Facts are Facts, I'm not contesting this assertion. What I am confused about is "Similarly, many Chinese hold Mao in high regard despite his administration overseeing systematic human rights abuses". There are 1.3 - 1.4 Billion Chinese, how many of them hold this idea of yours? Obviously you can not use national polls data as it is certain it is rigged in favor of the CCP and its policies.
Would a Japan/China war be good for the US
- Thread starter noob_trad3r
- Start date
Facts are Facts, I'm not contesting this assertion. What I am confused about is "Similarly, many Chinese hold Mao in high regard despite his administration overseeing systematic human rights abuses". There are 1.3 - 1.4 Billion Chinese, how many of them hold this idea of yours? Obviously you can not use national polls data as it is certain it is rigged in favor of the CCP and its policies.
Probably a bad mistake to get involved in this particular war as both our allies of Taiwan and South Korea have existing territorial disputes with Japan.
As a matter of fact, China accepts that the Diaoyutai Islands should be administered by Taiwan and Taiwanese naval forces have themselves been involved in altercations with the Japanese coast guard. South Korea also has a vociferous long standing dispute over the Dokdo Islands, both South Korea and Japanese forces have dispatched gunboats to the area.
It is historical revisionism, 70 million is an over-exaggeration. Although we may never know the full extent, most accepted historical figures put it at 20-30 million, most of which were caused by disastrous economic policies such as collectivization resulting in famines. No different from how British economic policies during the British Raj in India caused the Great Indian famine of 1876 resulting in anything from 5 to 20 million Indian deaths. That episode would form the basis for the formation of the Indian National Congress to advocate for Indian independence.
I too have a couple of connections to the war.
My maternal grandfather was a tropical botanist who ran a rubber tree plantation on Sumatra for the US Rubber Company. Rubber was a pretty big deal before synthetics. He was captured on Sumatra and held in a Japanese POW camp for the duration of the war even though he was a civilian. He got malaria and beriberi which eventually killed him years later. He had amazingly bad luck considering that he was a WWI veteran who fought in France and managed to get sucked into WWII as well.
On the other side of the coin my stepmother is Japanese and was born in an internment camp in California. Her mother and father were both interned but the father elected to be deported to Japan and he stayed there leaving his two daughters and his wife behind in the camps. He never returned to the US and became a pretty big industrialist in Japan. They lost their home and a strawberry farm when they were imprisoned. The mother (my step-grandmother?) is still living but she is very embittered as she was working on a law degree before she was imprisoned and never was able to return to school. She spent her career as a secretary at a law firm instead of becoming an attorney.
I worked for The National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA) and ran a tracking station on Kiribati Island in the South Pacific for a few years. I visited Tokyo a few times and made one trip down to the Tanegashima Space Center. I liked Japan and got pretty good at speaking conversational Japanese. I've never seen a harder working people. They also party very hard. I toyed with the idea of living in Japan and working at Bloomberg in Tokyo but I never made a sufficiently strong connection to be able to get hired there.
Its interesting that your mother was in Singapore before the war. Is your family British?
Hitler came to power because the winners of the first world war were trying to completely strangle Germany and give it no chance to survive, as mentioned the Treaty of Versailles signatories (on the winning side) really laid the first building blocks for WW2.
Therefore, I do not agree that going to war against Hitler was noble, it was war like any other - nothing noble about it.
To phrase the context of a war between other countries as beneficial to the US shows the epitome of arrogance. It's just about time that the US stop benefiting.
Hitler came to power because of those harsh terms, but WWII was his choice above and beyond seeking redress.
By 1938, under the Nazi policy of Lebensraum, the territories lost had been retaken, Austria annexed and the parts of Czechoslovakia populated by ethnic Germans (Sudetenland) also annexed. So, not just lost territory retaken, but expanded beyond WWI borders.
This was accepted by the U.K. and France via the Munich Agreement of September 1938. Remember Chamberlain's "Peace in our time......"?
WWII broke out in 1939 when Germany refused to withdraw from Poland.
Up to and even after this point, if you want to characterise the war as being like any other, I would not argue. Europe has a centuries long history of wars, this would be just one more in a long catalogue of barbaric behaviour.
What changed things was the interpretation of Lebensraum as 'Living space for the Aryan master race', and the consequent industrial scale slaughter of civilians. Accounts vary as to when this was first known, but by July 1941 mass killings were already taking place in Russia.
Stopping that is what I see as noble, in the same way that I see the failure of the international community to stop the killing fields of Cambodia and the genocide in Rwanda as being utterly shameful.
British on my mother's side.
She was actually in Kuala Lumpur when the Japanese invaded Malaya. Events moved fast and she (and her 2 sisters) were sent to hide in a convent. Unfortunately they were betrayed by an informer, the convent raided and all 'enemy aliens' sent to the Sime Road Internment camp in Singapore.