Monday, November 24, 2014
Here's My Theory (And, No, I'm Not Wedded to it)
Being that the purpose of the war was to liberate Poland and Poland ended up as a 45 year slave slate of the most murderous country in all of human history, and being that the Allied forces (before, during, and after the damned war) themselves committed some of the most atrocious war crimes ever perpetrated (the firebombing of Dresden, the fact that we dropped a fucking nuclear weapon on two Japanese cities for Christ sakes, the fact that German soldiers were rounded up after the war and bullied into pens like animals etc.), Western governments really didn't have a choice but to demonize the enemy and, boy, did they ever; taking a thug like Hitler (a loathsome creature that nobody is defending here) and turning him into not just an evil man but the devil himself, demonizing the Japanese to the point where Japanese-Americans quickly became amongst the most hated groups in U.S. history (this, after we had clearly egged them into the conflict with what could only be referred to as a virulent economic policy and a total refusal to negotiate). I mean, I know that the victors get to write the script and all but taking 117 executions and turning them into 4,000,000 gassings is a bit much.
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3 comments:
I'm probably being semantically petty, but IMO, yours is a hypothesis rather than a theory.
I agree, Poland would prefer to have been on another planet during the invasions and counter invasions and ethnic cleansing of
their suffering people. As regards Japan, we assume the US
economic sanctions were based on
the systematic Japanese atrocities in much of China and
Yamamoto's observation about awakening a sleeping giant after Pearl Harbor rings true. (When I
did Arsenal work during the VN
conflict, the equipment that had sat after WWII was quickly cleared of cosmoline and I remember a transfer cart that
read "50 caliber zippers for slant-eyed gippers") Whether hatred was justified, it was there and exacerbated during the deaths of 60 million humans during those years. See human losses by country and adjust the figures to fit your thinking.
Me, I knew a lot of Greatest Generation guys and still think about them on Veterans Day.
I have nothing against the soldiers, BB, and I salute them as well.......Yes, the Japanese were engaged in atrocities for sure but so, too, were the Brits, the French, and especially the Russians. Why did we only pick on them and antagonize them to the point where they felt that they had to attack us? Is it possible that FDR wanted this to happen and used it as an excuse to enter the war (not that he knew specifically that Pearl Harbor was going to happen but that he certainly shouldn't have been surprised by it)?......Maybe I've been listening to too much Anti-War Radio.
And, yes, hypothesis is much more apropos.
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