• '12

    I stand by my claim that the Communist Chinese didn’t.  As we all know, didn’t and doesn’t are two entirely different things.  Didn’t refers to a past tense subject.  What I didn’t specifically state was when the didn’t ended or indeed seriously began to end.  Clyde, you state this warming began about 5 years ago, that prior period I do believe is covered by this statement.

    I also read in a few places the communists in China didn’t speak out as much about Nanking as it was the nationalist Chinese who were trying to defend against the Japanese.

    I had read somewhere this thawing began about 10 years ago, in any event, it is true that in the past the Communists didn’t discuss this incident in the way they do now for a variety of reasons.


  • Ok and thanks for a lesson in semantics 101, The communists didnt “discuss” (whatever the hell that is supposed to mean) the nanjing masscare at the level they do today right after the civil war, but they never denied it happened. On the contrary given that it was supposed to be defended by the Nationalists and the commanding General fled before the battle and the city suffered as it did, it was a great topic to point out to the Chinese people how bad the KMT goverment was, Rather then defend their own city they fled and let the people suffer. That jives pretty well with all the communist doctrine they would throw around back then. They never really pressed the issue with Japan itself back then because doing so would hurt trade with Japan which the communist goverment desperately needed (several times trade was disrupted during this period when mention was made of the crimes commited by the Japanese during the war).

    What has changed is a greater focus on the scarfice of the people (KMT or otherwise affiliated) during that period, and what they did for China as a whole (KMT or CCP). A much more honest appraisal of what took place, taking into account the actions of all involved equally has been the outcome which is a good thing. Also, China has placed a great emphasis on getting Japan to accept the responiblity for its actions which it, litteraly could afford to do in the past.

  • '12

    Ugh, you are now going to take issue with my usage of ‘discuss’?  What word would you suggest that I ought to use when referencing the action described as “state control of dissemination of information relating to a particular event”?

    Can we at least agree that in the ‘state slant’ on this topic has changed for the better and more historically accurate?  There seems to be a certain additional lack of freedom in expressing views in China as compared to more traditional forced lacks of expression of opinion in other states.


  • @MrMalachiCrunch:

    Can we at least agree that in the ‘state slant’ on this topic has changed for the better and more historically accurate?  There seems to be a certain additional lack of freedom in expressing views in China as compared to more traditional forced lacks of expression of opinion in other states.

    Yes, that is what I was saying, but apparently when I express this setiment im an A-hole.


  • @aequitas:

    correct me if I�m wrong but I think Japan tried to push forward and adress a commitment for the Geneva Convention to protect civilians during a war and was blocked by others and the beginning of WWII…

    No, this is incorrect, Japan never signed or agreeded to the Geneva convention as it would require them to treat POW’s better then they did their own soliders. So I highly doubt and have seen no evidence to cinfirm that Japan would be trying to push such a thing threw. Also considering their actions towards occupied civilans drunig the war, I find it hard to believe the Japanese would be trying to find a way to protect civilians. quote of Clyde

    15th International Red cross-Conference in Tokyo in 1934

    The Tokyo Conference recognized the value of the draft and asked the ICRC to do everything necessary to arrive at a Convention on the subject.[27 ] The ICRC therefore transmitted the draft to the Federal Council, which undertook to consult the governments most directly concerned; several governments expressed their doubts and, in the view of Federal Councillor Giuseppe Motta, the French government in particular sent " a firm and definite refusal " .[28 ] In the circumstances, the Federal Political Department concluded that the auguries were insufficiently favourable for any real chance of success and refused to convene a diplomatic conference.
    source from :

    http://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/misc/57jmr9.htm


  • ……And? You have conspicuously left out what that resolution was. I did read the article so I know but the paragraph you posted dosnt mention any of that. Also just because the confrence was hosted in Tokyo dosnt mean the Japanese goverment had anything to do with it. They didnt, it was done by the red cross which is an international organization, with its member made up of people from all over the world and not working for or being representitive of any one goverment.

    Now more realisticly from wiki; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Red_Cross
    During the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), the Japanese Red Cross played a vital role in assisting Japanese civilians and wounded soldiers. However, as the Imperial Japanese Army tended to ignore the Geneva Convention, government and military restrictions hampered the ability of the Japanese Red Cross to assist the hundreds of thousands of European military and civilians interned in prison camps in the Japanese-occupied areas of Southeast Asia.

    So while a small group of people in Japan wanted to help and do the right thing, the overwhelming majority of the population, and importantly military and goverment leaders, didnt care to. Japan never signed the Geneva convention and being a member of the IRC is different and unrelated to the Geneva convention


  • @Gargantua:

    Insert Quote

    were the JAPANESE punished enough for their actions?
    rape of nanking bataan death march etc.
    seems the germans paid a high price but did japan?

    Yes.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contest_to_kill_100_people_using_a_sword

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Military_Tribunal_for_the_Far_East

    Twenty-eight Japanese military and political leaders were charged with Class A crimes, and more than 5,700 Japanese nationals were charged with Class B and C crimes, mostly entailing prisoner abuse. China held 13 tribunals of its own, resulting in 504 convictions and 149 executions.

    There is an Irony however… In 37 and 38, when the Japanese were raping, pilliaging, killing, and exploiting people in China…  Only ONE other country came to the table, gave a damn, and did it’s best to end the bloodshed…  That country, was NAZI GERMANY.

    John Rabe for example, a member of the party, was responsible for creating a Safe Zone in the city of Nanking, and creating a psuedo international committee to try and stay civilian executions etc…
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/15/international/asia/15letter.html?pagewanted=all

    Thanks for the links. I gleaned the following points from the article.

    • The Japanese Army behaved brutally in Nanking.

    • The postwar Allied tribunal consisted of those appointed by Allied governments, thereby setting the stage for victors’ justice.

    • Victors’ justice actually occurred, as the prosecution’s main case was very weak.

    • Very serious Allied war crimes committed against Japan or the Japanese were ignored.


    Justice Radhabinod Pal, the Indian justice at the IMTFE, argued that the exclusion of Western colonialism and the use of the atom bomb by the United States from the list of crimes, and judges from the vanquished nations on the bench, signified the “failure of the Tribunal to provide anything other than the opportunity for the victors to retaliate.” [17] In this he was not alone among Indian jurists of the time, one prominent Calcutta barrister writing that the Tribunal was little more than “a sword in a [judge’s] wig”.

    Justice B. V. A. Roling stated, “of course, in Japan we were all aware of the bombings and the burnings of Tokyo and Yokohama and other big cities. It was horrible that we went there for the purpose of vindicating the laws of war, and yet saw every day how the Allies had violated them dreadfully”.

    Pal’s dissenting opinion also raised substantive objections: he found that the entire prosecution case, that there was a conspiracy to commit an act of aggressive war, which would include the brutalization and subjugation of conquered nations, weak. About the Rape of Nanking in particular, he said, after acknowledging the brutality of the incident (and that the “evidence was overwhelming” that “atrocities were perpetrated by the members of the Japanese armed forces against the civilian population… and prisoners of war”), that there was nothing to show that it was the “product of government policy”, and thus that the officials of the Japanese government were directly responsible. Indeed, he said, there is “no evidence, testimonial or circumstantial, concomitant, prospectant, restrospectant, that would in any way lead to the inference that the government in any way permitted the commission of such offenses.” [17]

    In any case, he added, conspiracy to wage aggressive war was not illegal in 1937, or at any point since.[17]


    Making up laws after the fact (in this case laws against wars of aggression) and selectively applying them to vanquished nations only, seems entirely too convenient for the Allied prosecution.

  • Liaison TripleA '11 '10

    With that said Kurt Godel…

    That makes Jodl innocent.  But also… dead, by execution.

    Thus, the United States government is guilty of Murder?  Or is it the internationally community that is to blame?


  • The “funny” thing that happened after World War II was the Allies keeping emperor Hirohito in charge until his natural death.


  • @Gargantua:

    With that said Kurt Godel…

    That makes Jodl innocent.  But also… dead, by execution.

    Thus, the United States government is guilty of Murder?  Or is it the internationally community that is to blame?

    The Allies conducted Soviet-style show trials after the war, against both the Germans and Japanese.


    Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court Harlan Fiske Stone called the Nuremberg trials a fraud. “(Chief U.S. prosecutor) Jackson is away conducting his high-grade lynching party in Nuremberg,” he wrote. “I don’t mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas.”[61]

    Jackson, in a letter discussing the weaknesses of the trial, in October 1945 told U.S. President Harry S. Truman that the Allies themselves “have done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for. The French are so violating the Geneva Convention in the treatment of prisoners of war that our command is taking back prisoners sent to them. We are prosecuting plunder and our Allies are practicing it. We say aggressive war is a crime and one of our allies asserts sovereignty over the Baltic States based on no title except conquest.”[62][63]

    Associate Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas charged that the Allies were guilty of “substituting power for principle” at Nuremberg. “I thought at the time and still think that the Nuremberg trials were unprincipled,” he wrote. “Law was created ex post facto to suit the passion and clamor of the time.”[64]


    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Trials#Criticism

    The above-described trials resulted in a very different outcome than might have been expected, had the trials been conducted by a trustworthy neutral government. (In contrast, the Allied governments which conducted the trials had a strong vested interest in making the Nazis look as bad as possible. The worse the Nazis looked, the better the Allied governments would look for having beaten them.) Also, there is this quote from The Guardian, one of Britain’s most prestigious newspapers:


    Official documents discovered last month at the National Archives at Kew, south-west London, show that the London Cage was a secret torture centre where German prisoners who had been concealed from the Red Cross were beaten, deprived of sleep, and threatened with execution or with unnecessary surgery.

    As horrific as conditions were at the London Cage, Bad Nenndorf was far worse. . . . Initially, most of the detainees were Nazi party members or former members of the SS, rounded up in an attempt to thwart any Nazi insurgency. . . .

    The Foreign Office briefed Clement Attlee, the prime minister, that “the guards had apparently been instructed to carry out physical assaults on certain prisoners with the object of reducing them to a state of physical collapse and of making them more amenable to interrogation”. . . .

    Threats to execute prisoners, or to arrest, torture and murder their wives and children were considered “perfectly proper”, on the grounds that such threats were never carried out. . . .

    One victim of the cold cell punishment was Buttlar, who swallowed the spoon handle to escape. An anti-Nazi, he had spent two years as a prisoner of the Gestapo. “I never in all those two years had undergone such treatments,” he said.


    Had a trustworthy neutral government conducted the postwar trials, it is highly unlikely that the above-described tactics would have been used to extort confessions for use at the Nuremberg Trials.


  • @KurtGodel7:

    @Gargantua:

    With that said Kurt Godel…

    That makes Jodl innocent.  But also… dead, by execution.

    Thus, the United States government is guilty of Murder?  Or is it the internationally community that is to blame?

    The Allies conducted Soviet-style show trials after the war, against both the Germans and Japanese.


    Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court Harlan Fiske Stone called the Nuremberg trials a fraud. “(Chief U.S. prosecutor) Jackson is away conducting his high-grade lynching party in Nuremberg,” he wrote. “I don’t mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas.”[61]

    Jackson, in a letter discussing the weaknesses of the trial, in October 1945 told U.S. President Harry S. Truman that the Allies themselves “have done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for. The French are so violating the Geneva Convention in the treatment of prisoners of war that our command is taking back prisoners sent to them. We are prosecuting plunder and our Allies are practicing it. We say aggressive war is a crime and one of our allies asserts sovereignty over the Baltic States based on no title except conquest.”[62][63]

    Associate Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas charged that the Allies were guilty of “substituting power for principle” at Nuremberg. “I thought at the time and still think that the Nuremberg trials were unprincipled,” he wrote. “Law was created ex post facto to suit the passion and clamor of the time.”[64]


    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Trials#Criticism

    The above-described trials resulted in a very different outcome than might have been expected, had the trials been conducted by a trustworthy neutral government. (In contrast, the Allied governments which conducted the trials had a strong vested interest in making the Nazis look as bad as possible. The worse the Nazis looked, the better the Allied governments would look for having beaten them.) Also, there is this quote from The Guardian, one of Britain’s most prestigious newspapers:


    Official documents discovered last month at the National Archives at Kew, south-west London, show that the London Cage was a secret torture centre where German prisoners who had been concealed from the Red Cross were beaten, deprived of sleep, and threatened with execution or with unnecessary surgery.

    As horrific as conditions were at the London Cage, Bad Nenndorf was far worse. . . . Initially, most of the detainees were Nazi party members or former members of the SS, rounded up in an attempt to thwart any Nazi insurgency. . . .

    The Foreign Office briefed Clement Attlee, the prime minister, that “the guards had apparently been instructed to carry out physical assaults on certain prisoners with the object of reducing them to a state of physical collapse and of making them more amenable to interrogation”. . . .

    Threats to execute prisoners, or to arrest, torture and murder their wives and children were considered “perfectly proper”, on the grounds that such threats were never carried out. . . .

    One victim of the cold cell punishment was Buttlar, who swallowed the spoon handle to escape. An anti-Nazi, he had spent two years as a prisoner of the Gestapo. "I never in all those two years had undergone such treatmdescribed tactics would have been used to extort confessions for use at the Nuremberg Trials.

    @KurtGodel7:

    @Gargantua:

    With that said Kurt GNuremberg," he wrote. “I don’t mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas.”[61]

    Jackson, in a letter discussing the weaknesses of the trial, in October 1945 told U.S. President Harry S. Truman that the Allies themselves “have done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for. The French are so violating the Geneva Convention in the treatment of prisoners of war that our command is taking back prisoners sent to them. We are prosecuting plunder and our Allies are practicing it. We say aggressive war is a crime and one of our allies asserts sovereignty over the Baltic States based on no title except conquest.”[62][63]

    Associate Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas charged that the Allies were guilty of “substituting power for principle” at Nuremberg. “I thought at the time and still think that the Nuremberg trials were unprincipled,” he wrote. “Law was created ex post facto to suit the passion and clamor of the time.”[64]


    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Trials#Criticism

    The above-described trials resulted in a very different outcome than might have been expected, had the trials been conducted by a trustworthy neutral government. (In contrast, the Allied governments which conducted the trials had a strong vested interest in making the Nazis look as bad as possible. The worse the Nazis looked, the better the Allied governments would look for having beaten them.) Also, there is this quote from The Guardian, one of Britain’s most prestigious newspapers:


    Official documents discovered last month at the National Archives at Kew, south-west London, show that the London Cage was a secret torture centre where German prisoners who had been concealed from the Red Cross were beaten, deprived of sleep, and threatened with execution or with unnecessary surgery.

    As horrific as conditions were at the London Cage, Bad Nenndorf was far worse. . . . Initially, most of the detainees were Nazi party members or former members of the SS, rounded up in an attempt to thwart any Nazi insurgency. . . .

    The Foreign Office briefed Clement Attlee, the prime minister, that “the guards had apparently been instructed to carry out physical assaults on certain prisoners with the object of reducing them to a state of physical collapse and of making them more amenable to interrogation”. . . .

    Threats to execute prisoners, or to arrest, torture and murder their wives and children were considered “perfectly proper”, on the grounds that such threats were never carried out. . . .

    One victim of the cold cell punishment was Buttlar, who swallowed the spoon handle to escape. An anti-Nazi, he had spent two years as a prisoner of the Gestapo. "I never in alldescribed tactics would have been used to extort confessions for use at the Nuremberg Trials.
    I don’t see a problem here
    the nazis got what they deserved

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