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?

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?

punk rebel ecks posted:

List the major ones.

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.

They've been pretty busy.

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.

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.

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

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 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?

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).

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.

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“).

Since the Chinese Communist Party has figured out these rules, it can have a high degree of confidence in the success of its policies. Far being a cynical post-truth manipulator like Putin, Xi gives every sign of being a true believer in his brand of pseudo-scientific, authoritarian, developmental Marxism. His confident nationalism in foreign policy and confident interventionism in economic policy are both underpinned by a high degree of epistemic confidence that he knows how the world really works.

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

icantfindaname posted:

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.

Silver2195 posted:

You can be a Marxist without being a Marxist-Leninist.

Venomous posted:

Moreover, you can be a communist without being a statist

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Silver2195 posted:

And I'm unaware of any official US government statement specifically using the word "genocide" with regard to Native Americans.

punk rebel ecks posted:

Oh, that's good to know. I was told otherwise by people. I guess they were "experts" on Japanese culture.


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.


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).

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.

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.

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

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.

LimburgLimbo posted:

PRE try literally googling poo poo for even a moment before saying tons of dumb poo poo tia

punk rebel ecks posted:

I see. Thank you.


I already stated that I couldn't find some stuff on Google. Don't appreciate the rude response.

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 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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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:

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.

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.

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).

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 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

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

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.

NikkolasKing posted:

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")

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.

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")