freiheitlich demokratische Grundordnung" (free and democratic order) based on some of their more aggressive rhetoric. true.spoon fucked around with this message at 17:10 on Sep 2, 2019 |
# ? Sep 2, 2019 09:25 |
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true.spoon posted:Btw since you brought up a paper by Jeffrey Herf, you might be interested in his Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys, where he contrasts how East and West Germany dealt with the Nazi past. I haven't read it and am no expert either but apparently the approach of the GDR was kind of similar to the approach taken by Japan, with predictable results as far as the elimination of Nazi thought goes. The surge of the AfD in East Germany does speak to that. Also, lol at the thought of any country dealing with their sins in an honest manner. It's rare enough that people can do it. Heck, I can't. Countries should get better at self-reflection and memorializing of mistakes as well as triumphs though (or memorializing awful mistakes as triumphs...) so that the same stupid poo poo doesn't happen as often. Talking about history and framing this is an excellent episode of on the media focused, of course, on the US but where Japan makes a guest appearance: https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/on-the-media-empire-state-mind-1
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# ? Sep 2, 2019 12:25 |
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As a point of comparison, Britain is also a former empire island and Brits almost certainly know nothing of our imperial atrocities. The second in command in the opposition party (John McDonnell) was given a media fuckbarrel for saying that Churchill was bad for the Bengal Famine which killed at least 2 million and more likely 3 million people. No-one even knew what McDonnell was talking about even though it was one of the many big events that led to Gandhi's independence movement gaining such strength. This is to say nothing of how our government has handled the independence of Ireland to this day. Personally this is why I call for the UK-Nihon Union of Fash Islands so I can get cheaper geek poo poo.
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# ? Sep 2, 2019 12:45 |
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I have no real education in this topic so I'd like to get the perspective of informed people. My more Lefty friends think the Holocaust is treated like such a unique crime because it was perpetrated on mainland Europeans. If Hitler had killed a bunch of Africans or Asians instead, he might not be viewed as a great guy but he wouldn't be synonymous with evil like he is today. This kinda goes hand-in-hand with explaining why the crimes of Imperial Japan get overshadowed or overlooked in Western history. They killed a bunch of Asians, that just doesn't get the same level of condemnation from Western historians. (unless it's the Great Leap Forward anyway. Then we "care a lot")
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# ? Sep 2, 2019 13:03 |
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NikkolasKing posted:I have no real education in this topic so I'd like to get the perspective of informed people. mystes fucked around with this message at 13:37 on Sep 2, 2019 |
# ? Sep 2, 2019 13:32 |
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There was a good post on r/AskHistorians about why Generalplan Ost isn't memorialised like the Holocaust, which touches on this kind of thing: link here A key passage: quote:The fact that the Nazi government exerted diplomatic pressure on the Imperial Japanese government to hand over the 18.000 Jews in Shanghai demonstrates that for the Nazis even a comparatively small number of Jews thousands of miles away from any of their territory represented such a danger to them in their minds that they had to die. Many genocides in history were absolutely devastating to the ethnic population they targeted; how many genocides can you name where diplomatic pressure was put on an ally to round up that ethnic group on the other side of the world?
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# ? Sep 2, 2019 13:47 |
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# ? May 13, 2024 06:42 |
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NikkolasKing posted:My more Lefty friends think the Holocaust is treated like such a unique crime because it was perpetrated on mainland Europeans. If Hitler had killed a bunch of Africans or Asians instead, he might not be viewed as a great guy but he wouldn't be synonymous with evil like he is today. This kinda goes hand-in-hand with explaining why the crimes of Imperial Japan get overshadowed or overlooked in Western history. They killed a bunch of Asians, that just doesn't get the same level of condemnation from Western historians. (unless it's the Great Leap Forward anyway. Then we "care a lot") Your Lefty friends have the wrong idea. Generally it's the cold, meticulous, industrialized nature of the Holocaust that makes it so unique. It's why all the imagery focuses on the death camps, and not the good old fashioned massacres in the east that had comparable body counts. People who care about how white and European people are typically do not cry for dead Jews.
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# ? Sep 2, 2019 18:48 |