In Japan August is a season of war. Two atomic bombs were dropped in two cities in August. Japan surrendered in August. Besides they have usually bon festivals which celebrate the return of ancestor's souls as well as the souls of the dead at war.
Dead people are free from any discriminations they had while still they were alive. Even though executed crimes ought to be treated just as the deceased souls as ordinary citizens. War criminals are a strange word. For those who think war is nothing but a crime, war crime just sounds like capital punishment death penalty, or automobile car, submarine undersea boat.
Seven war time leaders were executed as A class war criminal in International Military Tribunal for the Far East held in Tokyo after the World War II. One out of seven was a civilian official. They were charged at their role of war in three parts, war crimes, crimes against peace, crimes against humanity.
Some insist that they ought to be payed respected in a different shrine other than one particular shrine that specifically designated for soldiers who were dead at war. Is there any meaning to discriminate even after their death?
Different shrines sound absurd to me. It could perhaps be argued that war criminals shouldn't be respected at all - in my opinion a rather arrogant attitude. The alternative is to say: they were punished, they paid for their crimes, now they are like every other soul.
ReplyDeleteI believe we all get the chance to learn what we didn't learn in this life, as "spirits" and/or in our next incarnation. Judging those we don't understand and accept gets us nowhere whether they are alive or dead.
In WWII, all the beligerants engaged in a race to eliminate their enemies' civilian populations. Those with insufficient air power tried to do this extermination directly on the ground, as in the Japanese army order to shoot all Chinese on sight. The Western allies were able to do this from the air, with their thousand-bomber raids or fire-bombing of German or Japanese cities. Several fire bombing raids on Japanese cities managed to kill more people than the atomic bombs did. The only thing superior about this, compared to what the Japanese did in China, was simply a matter of taste -- that it seems more civilized to slaughter civilians from a distance, with high-tech impersonal devices of mass murder, rather than with guns and swords at close quarters.
ReplyDeleteAt present we have the USA and Israel trying to make the same distinction between their own killing and that of their enemies. Terrorists, they say, directly intend to target civilians, while the civilized nations only accidently kill civilians in the crossfire, while trying to kill only the enemy. In my opinion the distinction is totally imaginary. We have already seen the firepower which the Western nations bring to bear on any community which may "harbour" their enemies.
It is silly for all of us to undermine or admire the dead excessively. It's better for us to pay simple respect to the dead though some are revered in a mausoleum and others are just buried in a humble tomb .
ReplyDeleteA war is in the end killing because of the difference in language, culture. I think the value of life is much more important than just the difference in language, culture. In order to prevent such atrocities men tend to commit, we'd like to try to learn a bit more about our neighbours.Know your neighbours, that's men's eleventh commandments.
ReplyDeleteI guess it's no use because they are dead. dead is dead , i think it's the LIFE that one lives that we should celebrate:) the dead have their own appointment with God which is none of our business I think, so we shouldn't discriminate. I don't see the "point".
ReplyDeleteI think it's you who got to the 'point'. :)
ReplyDeleteWhile it is certainly true that the allies did target civilians the motivation was not the wholesale elimination the population of the enemy country. Civilians were targeted as a means to either deprive a nation of industrial capacity or break their will to fight. These policies may have been pragmatically misguided and/or immoral, but they are certainly not equivalent to the genocidal policies of the Axis powers.
ReplyDeleteAs proof of this, once an area had become occupied by western Allied forces - I don't know enough of the behavior of the Soviets or Chinese - we don't see the large scale exterminations - Auschwitz or Nanking - that were a typical part of the occupation by Axis powers. Of course, I'm sure that plenty of atrocities did occur. But at the highest levels of the western governments, there was never a policy decision to eradicate a population.
There is some truth to this. Only some modern wars have been race wars or ethnic cleansing wars. In WWII the Russian front, the Chinese front, and the Japanese-American battle of the Pacific were race wars, with very little mercy shown in taking prisoners or respecting civilians. Meanwhile, the war in Western Europe was fought with some degree of restraint and respect between enemies. But the extremes the Western nations went to in bombing German population centers, and the various war crimes they committed in the later colonial wars, show there is a common denominator in all wars. Once they are thrown into battle, armies will do almost anything they feel is necessary to win and survive, no matter what the cost to the surrounding population. In that sense all war is a settling of differences through a contest of mass murder
ReplyDeleteTrue. In early stages of WWII Hitler didn't try to eliminate British soldiers in Calais. He let them go back to Britain.
ReplyDeleteIn general the Nazis did not commit atrocities against western troops. The normally obeyed the "laws of war", accepting surrenders, treating POWs humanely, etc. Also they did not target the general population of western occupied countries to a great degree. There was no policy of slaughtering the French.
ReplyDeleteThe Nazis did carry on their race war in the occupied areas, however. They did round up Jews and Slavs and other undesirables in occupied France. They did ship these people off to die in concentration camps.
On the Eastern front in Europe the Nazis were hell bent on extermination of the Jewish and Slavic populations. A captured British soldier could expect reasonably humane treatment, while a captured Russian could expect a death camp.