Strange, you never hear about the atrocities committed by the Japanese and Uncle Joe Stalin during the war; all you hear are the ones that were committed by Hitler.
11 comments
I must have been dreaming when I watched The Bridge on the River Kwai during RE at school, and when I read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, then. My mind must be playing tricks on me when I come across several pages dedicated to outlining Imperial Japan and Stalinist Russia's atrocities on the internet.
They'd make great films and TV series - they could be called things like Dr. Zhivago, or Goodnight Mr. Lawrence, or Tenko, or ...
Uh, yeah you do. I've seen documentaries and even fictional-but-based-on-fact movies talking about Japanese and Russian soldiers killing not only enemy soldiers, but sometimes their own for simply retreating in the face of overwhelming fire and certain death.
And I guess nobody's ever heard of the Rape of Nanking.
Empire of the Sun, a bunch of movies about Bataan and the Japanese in the Philippines, novel Darkness at Noon, movie Burnt by the Sun, Faithful Ruslan, etc.
I'll stick to film for convenience's sake:
Imperial Japan:
-Bridge on the River Kwai
Stalin:
-The Way Back
So why is Stalin always named in the same context as Hitler whenever someone brings him up? Why is the Rape of Nanking one of the most well-known war crimes of WWII? Why do the Japanese still have the reputation as zealous evil monsters thanks to what they did in that conflict?
I think Mussolini and Fascist Italy's absence from the list of well-known and even semi-known war crimes of WWII is most surprising. I also wish more people knew about groups like the Romanian Iron Guard and the Hungarian Arrow Cross, who utterly crazy in their fascist butchery. Even the Nazis thought the Iron Guard were insane.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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