Current Events > Is this what war does to a person? I'm reading about Japanese WW2 war crimes

(+) Yeah! (+)

im reading about the massacre of manila in particular, where japanese soldiers forced 14 year old girlks into sex slavery, and then murdered them on a whim. one instance they cut off their breasts, wore them around to mock them, then set the girl on fire after raping them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila_massacre#Mass_rapes

like how the fuck does a person do this? i refuse to believe these people were like this before they entered the army, or the war.

and like, what's going on right now? what are our american troops doing around the world, given how large it is? and given how much americans fucking glorify war and shit. jesus christ.

"DUH NO SHIT TC EVERYONE KNOWS THIS HAPPENS" okay shit shut the fuck up

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mob mentality + power imo
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Humans are inherently broken. Sanctioned violence / war tends to disinhibit any control we might have over our already broken nature.

I'm not trying to generalize that this is unique to military service, by any means. It applies to many positions and situations. Gangs, riots, law enforcement, etc. The only reason our relatively peaceful and orderly civilization can exist is because the promise of incarceration or death is terribly inconvenient to most people. When the line between justified and non-justified violence is blurred, then we're more likely to cease controlling our existing violent urges.

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Dehumanization

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It's partially cultural to the Japanese Government at the time. Any time you convince people that the people they are fighting are less human than themselves you open the door to this kind of thing. It's fucking horrible.

I once made the mistake of going down a war crimes rabbit hole. The eyewtiness/survivor testimony from the rape of Nanjing will forever haunt me. That one and the Soviet sack of Berlin are fucking horrible.

America has it's own fair share of war crimes and massacres on it's hands. My Lai springs to mind, but nothing quite of the scale of what I mentioned above. We tend to train others to commit our crimes against humanity. IE The School Of The Americas.

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its fucked

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Older scholarship on Ancient Greek warfare once believed that the Ancient Greeks would fight ritualized battles against one another to minimize the destruction of war. Of course this was never really the case and more of the reading of later authors moralizing the past and taking Herodotos' words he puts in the mouth of Mardonius to Xerxes at face value. Hans van Wees Defeat and Destruction is the perfect starting point to see just how brutal ancient warfare can be and one of his latest paper on the Spartan King Agesilaus II treatment of enslaved and abandoned children really puts this into perspective, especially since it was considered a kindness worthy of praise to simply leave babies and children separated from their mothers by their enslavers with the old and sick who were also to be abandoned with no supplies.


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teep_ posted...

mob mentality + power imo

This combined with dehumanizing those who are conquered and / or oppressed and being morally bankrupt and depraved deep down.

ImAMarvel posted...

for real, the imperial japanese military did some truly fucked up shit before and during ww2 and they've never truly paid for their crimes

The US let Unit 731 go unpunished in exchange for their data, just like they were happy to take in Nazi scientists and overlook anything wrong they did. They also constructed a narrative of everything is largely Tojo's fault ignoring the role many others played and especially vindicating the emperor who despite largely being a puppet manipulated by giving him half-true, incorrect or otherwise bad information (Tojo famously told him the Hull memo was an ultimatum when it wasn't to force war and Konoe told him he couldn't prevent the war on China and after being ordered to pull out by the emperor sent troops back in claiming China caused it and claimed victory would happen in 3 months time, among many others) still bore a lot of responsibility for what happened. He signed off on orders, he picked Tojo despite knowing he was pro-war to be prime minister because he didn't want a member of the imperial family to take the blame if it went bad, the list goes on. But Konoe killed himself, the emperor was useful to the American occupation, as were many of the war criminals, so a halfass court created a pseudo history and killed and imprisoned some people and called it a day.

Now we live in a world where you can commit war crimes with out any concern about being held responsible so I would hardly say things are much better, but you will find there was never really much of an intention for justice then either.

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Yeah but another thing is like murderers are often just formerly law abiding people who got caught up in a heat of the moment. I'm not gonna call these people evil specifically, as their definition of normal was perturbed, but the actions speak for themselves. Just because you haven't committed crimes up to that point doesn't excuse the crime that has been committed now.

Japan certainly swept it under the rugs considering the gravity of it, and they really shouldn't complain about being asked to pay reparation. The biggest problem is that the reparation has to be so fucking massive that it's also unrealistic for them to follow through without imploding themselves. But yeah sucks

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These are not unlike some of the horrors one would witness if they were transported to mythological hell.

Hence the saying "War is hell".

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Are you implying that modern American soldiers are like WW2 Japanese soldiers?

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As long as it don't last more than 30-40 minutes.

I knew elderly folks who lived through Japan occupied Philippines. They had ww2 stories.

The people were divided. RICH and middle class Families made deals with Japanese representatives to keep their land and people safe. They even had Japanese filipino Pesos.

Those who didnt have that luxury to deal with Japanese forces had living conditions where Japanese soldiers used the beds filipinos slept on as toilets.

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