Seen on the street in Kyiv.

Words of Advice:

"If Something Seems To Be Too Good To Be True, It's Best To Shoot It, Just In Case." -- Fiona Glenanne

“The Mob takes the Fifth. If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” -- The TOFF *

"Foreign Relations Boil Down to Two Things: Talking With People or Killing Them." -- Unknown

“Speed is a poor substitute for accuracy.” -- Real, no-shit, fortune from a fortune cookie

"If you believe that you are talking to G-d, you can justify anything.” — my Dad

"Colt .45s; putting bad guys in the ground since 1873." -- Unknown

"Stay Strapped or Get Clapped." -- probably not Mr. Rogers

"The Dildo of Karma rarely comes lubed." -- Unknown

"Eck!" -- George the Cat

* "TOFF" = Treasonous Orange Fat Fuck, A/K/A Dolt-45,
A/K/A Commandante (or Cadet) Bone Spurs,
A/K/A El Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago, A/K/A the Asset., A/K/A P01135809

Thursday, December 11, 2014

Dear Japanese Nationalists: Go Fuck Yourselves

The Japanese nationalists are suffering a severe case of butthurt over Angelina Jolie's movie "Unbroken".
Japanese nationalists have branded Angelina Jolie a 'demon' and called for her to be banned from travelling to the country over her so-called 'immoral' depiction of Japanese Second World War prison guards in her directorial debut 'Unbroken'.

The Hollywood star's new movie, released on Boxing Day in the UK, is based on Laura Hillenbrand's book telling the heroic true life story of U.S. solider turned Olympian Louis Zamperini.

The 2010 biography left Japanese patriots furious at depictions of American prisoners of war being 'beaten, burned, stabbed or clubbed to death, shot, beheaded, killed during medical experiments or eaten alive in ritual acts of cannibalism'.

Now the same groups are turning their attention to protesting Jolie's big screen adaptation, branding it a work of 'pure fabrication', insisting it has 'no credibility', and accusing the star of racism.
"Racism", in this case, is "telling the truth about the conditions in Japanese POW camps".

Actually, the movie likely goes light on that point. From the survivors' accounts that I've read, conditions were horrific and about on the level of a German concentration camp. The Bataan Death March. The Rape of Nanking. The use of prisoners for experiments to test chemical and biological weapons. All of those are factual and well documented by the historical record, regardless of how much the Japanese nationalists may desire to pretend that they never happened.

But I can't go too hard on the Japanese, here, for denying reality. The past few days have shown that America has no shortage of people who want to pretend that bad things never were done, or rationalize them away.

10 comments:

Grog said...

Unit 731

Expatriate Owl said...

And let us not forget Alexandra Hospital.

Murphy's Law said...

Greg Boyington of Black Sheep Squadron fame and Dick O'Kane, skipper of USS Tang, were in that same prison camp--Ofuna--and they tell some of the same tales and describe the same bad Japs in their autobiographies. As far as I'm concerned, Unbroken has been corroborated sufficiently enough to dismiss their objections.

Unknown said...

Thank you, Comrade.

One of the horrible things U.S. propaganda "forgets" is that one of the conditions of the "unconditional surrender" was that we wouldn't pursue some of the perpetrators of the tortuous experiments, as long as we got to keep the records of them. Just in case.

Unknown said...

Thank you, Comrade.

One of the horrible things U.S. propaganda "forgets" is that one of the conditions of the "unconditional surrender" was that we wouldn't pursue some of the perpetrators of the tortuous experiments, as long as we got to keep the records of them. Just in case.

Glenn555 said...

Prisoner death rate in Jap camps was at least 10 times that of POW's held in German camps.

Anonymous said...

I have only surface knowledge but my impression is that there is no comparison between Japanese and German POW camps. The Germans were harder on the Russians than they were on the American and British but it was up to Stalin to kill the Russians who were captured by the Germans. I don't recall the number of Russians repatriated at the end of the war or the exact number/percentage of those eradicated by Stalin. I just remember that the number was shocking.

It is interesting to me that our (American) history books are explicit and detailed about the sins of Germany but remarkably quiet about Japan. The Rape of Nanking gets a mention but Japanese treatment of civilian populations and POWs gets short shrift.

Jill

S O said...

"Prisoner death rate in Jap camps was at least 10 times that of POW's held in German camps."

That's certainly not true for Soviet POWs of 1941/1942, though.

In an unusual act of poor organisation, Germany had not prepared for the intake of millions of POWs. prior to launching Op Barbarossa.
The conditions for the Red Army soldiers were horrible (they dug holes not to escape, but for shelter).
Conditions only improved much when they were discovered as industrial and agricultural manpower pool in 1943.

And I'm not even talking about the commissars' fate.

Comrade Misfit said...

S.O., before the start of the invasion, the Germans decided that they weren't going to abide by the Geneva Convention with regard to Soviet prisoners. They regarded the Slavs as subhuman and acted accordingly.

If they had intended to abide by the Convention, and then were overwhelmed, that might be excusable. But that wasn't the case.

Anonymous said...

Spent a lot of time in China; many, if not most Chinese folks have a deep hatred of Japanese for their past atrocities.