Atrocity?

This is coolbert:

Walking through the aisles of the discount book store yesterday.

And come to the history section.

And see a book with a title that catches my attention immediately.

The title is "Japanese Atrocities in World War Two [WW2]".

So I pick the book up and thumb through it.

Curious about the entire subject.

Go to the index and look up two items that I have previously blogged about.

One is the Andaman Islands massacres and the other is Colonel Tsuji.

The former was one of the most egregious atrocities of WW2 [can an atrocity be referred to anything else other than egregious??]. The latter was the man who was instrumental in the massacre of ethnic Chinese living in Singapore in 1942, and the callous mistreatment of American prisoners in the Philippines during the same year.

And guess what?

Neither the Andaman Islands atrocity or the name of Colonel Tsuji is mentioned in the book.

How is this possible??

It is not like this stuff is small potatoes.

And I know that Tsuji escaped prosecution at the end of the war by going into hiding. So, in a technical sense, Tsuji was never found guilty of anything.

But nonetheless, was the author so ignorant of this events and person that he did not include them in this book??

I just cannot say.

Who knows what goes into the minds of those that write history?

 I know you cannot include EVERYTHING. Hard to say what went on in the mind of the author in this case. Maybe there is just so much to cover you can only include what YOU feel is important.

There are perhaps several factors as to why Japanese atrocities of WW2 just have not been covered to the same degree as the atrocities of the German Nazis have been.

To begin with, in the aftermath of the war, the Japanese were looked upon by some persons as being the "victims".

This as a consequence of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The American author Joyce, who wrote "From Here To Eternity", a novel of WW2, and who lived as an expatriate in Paris for decades, comments about this in his book, WW Two.

Joyce relates how it was very fashionable for Parisian intellectuals beginning around 1947 to portray the atomic bombings as terrible unwarranted crimes that made the Americans just as bad as the Japanese, perhaps even worse??!! These were persons who were anti-American and hated everything American and were usually communists or communist sympathizers.

[the fact that about 15 million ethnic Germans were uprooted from their ancestral homes all over eastern Europe and ordered at bayonet point to depart at once and be resettled in Germany would never be allowed to be used as an event that would portray the Germans as being "victims" of the war].

Some persons have suggested that the number and scale of Japanese atrocities was down played by allied authorities in an attempt to bring the Japanese on board in the Cold War. Not to antagonize the Japanese was seen as a positive step to bring the Japs into the camp of "free nations".

Again, the myth man Joseph Campbell has some interesting observations on the subject.

Germany, says Campbell, was felt to be a member of the civilized, Christian world.

The Germans knew better than to do what they did in the war. What they did went against their basic nature and is to be condemned in the strongest terms.

Nations such as the Russians, the Chinese, or even the Japanese are not part of the civilized, Christian world.

Do not possess the moral code or ethical standards of behavior that western Christian countries and their armies are supposed to adhere to. When they commit atrocities, they are acting according to their true nature. Nothing better can be expected of them.

The true and complete explanation of why Japanese war crimes during WW2 were glossed over is probably a combination of the above factors. Understandable, but not excused.

coolbert.