Submitted by Jupitair t3_z4vw6p in todayilearned
Reply to comment by haribobosses in TIL of the Arisan Maru, a Japanese "hell ship" that was torpedoed while carrying Allied prisoners of war. None of the 1,781 passengers were killed by the explosion, but other Japanese ships refused to rescue them, resulting in only 9 survivors. by Jupitair
the fact you are comparing Japan to america in ww2 tells me everything. Later weeb
Oh, you probably don't know that America firebombed Japanese cities. Not their factories. Not their munitions depots. Their urban centers. Why? To kill civilians. As many as 100,000 dead mostly women, children, and elderly in one day.
Everybody was ruthless in the war. The Soviets were plenty ruthless too.
But the Germans did a Holocaust. No one else did a holocaust.
So you can't make equivalences between Japan and Germany. Yes, Japan killed 15 million Chinese. Yes, the Germans killed 20 million Soviets.
But the Germans did a Holocaust. No one else did a holocaust.
Honestly I'm not sure how a ranking system of atrocities works here but Imperial Japan should still rank pretty high on any system. A quick Google of 'comfort women' can educate on how Imperial Japan created 'the largest ever case of government-sponsored human trafficking and sexual slavery in modern history'. They also came up with and almost implemented the bestest strategy ever which involved convincing the civilian populace to soak up bullets in the event of a land invasion. The idea was the Americans would give up after killing so many civilians.
If you are looking for American atrocities though, I'd suggest focusing on the Japanese Internment Camps or the fact that they snapped up every evil scientist they could find afterwards. Pretty much everyone dropped some bombs on civilian targets in WW2.
>Honestly I'm not sure how a ranking system of atrocities works here but Imperial Japan should still rank pretty high on any system.
Agreed. But absent a deliberate program of mass extermination, I think the Japanese can't rank above the Nazis. Singling out the Nazis specifically for the Holocaust is to identify the unique cruelty of a program of mass killing of civilians based on race as something apart from the horrors of colonialism and the indiscriminate murder and rape of war.
>Pretty much everyone dropped some bombs on civilian targets in WW2
Here, numbers make a difference. Allied firebombings of German and Japanese cities were devastating in a way that The Blitz wasn't. 40,000 Britons died over an 8 month period of German bombing, but in Dresden 20,000 died in one night. What happened there happened in no Allied city. What the Americans did to Japan, deliberately using incendiary bombs in their mostly wooden cities, was an atrocity with few comparisons. Killing 100,000 people in a day is worse than killing 3,000. It just is. it's extermination, not intimidation.
>A quick Google of 'comfort women' can educate on how Imperial Japan created 'the largest ever case of government-sponsored human trafficking and sexual slavery in modern history'
The forced prostitution under the Japanese empire is an incomparable evil. But the coercion of poor women into prostitution during wartime did not end in Korea in 1945. After the liberation of Korea, for example, and during the Korean War, US soldiers became the new customers of the very same brothels and the very same sex workers, with the South Koreans turning a blind eye. The US more or less set up a similar "military brothel" system in Vietnam, with thousands of women, many under the age of 18, coerced, tricked, or otherwise forced into prostitution by hunger and economic hardship. I can make this comparison, but I can still say the Japanese system was far worse.
I see no point to this response. Everyone above explained Imperial Japan maxed out the atrocity score but you keep agreeing but using whatabiutism to diminish this.
> Singling out the Nazis specifically for the Holocaust is to identify the unique cruelty of a program of mass killing of civilians based on race as something apart from the horrors of colonialism and the indiscriminate murder and rape of war.
Directly from the Imperial Japan war crimes Wikipedia entry "Rummel, a professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, estimates that between 1937 and 1945, the Japanese military murdered from nearly three to over ten million people, most likely six million Chinese, Indians, Koreans, Malaysians, Indonesians, Filipinos and Indochinese, among others.
> The forced prostitution under the Japanese empire is an incomparable evil.
Then literally proceeds to immediately compares it to another very different atrocity. Full stop, Imperial Japan did some incredibly fucked up things even in the context of the historical period. That doesn't mean modern Japan is a horrible place or that many other regimes haven't committed different and novel atrocities. Hell even putting the Nazis on a special tier ignores Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, and all of the creative African leaders who I don't feel like looking up right now.
Nazis atrocities were worse than the Imperial Japanese, because of the unique evil of the Holocaust. The Holocaust is a unique evil in the history of the earth.
Why are you trying to take the Nazis off the hook?
Wow, straight to a thinly veiled attempt to call me a Nazi. Freaking Godwin's law.
Nazis are bad, I absolutely despise anti-Semitism and specifically any Nazi ideology should be considered abhorrent. I have not once said anything pro-Nazi just explained their regime is not the only one that did horrible shit and your rating scale is irrational.
But to call the Holocaust a unique evil means you have zero grasp of history a bunch of western centric biases. Genocide is one of the favorite tools of totalitarian regimes and all are abhorrent. Honestly, by focusing only on the Holocaust you are the one who is letting the Nazis off the hook. The Holocaust resulted in 7 million Jewish casualties, the Nazis also killed 3.5 million Soviets, 3 million Poles, 500K Romani, and a bunch of other undesirables.
Where did all of this disagreement begin? With me saying the Holocaust sets the Nazis apart from the Japanese in terms of the atrocities they inflicted.
What are you arguing here? All wars are created equal? All genocides are interchangeable? Auschwitz is just like Nanking?
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