r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/flyingcatwithhorns • Sep 01 '22

Image As Japan's economy was projected to surpass US economy in the 1980s, anti-Japanese sentiment in the US was so high that a Chinese man was beaten to death before his wedding just because he looked Japanese. In 1987, a group of US congressmen smashed Toshiba products on Capitol Hill.

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18

u/Seffi_IV Sep 01 '22

just the recorded events from their prisoner camps are enough to be kinda chilling.

Not that americans are much better, but none of it is excused in the eyes of morality.

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u/WokeUpFlithy Sep 01 '22

I’m all for calling out America on their issues. But arguably it is a little better that we didn’t do some shit like the rape of Nanking, and then also go around denying it. Japanese soldiers went around throwing babies in the air and then stabbing them with their bayonets. They performed horrible experiments on people in UNIT 731.

Not saying there isn’t the blood of children on Americas hands too. But something about throwing kids up in the air just to stab them on the way down rubs me the wrong fucking way.

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u/[deleted] Sep 01 '22

To be real, we did literally nothing like the Nazis or Japanese died. Local atrocities, yes - guess what happens when you send armed 19 year old testosterone fueled men around the world with marching orders. The difference is we never had state-sponsored/sanctioned programs to rape and murder entire populations.

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u/[deleted] Sep 01 '22

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u/[deleted] Sep 01 '22

Let's not forget the American citizens of Japanese decent who were corralled into concentration camps in the first half of the 40s. I'd say that's a pretty egregious violation of the set of principles we were supposedly fighting to protect. As Carlin said, you have no rights, only a set of temporary privileges.

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u/[deleted] Sep 01 '22

I was speaking to the context of WW2, neither before or afterwards. But yes that would count, and was horrific.

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u/Hear_two_R_gu Sep 01 '22

Nuking 2 japanese cities, which in turns killed millions of innocent civilians in a fraction of a second is nothing horrific?

Letting german scientist live in the US just so they can build bombs for the military corporations in the name of "safety"

Forcing black Americans to train as a literal suicide squad and got not recognition after the war?

History is clearly written by the winners to cover up their horrible actions.

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u/[deleted] Sep 01 '22

Literally none of those were state sponsored programs to kill an entire race/ethnicity/whatever.

Yeah we nuked Japan. Sad. Definitely don't read about the firebombings of Tokyo or Dresden if that upsets you. Brutal war with brutal tactics, not sure what you'd expect us to do, we weren't going to defeat the axis with kind words. (Even after the two nukes a significant & influential amount of Japanese elites encouraged the emperor not to surrender. You're living in an alternate reality of you think less people would have died if we invaded the home islands. Wow.)

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u/WokeUpFlithy Sep 02 '22

Other dude is ignorant as hell. They all just love to bag on the U.S.

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u/[deleted] Sep 02 '22

It's gotta be a mental sickness at this point.

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u/WokeUpFlithy Sep 02 '22

Where the fuck did you get millions of civilians. Most is quarter million from any source. Stop lying and spreading misinformation.

Japan was ready to keep fighting, tooth and nail, which would have resulted in actual MILLIONS dying. The war they were waging was BRUTAL. The Nukes were a necessary evil.

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u/masterofthecontinuum Sep 01 '22 edited Sep 01 '22

It is constantly in question to me as to whether humanity as a whole even deserves to exist. Especially when we actively propagate arbitrarily selective eradication on ourselves constantly. We're the only species capable of such knowing cruelty. We're so unbearably self-destructive. People can achieve great things in spite of this though, so perhaps there's still some hope for us somewhere.

TL;DR: Reject humanity. Return to small human hunter-gatherer bands that actually knew how to coexist with one another.

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u/[deleted] Sep 01 '22

Return to small human hunter-gatherer bands that actually knew how to coexist with one another.

I doubt that was the case even then

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u/masterofthecontinuum Sep 01 '22 edited Sep 01 '22

You can't do genocide if there's no concept of nationality or ethnicity. You can't be at risk of nuking the planet if there are no engineers or nuclear physicists. RETURN TO MONKE.

To be serious, allegedly warfare isn't a thing between bands of humans populated within the range of 25-50 individuals each. Especially when neighboring bands have a very high chance of containing your extended kin.

The story so far: In the beginning, Humanity created civilization. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

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u/[deleted] Sep 01 '22

Actually I will admit make that makes some sense lol

I just doubt it was all that peaceful. There's just no records of "tribe A" genociding "tribe B" 10,000 years later.

Like yeah you can't commit genocide, but that doesn't mean you can't kill a bunch of other tribes for other reasons lol. I'm fairly skeptical of most attempts to document human history before reliable written testimony, seems like massive guess based on questionable "science" (i.e. anthropology)

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u/masterofthecontinuum Sep 02 '22 edited Sep 02 '22

I'm pretty sure they use extant groups to infer past behavior. There are still groups of humans today that haven't discovered how to produce fire. Or at the very least, they have lost that knowledge. There are still enough hunter gatherer bands around to gather data from.

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u/[deleted] Sep 02 '22

We're the only species capable of such knowing cruelty.

Not really.

Animals do some pretty fucked up things to one another, it's a natural part of the instinct to survive and thrive at all costs. The only difference between us and them is the scale.

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u/WokeUpFlithy Sep 02 '22

No, the difference is that all that horrible warfare led to us recognizing what we did was wrong and creating Indian reservations. And I’m not saying that that solved the problem, just that we’ve recognized it and made steps towards being better.

Japan will, to this day, deny their atrocities. If you don’t see that as a big issue then idk what to tell you. America has its flaws, at least we own up to them.

Bandwagoners

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u/[deleted] Sep 02 '22

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u/WokeUpFlithy Sep 02 '22

Oh fuck off with that comparison. Good job completely ignoring the main point. Sorry you’re an ignoramus.

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u/[deleted] Sep 02 '22

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u/WokeUpFlithy Sep 02 '22

@yourself

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u/[deleted] Sep 02 '22

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u/Nectarine_Open Sep 02 '22

The difference is we never had state-sponsored/sanctioned programs to rape and murder entire populations.

No you did. Just look take a look at your country’s active support and covert involvement in the 1965-66 Indonesia mass killings

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u/barefeet69 Sep 02 '22

They performed horrible experiments on people in UNIT 731.

Before you pat your country on the back too much, do realize that the US pardoned most of the Japanese war criminals involved in Unit 731 because they wanted the data. The Chinese wanted to hold them accountable for war crimes but the US government dismissed that as "Chinese propaganda". Sounds familiar.

Ironically the few were only held accountable because the Soviets captured them before the Americans could take them.

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u/WokeUpFlithy Sep 02 '22

Oh yeah bro I been knew that. Nazis we’re pardoned too. Still gunna pat the country on the back.

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u/CatL1f3 Sep 01 '22

Not that americans are much better,

Speaking of which, I've heard (from my German history teacher) that Hitler was inspired by the US's segregation and institutionalised racism when cooking up his plan for Germany.

Comparing to the story of Jesse Owens, who in NAZI Germany could stay in the same hotels as white people but was denied that and met with continued racism when he returned to the US as a quadruple Olympic gold medallist...

That makes me think that it's quite believable