3,953 words
De-Humanizing the Enemy
From my childhood, I vividly recall a scene from an old war movie. The US Marines are storming some Pacific island and driving the terrified “Jap” defenders before them, much as safari beaters drive prey. The wild chase increases in momentum until the enemy is finally flushed from the trees and onto the beach. Halting their tanks, situating their machine guns for maximum effect, the marines open fire. Scores of Japanese are mowed down mercilessly. With no hope, with no escape, the survivors leap into the surf and try to swim for it. In a matter of minutes, there is not a living “Nip” among them.
Another scene I vividly recall seeing—and this only once—was a war documentary. A Japanese sailor is struggling in the water amid a flotsam of oil and debris, desperately trying to save himself. Clearly, he is a survivor from a recently sunk ship. The sailor is so close to the American naval vessel that I can see the fear and confusion in his face. Suddenly, from a point beyond camera range, bullets spray the water around the man. In a panic, the sailor begins swimming around and around in circles. Finally, a well-aimed bullet blows the young man’s head apart and he sinks silently beneath the surface.
In those old documentary films that cover World War Two in the Pacific, there is a very good reason why one seldom sees a live Jap in any of them, much less a prison camp filled with live Japs. Just as they were doing in Europe, Americans in the Pacific were taking no prisoners. The awful truth never mentioned in these films, or in any book, for that matter, is that the war with Japan from start to finish was a black flag no-quarter contest in which the rules of engagement were shockingly simple: If the Japanese won, they lived . . . if they lost, they died.
***
Millions raped, millions tortured, millions enslaved, millions murdered—truly the defeat of Nazi Germany was utter in its hate and hellish in its evil. It was, by all standards, the most savage and sadistic such defeat in human history.
Savage and sadistic as the war and ensuing Jewish “peace” in Germany was, nowhere was the terrible price of propaganda more evident than in the war with Japan. Unlike the Germans who not only looked and acted much like the Americans, British, French, and Russians, and shared a similar religion and culture, the Japanese were outwardly, at least, very different from their opponents in World War Two. Most graphic, of course, was race and the fact that the Japanese were Asians.
Although racially and culturally the enemy nations differed, prior to hostilities each side had no difficulty at all interacting amicably with one another. Indeed, a great degree of mutual respect, even admiration, existed among the two peoples.
All that changed in a blink, of course, on December 7, 1941. With the sudden attack on Pearl Harbor the American propaganda mill had no problem at all transforming those who had been universally acknowledged as a kind, courteous, and dignified people into a race of “dirty rats,” “yellow monkeys,” and “sneaky Japs.” Thus, unlike the vilification campaign waged against Germans which took a great amount of time, effort, and imagination, the job of demonizing the Japanese was simple. Once the US Government and the entertainment industry were up and rolling, the natural outrage and racial instincts of white Americans took over.
In the anti-Japanese furor that swept America following Pearl Harbor, in the hyper-heated madness to exact revenge for the attack, rare was that American who paused to consider that perhaps the impetus behind Pearl Harbor was the months of deliberate and humiliating aggression directed at Japan by the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, including the embargo of vital raw materials without which Japan was doomed to collapse as an industrialized nation. Well before December 7, 1941, such sanctions were correctly viewed by the proud Japanese leadership, as well as the world, as a de facto declaration of war by the United States. Also, though few were aware at the time, it has long since been known that Roosevelt and others in the US government were well aware of the coming attack in the central Pacific.
Nevertheless, because of Japan’s military pact with Nazi Germany, Roosevelt and his Jewish “advisers” desperately hoped that backing the Japanese into a corner would provoke just such a response resulting in the United States entering the European war via the “back door.” In that case, the U.S. would then join with Britain and the Soviet Union to crush Hitler and Germany.
Thus, and almost on cue, the “sneak” attack at Pearl Harbor and the “date which will live in infamy” was used by the propagandists as a rallying cry to whip the American people—who had been decidedly against war—into a frenzy of anger, hatred and revenge.
If possible, the degree of American rage actually increased four months later when lurid details of the “Bataan Death March” reached the public. Bad enough in its own right, the chaotic 60-mile forced march of over 70,000 American and Filipino troops captured after the siege of Bataan was made infinitely worse by the fact that many of the prisoners were already near death from lack of food and medicine resulting from the long siege itself. Overwhelmed by the sheer number of prisoners, unable to provide transportation, the Japanese could do little else but watch as hundreds of prisoners dropped dead along the road during the long march.
Describing them as “yellow vermin,” angry American artists created posters depicting the Japanese as everything and anything, save human—sneaking cockroaches, rampaging monkeys, large-fanged snakes, flapping vampire bats—an official U.S. Navy film described enemy soldiers as “living, snarling rats.”
Reinforcing this dehumanization process were US political and military leaders. While General Eisenhower was busily murdering as many as a 1.5 million disarmed German prisoners in his secret death camps, Admiral William Halsey, US commander of operations in the South Pacific, seemed determined that not a single Japanese in his sphere of operations would survive to even reach a death camp.
“Kill Japs! Kill Japs! Kill more Japs!” Halsey exhorted his men time and time again. “Remember Pearl Harbor—keep ’em dying!”
Thus, in what was perhaps the worst-kept secret throughout all branches of the US military, it was this unofficial, yet understood, injunction to all American service men, high and low, that there was to be absolutely no mercy shown the enemy in combat.
“You will take no prisoners, you will kill every yellow son-of-a-bitch, and that’s it,” yelled a marine colonel to his men as their landing craft was about to touch shore on one Japanese-held island.
And thus it was, from the outset, from the initial island invasions of 1942, all the way down to 1945 and the nuclear holocausts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “no quarter” to Japan and the Japanese was the tacit understanding.
***
One of the Few–A Live Captive
Despite the generally held belief that persists to this day, a belief which argues that all Japanese soldiers willingly, even eagerly, died for the emperor, relatively few young men embraced such an end if there was any hope of living. Like the American, British, and Australian soldiers they were facing, most Japanese soldiers dreamed only of a day when the war was over; when they could return home in peace to family and friends; to marry a sweetheart; to raise a family; to tend a small garden; to enjoy life. Nevertheless, almost from the first, it soon became apparent to these young men that there would be, that there could be, no surrender. Wrote one American early in the war:
Japanese were known to come out of the jungle unarmed with their hands raised crying ‘”mercy, mercy,” only to be mowed down by machine-gun fire.
Time and again, on every contested island and every spit of sand, Japanese soldiers and sailors were slaughtered the instant they raised their hands and walked forward to surrender. After scores of such encounters in which breathless comrades in hiding watched, waited, then witnessed the massacre of their unarmed friends, fewer and fewer Japanese soldiers entertained even the slightest notion of giving up.
Ironically, though murdering a helpless enemy may have brought some sadistic satisfaction to Allied soldiers, the failure to take prisoners insured that thousands of comrades would also be killed by an enemy now forced to dig in and fight to the death. It is also a fact that as the war wore on and defeat became certain, more and more Japanese soldiers would have gladly surrendered if only they could.
“If men had been allowed to surrender honorably,” admitted one Japanese veteran late in the war, “everybody would have been doing it.”
In addition to the murder of prisoners, numerous other atrocities occurred. When one marine battalion captured a Japanese field hospital containing over 400 unarmed men, including patients and medics, all were slaughtered on the spot. Other massacres occurred when hundreds, even thousands, of Japanese were driven onto beaches or small peninsulas where there was no hope of escape. Such wholesale “kill offs” reminded one Midwestern marine of nothing so much as the merciless massacre of jack rabbits driven into fenced enclosures back home.
“Nothing can describe the hate we feel for the Nips,” wrote an American lieutenant to his mother. “The destruction, the torture, burning & death of countless civilians, the savage fight without purpose—to us they are dogs and rats—we love to kill them—to me and all of us killing Nips is the greatest sport known—it causes no sensation of killing a human being but we really get a kick out of hearing the bastards scream.”
Remembered another witness:
When a Japanese soldier was “flushed” from his hiding place . . . the unit . . . was resting and joking. But they seized their rifles and began using him as a live target while he dashed frantically around the clearing in search of safety. The soldiers found his movements uproariously funny. Finally . . . they succeeded in killing him. . . . None of the American soldiers apparently ever considered that he may have had human feelings of fear and the wish to be spared.
Flame throwers were a particularly sadistic way to “roast rats.” Reported one observer:
I have asked fighting men, for instance, why they—or actually, why we—regulated flame-throwers in such a way that enemy soldiers were set afire, to die slowly and painfully, rather than killed outright with a full blast of burning oil. Was it because they hated the enemy so thoroughly? The answer was invariably, “No, we don’t hate those poor bastards particularly; we just hate the whole goddam mess and have to take it out on somebody.”
“We are drowning and burning them all over the Pacific, and it is just as much pleasure to burn them as to drown them,” bragged William Halsey. As the admiral was well aware, his men were doing much more than just burning and drowning the enemy. . . .
With discipline lax or non-existent, those who wanted to torture, kill, and mutilate, did. Desecration of bodies first began with the first islands invaded. Along a wide stream dividing the two armies on Guadalcanal, fresh arriving troops noticed decapitated Japanese heads stuck on poles facing across the river. There on the “Canal” and elsewhere, U.S. Marines tossed the dead and dying into open latrines while others laughingly urinated into the open mouths of the wounded.
The collection of ears, noses, fingers, and other body parts was a pastime many marines proudly participated in. Some strung the trophies and wore them like necklaces.
“Our boys cut them off to show their friends in fun, or to dry and take back to the States when they go,” said one man matter-of-factly.
Japanese skulls were another popular trophy. Some were sent home to friends, family, even sweethearts. Most heads, however, after being “cured” by ravenous ants or boiled in kettles to remove flesh, were then sold to eager naval personnel.
Bones were also collected. Some were carved to form letter openers for folks back home. Even the White House received one such present.
“This is the sort of gift I like to get,” laughed President Roosevelt. “There’ll be plenty more such gifts.”
Understandably, when news reached Japan that the bodies of their sons and husbands were being wantonly abused and that the US president himself countenanced such atrocities, there was outrage. The Americans were portrayed in the Japanese press as “deranged, primitive, racist, and inhuman.” Explained one American, himself equally outraged:
The thought of a Japanese soldier’s skull becoming an American ashtray was as horrifying in Tokyo as the thought of an American prisoner used for bayonet practice was in New York.
Of all the trophies, however, none were more sought out than gold-capped teeth. After any battle or massacre, the mouths of the fallen were often the first stop for many Americans. Like South Sea prospectors, fights broke out when “claim-jumpers” attempted to steal the bodies claimed by others. One excited marine felt he had struck it rich after spotting a dead enemy. “But,” according to a witness . . .
. . . the Japanese wasn’t dead. He had been wounded severely in the back and couldn’t move his arms; otherwise he would have resisted to his last breath. The Japanese’s mouth glowed with huge gold-crowned teeth, and his captor wanted them. He put the point of his knife on the base of a tooth and hit the handle with the palm of his hand. Because the Japanese was kicking his feet and thrashing about, the knife point glanced off the tooth and sank deeply into the victim’s mouth. The Marine cursed him and with a slash cut his cheeks open to each ear. He put his foot on the sufferer’s lower jaw and tried again. Blood poured out of the soldier’s mouth. He made a gurgling noise and thrashed wildly. I shouted, “Put the man out of his misery.” All I got for an answer was a cussing out. Another Marine ran up, put a bullet in the enemy soldier’s brain, and ended his agony. The scavenger grumbled and continued extracting his prizes undisturbed.
Understandably, Japanese soldiers had no more desire to surrender and be tortured than did US soldiers fighting the Indians on the Plains of America a century earlier. Each fought to the finish, but each also saved the “last bullet” for them self. If a Japanese soldier found himself surrounded with no way to escape or kill himself, he committed “suicide” by walking calmly back and forth along the enemy lines until a bullet found its mark. Sometimes ten, even twenty, Japanese would thus kill themselves simultaneously.
Once the Americans reached Saipan, Okinawa, and other Japanese islands with civilian populations, mass rape was added to the menu of war crimes. Small wonder that a Japanese soldier, or civilian, for that matter, would do whatever it took to keep from falling into Allied hands. As one American revealed:
The northern tip of Saipan is a cliff with a sheer drop into the sea. At high tide the sharp coral rocks are almost covered with swirling surf. The Japanese civilians and the surviving soldiers were all crowded into this area. Now one of the worst horrors of the war occurred. In spite of loud-speaker messages asking them to surrender, and assurances that they would be well-treated, they began killing themselves. Soldiers clutched hand grenades to their bellies and pulled the pins. Through our spotting scopes from our observation post I witnessed this sickening spectacle. One of the worst experiences of my life.
Not only were there virtually no survivors among the 30,000 men of the Japanese garrison on Saipan, but two out of every three civilians—some 22,000 in all—were either murdered or committed suicide.
“We just blew it all up,” admitted one marine. “We don’t know if there were women and children or whatever, we just blew them up.”
“Japanese are still being shot all over the place,” reported an Australian late in the war. “The necessity for capturing them has ceased to worry anyone. Nippo soldiers are just so much machine-gun practice.”
A handful of prisoners did manage to get captured, of course, by accident if nothing else. All were spared solely for the information they might provide. When the interrogation was through, the subjects were of no further use. Wrote one witness:
When they flew Japanese prisoners back for questioning on a C-47, they kept the freight door at the side of the plane open, and when the questioning of each man was concluded, he’d be kicked overboard before they reached their destination.
Of course, it was not just island-hopping marines who committed countless atrocities; virtually all American service men partook. A Japanese sailor whose ship or submarine was sunk stood no better chance of survival than his comrade on shore. US naval vessels routinely shelled all life boats and machine-gunned any survivors still in the water. Overhead, Japanese pilots who escaped from burning planes were themselves murdered by Allied airmen as they struggled in their parachute harnesses.
As late as October, 1944, it was announced that a mere 604 Japanese were being held in Allied POW camps.
***
Hiroshima, August 6, 1945
Just as the Allied air forces were targeting cities and civilians in Germany, so too was the US air force incinerating the women and children of Japan. As was the case with his peers in Europe, cigar-chewing, Jap-hating Gen. Curtis Lemay had no qualms whatsoever of targeting non-combatants. Once his air armada moved with striking distance of the Japanese home islands, the American air commander sent his B-29 bombers to attack Japan with high explosives and phosphorous bombs. Virtually all Japanese urban centers suffered utter destruction but it was the larger cities that were forced to endure the hell of “fire bombing.”
In one raid on Tokyo alone, in one night, an estimated 75,000 to 200,000 people, mostly women and children, were burned to death. Only the incineration of Dresden, Germany, with an estimated death toll of between 200,000–400,000, was greater.
In January, 1945, Gen. Douglas MacArthur forwarded to President Roosevelt a Japanese offer to surrender that he had just received. Roosevelt spurned the request. Seven months later, the new American president, Harry Truman, received virtually the same offer from the Japanese. This time, the Americans accepted. Had the Japanese surrender been accepted when first offered, well over one million people, American and Japanese, would not have died needlessly. Had peace been made in January, 1945, there would have been no battle blood-bathes as occurred at Iwo Jima, Saipan and Okinawa. There would have been no firebombing murder of hundreds of thousands of women and children in Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, and every other major Japanese city. And, perhaps most important of all, had the Japanese peace offer been accepted earlier there would have been no horrific use of atomic weapons against the women and children of Japan and no stigma or shame attached to we Americans forever for the use of such hideous and hellish weapons.
The fiery deaths of civilians in Tokyo and other cities and the vaporization of 200,000 mostly women and children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki remains an evil black smear on the human soul for all time to come; they provide a clear and terrible testament to man’s inhumanity to man. The unbridled assaults against the helpless civilians of Japan were also a graphic comment on the powerful price of propaganda. From beginning to end, American political and military leaders hoped to punish the Japanese like no other people in history had been punished. Hence, the refusal to accept Japan’s surrender in January, 1945, and the refusal to accept the surrender several times later on. The argument made by President Truman and his apologists that the atomic bombs were used to “end the war sooner” and thereby save both American and Japanese lives, was a lie; it was a lie then, and it is a lie to this very day. In fact, Truman deliberately prolonged the war until the bombs were tested, assembled, delivered, and ready for use against Japan. When the first device exploded as planned at Hiroshima and vaporized an estimated 80,000–100,000 civilians, Truman was eager to use another such bomb against another civilian target, Nagasaki. Had Truman a hundred nuclear weapons in his arsenal—rather than the mere two that he used—it seems clear he would have happily dropped them all on the women and children of Japan.
“The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them,” argued the American president. “When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him like a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless necessary.”
Another argument for the use of the atomic bombs when Japan was willing, even eager, to surrender, was an attempt to impress the Soviet Union with American might. If such a line of reasoning was indeed true, as many later pointed out, then the weapons could have just as easily been used against isolated military targets, and not urban areas filled with women and children.
Certainly, one strong reason for using the weapon, though never mentioned then, and seldom mentioned even now, was hate. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were merely a more dramatic and devastating continuation of the no-quarter policy that had been in effect since December 7, 1941. The bombs were used against a much-hated enemy simply because the Americans wanted to use them. Weapons that would kill tens of thousands in a flash, then kill tens of thousands more in the most hideous and painful ways imaginable, made perfectly good sense at the time; it certainly made sense to Truman and millions of Americans then, and sadly, it still makes perfectly good sense to millions of Americans even now, seventy years later.
“The Dirty Japs began the war,” as the reasoning ran then, and still runs now, “the Dirty Japs fought the war in the most inhumane and barbarous way possible, and so it is thus fitting that these dirty yellow rats should suffer like no other people ever suffered”; or, as one American historian phrased it more delicately: “[T]he widespread image of the Japanese as sub-human constituted an emotional context which provided another justification for decisions which resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands.”
Nevertheless, with the war clearly won, and with pangs of conscience beginning to reassert themselves among some, a few voices felt that the dropping of the terrible new weapon was a display of sadistic savagery, pure and simple.
“The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul,” former US president, Herbert Hoover, wrote shortly after the news reached him.
Added the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William Leahy:
It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were almost defeated and ready to surrender. . . . [I]n being the first to use it, we . . . adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.
And even Dwight David Eisenhower—a man who himself knew more than a little about the mass murder of a helpless enemy—suddenly found a mote of pity when he registered his complaint against the use of the hideous new weapon. “The Japanese were ready to surrender . . . ,” the general wrote. “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
Mercifully, for everyone concerned, the Allied powers soon accepted the Japanese surrender seven months after it was originally offered and World War Two, the most savage and evil conflict in history, was over.
20 comments
The thing about articles like this is they are such a paradigm shift that I cannot even communicate the ideas to people I know. The idea that the Japanese were all fight-to-the-death, maniacal loyalists has been ingrained into nearly all Americans’ heads. I myself am a little taken aback by Goodrich’s article. He has that impact with his writings. The death toll of the Japanese was our doing, not theirs. It seems so obvious too me now, but had I not been educated by Counter-Currents, and other like-minded sources, all my intellectual defenses would be in use right now to keep out the truth of what we did to Japan.
This is probably the most disturbing account of WW II I’ve read. It certainly shows up the hypocrisy of the claim that it was in any way a just war. The atrocities of the Allies were infinitely greater than the fabricated atrocities of the Hollohoax even had the fairy-story of six million gassed Jews been true. What is frightening is that the likes of those who perpetuated such acts still hold sway over the Western World and are largely responsible for our current situation.
Michael Woodbridge refers to “the fairy-story of six million gassed Jews…”
In truth, no historian claims that the German gassed six million Jews. Sounds like Michael is too unfamiliar with the arguments and evidence of modern historians concerning Reich policy towards Jews even to argue against it. You see that a lot with “revisionists.”
A very important article on WW2…i think like Francis Parker Yockey did that Americans lost WW2…I am a 100% disabled veteran,and i bring this subject up amongst Americans and they go into a 2 minute Orwellian Hate…the media plays the dominant role in what people think and feel,as americans have never been book readers…I think the last study was that around 400,000 americans were serious readers…thanks for article…
In the foreword of his book, Revolt Against the Modern World, Julius Evola, says “From the perspective that I adopt, what matters in history are all the mythological elements it has to offer, or all the myths that enter into its web, as integrations of the “meaning” of history itself.”
Modern man, he claims, is simply concerned about objective realities and facts. The traditional man views history from a nonhuman, superindividual, transcendental, frame of reference.
He goes on to say, in the chapter titled “Space, Time, The Earth”, “myth and antihistory represent the path leading to a deeper knowledge of what we regard as “history.””
My question to Counter-Currents and its readers: What are we to do when myths and antihistory prodvide even more momentum to the destructive forces of modernity, instead of offering us a transcendental frame of reference? For example, I would claim Americans are still living under the myth of Germans being Nazis to a certain extent, Americans during World War II lived under the myth of the less than human, savage Japs. Americans still live under the myth, or antihistory, of the Confederate States of America being nothing but racist slave owners. Maybe the biggest myth of them all is the myth in America being the beacon of light to the world, the torch bearer of freedom, the nation that holds moral superiority.
How do we reconcile Evola’s views about the importance of myths, and the destructive myths of modern times?
Evola also says in the foreword, “I will argue that no idea is as absurd as the idea of progress, which together with its corollary notion of the superiority of modern civilization, has created its own “positive” alibis by falsifying history, by insinuating harmful myths in people’s minds, and by proclaiming itself sovereign at the crossroads of the plebeian ideology from which it originated.”
How do we distinguish between what constitutes a harmful myth and a myth that leads humans to the transcendental?
It seems ironic to me that the only way the these modern myths, the barbarity of the Japanese, Germans, and Southerners, just as a few examples, have only been “demythologized” to us and others, is by viewing historical events objectively and factually.
Traditionally myth and antihistory are what matters and what gives any real meaning to history. However, the antihistory of today, if it is what gives history any real meaning, would lead us to accept the myths of the savagery of the people who oppose American Imperialism. We have liberated ourselves from this absurd position by rejecting modern antihistory and viewing things objectively.
I feel as though I am starting to repeat myself. I hope I have articulated well enough what I intended to bring to discussion.
While I’ve benefited from Goodrich’s work, I feel I must point out that the responses to his writings confirm my suspicions that his corpus doesn’t so much serve as to right the record as to invert it. I certainly don’t claim that that is Goodrich’s intention, but he can hardly fail to be aware that very often in the opinions of his target audience WWII Germans and Japanese come out looking squeaky clean. A man as clearly horrified by the results of war as Goodrich is cannot want to perpetuate the cycle of blame and counter-blame that only increases the chances of a new conflict, so I do wish he’d give more consideration to the moral inversion effect that his work tends to have.
Regarding Goodrich’s comments about the bomb, as gruesome as it was it’s nevertheless still possible to exaggerate the horrors, and that is something Goodrich comes close to doing here. It’s not clear to me why the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should be considered so much more horrific than the fire-bombings of other cities, when the destruction wrought was comparable. In my view, the same moral stain attaches to all participants in area-bombing and should weigh equally on the consciences of all the publics which supported it.
With respect to the claim that the U.S. used the bomb to intimidate the Soviets, that is very likely true but selecting strictly military targets would not have had the same psychological effect as laying waste to entire cities. If any good can be said to have come from this use of the bomb, it’s that it was so shocking that no nuclear weapons have ever been used since. Given the vastly greater yields of thermonuclear weapons (“hydrogen bombs”), not to mention the vastly expanded size of the nuclear arsenal itself, the moral catastrophe would have been far greater had these been the first nuclear weapons used. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in a sense, can be said to have spared the world much greater suffering. (This of course has nothing to do with the foresight of the military planners of the day – we plumb lucked out.)
…but he can hardly fail to be aware that very often in the opinions of his target audience WWII Germans and Japanese come out looking squeaky clean.
Well, if I’m a part of that target audience, let me assure you that I sure didn’t come to that conclusion. The purpose (it seems to me) of Goodrich’s writings is to make sure we know that we were no better than our enemies – and maybe a hell of a lot worse. Like every other baby boomer in this now godforsaken western world, I grew up believing that we were good and moral and decent in our conduct during WW 2. That we never did anything that we didn’t absolutely have to. That the enemy was all evil, all the time, from 1939-45 and the Allies never were.
Well, I didn’t like this article. To me, it smacks of the guilt-tripping that Europeans receive from every corner. Yes, I am sure there were massacres of “Japs” by Americans, almost all of whom were Europeans. And this is completely normal in war. The Japs were busy doing worse to their enemies, which is also normal human behavior in such an environment. For an armchair observer living a fat and happy life of peace to try to moralize about what men do in a brutal life-and-death struggle is silly, meaningless ivory-tower chatter. First go to war and live in that environment before you give your moral sermons. You may as well moralize against lions living their fierce and brutal hunting lifestyle. Lions do what they do, just like soldiers in a real war do. New Testament morals have little place in either situation. If people collected the bones of their enemies and decorated them, and denunciated the enemy in politically incorrect propaganda, that is healthy and right.
The allied atrocities against the Germans are something completely different, because that is brother against brother, and most importantly, it was harming our European folk nation. It is perfectly ok to do terrible things to non-Whites in war if that is needed, but it is never ok to unnecessarily harm your European brothers. Unsurprisingly, much of the impetus for destroying the Germans (with plans to genocide them) came from the usual non-European suspects which held prominent positions of power in the U.S. administration.
The atomic strikes were unnecessary, and were probably a war crime, but the moral standard by which they (and everything else) should be judged is: “were they good for the Europeans?” If they saved European lives in the long-term, then they were worth it, although I don’t think that was the case. My understanding is that George C. Marshall and many other planners were against it, and if we do our Monday-morning quarterbacking, with a bit of moralizing from our position of being fat and happy Americans living in peace years after the crisis, it was probably a bad decision. Harry Truman was a little like George W. Bush in being a friendly, charismatic figure who was quite unqualified for the office, but thats what our genepool cranks out, I guess.
@ Andrew
“To me, it smacks of the guilt-tripping that Europeans receive from every corner.”
But what if the guilt is so obviously real?
“It is perfectly ok to do terrible things to non-Whites in war if that is needed, but it is never ok to unnecessarily harm your European brothers.”
That smacks of a double standard. What if the “usual non-European suspects” did that to you? What if they would say : “If Jews collected the bones of Europeans and decorated them, and denunciated the enemy in politically incorrect propaganda, that is healthy and right.”
Moral is either reciprocal or it is no moral at all. If you don’t accept that, if you go by the “law of the jungle” then you have no right to complain about the misconduct of others. After all, that would be “healthy and right” from their perspective.
““To me, it smacks of the guilt-tripping that Europeans receive from every corner.”
But what if the guilt is so obviously real?”
If Europeans feel any guilt whatsoever for their past, that is unhealthy, poisonous guilt, a psychological pathology. Europeans should only feel the greatest sense of deep, untainted pride in their glorious past. Anything less than that is unacceptable.
“It is perfectly ok to do terrible things to non-Whites in war if that is needed, but it is never ok to unnecessarily harm your European brothers.”
That smacks of a double standard.”
Of course its a double standard! What is good is that which is good for Europeans, period. I absolutely reject any universal conceptions of morality. I believe that God put Europeans here on earth, like he did for all other creatures, to survive. And that means pursuing their interests totally and completely. To pursue others’ interests is the road to destruction, which we are well on our way down now.
“What if the “usual non-European suspects” did that to you? What if they would say : “If Jews collected the bones of Europeans and decorated them, and denunciated the enemy in politically incorrect propaganda, that is healthy and right.””
Of course I wouldn’t like it! But I completely understand it. For the Jews, what is good is good for the Jews, and likewise for the Chinese and so forth. They do what is best for them, and if all peoples did that, the world would go on like it always has, with true diversity. Only insane Europeans do otherwise.
“Moral is either reciprocal or it is no moral at all. If you don’t accept that, if you go by the “law of the jungle” then you have no right to complain about the misconduct of others. After all, that would be “healthy and right” from their perspective.”
Your morality is reciprocal, and based on an insane need to be fair to everyone, unable to pursue your genetic interests in the way that is needed for a nation/folk to survive. Reciprocity and the New Testament teachings are solely for within ingroups, not for outgroups. I believe that God hates the current universalist morality that we see practiced across the West, because it is totally at odds with his will that his European children to continue to exist. This is the same twisted morality that has gotten the Rhodesians genocided, and the South Africans into a predicament of dispossession and future genocide. I think this sick breed of morals will be cursed by future generations of Europeans, and that those who practice it will have much to answer for in the afterlife.
The reaction to Goodich’s article, that it sounds like white guilt-tripping, really surprises me. If you even look Goodrich up on Amazon you will see he has written about Indian savagery and, of course, Hellstorm. He is not a left wing guilt tripper. Maybe we get so much of that stuff we are starting to see it everywhere. He is just giving us a dose of the cold truth, which is something that even the farthest left in academia have never gone far on. The most significant has been the suggestion that the atomic bomb was not necessary, but those that even suggest that are usually the farthest of the anti-war left, and are dismissed. Goodrich is doing Noam Chomsky’s job for him.
It does seem, now that I think about it, that the Japanese are the only non-whites that aren’t freed from criticism and have numerous excuses made for their atrocities. There suffering is always put in context, and there are discussions about them paying restitutions to those they have harmed. The other non-whites have excuses and outright bypassing of numerous past and present crimes.
I think the Japanese are the non-whites with the highest qualities, although even they can only imitate Western Civilization, and only to a certain degree.
No white army should be collecting body parts and other disgusting practices. Their commanding officers should put a stop to that stuff. That is what the Germans are accused of doing to Jews and they didn’t even commit those crimes (human skin lampshades and other myths). These savage rituals are beneath us.
I would call the American atrocities against the Japanese horrible war crimes, but I would reserve the term “barbarity” for the taking of “trophies” from dead (or even not yet dead) Japanese soldiers such as body parts, bones, skulls and golden teeth to be send home as a proud sign of victory. That even the president himself accepted a letter opener carved from the bones of a Japanese soldier says a lot about the prevalent mentality. This is barbarity at the cannibalistic level, not to be expected from a “civilized” people.
And then to think of it that this avoidable war was only provoked to join another war in which even more cruelty was practised.
I add a link to 10 pictures of the most atrocious racist anti-Japanese propaganda of that time :
http://brainz.org/10-most-xenophobic-pieces-anti-japanese-wartime-propaganda/
This article would greatly benefit if its sources were indicated.
The article is technically good overall in its message and historical discussion, but it lacks a crucial element which makes it sound like White guilt-tripping, as some have already pointed out. I believe all peoples (White or non-White alike) deserve some level of respect, and it is important to recognize this because Whites will always have to deal with non-White nations in some sense (diplomatically or in regards to trade or other political affairs) even after we rid ourselves of the multi-racial systems we currently live under. The notion I have seen some White Nationalists have, that Whites can obtain some all-White homelands and never again have to interact with non-Whites (not even via international diplomacy) ever again is an unrealistic fantasy. So, we cannot assume that we, as Whites, can treat non-White nations in whatever brutal ways we please and hence assume that there will no consequences afterwards.
I think this is the value of Thomas Goodrich’s article here. However, I think he fails to clarify this idea, which, as I said before, sadly makes it all sound more like a guilt-trip than a useful lesson.
I think the case against America is more than strong enough that exaggeration is not necessary. The line minimizing and excusing Japanese atrocitres during the Bataan Death march was gratuitous.
Google Unit 731 if you don’t believe the Japanese knew how to dish it out using classic orient sadism. They also murdered/raped 300,000 Chinese civilians in a six week period in 1937 surpassing the death tolls of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I’ve no opinion either way, but there is much speculation that The Rape of Nanking never happened, at least not as terrible as presented to us. Just saying. We all end up believing what serves our purposes. That is what “history” is all about.
The so-called Nanking Massacre is a bloody lie, a vicious and poisonous propaganda weapon employed by the neo-imperialistic, iniquitous, jingoistic, aggressive, Israel-colluding, and Jew-backed Chinese regime to whitewash its own genocidal ethnic-cleansing crimes, distract, deflect and delude public attention of its own people from its abysmal corruption and other serious domestic problems and incite chauvinistic uber-nationalist sentiment internally, while trying to smear and discredit Japan in the eyes of the international community in an attempt to establish its own “moral high ground” on the international stage.
The infamous book sensationally and hysterically titled “The Rape Of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust Of World War II” http://www.amazon.com/Rape-Nanking-Forgotten-Holocaust-World/dp/0465068367/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1438560969&sr=1-1&keywords=rape+of+nanking is self-evident as a propaganda book both in both its exaggerating and disgusting title and its vehemently warped and truth-distorting content. The author, being one Chinese-American woman named Iris Chang took money and assistance from numerous Chinese Fifth Column organizations and lobby groups in US to promote and sell her book, but ended up killing herself out of mental distress and depression eventually. What a shame!
Here I would like to introduce some valuable information from an excellent historical facts-providing website run by conscientious and patriotic Japanese scholars working on its own independently and completely without backing from the weak-kneed and faint-minded post-war Japanese government which brings to mind the natures and roles of the brave Western intellectuals debunking the myth of Holocaust and the post-war German puppet government respectively. Please take a look.
The relevant webpage containing further entries of various articles, book reviews, and editorial opinions: http://www.sdh-fact.com/category/nanking-massacre
“Only the incineration of Dresden, Germany, with an estimated death toll of between 200,000–400,000, was greater.”
Only in Goodrich’s imagination. Even the Reich’s own internal documents put the death toll at 22,000. 65 years later a team of German historians calculated the death to be in the range 22,700 and 25,000. See Müller, Rolf-Dieter; Schönherr, Nicole; Widera, Thomas, eds. (2010), Die Zerstörung Dresdens: 13. bis 15. Februar 1945. Gutachten und Ergebnisse der Dresdner Historikerkommission zur Ermittlung der Opferzahlen. (in German), V&R Unipress.
It is not necessary to exaggerate the war crimes by the Allies; the truth is bad enough.
You are giving credence to the outcome of the “Historikerkommission” which was working under the peremptory statement by Dresden’s mayor Rossbach that he wouldn’t accept any number of deaths above 25000. That’s one way of getting results.
This is typical for the Federal Republic of Germany: Minimize, downplay and make seem harmless anything done to German’s. Thus, the largest ethnic cleansing in world history with complete elimination of Germans and several millions dead from one third of their territory is a “forced hike” in the word’s of the former President of the FRG.
Official numbers to the bombardment of Dresden are 35000 dead with full identification, counted non-identified dead 222000. That in an area of 13 square kilometers completely destroyed by two waves of heavy bombardment in a large city overrun by people fleeing from the Red Army 50 miles to the East should result in a death toll comparing to a single bomb attack in a small city (Pforzheim) is plainly unbelievable.
Whatever is “official” in the Federal Republic of Germany” is unbelievable. This state is ruled by people who have been installed by the Allied Military Government as their. lieutenants and carefully selected to not have regard for the welfare of Germans.
I have recently read a little booklet by E.D.Morel, written in 1920, The Poison that Destroys; this title describes the course of liberal-democratic behavior since 1917, when it was decided to force Germany to sign War Guilt Clause, becoming Paragraph 321 in the Treaty of Versailles. Everything done since then has been a policy to maintain this unrealistic and deeply inhuman brutality.
I was born a few years after the war and am now an Old Age Pensioner but still none the wiser regarding the last war. I grew up knowing that the “Nazis” were thugs and bullies while we were the honorable ones. I was told a few tales which flipped all that on its head which I quickly forgot as I watched the latest Hollywood war movie.
And now they tell me that the blighters were better Christians than us!!!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=14&v=Mqs09Xjj4q0
Its enough to drive you to drink!
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