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|  The Forgotten Holocaust
When one thinks of WWII, we think of the European Holocaust. We think of Hitler and his Nazi Germany and the massacre of millions of Jews during the Final Solution. But many forget what happened on the Eastern Hemisphere BEFORE the Final Solution embarked.
Even before Germany started it's quest, Japanese soldiers were brutally marching through East Asia and nearly down to Papua New Guinea on a Reign of Violence, Rape, Arson, Looting, and Murder.
Both totalitarian states had plans of world domination, being superior to INFERIOR races. The proposed establishments were the Third Reich and Daitoa.
One account by Chalmers Johnson said: "It may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimised. The Germans killed 6 million Jews and 20 million Russians [i.e. Soviet citizens]; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burmese, at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese. Both nations looted the countries they conquered on a monumental scale, though Japan plundered more, over a longer period, than the Nazis. Both conquerors enslaved millions and exploited them as forced labourers — and, in the case of the Japanese, as [forced] prostitutes for front-line troops. If you were a Nazi prisoner of war from Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand or Canada (but not Russia) you faced a 4 % chance of not surviving the war; [by comparison] the death rate for Allied POWs held by the Japanese was nearly 30 %."
Today, many are ignorant of what actually happened during these times. Presently, the Japanese governments remains in denial of the cruel events and adamantly refuses to make reparations. These events have consistently been conspicuously absent from Japanese books and textbooks. Most Japanese schoolchildren do not even know these actions event occurred.
When Hitler embarked on the Final Solution in 1941 - the physical extermination of all Jews in Europe – the Japanese Imperial Army had already massacred 300,000 Chinese and publicly raped upwards of 20,000 women and children in a Nanking population of 500,000 in a space of 14 weeks. And that was just Nanking, China. The year was 1937
If Nazi Germany is ever contemplated, we think of the concentration and death camps like Auschwitz or Dachau.[/font]
But whenever we scrutinize Japan, we think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan as a pathetic victim of America rather than the committed aggressor of countless atrocities in Asia.
It comes to mind on how Japan escaped prosecution for the crimes when Germany did not. Could it be that in post-World War II geopolitics, Japan became a strategic ally to America's fight on the "Greater Evil": Communism? Post-World War II Communist China became the enemy and Japan's war crimes swept under history's rug.
Was this American ignorance and reluctance to even think of such barbaric acts? Or perhaps Japan's adamance in denying it ever happened?
From 1932 to 1945, the Japanese government instituted what it called the Military Comfort System.
It was a systematic and carefully planned operation .Young girls and women were either sexually enslaved or mass raped by Japanese soldiers throughout the war front. It is estimated that some 200,000 females from 9 countries including occupied China, Korea,Taiwan,the Philippines, Burma, Indonesia, East Timor, Micronesia were conscripted to be the soldiers’ sexual slaves. They were held in prison-like brothels, often gang-raped on a daily basis, by ten or more soldiers.
They were drawn from areas the Japanese considered populated by racially inferior peoples - including Dutch women. Korean comfort women were referred to as chosenppi (Korean vagina). Some were young girls of 11 or 12 years old kidnapped from schools throughout the vast Asia Pacific region occupied by the Japanese forces and shipped as military supplies. Many were recruited by coercion and deception using Teishintai (devoting of one’s entire being to the cause of the Emperor). Most became sterile from the repeated rapes.Those who became pregnant or infected with a sexually transmitted disease were given a shot of a drug referred to as "Number 606. The Japanese government insisted that sexual violence and rape was unavoidably part of war but finally admitted involvement when in 1992, Professor Yoshimi Yoshiaki of Chuo University found wartime documents in the Library of the National Institute for Defence Studies confirming that the Japanese military had indeed operated comfort stations. However, the Japanese government as a whole continues to deny the full nature and extent of its responsibility for the atrocities. Today, the thoroughly patriarcha Japanese social system continues to treat women and young girls as commodities. Corporate fringe benefits in Japan includes “sex tours” of Southeast Asia. Sex trafficking is rampant
Perhaps as a result of the civilian targeting, civilian casualties have risen tremendously since World War I.
During World War I, the percentage of civilian casualties was fifteen percent. The figure catapulted to sixty-five percent in World War II, and now, in more recent "low-intensity" conflicts, it has risen to ninety percent. Increasingly, in twentieth-century warfare, from Nanjing, London, Dresden, and Nagasaki, to Guatemala, Bosnia, Rwanda, and the Middle East, civilians are the target.
Btw, in the early 20th century, there was another Holocaust: the Armenian Holocaust, which was a precursor to the following genocides.
This post is not to blame the Japanese for being sick animals and degrade anyone because of racial background, but rather to enlighten to those who do not fully understand what happened throughout the whole world in the period of time. I am trying to encourage reasoned discussion and comprehension of the other genocides that many do not know much about. Saying that one was worse doesn't do anything, though. [/font]
I know for a fact that my grandfather is not quite fond with and about Japanese people. He lived in Hong Kong at the time, around a pre-teen I think. He actually doesn't talk about it much.
Anyhow...discuss.
PS: Refrain from comments like "those Japs fuckin bloowwww. lets drop 500 nukes on dem"
Last edited by SheiK; 08-08-2007 at 01:46 PM.
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