Nazis hate me, and I am fine with that
It is a moral abomination to deny the Rape of Nanking and the war crimes committed by Imperial Japan.
I managed to anger a bunch of Nazi sympathizers on Twitter last week when I posted about the genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany’s ally, Imperial Japan. Nazi war crimes get more coverage and are closer to the front of people’s minds, but Imperial Japan was just as vicious, just as cruel, and just as murderous as Hitler’s devoted cult. Japan, of course, was an ally of Nazi Germany in World War II.
Japan massacred civilians in Nanking in what has since become known as the Rape of Nanking. They slaughtered civilians and engaged in sadistic “medical experiments” that rivaled the vile “research” of Nazi maniac Josef Mengele. As with Mengele, the purpose of these “experiments” was sadism, not “knowledge.” Imperial Japan subjected Chinese civilians to frostbite, vivisected conscious people, and infected people with terrible diseases. Reading about Unit 731 shocks the conscience.
Japanese soldiers also engaged in a campaign of mass rape of women and girls in occupied nations, forcing both Chinese and Korean women and girls into rape slavery as “comfort women.” Much like other evil regimes throughout history, Japan used mass rape as a weapon of war to terrorize and humiliate civilian populations and demoralize the opposition. The brutality committed against American prisoners of war was a small taste of what was done to innocent civilians in China, Korea and elsewhere.
What angered Nazi sympathizers is that I brought up Japanese war crimes on the anniversaries of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We have heard for decades how terrible the bombings were, but it is critical to remember the historical context of Imperial Japan’s vicious sadism. Japan and Germany both brought the wrath of the Allies on themselves by trying to conquer and then committing terrible crimes against the occupied nations.
The atomic bombs may well have saved lives of Japanese civilians in the long run, as an invasion of Japan would have been incredibly costly for both sides. Do the war crimes of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan justify the incineration of civilians via nuclear weapons or the annihilation of Dresden and the creation of a firestorm? No, but Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan also bear moral responsibility for the living Hell inflicted on their own civilian populations. Had they not invaded and then brutally subjugated their neighbors, the heavy bombings of both nations would never have happened.
So yes, we should have sympathy for the innocents killed in with the atomic bomb, but we also need to have just as much sympathy (if not more) for the victims of Imperial Japan’s demonic war crimes. Those innocents deserve to be remembered alongside the people killed by Fat Man and Little Boy.