Truest statement here. War cannot be refined.
However, I do wish that some of my fellow Freepers wouldn’t condemn a whole people for the actions of those who conducted WWII. I’m talking about those who would say we “should’ve dropped another one” or that the Japanese are “fill in the blank”..you’ve read them.
There are plenty of Japanese who know, and are quite embarrassed by the truth of thier nation’s conduct during those years. I know many of them, young and old, that know thier government is full of crap on the issue. They just don’t want to re-live it.
As I understand the memorials to them, the people honor the fact that young men went off to fight for thier country. They lost, but the Japanese people do not see them as criminals. They see them as soldiers who had a job to do.
Yes, the Japanese official line is twisted, and these views piss off thier nieghbors to this day, but most are as passive as the Germans when it comes to the idea of ever entering into another war.
By all means, I think the atrocities should be prosecuted, even now. But, I don’t think it serves us well to rub thier faces in it. Someone mentioned that China will pay them back someday (reckoning). I would ask, after reading this thread, who’s side will we be on?
As for whether there are war criminals that escaped punishment, I think they have to live every day of their lives knowing that hundreds of thousands of japanese men, women and children payed for their sins at Hiroshima and Nagasaki..
They will have to live with that secret guilt until the day they die, and their survivors, family members, descendants, those who know what their husband, father, uncle, grandfather did during the war, will also have to live with it.
Additionally, we are living in the beginning of what is being called the "information age"..
There will come a time when any japanese citizen can enter his/her grandfather's name on Google or some other search engine, and they will find that name listed as being an officer or crewman on some vessel in WW2, and find accounts of the murders performed by that vessel's crew members.
They will then know not only what their grandfather did in the war, but that everyone in the world with a computer terminal can easily find out what they did in the war.
How disgraceful will that be, when your grandpa's war crimes are a matter of public record on the world-wide web?
For all the world to see?
I cannot begin to imagine the humiliation those descendants will feel.
Those that escape prosecution will suffer the greatest punishment of all for their culture.
The public disgrace and humiliation of his entire family line.
Iv’e always called them JAPS.
And the reason we had no more nuclear bombs was that we had to use one to test the Fat Man implosion device to see if it would even work and did not yet have enough weapons grade uranium 235 or plutonium 239 accumulated from our reactors to construct another Little Boy or Fat Man bomb at that time. We had to bluff the Japs.
There are plenty of Japanese who know, and are quite embarrassed by the truth of thier nation’s conduct during those years. I know many of them, young and old, that know thier government is full of crap on the issue. They just don’t want to re-live it.My grandfather and his buddies would sympathize, I'm sure -- they weren't particularly interested in living it the first time.