Does every WW2 film from any nation's perspective have to cover it's war crimes?

[josak]

OK that is simply not true, I know several Japanese people and all are aware of the war and most acknowledge they did horrible things in it, I know one (out of 7) who thinks that they did terrible things which were justified given the situation. That seems to me to be about the same as not better than what say the average American believes as I know lots of Americans who will defend every single atrocity ever committed by the US military.

Again with the false equivalence, the Japanese state is engaging is systematic whitewashing of the past. The American government is not going to add the names of the people who committed the Mi lay massacre to the Vietnam war memorial and yet the with the full agreement of the Japanese 1618 convicted war criminals were added to the Yasukuni shrine, which acts as a memorial to Japanese war dead. There is a difference between the beliefs of individuals and the action of the national government.

Seriously, you are telling me if I look I won't find anyone responsible of war crimes on a US military memorial or cemetery? (or any other country for that matter?).

No but the US government has not decided to add the names of war criminals who had been executed for their crimes to a war memorial. Again with the false equivalence.

Now that is just pointless semantics, so giving someone a state burial with an honoring gravestone is fine but a memorial is not? Ridiculous.

As for "convicted and executed" we all know that victors are not punished for war crimes so that is a pointless distinction. All nations somewhat whitewash their past, is it good? No, is it inevitable? Yes every school curriculum reflects the views of that nation, I was taught the atom bomb was fine morally and that American natives benefited greatly from the arrival of civilization in school.

Should we talk about these issues? sure, should we ham fistedly shove them into every movie even tangentially related? Obviously not. If any Japanese person doesn't know about their past atrocities it's not because it's whitewashed it's because they are blinded by their patriotism to the point of idiocy... A massive percentage of the US population is just like that too.
I believe American presidents visit the graveyards of which contain several war criminals, I would further claim the fact that we don't even know off hand which ones contain such people just proves how much more ignorant we are of our war crimes. Do you know for example where Major-General Raymond Hufft is buried? That guy admitted that if the US had lost the war he would be tried for war crimes (he ordered troops to kill all German soldiers who surrendered beyond the Rhine).

It's also a rare American who will know about Perry's forced opening of Japan.

Yet again wit the false equivalence. The visits the Yasukuni shrine is part of systematic whitewashing of the past. Japanese school textbooks version of the Japanese occupation of Korea goes into great detail about the industrialization of Korea that took place under Japanese rule between 1905-1945. However it makes no mention of the fact Japanse rule made speaking Korean a criminal offence and forced all Korean nationals have a Japanese name which they were known by in public. Japan tried to wipe Korean culture out but its not mentioned once in school history books. Every German school child is taught the reality of the 3rd Reich, every Japanese school child is taught version of the past the deliberately glosses over the truth of Japan's past. Germany's children are taught that Germans used slave labour in its war machine, Japanese children are taught that they were not slave labourers but volunteers.

 

[Gorrath]

I agree with the first part of what you say but the second part is not justifiable. Simply attacking civilian populations to demoralize them is not only immoral, but it often does not lead to achieving the objectives you might think. If you go on a campaign of killing civilians for no other reason than to cause wholesale slaughter, you are more likely to gird your opposition, turning moderates into war-supporters. Precise targeting of military objectives is considered best practice in modern war fighting. That factory you mention is a perfectly acceptable target, even if all it's producing is food for the troops. Blowing up a suburb with no military or industrial targets is counter productive and a war crime.

What do you consider the two bombs the US dropped in Japan? Morally justified or not, they sure as Hell accomplished the desired goals.

I guess the goal was to explain that if they wanted war, we had the power to level them. It wasn't to slaughter, it was to flex and it worked. But the result was terrible.

There's more to the target selection of Nagasaki and Hiroshima than most people pay any attention to. The selection committee which decided exactly where the bombs would be dropped had initially considered Kyoto and Tokyo as possible targets, but both were dismissed. If the United States simply wanted to end the war by nuking a bunch of civilians, either of those two cities would have been far preferable to where the bombs ended up landing.

I would be foolish or disingenuous if I stated that the use of the bombs on Japan wasn't rooted in psychological warfare against the whole nation, but we did choose Nagasaki and Hiroshima for tactical reasons as well. Both cities were already considered targets of some importance, but it was felt neither city was a good choice for fire bombing due to the close proximity of rivers. People tend to think that we just nuked the two places to kill as many people as possible, and that simply isn't true.

I also have the power of hindsight on my side, which allows me to be thankful we did use the bombs on Japan. I realize some might find that distasteful, but I cannot help but feel that had we not used the bombs in what was their infancy, and demonstrated to the world just how dangerous they were to the whole world at that time, we may very well have ended up with far more powerful bombs being dropped by warring nations later on down the road. Someone was going to be the first to use them, so I can be glad that it was done when the technology was barely out of the cradle.

I hope that answered your question, not sure if I was just rambling around it or not.

Edit: I see that your post I quoted was added to, so it seems we pretty much agree on the atomic bomb issue. However I would not concede that this demonstrates that it is okay to basically bomb civilian populations without it being pursuant to some tactical or strategic purpose. I'd add that terrorizing the populace into submission through slaughter is not considered an appropriate military strategy and is a war crime. There are other, far better ways to go about ending a war between nations that don't involve such egregious loss of innocent lives.

 

[josak]

The fault of the Dresden bombings was that we used fire bombs which maximizes the loss of human loss. The problem was not that it was targeting civilians since the actual target was the train and factory depos. Perhaps they felt that a fire would be more destructive to those things and went ahead with them despite the human element. I would call the cities bombed valid targets because of their strategic positioning for supplying German troops and manufacturing military goods.

while cities are valid targets i never get why the allies are rarely called out for using time-delayed bombs that were not designed to detonate on impact but hours later so they detonate in the middle of rescue operations. i wasn't even aware those thing were used until a friend of mine who works in bomb disposal told me that like 90% of all the explosives they have to deal with are those kinda bombs from WW2 that failed to detonate.
and the issue with Dresden was never if it was a justified target, it was more about the city center being bombed as opposed to the industrial areas further out.


interestingly, the Chinese prime minister is visiting Germany at the end of the month and originally was supposed to visit the Holocaust memorial in Berlin with Merkel but they scrapped that because it would upset the Japanese.

Dresden was about sending a message not military targets, suburbs were leveled completely, bombs were specifically designed to kill civilians and civilian centers were targeted.

 

[josak]

I went to a half-British school. In no textbook about Fisrt and Second World Wars were British crimes adressed. The books didn't talk about the bombing of Dresden, nor how colonial troops composed the wide majority of front line infantry nor admitted the use of chemical warfare as weapon of the British (mostly talking about chenical weapons in a small asection, and with focus on German Mustard Gas). I was never thought about the Boer Wars nor their concnetration camps.

And all this can eb said it is glossed over in British media. Of the episodes I've seen of Doctor Who, the two that happened during the WWII were during the bombing of London and not a mantion of Dresden. The quite good Downton Abbey has two characters that fought the Boer Wars and not one mention to concentration camps. Nor are the atrocities of WWI talked about, even while half of the cast was occupied with it and it was a constant background for a whole Series.

The Japanese may be especially into more denialism than other countries, but their own crimes do seem glossed over for most countries (Germany is an exception). They might be shown a bit (US sldiers killing surrendering German troops in Saving Private Ryan) but completely forgeten thematically, "justified" (Peral Harbor and the bombing of civilians) ro in most cases just not talked about (Monument Men). They are not actively dening as a lot of Japanese offcials, but they are the kid that sayws "yeah sorry by the way look over there to that other thing", not owning up to their war crimes. And it seems a bit hypocrytical. After all, the only quick reference to American Caoncentration Camps that I can think of in the mainstream media is in The Karate Kid. nor are there many refrences to the Bombing of Hirsoshima and Nagasaki (I reacall Hiroshima Mon Amour a French film that went into it).


Absolutely nailed it. When we "whitewash" our own history it's fine but if Japan does it it's evil because they are "The Bad Guys".
Also, quite a bit of th Unit 731 was pardoned by Allied forces, probably because they found the research useful. So the US can be said complicit fo the actions fo the Unit, which is normally not adressed by any of the participants.

Japan has done terrible things, and writing criminal anme sin a war memorial doesn't make it better. But everyone is trying to igore their own misdeeds in general, even while not being as overt as teh Japanese (again, exception noted with the Germans).

Exception to the examples I made can be found. They do not how ever disproof the wider trend of that it is present in Western media.

 

[spartan231490]

I raise this obviously over the issue of "The Wind Rises" which has been accused of being Japanese WW2 apologism because a film focused on a military plane designer does not make note of Japan's atrocities in WW2. I am not claiming Japan did not commit such atrocities, indeed there is little I have ever read as horrifying as accounts of the rape of Nanking BUT

Every major nation in WW2 has war crimes under it's belt, the US has not only the intentional targeting of civilians with nuclear weapons but also Operation teardrop, the Biscari massacre, The massacre of Audouville-la-Hubert etc. etc.

Britain (and the US) intentionally targeted civilians during the bombing of Dresden etc. etc.

The Soviets have the rape of Berlin etc. etc.

Yet "Saving Private Ryan" was not condemned for not skipping over to Italy or Hiroshima to show us these atrocities. They simply aren't relevant to the film and the fact that a Japanese film (by a pacifist no less) is being criticized for not doing so demonstrates rampant hypocrisy and a serious lack of self analysis.

I haven't seen the film, but I have heard several analysis about it. The thing is, the atrocities committed by Japan are not irrelevant to "The Wind Rises." One of the major themes was the main character's moral responsibility for how his planes were used in the war, and his refusal to face that. That theme ties directly in with the atrocities committed in the war.

Further, the film does not exist in a vacuum. The reason it's being criticized so harshly is because it's symptomatic of a greater cultural refusal to address the tragedies of the war on the part of Japan. Also, one of the reasons the film was made was to address how awful the war was, so the claim that the atrocities of Japan aren't relevant is disingenuous, at best.

In other words, the problem isn't even that the film glossed over Japanese war crimes, it's how the film did this.

 

[Bocaj2000]

... If a civilian population supports a politician that creates war, then reducing or eliminating that population will correspondingly reduce the support that politician has to make war.

In modern military strategy, the ends almost always justify the means.

Do you realize that you just advocated for genocide?

 

[josak]

Well then you don't get to have it both ways, the film can't be apologism if a central theme is "the way the planes you made were used was bad" because it thus centrally establishes the role of Japan in WW2 as "bad" (as horribly simplistic as that is) thus one should be pleased with the films criticism.

No the reason it is being criticized harshly is because the American national psyche needs to constantly remind everyone that Japan was bad to excuse nuking them or Perry's forced opening of Japan etc. not to mention historical rivalries between Asian superpowers which will take any opportunity to put the others down.

Thus the film criticizing the war and Japanese actions by inference and with subtlety is not enough, what people in the west seem to want is not self recognition or understanding of the war what they want is effacement and self humiliation, pushing for that will only get the opposite result.

 

[josak]

... If a civilian population supports a politician that creates war, then reducing or eliminating that population will correspondingly reduce the support that politician has to make war.

In modern military strategy, the ends almost always justify the means.

Do you realize that you just advocated for genocide?

Jesus Christ, he actually did.

 

[Fox12]

Miyazaki's film has no responsibility to depict the atrocities in Nanking, or any other place in Asia. It is about a man who designed war planes, but he was not directly in control of how those planes were used. The only reason I would be angry is if the film demonized the countries at war with Japan (which doesn't fit Miyazaki's pacifistic attitude).

Nanking represented a horrible breakdown of military discipline, a perfect melting pot of horrible circumstances. A powerful racist military organization with zero accountability just took control of the enemy capitol after months of brutal, slow warfare. Many of them wanted revenge. However, when the slaughter happened, most of the people in mainland Japan didn't know about it. They were just told of the glorious Japanese military. The difference is that the slaughter in Germany actually occurred within their own country, and we forced them to acknowledge it. Japans war crimes occured overseas, and we were willing to make more negotiations with them in order to achieve a quick victory, before the Soviets moved in. None of this is really attached to a plane designer, who probably didn't even know about Japanese war crimes, and whose planes had little to no impact on massacres that were mostly committed by ground forces.

I think the issue is that most countries acknowledge their war crimes, even in the U.S. The United States imprisoned Japanese Americans and fire bombed civilian population centers. Russia... well, they were out for blood. The issue that makes people so irate is Japans refusal to acknowledge their mistakes because of their history strong ethnic central national pride. While I agree that this is certainly bad, and may have bad repercussions in the future, I'll repeat that this is a national problem, and not tied to Miyazaki's film in any way.

Off Topic: On a side not, I do feel compelled to play devils advocate concerning Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That really was the best option available at the time, as Japan refused multiple times to surrender. The military was prepared for a full invasion, and refused to surrender even after the dropping of the first bomb because they wanted to preserve their emperor. Some hokey historians have claimed that the Japanese wanted to surrender, and that we mistranslated a message, but this has been more or less debunked. The use of WMD's was a horrible event, but it also cost the fewest live. Several hundred thousand people died in the event. However, a land invasion would have costed an estimated 2 million Japanese lives, and 1 million Allied lives. More people died due to conventional warfare in Japan than died from nuclear weapons. The firebombings alone killed more people than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Most people don't know that, though, because WMD's are a more dramatic psychological symbol, even though they killed fewer people. To make matters worse, a swift victory was needed, because if Russia had been allowed to invade from the north (they had already invaded Manchuria) then they would split Japan in half in the same way that Berlin was split in half. In conclusion, the use of WMD's was the best option in a bad situation, because it cost the fewest lives.

That said, the United States has committed war crimes throughout its history as well, including the destruction of Native American tribes, and the overthrow of popularly elected governments during the Cold War by the CIA.

 

[Soviet Heavy]

Wasn't there a big outcry in the 80s when Reagan and some German politicians paid their respects to a war cemetery that also contained Waffen SS dead?

Yes but that has not been repeated by any other President . Yasukuni shrine visits by the Japanese Prime ministers is repeated and each and every time there is a visit, it causes problems with China and both Koreas. Japan added the names of war criminals in 1978. Furthermore the shrine's musume use the nationalist propaganda line that Japan was forced into war by the United States and all Japan wanted was a co-prosperity sphere for Asians. The millions of Chinese and Korean victims puts a lie to that statement.

Several countries have come out and stated that a Trade Embargo is not grounds to go to war. (Japan was heavily reliant on foreign trade in the early 20th century, and their unpopular military actions resulted in the United States cutting them off from the country's large fuel and oil resources.)

Japan treats this trade embargo as a means to go to war out of desperation. Their local reserves weren't enough to sustain their large military, so they feel justified in starting a war. Never mind that the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and later the rest of China was also directly motivated by this same desire for resources.

 

[Gorrath]

... If a civilian population supports a politician that creates war, then reducing or eliminating that population will correspondingly reduce the support that politician has to make war.

In modern military strategy, the ends almost always justify the means.

Do you realize that you just advocated for genocide?

Genocide is something done to eliminate an unwanted faction within one's own country.

It's not genocide when you do it against the enemy.

what your describing is "total war" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_war

in WW2, out of the main players, Britain, Japan, Germany and Russia were all fully mobilised and existed in a state of "total war".

That's the term I couldn't remember! Thanks!

So, backtracking a bit with the proper term:

Is Total War a socially justifiable practice or is it an immoral war crime?

Should segments of a population still be considered off-limit non-combatants when an entire nation is mobilized for war?

Personally, I think that line moves about depending on time and circumstance.

No doubt it does move, no war effort is done cleanly or without innocent casualties. Even in WWII however we can certainly draw some lines. I do not begrudge Japan their attack on Pearl Harbor, nor the Allies their attack on Dresden. I would condemn any group of soldiers walking into a house full of scared women and children and putting bullets in everyone or forcing POWs to work themselves to death. As you say, the line moves, but it should never be abolished.

 

[Lightknight]

while cities are valid targets i never get why the allies are rarely called out for using time-delayed bombs that were not designed to detonate on impact but hours later so they detonate in the middle of rescue operations. i wasn't even aware those thing were used until a friend of mine who works in bomb disposal told me that like 90% of all the explosives they have to deal with are those kinda bombs from WW2 that failed to detonate.

I'm unfamiliar with any such bombs. They would be an entirely ineffective use of explosives. I think you're confused with the hour break in Air Raids in which they do wait for an hour before attacking again and this is to prevent successful prevention of additional harm (such as preventing fire from spreading further). That's pretty typical in WWII raids but is functionally the same thing as if we had delayed bombs. But if you're going to bomb strategic facilities, you don't want the fires getting put out too early.

and the issue with Dresden was never if it was a justified target, it was more about the city center being bombed as opposed to the industrial areas further out.

Several large factories weren't hit but that doesn't mean valid targets weren't hit. I don't know how much we knew about the factories' locations at the time or even if we could have hit them reliably at night. Ever tried to bomb facilities at night? They probably just aimed for light and then after the first strike everyone targets that general area. In what world is a major rail and communications center with 110 factories and 50,000 workers in support of the enemy's war effort not a justified target? There has been a significant amount of misinformation on the subject though. But in 1942 it was listed as one of the foremost industrial locations of the Reich and in 1944 the German Army High Command's Weapons Office listed 127 medium-to-large factories and workshops which supplied the army with material. (thanks wikipedia)

Have you looked at the tonnage of bombs dropped on Dresden compared to other cities of comparable size? It was the least bombed city in Germany despite being comparable in size to several of the other targets.

It is easy to look back in hindsight and say one thing or the other. But Dresden was absolutely a valid target as is and honestly should have been bombed sooner.

 

[Lightknight]

There's more to the target selection of Nagasaki and Hiroshima than most people pay any attention to. The selection committee which decided exactly where the bombs would be dropped had initially considered Kyoto and Tokyo as possible targets, but both were dismissed. If the United States simply wanted to end the war by nuking a bunch of civilians, either of those two cities would have been far preferable to where the bombs ended up landing.

I would be foolish or disingenuous if I stated that the use of the bombs on Japan wasn't rooted in psychological warfare against the whole nation, but we did choose Nagasaki and Hiroshima for tactical reasons as well. Both cities were already considered targets of some importance, but it was felt neither city was a good choice for fire bombing due to the close proximity of rivers. People tend to think that we just nuked the two places to kill as many people as possible, and that simply isn't true.

I also have the power of hindsight on my side, which allows me to be thankful we did use the bombs on Japan. I realize some might find that distasteful, but I cannot help but feel that had we not used the bombs in what was their infancy, and demonstrated to the world just how dangerous they were to the whole world at that time, we may very well have ended up with far more powerful bombs being dropped by warring nations later on down the road. Someone was going to be the first to use them, so I can be glad that it was done when the technology was barely out of the cradle.

I hope that answered your question, not sure if I was just rambling around it or not.

Edit: I see that your post I quoted was added to, so it seems we pretty much agree on the atomic bomb issue. However I would not concede that this demonstrates that it is okay to basically bomb civilian populations without it being pursuant to some tactical or strategic purpose. I'd add that terrorizing the populace into submission through slaughter is not considered an appropriate military strategy and is a war crime. There are other, far better ways to go about ending a war between nations that don't involve such egregious loss of innocent lives.

Oh yeah, attacking non-combatants for no reason is terrorism. War time or no. Sorry about the edit so far after.

 

[josak]

"Genocide is something done to eliminate an unwanted faction within one's own country.

It's not genocide when you do it against the enemy."

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO

genocide

noun
1.
the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular nation or ethnic group.

 

[Lightknight]

Miyazaki's film has no responsibility to depict the atrocities in Nanking, or any other place in Asia. It is about a man who designed war planes, but he was not directly in control of how those planes were used. The only reason I would be angry is if the film demonized the countries at war with Japan (which doesn't fit Miyazaki's pacifistic attitude).

Oh, this is about a Miyazaki film? Yeah, it'd actually be weird if it touched on that.

"Genocide is something done to eliminate an unwanted faction within one's own country.

It's not genocide when you do it against the enemy."

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO

genocide

noun
1.
the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular nation or ethnic group.

Yeah, genocide is definitely genocide no matter who you would commit it against. Though I disagree that "large group of people" qualifies regardless of them having a common nationality or ethnic background. The etiology of "genocide" demands they have a common background.

 

[Gorrath]

Oh yeah, attacking non-combatants for no reason is terrorism. War time or no.

Okay good, it did seem like you were suggesting that simply eliminating a whole population of civilians for no other reason than that they supported their government was an okay thing to do because the means were justified by the ends.