Yao Ming Rejected for Taiwan Charity Visit, China Times Reports

I'm not sure that children should be taught about genocide to be honest, but probably high schoolers could be. Regardless, the college instutions in the U.S. don't pull any punches regarding the activities of Japan or the U.S.

 

Is that your best answer to my question? Where is the link that I have been asking for? Perhaps you should just admit that you have pulled the quote below out of your ass so people will stop asking you for a link. What do you think?

That is what you said in post #163. I don't have opinion on this China-Taiwan issue. But I do have problem with a hypocrite like you who makes up lies in order to rationalize something r****ded. Now give us a link if you can or I will take your silence as an admittance that you are a hypocrite.

 

But you are NOT independent country. Not according to UN, not according to more than 160 countries in the world, including US.

It is a joke that Taiwan keep giving hundreds of millions of dollars to a handful of island countries to buy a diplomatic relationship. Chen keeps wasting taxpayers money on this so that Taiwanese can keep get humiliated getting rejected outright from applying for an official UN status. And every time Chen goes to those tiny countries in Latin america, he begs US government "please let me land on your soil, even if it means I spend 2 hours in the airport, so that I can brag about getting accomodated by the US government".

Has this guy no shame or what? We think Bush is terrible, maybe we ought to feel lucky that we don't have a Chen clown.

 

It is quite different. Between Japanese and Americans it was just a war. Japan didn't occupy any of american territory or killed dozens of millions of american civillians. It is even possible that American killed more Japanese than the other way around in WWII.

I am sure a lot of Jews (I myself know a few) still dislike Germen. What Japanese did to Chinese is only worse than what Germen to Jews. AND, Germen have stood up and admitted what they did was crimes. Japanese have NOT.

One deserves a second chance, ONLY after one learned a lesson from one first chance. Japanese have not done that.

 

No. Your jewish friends would tell you that what the Ger-Men did was something else entirely - and I would agree with them. This borders on the tasteless.

 

Did the Germen have contest among themselves to see who cut off more Jewish heads in a day? I mean literally beheading civilians?

It is pointless to compare who were more cruel. But if you think Japanese were better you are dilusional. Just ask yourself: were Germen crazy enough to fly suicidal mission into battleships? Were Germen crazy enough to cut off themselfs? were Germen crazy enough to rape any fallen city and kill all its civillions?

Take a look of here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

You think Jews took the hardest hit in WWII, think again.

 

Wow, this post is incredibly insensitive. What the Germans did to Jews was even more chilling, not because it was frenzied rape and pillaging, but because it was so cold hearted and systematic.

Canoner, you are way out of line here. When others read this they are going to be very upset.

 

To say the Japanese have never apologized is simply not true. You may take issue with how that apology was presented, or in what capacity, or you can even reject that apology and stay mad, but it has been given by the prime minister of Japan to China.

Here is one example.

Here is another.

If you do 10 minutes of searching you can find half a dozen others. The extreme right wing in Japan is not the majority and does not represent the majority view. If you are waiting for the extreme right wing, you might as well wait for Pat Robertson to embrace homosexuality. If you want every textbook to reflect acurate history, you should probably expect people in Kansas to embrace textbooks on evolution.

The freaky "New History Textbook" that everybody (including Japanese) complain about was used by only 0.039% of junior high schools in Japan as of August 15, 2001, and in 2004 there are eight private junior high schools, one public school for the disabled in Tokyo, three public junior high schools and four public schools for the disabled in Ehime that use the textbook.

I'm also sure that with a bit of digging you can even find Chinese people who believe that the Cultural Revolution was just grand and think the last 40 years have been a long downhill slide.

Taking the nutty views of a minority percentage of the population and trying to extrapolate that to say that all or most Japanese are revisionists is not valid. I appreciate that these nuts offend people. Pat Robertson offends the hell out of me. So do Neo-Nazis. But I don't blame every Christian or every German for these minorities.

 

I can see it now. This gonna be a dick swinging conetst about of "my people got our asses worse wooped than your people....... "

I will point out however, that while what the Japanese did to the Chinese during WWII doesn't get as much interest from the west as the Holocaust, it's no less chilling or cold hearted. If you think it is, maybe you just don't know the subject well enough. People in China don't hate the Japanese for no reason.

I mean look at 9/11, (this is going to sound more insensitive then I'm intending) it was just two buildings but it changed everything in the U.S. Japanese systematically destroyed "cities", and in manners that are extremely cruel. That's why the anger and hate exist. I mean you have people in the U.S. asking why do the non-millitant muslim groups/countries not speak out against terroism (criticism of a passive act) while not understanding why the Chinese are affected by shrine visits (a criticsim of a active act). There is some hypocracy in that.

Lastly, while I personally believe that we should look forwards and not backwards, and do on some level believe "an eye for an eye make the whole world blind", I can understand why other Chinese people have certain feeling for the Japanese.

 

Actually some of my Jewish friends do agree with me. There are a lot of people, who do not know much about WWII in Asia, think it is all about Nazi vs Jews and US vs Japan. Look at the statistics you will see there was a lot more suffering and a lot more killings elsewhere.

 

No, but they had contests about the carbon monoxide trucks. Beheading has no history in Germany so it didn't take off as a enjoyable mass murder method.

There was also a standing practice at several of the camps when people were starving to death where as they were about to succumb to death by starvation they would put them face down in the open pit latrines so that Jews would be too weak to lift their heads and the terminally ill people would die by sufficating in urine and s**t in order to maximise the suffering.

Ilse Koch, whose husband was the superentendant at Buchenwald also had a wonderful collection of Jewish skin rugs and lampshades and other 'leather goods'. She would set aside people with interesting tatoos, starve them so the flesh would be loose on the bones, and then would have the flesh for making leather taken off while the soon to be deceased were still alive so the leather would remain supple.

Essentially the Japanese operated a large group of amateur sadists and torturers operating as thousands of cottage industries. The Germans for the most part operated with the precision coldness of professionals. They preformed engineering analysis as to how many people could be killed in the most cost effective way, etc. They were much less outwardly emotional about it. Fire vs. Ice.

No, but they had suicide torpedos that the sent into battleships and they had suicide piloted V-1 Bombers that they flew into London, and they had Rocket planes that weren't primarily suicide but had 99% mortality rate which were sent to attack bombers, and the orders were to fly into enemy planes if you ran out of ammo.

I don't understand what this means. If you are talking about Seppuku see the above on the history of Germany and beheading. They did commit suicide by the tens of thousands.

Yes. Warsaw and Stalingrad are two good examples. There are many, many others.

 

You're right, and the Jews are going to win because it is not even a contest in this regard. The systematic , meticulously planned annhilation of 6 million jews -- for the express written purpose of ridding the world of jews -- by Nazi germany makes the Japanese inhumanity to Chinese, Koreans, and other Asians (as well as American POW's) pale in comparison. I don't believe the posters arguing otherwise know enough about the true nature of the Holocaust. Yes, the Japanese were frenzied, brutal occupiers - but the chilling, detached, and above all, premeditated nature of German war crimes makes it something else, IMO.

 

Well there are always a few self-haters in that bunch, lol. Anyway - the Nazi extermination of Jews is less about pure statistics (though they are ovewhelming) and more about the pure methodical nature of it - it is unparalleled in modern history.

If the Japanese had done to Chinese what the Germans did to European Jews - we wouldn't be having this conversation, because you wouldn't exist.

China would have no ethnic Chinese and be speaking Nippon, and a small enclave of Chinese would be in the Chinese homeland (probably, ironically, on the island of Formosa...) and a pre-war chinese diaspora around the globe would be all that was left.

 

I am kinda late for the party, but can't really stay away from something totally illogical and irrational. You see, Lil, the problem is not what Japanese or people in Taiwan can or cannot do, because they have done all they wanted to anyways, despite objections from other people. The only problem is that you and some others don't allow some Chinese or other people to be outraged by certain actions from certain Japanese and Taiwanese.

Nobody stopped Japanese officials paying respect to war criminals, but Chinese people will be angry about it. Now, you and some others are telling Chinese people they don't have the right to do so. That's wrong and outragous. Some Taiwanese want independence, and they did have their freedom of speech, but you, and some others don't allow lots of Chinese to disagree with that view. Again, that's wrong and outragous.

You love to play the democratic game for your actions, but can't even handle different opinions, that's called hypocrisy.

One misunderstanding I would like to clarify for the board though.

We spoke a lot about those 14 Japanese class A war criminals in that famous/infamous shrine, some may think that 99.9% of the rest honored in that shrine were heros defended that innocent country of Japan. As a matter of fact, Japan hasn't been invaded for a long long time, except by the Americans in WWII. In Yuan Dynasty, the Yuan Chinese fleet was taken out by the huge storm, and Japanese soil wasn't touched or invaded. In other words, those honored in the shrine, they were most invaders in different times, not defenders, if not all of them. Who did they invade? Of course, most are their Asian neighbouring countries. Frankly speaking, that shrine is filled with 99% war criminals. Japan is the second richest country with a very strong Navy, who's also partner of US and defended by US. Their people will continue to pay respect to war criminals, other people can only object verbally, at this time, when US will protect them to protect own interest. But it does show their true color, as a nation, and as a people. It's funny how some would consider a town peace-loving, when the whole town built a huge shrine to honor all the serial killers from that town in history, which are plenty.

Now, you can continue with your outrage about Chinese people being outraged by Nanking or Shrine visit. You have the freedom to do that, but don't tell me that I don't have the right to laugh at your hypocrisy.

 

The problem with all these "apologies" is that they are very wishy-washy to begin with, and they are directly contradicted by the actions of the top level Japanese politicians. Take Koizumi for example, he would come to China or Korea and say that he was sorry for the war and the deaths of the Chinese and Koreans (without saying anything on how sorry he was about the war crimes committed by his country), but then he would go home and visit the Yakusuni shrine in his official capacity knowing that these visits would be viewed domestically and internationally as showing symbolic sympathy to the war policies of WW2 Japan.

There is a huge difference between the Japanese revisionists and the German Neo-Nazis. The Japanese revisionists actually have considerable political power, and most importantly, they have so far successfully managed to hide the truth about Japan's role in WW2 from its general public. You ask a Japanese young person about Japan in WW2, he's more likely to tell you all about the US-Japan war and the a-bombs dropped in Japan than what Japan did to China and Korea. The danger with the Japanese revisionists is that it would be much easier for them to one day throw away their peace constitution and get back to their war path with popular support. That's why China and Korea always make a big fuss about Japanese PM's right wing antics because they were the two biggest victims in WW2 and they don't want to go through that again, ever!

Now, even with the pacifist constitution, Japan spends 50 billion US$ a year on its defense -- that's at the same level as China does. (http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/japan/jda.htm) You see why China gets nervous about Japan?

 

It is really minority or is there an widespread unapologetic attitude? The revisionists you refer to include a number of politicians, the governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, being one of the worst.

The current prime minister Abe made revisionist comments on comfort women early this year. Various of his predecessors also made insensitive comments. Should that just be brush aside as "minority" opinions? Imagine head of Germany make offensive comments towards Jews, what would you be doing?

Yeah, most of Japanese high school students probably don't use that particular history textbook you referred to, but they don't get much of the facts either. Other textbooks basically skip that part of history.

Can you honestly say that Japanese have ever regretted about the crimes they committed the same way Germen have? Shouldn't they be expect to do so?

 

I don't really know the purpose here. Every time Nanking was mentioned, Chiense posters would get light-hearted comments from some, that it was wrong, but we cannot live in the past forever, they are peace loving now. And you Chinese killed each other plenty as well, so just let it go. When Chinese posters responded how about you tell that to Jewish people? They will get standard answer in same format - No, that's totally different, from the magnitude, the nature, it's different. So, Jewish people should keep pounding on Holocaust, but Chinese shouldn't mention Nanking.

To me, they are both inhumane, cruel, and one of the worst atrocities. By pure numbers, 30 million >> 6 million, although one can argue about the number, but no matter how you water that down, it's still bigger than 6 million. As for cruelty, not sure how live human biomedical experiments or lively taken unborn children eaten alive is not at least as putting into a gas chamber. I don't know how one compare cruelty. But if one is interested, he/she can find enough reliable source to describe that Japanese war crimes. I only know there was a recorded direct quote from a German officer described their Japanese "partners" "inhumane" and "worse than animals".

It's ok for you to get over with a stolen wallet, but IMO it's not ok to ask Jewish people to get over with Holocaust, and it's not ok for a person with no part of that history to ask Chinese people to get over with Nanking. JMHO.

 

I'm not even Jewish, so I'm not going to respond to the rest - but honestly, just looking at this quote, knowing what the Germans did, makes what the Germans did to the Jews even worse.

That the Germans considered their systematic, deliberate, extermination of Jews to be of a higher calling should be proof enough to any observer of the truly unparalleled nature of hte Holocaust. I really think some of you guys should read up on the Holocaust or visit the HOlocaust museum in Washington - your thinking would be changed.

 

Talk about being tasteless

Jews had NO countries of their own that is why they got terminated (not really) in Europe. It is NOT because Nazi Germen were less merciful. Had Jews had a country and an army, they would've put up a fight and kept many more of them alive.

 

Canoner, with all due respect, you need to read up on the history of the Jewish diaspora and the various campaigns of extermination against them in the west, culminating in the holocaust. I am not pro-israel or jewish myself but I think you would have an entirely different perspective if you were fully informed on this issue.