Frollein wrote:Well, historically, Germany a) has a different moral and philosophical tradition (Roman, Christian, Enlightenment) than Japan, and the values of the Nazis were against everything that tradition stands for. So the condemnation of the war crimes did resonate deeply with the population. And b) wars in Europe were on the whole not wars of extinction, but means to gain the upper hand in the peace negotiations. I don't know if Japan has a tradition of Kabinettskriege?
Japan has something almost like
Kabinettskriege, but in Japan there was never a stipulation that you couldn't just kill people if they were resisting and being insurgents. Basically, this allowed Japan to transition almost seamlessly into the
total war concept.
A lot of the soldiers who carried out the more brutal tactics, were the ones who were posted to China first, and got a taste of a what modern insurgency looks like, and it was those guys who reformulated their approach on the fly by simply reclassifying civilians as their opponents. That was not their default behaviour, but it was something they just picked up.
The ease of picking it up is I think of course because of cultural tradition. The Ashigaru used to just shoot people if they came to fight since back in the day it was expected that if you came out with a weapon then surely you are fighting to the death. The idea that someone would deliberately set out to get captured was a strange new innovation in their view.
On a deeper level, Japan is the same culture that even while having something close to
Kabinettskriege during the Warring States period, at the same time did not have it for the reasons that the Germans had it, because the Japanese view did not inherently value the life of a person -- that wasn't the reason for their restraint, it's just that if the main population isn't fighting then it wouldn't make sense to use up time on them. After all, the same Samurai and Ashigaru had the
crossroads-killing tradition, and the
authorisation to cut and leave tradition.
In
crossroads-killing, someone who wants to test a new weapon like a sword or something, would just go and station themselves at a crossroad on a dark night, choose a subject and attack that person. So it's like a checkpoint, except sometimes it's hidden and it can randomly kill. The rationalisation during the feudal era was that conducting the test can be the difference between victory and defeat when the weapon actually has to be used, and so the person being killed
(or almost-killed/seriously-frightened, depending) is an acceptable sacrifice, particularly if the person isn't even one of your own subjects. Crossroads-killing only stopped because eventually the Tokugawa Shogunate decided that they didn't like it
(after the country was unified and the practice thus no longer had a strategic purpose), and that anyone who did it thereafter would be accused of 'murder', rather than being allowed to claim it was about defence. But no one ever said, "Oh, I'm sorry about all the time before 1600 CE when it was happening."
In
authorisation to cut and leave, that is similar to the American
castle doctrine and
stand your ground doctrine, except this applied to feelings as well. A person of higher rank was allowed to fight and kill a person of lower rank if that person provided a credible threat or posed a serious insult to that person. There had to be one witness, and they would have to give an account for themselves if they were in someone else's territory when it happened, otherwise they could just do it.
These things only ended because peace was established, but not because anyone really formulated a principle of "you just can't do this stuff". They could,
if they wanted to.
During the 1980s all of these things were being talked about by Anglo-American liberals apparently, maybe because the 1980s was '
the return of Japan' and the liberal multiculturalists were finding it difficult to comprehend how these things could be seen as a normality for the incredibly long durations that they were in the culture, and it led to Mary Midgley writing some hilarious line like, "It should be possible to absolutely condemn a culture that was okay with these things".
And then
Islamic immigration became a thing, and liberal multiculturalists suddenly decided that
actually, they could indeed take a culturally-relativist view of who can kill who and under what circumstances. So we would be told that Japanese crossroads-killing during the Warring States Period up to the 1600s was 'absolutely morally wrong', but that Islamic Sharia punishments should be examined relativistically within the context of the culture in which they arose. What can even be said? You know how it goes.
Frollein wrote:Ha, I had that kind of conversation a while back here, regarding the question if the Holodomor qualifies as genocide or not, considering that the definition of genocide was written with the participation of the USSR. Imagine, a definition of a crime, written by the perpetrator of that crime is not flawed, according to PoFo!
Indeed, it's stunning.
________
Dagoth Ur wrote:I just noticed Rei claimed that liberals support or are in favor of the DPRK.
I didn't say that, I said they produced the result. Obviously they didn't like the result since now they can't find enough words to condemn the DPRK with.