Posted on 09/30/2017 4:19:11 AM PDT by RoosterRedux
I was watching a World War II movie in a theater, with an Asian immigrant friend, when I learned a lesson in culture that no university could have taught better. In one battle scene, there is a cease-fire order, and a German soldier approaches the British position, under a white flag of truce. The British commander steps forward, completely vulnerable, but the Germans do not shoot. There is a brief exchange of words, as the Germans demand surrender, and the British commander declines. Both men then return to their positions, and the deadly fighting resumes.
My friend in the theater leaned toward me, and quietly asked, why didn’t they shoot the German?
I was both amused and horrified at the question. It was unthinkable that one would shoot a man under a white flag, so unthinkable that it was literally laughable. I actually did laugh.
My answer was, they can’t shoot him; he’s under a white flag.
My Asian friend was perplexed for a moment, and then got it. So, this is how Western people fight wars.
This incident sticks in my memory all these years later, because it enlightened me to a profound truth. Not all cultures are equal. In that same war, the Japanese, for example, had utterly no regard for our white flags, unless it suited their purposes. Their concept of honor was utterly unlike ours. To them, it was the white flag of surrender that was dishonorable, and anyone who surrendered, friend or enemy, was a pariah. Suicide was preferable.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
I agree, they were tough SOBs (saying that with respect). I remember up until not long ago there were still reports of finding Japanese soldiers in a jungle somewhere still fighting WWII.
The last one to surrender...
http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/17/world/asia/japan-philippines-ww2-soldier-dies/index.html
Your premise was incorrect, so no, your point is not proven. The fact that @$$hole is in the American vernacular does not make all Americans @$$holes, though I’m willing to make exceptions...
That disturbing paradox applies to the Germans as well. How a people who appreciate the arts and value education almost more than anyone else can perpetrate the Holocaust and wage WWII is both discouraging and perplexing.
The Japanese attitude toward their own cruelty in China and through out the Pacific is likewise a puzzle. It only makes sense if we assume that they truly considered the Chinese and others as a sort of non-human species, entitled to no more respect than one would give an insect. I saw a good example of this in the WWII documentary "World at War". A very cultured Japanese prince, notable for his sardonic grin, and memorable for appearing in a top hat in pictures of the formal surrender on the Missouri, said that when he heard news that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Japan, he wondered if we we truly civilized.
Antifa is good evidence that you speak the truth.
No, I don’t think so. I have never been able to find that book again, but it was pretty thick, and it covered the Bataan Death March, the prison ships to Japan that got attacked by the Americans, the experience of being a POW in Japan, and repatriation. The author also covered POWs from Wake, Singapore, and others.
It had an effect on me...I had a hard time believing it really happened that way. That people could treat other people that way.
Actually, if you have ever seen the the movie with Spencer Tracy in “The Nuremberg Trials” he has an equivalent moment.
He just spent the day watching the films that had been taken when the concentration camps were liberated, and goes out to have dinner at a beer hall with a German war widow. He has difficulty reconciling all these jolly people singing songs in German and pounding their steins on the table with the the people who had created and run the camps.
It bugged him out.
In war we are not civilized. Nobody is civilized. When you have to stick a bayonet into another human’s throat or drop an atomic bomb on them, you have to hang the cloak of civilization on the hook for some period of time. It may be 10 seconds. It may be the rest of your life. We ask people to kill on our behalf, and sometimes people need killing.
I read an account of a submarine that shot Japanese soldiers in the water after their ship had been sunk. They were within swimming distance of land, and would have ended up fighting and killing American troops if they survived.
Everyone knew it.
So they took care of it there instead of letting them get ashore and fight. Given the no-holds barred nature of the warfare in the Pacific, I found it very difficult to judge them.
Some people make up some sh** and run with it.... I agree 100% with you.
I read “Knights of Bushido” in 6th grade; it could very well be the one you’re thinking of.
One thing I find historically interesting is Japan’s behavior in the Russo-Japanese War & the few land actions that occurred for them against German Far Eastern interests in WWI contrasted with their behavior in WWII. What happened? From what I can find to read that claims to be definitive on Japan’s behavior in those two previous conflicts says was quite honorable and within western norms.
Thanks - it’s mostly just a metaphor - the closest in America would probably be “douchebag”.
My paternal grandfather served as reconnaissance with the Trailblazers in Europe. He never talked about the war when I was growing up, and only in his last years did he talk about some of his experiences. One thing he did related was having German prisoners, captured for interrogation, shot trying to bring them back across American lines. It bothered him greatly.
He also spoke of having to kill German soldiers who were just kids. He was born in ‘24 so he himself was only barely in his 20s.
Sometime around 1995, a bizarre romanticization of World War II took hold in the American consciousness. It probably had something to do with the 50th anniversary of the end, and the knowledge that most of the remaining veterans would soon be gone. When I was growing in Queens, virtually every man my father’s age was a WW-2 vet, the impression they made on me was that the only thing about World War II worth celebrating was its end.
Thanks DuncanWaring, I am going to check it out...I will be grateful to you if it is the one, as I have been looking for it for many years.
bkmk
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