BTW, can we try somehow, sometime soon, to set up something for the coming EU elections?
Can we organize a campaign for shutting down the EU Commission and the EU Parliament?
We should because I'm not a Professor (XD) but if we look at European History or western history generally, especially since 20th century, WITHOUT a CONSTITUTION, any form of Government, Laws or Health measures, or even monetary policies ARE ILLEGAL. Even the EU Court of Justice is illegal. Treaties were not proposed or submitted to EU citizen. No Referendum has been held to ask democratically if we want this kind of EU central Government that in the last 20 years has brought anything good to us, but to corporations, eu or not ones.
We should do a huge campaign of course online, where we say "No Constitution, No Elections" or " No Constitution, No Commission" And so on. Especially pushing that the EU Commission it's completely illegal and has powers that we citizen never gave to them.
We have only 3 months but we should try! It's the last time we have a chance before ending in a USUK (u suck...) Neonazi EU!
You're of course correct here, quite frankly, but the problem isn't whether something is 'illegitimate' or even 'illegal'; the way I see it, these are functions of power, and they do speak about who's in charge (Europeans aren't).
Sure, but as u know, they tried to write a Constitution years ago, but then because wasn't accepted by french, if I don't remember wrong, they gave up. And right after they set it up all the functions and institutions as if there was a Constitution... And they went too further without it! There are decision u can't take without it, an example the money and arms to Ukraine. Or the Digital Act, if there is no one that Control the controllers it's a fascist state/government. So...
Yes, great doccie. I watched it because I was so amazed by the director's previous work, particularly 'The Square' (2013). I remember infographics being featured but not details. Must have watched 500 doccies since then. If you have a link, please share.
USUK, given how it sounds when said out loud in english, is a great acronym.
When I went to school, calling the bombing of Dresden and Hiroshima et cetera, as well as the betrayal of Czechoslovakia and Poland and the "stringing along" of Finland during the Winter War, was part of the curriculum.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, calling out the United States murdering millions of vietnamese civilians (millions, yes - if we use the same definitions as are used for Germany and Japan and the Soviet Union, that is) was no big deal except for americans not knowing their own history (the shitty treatment of their own soldiers upon returning home f.e.).
But after 2010, and especially after St Obama the Annointed, the US seems to be going whole hog into its generations-long tendency of "We're thr Good Guys"-delusion.
Which isn't good for the US to think (it's not good for anyone to think that). It's just as stupid as grand-dad's history books from when he went to school, where the swedish forces atrocities in Germany/Poland during the Thirty Years War were celebrated.
Difference is, us europeans have gotten over treating history as justification. Or we had, until 2010-ish or so.
Excellent points, I’d add just two crucial aspects to the chronology:
Schindler’s List and Saving Pvt Ryan wetr crucial for this descent into un-reality, and both are from the mid-1990s.
In the other recent piece you mentioned the utter delusion masquerading as USUK mainstream ‘culture’ after the end of the USSR. I suppose both movies and their images are instrumental here.
Schindler’s List (1993) is based on a fictional novel by the name of Schindler’s Ark (1982), with the crucial point here being: fictional novel.
As propganda, it’s genius; as guiderail for public policy, it’s catastrophic (but that’s the point).
I still love Olaf Scholz with the "We remember" sign in his hands, that was a classic PR failure. Everybody who saw this picture suddenly thought of his CumEx answers, or no-answers.
While I agree, from what I have read, the bombing of Dresden had no military purpose. However, that cannot be said of the bombing of Japanese cities, whether fire bombing or the atomic bombs.
There was no collateral damage in Japan. There were no innocent civilians in Japan. The Imperial Japanese government turned every single household into munition factories. Every house hold had quotas to fill. Everything from the “thousand stitch” wrap for soldiers midsection to filling bags with gunpowder for artillery shells where produced in homes and schools. Schools had already been used as boot camps for school aged kids, a school mates grand mother was taught how to fight with a bamboo spear to use against the landing allied forces. On display in a major museum in Tokyo is a ceramic hand grenade that little buoys were thought to through at invading forces. I have seen the same in the States. Schools would also become munition factories. Published diaries of school kids, at least of girls from the period contained the phrased “Today we put away our ink stones and brushes and picked up…..”, followed by whatever tool/s were required to produce the war material assigned to their school to make.
There was indeed a war crime committed in regards to the unrestricted bombing of Japan, but it was not on the part of the bombers. Japan committed the war crime by making their entire population a legitimate military target.
Look, I don't know nearly enough about Japanese history to weigh in here, but I will state this: wars always come with their own dynamics, and WW2 was certainly not an outlier.
The above-related notion referred to the post-war work of USUK to prevent 'strategic bombing' from being outlawed after WW2; this, of course, implies that it was not illegal in the technical sense of the term.
Problem is, by that same logic, the Nuremberg Trials couldn't be legitimate for they used ex-post reasoning to 'adjudicate' prior guilt. (And let's not get bogged down in debates about where, if applied, the 'laws' based on the Nuremberg Trials would place virtually every Western leader since then--next to the Nazi bigwigs in the docks.) Just check out the history of Korea, Vietnam, or Cambodia in the Cold War and the more recent US-led attacks in the Middle East.
Even if we look strictly at WW2 itself and leave out whatever happened afterwards, there'd be massive problems with assigning blame for atrocities vs. civilians on anyone due to the then-binding (sort of) Hague Conventions, esp. the permissible reprisals for civilians attacking occupying forces, e.g., in Oradour-sur-Glane a few days after 6 June 1944, to say nothing about the mass-atrocities and genocidal killings on the Eastern Front. Technically, the USSR didn't sign up to the Hague Conventions, didn't engage in POW exchanges, and the like, and while I personally consider these war crimes nonetheless, there's way more nuance here than first meets the eye.
Would you have a good book suggestion for what you describe?
Civilians are not allowed to attack military. Militaries are allowed to protect themselves and their individual members. Uniforms are to allow all belligerents to know who is a lawful target. If a civilian attacks a service member in a war zone, their attire is then the uniform of the enemy and opens up the right to shoot all thus attired as threats to the security of the force as a whole and the lives of its members. That’s a simplification, but that is the foundation.
Killing innocent civilians is not a war crime, the targeting of them is whether they are killed or not. But you are correct in that there are exceptions to protections and rights on both sides of this.
As far as a single book on what Japan required of its civilian population, I have not read one. However, various books and articles, especially those containing letters and excerpts of diaries and interviews over the years has informed me of this. As well as talking with friends here in Japan. One book that I can easily recall the title of is “Japan at War”. I think this was one that had such material. Long before the internet, I have seen a great many photographs in books of school aged children drilling with rifles, often wooded, spears and even young girls practicing firing stances. Admittedly, many of these may have been in Japanese language publications.
Wife just came down, allowing me quick access to the den. I was able to quickly grab a handful of books that I have read over the years. As you read these first person accounts, you will read what they did and observed. There will be little, if any notations spelling out that they were committing war crimes or being made legitimate targets. In the pages of these you find stories of school aged girls, often mistakenly referred to as “school girls”. Mistakenly because while they are in their school uniforms and often in the school building, they are no longer performing the tasks of schooling; rather they are making balloons to carry bombs across the Pacific to indiscriminately kill Americans and Canadians. Luckily, only two are known to have made it across but one did kill a young girl and a woman who were on a church picnic. While this particular episode may not be in the books listed below, there should be similar. One I know contains an episode of school aged girls being used to fill in bomb craters at an airfield after they forgot to replenish the cut branches used to camouflage the buildings and alerting allied bomber of its existence.
The list.
“Japan At War; An Oral History”. Haruko Taya Cook & Theodore F. Cook.
“The Girl with the White Flag”. Tomiko Higa
“Hiroshima”. John Hersey
“Blossoms in the Wind”. M.G. Sheftall
Tales by Japanese Soldiers”. Kazuo Tamayama and John Nunneley
The last one has very little English in it. Only the captions of the photos taken in Hiroshima the day the atomic bomb was dropped on it. There are no references in it that support my earlier statements, however I will here provide one caption, translated into English, a description of the photo and commentary to support what I wrote earlier.
“August 6, 1945, after 11am. The first photo I took on that day.
The west end of Miyuki Bridge in Senda-Machi 3-chome, about 2,300 meters south-southeast of the hypocenter. The open space in front of the Sendmachi Police box in the jurisdiction of Ujina Police Station was used as a makeshift first-aid station. There I found many students of Hiroshima Girl’s Commercial High School and Hiroshima Prefectural First Middle School. The bomb affected them while they were working on building demolition projects. Police sergeant Mr. Nagata had been posted at this police box. A policeman or a soldier treated the injured. However, cooking oil was all that could be applied to them.”
The background of the grainy black and white photograph is damaged two story buildings, private residences by the looks of them, and in the a concrete one story building with its roof damaged, presumable the police box referred to. Between the photo graphed and the assumptive police box is a group of standing girls wearing tattered remains of school uniforms hanging loosely from their bodies. To the left of them, from the left foreground of the photo, stretching past the group of girls standing in the cent and past the, are other girls sitting on the ground. A pitiful sight to behold.
But these girls were not in school, they were engaged in “building demolition projects.” These projects were to create fire breaks as protection against fires in the event they got bombed. A sensible precaution, by why are jr and sr, high school girls being employed in such works?
The book’s title. “The Viewfinder Clouded with Tears”. Tomoko Kashihara & Yoshihito Matsushige.
However, if the reader does not have some knowledge of what civilians are allowed to do and remain innocent civilians, the reader may not understand that the actions the authors state they engaged in or witness made them legitimate targets. But this is a start.
Thanks for the recommendations, I shall check them out!
You know, the proverbial fog-of-war clouds this all, esp. with respect to 'special operations' (i.e., soldiers wearing enemy uniforms and the like). No easy answers anywhere, but a lot of 20/20 vision, that's for sure.
Soldiers wearing enemies uniforms is an interesting one. I wonder if that changed after WW2. I was taught in boot camp that getting caught meant summary execution. I then learned that several German soldiers were fought in US uniforms and put on trial and executed. After the fact, a judgement came down that that was not a war crime, at least not one that carried the death penalty. However, wearing civies is a no no… unless this too had been amended.
I remember well the lesson of always carrying our leave papers. Not only was it required by navy regs, if we somehow found ourselves behind enemy lines in civically dress and without a leave papers, summary execution. Legal, summary execution. The example that gave was say you were traveling overseas, say in Taiwan and China invaded and declared war on the US in the process. Better have your leave papers on you, if caught with out them, your life is forfeited.
Until recently, I was all in favor of at the very least the goal and spirit of the Geneva Convention. Recently, I am having doubts. It seems to be becoming a false sense of security. For those under occupation, they seem to think that they are allowed to attack occupiers at will and the occupiers would be committing a war crime if they protect themselves. The opposite is true. The only people legally allowed to attack a military are card carrying, sworn in members of the belligerent military. The civilians attacking are no longer innocent and their actions put innocent civilian lives at risk.
The Geneva convention, rather the misportrayal of it causes observes to condemn perfectly legal and necessary actions taken by a military in enemy territory. War is hell. It is not pretty. The Geneva Convention attempts to alleviate that a wee bit for certain civilians but war is war and no piece of paper can change that fact. It is better to not start a war.
Let me know how you find the books. I think “Japan at War” would be the best to start with. OH, and if you run across any, read accounts of how the Japanese military treated Japanese civilians. Especially in Okinawa.
It just keeps getting better, doesn’t it? Shame and disgust
I just wish they'd leave the dead out their disgusting charade.
Very nice article!
BTW, can we try somehow, sometime soon, to set up something for the coming EU elections?
Can we organize a campaign for shutting down the EU Commission and the EU Parliament?
We should because I'm not a Professor (XD) but if we look at European History or western history generally, especially since 20th century, WITHOUT a CONSTITUTION, any form of Government, Laws or Health measures, or even monetary policies ARE ILLEGAL. Even the EU Court of Justice is illegal. Treaties were not proposed or submitted to EU citizen. No Referendum has been held to ask democratically if we want this kind of EU central Government that in the last 20 years has brought anything good to us, but to corporations, eu or not ones.
We should do a huge campaign of course online, where we say "No Constitution, No Elections" or " No Constitution, No Commission" And so on. Especially pushing that the EU Commission it's completely illegal and has powers that we citizen never gave to them.
We have only 3 months but we should try! It's the last time we have a chance before ending in a USUK (u suck...) Neonazi EU!
You're of course correct here, quite frankly, but the problem isn't whether something is 'illegitimate' or even 'illegal'; the way I see it, these are functions of power, and they do speak about who's in charge (Europeans aren't).
Sure, but as u know, they tried to write a Constitution years ago, but then because wasn't accepted by french, if I don't remember wrong, they gave up. And right after they set it up all the functions and institutions as if there was a Constitution... And they went too further without it! There are decision u can't take without it, an example the money and arms to Ukraine. Or the Digital Act, if there is no one that Control the controllers it's a fascist state/government. So...
We need those guys of Cambridge Analitica... 😂
I watched a month ago the documentary "The Great Hack", astonishing, unbelievable, the end of any kind of democracy , not even a 0.1%! All rigged.
Lou Fang's recent article on the company Logically, hired by the UK gov, and with Russel Brand as target was damn scary.
Gotta read it, thanks for bringing it up.
Fang - https://www.leefang.com/p/british-ai-firm-helped-censor-activists
Nice! But did u watch the documentary? If so, do u remeber a world map with all the country where they did work and "experiment"?
Yes, great doccie. I watched it because I was so amazed by the director's previous work, particularly 'The Square' (2013). I remember infographics being featured but not details. Must have watched 500 doccies since then. If you have a link, please share.
not a legal one sry 😉. It's on Netflix btw
Ops found it! Txs Archive!!
https://archive.org/details/the.great.hack.2019.nf.webdl.dd5.1.x264ntgreducido
Excellent article, thank you.
Sigh. What else is there to note?
War is hell, and there are those (demons) who wage it, and there are those victims who suffer.
It's like that old saying in English "what if there was a war and everyone stayed home?"
Perhaps a better outcome for many?
USUK, given how it sounds when said out loud in english, is a great acronym.
When I went to school, calling the bombing of Dresden and Hiroshima et cetera, as well as the betrayal of Czechoslovakia and Poland and the "stringing along" of Finland during the Winter War, was part of the curriculum.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, calling out the United States murdering millions of vietnamese civilians (millions, yes - if we use the same definitions as are used for Germany and Japan and the Soviet Union, that is) was no big deal except for americans not knowing their own history (the shitty treatment of their own soldiers upon returning home f.e.).
But after 2010, and especially after St Obama the Annointed, the US seems to be going whole hog into its generations-long tendency of "We're thr Good Guys"-delusion.
Which isn't good for the US to think (it's not good for anyone to think that). It's just as stupid as grand-dad's history books from when he went to school, where the swedish forces atrocities in Germany/Poland during the Thirty Years War were celebrated.
Difference is, us europeans have gotten over treating history as justification. Or we had, until 2010-ish or so.
Excellent points, I’d add just two crucial aspects to the chronology:
Schindler’s List and Saving Pvt Ryan wetr crucial for this descent into un-reality, and both are from the mid-1990s.
In the other recent piece you mentioned the utter delusion masquerading as USUK mainstream ‘culture’ after the end of the USSR. I suppose both movies and their images are instrumental here.
Schindler’s List (1993) is based on a fictional novel by the name of Schindler’s Ark (1982), with the crucial point here being: fictional novel.
As propganda, it’s genius; as guiderail for public policy, it’s catastrophic (but that’s the point).
We remember .... wasn't there something like that two weeks ago ? May "They" don't wont remember everything.
There was, and I’ll have some more on what I call ‘stupid Watergate’ tomorrow.
Sigh.
I still love Olaf Scholz with the "We remember" sign in his hands, that was a classic PR failure. Everybody who saw this picture suddenly thought of his CumEx answers, or no-answers.
While I agree, from what I have read, the bombing of Dresden had no military purpose. However, that cannot be said of the bombing of Japanese cities, whether fire bombing or the atomic bombs.
Well, there's an--admittedly extra-technical--argument there, which I acknowledge.
Yet, I'd argue that you cannot have it both ways: be pro-strategic bombing but without acknowledging the 'collateral damage'.
I still say the collateral damage was the objective-Germany AND Japan
That’s the inescapable conclusion, isn’t it?
There was no collateral damage in Japan. There were no innocent civilians in Japan. The Imperial Japanese government turned every single household into munition factories. Every house hold had quotas to fill. Everything from the “thousand stitch” wrap for soldiers midsection to filling bags with gunpowder for artillery shells where produced in homes and schools. Schools had already been used as boot camps for school aged kids, a school mates grand mother was taught how to fight with a bamboo spear to use against the landing allied forces. On display in a major museum in Tokyo is a ceramic hand grenade that little buoys were thought to through at invading forces. I have seen the same in the States. Schools would also become munition factories. Published diaries of school kids, at least of girls from the period contained the phrased “Today we put away our ink stones and brushes and picked up…..”, followed by whatever tool/s were required to produce the war material assigned to their school to make.
There was indeed a war crime committed in regards to the unrestricted bombing of Japan, but it was not on the part of the bombers. Japan committed the war crime by making their entire population a legitimate military target.
How is it that this is not known any more?
Look, I don't know nearly enough about Japanese history to weigh in here, but I will state this: wars always come with their own dynamics, and WW2 was certainly not an outlier.
The above-related notion referred to the post-war work of USUK to prevent 'strategic bombing' from being outlawed after WW2; this, of course, implies that it was not illegal in the technical sense of the term.
Problem is, by that same logic, the Nuremberg Trials couldn't be legitimate for they used ex-post reasoning to 'adjudicate' prior guilt. (And let's not get bogged down in debates about where, if applied, the 'laws' based on the Nuremberg Trials would place virtually every Western leader since then--next to the Nazi bigwigs in the docks.) Just check out the history of Korea, Vietnam, or Cambodia in the Cold War and the more recent US-led attacks in the Middle East.
Even if we look strictly at WW2 itself and leave out whatever happened afterwards, there'd be massive problems with assigning blame for atrocities vs. civilians on anyone due to the then-binding (sort of) Hague Conventions, esp. the permissible reprisals for civilians attacking occupying forces, e.g., in Oradour-sur-Glane a few days after 6 June 1944, to say nothing about the mass-atrocities and genocidal killings on the Eastern Front. Technically, the USSR didn't sign up to the Hague Conventions, didn't engage in POW exchanges, and the like, and while I personally consider these war crimes nonetheless, there's way more nuance here than first meets the eye.
Would you have a good book suggestion for what you describe?
Civilians are not allowed to attack military. Militaries are allowed to protect themselves and their individual members. Uniforms are to allow all belligerents to know who is a lawful target. If a civilian attacks a service member in a war zone, their attire is then the uniform of the enemy and opens up the right to shoot all thus attired as threats to the security of the force as a whole and the lives of its members. That’s a simplification, but that is the foundation.
Killing innocent civilians is not a war crime, the targeting of them is whether they are killed or not. But you are correct in that there are exceptions to protections and rights on both sides of this.
As far as a single book on what Japan required of its civilian population, I have not read one. However, various books and articles, especially those containing letters and excerpts of diaries and interviews over the years has informed me of this. As well as talking with friends here in Japan. One book that I can easily recall the title of is “Japan at War”. I think this was one that had such material. Long before the internet, I have seen a great many photographs in books of school aged children drilling with rifles, often wooded, spears and even young girls practicing firing stances. Admittedly, many of these may have been in Japanese language publications.
Wife just came down, allowing me quick access to the den. I was able to quickly grab a handful of books that I have read over the years. As you read these first person accounts, you will read what they did and observed. There will be little, if any notations spelling out that they were committing war crimes or being made legitimate targets. In the pages of these you find stories of school aged girls, often mistakenly referred to as “school girls”. Mistakenly because while they are in their school uniforms and often in the school building, they are no longer performing the tasks of schooling; rather they are making balloons to carry bombs across the Pacific to indiscriminately kill Americans and Canadians. Luckily, only two are known to have made it across but one did kill a young girl and a woman who were on a church picnic. While this particular episode may not be in the books listed below, there should be similar. One I know contains an episode of school aged girls being used to fill in bomb craters at an airfield after they forgot to replenish the cut branches used to camouflage the buildings and alerting allied bomber of its existence.
The list.
“Japan At War; An Oral History”. Haruko Taya Cook & Theodore F. Cook.
“The Girl with the White Flag”. Tomiko Higa
“Hiroshima”. John Hersey
“Blossoms in the Wind”. M.G. Sheftall
Tales by Japanese Soldiers”. Kazuo Tamayama and John Nunneley
The last one has very little English in it. Only the captions of the photos taken in Hiroshima the day the atomic bomb was dropped on it. There are no references in it that support my earlier statements, however I will here provide one caption, translated into English, a description of the photo and commentary to support what I wrote earlier.
“August 6, 1945, after 11am. The first photo I took on that day.
The west end of Miyuki Bridge in Senda-Machi 3-chome, about 2,300 meters south-southeast of the hypocenter. The open space in front of the Sendmachi Police box in the jurisdiction of Ujina Police Station was used as a makeshift first-aid station. There I found many students of Hiroshima Girl’s Commercial High School and Hiroshima Prefectural First Middle School. The bomb affected them while they were working on building demolition projects. Police sergeant Mr. Nagata had been posted at this police box. A policeman or a soldier treated the injured. However, cooking oil was all that could be applied to them.”
The background of the grainy black and white photograph is damaged two story buildings, private residences by the looks of them, and in the a concrete one story building with its roof damaged, presumable the police box referred to. Between the photo graphed and the assumptive police box is a group of standing girls wearing tattered remains of school uniforms hanging loosely from their bodies. To the left of them, from the left foreground of the photo, stretching past the group of girls standing in the cent and past the, are other girls sitting on the ground. A pitiful sight to behold.
But these girls were not in school, they were engaged in “building demolition projects.” These projects were to create fire breaks as protection against fires in the event they got bombed. A sensible precaution, by why are jr and sr, high school girls being employed in such works?
The book’s title. “The Viewfinder Clouded with Tears”. Tomoko Kashihara & Yoshihito Matsushige.
However, if the reader does not have some knowledge of what civilians are allowed to do and remain innocent civilians, the reader may not understand that the actions the authors state they engaged in or witness made them legitimate targets. But this is a start.
Thanks for the recommendations, I shall check them out!
You know, the proverbial fog-of-war clouds this all, esp. with respect to 'special operations' (i.e., soldiers wearing enemy uniforms and the like). No easy answers anywhere, but a lot of 20/20 vision, that's for sure.
Soldiers wearing enemies uniforms is an interesting one. I wonder if that changed after WW2. I was taught in boot camp that getting caught meant summary execution. I then learned that several German soldiers were fought in US uniforms and put on trial and executed. After the fact, a judgement came down that that was not a war crime, at least not one that carried the death penalty. However, wearing civies is a no no… unless this too had been amended.
I remember well the lesson of always carrying our leave papers. Not only was it required by navy regs, if we somehow found ourselves behind enemy lines in civically dress and without a leave papers, summary execution. Legal, summary execution. The example that gave was say you were traveling overseas, say in Taiwan and China invaded and declared war on the US in the process. Better have your leave papers on you, if caught with out them, your life is forfeited.
Until recently, I was all in favor of at the very least the goal and spirit of the Geneva Convention. Recently, I am having doubts. It seems to be becoming a false sense of security. For those under occupation, they seem to think that they are allowed to attack occupiers at will and the occupiers would be committing a war crime if they protect themselves. The opposite is true. The only people legally allowed to attack a military are card carrying, sworn in members of the belligerent military. The civilians attacking are no longer innocent and their actions put innocent civilian lives at risk.
The Geneva convention, rather the misportrayal of it causes observes to condemn perfectly legal and necessary actions taken by a military in enemy territory. War is hell. It is not pretty. The Geneva Convention attempts to alleviate that a wee bit for certain civilians but war is war and no piece of paper can change that fact. It is better to not start a war.
Let me know how you find the books. I think “Japan at War” would be the best to start with. OH, and if you run across any, read accounts of how the Japanese military treated Japanese civilians. Especially in Okinawa.
Watch this: https://visceraladventure.substack.com/p/war-and-democide
I read transcripts but not watch video. Is there a transcript?
There may be a transcript by Spartacus but the words are all subtitled on the video. It's well worth the watch if you are able.
It’s all the same-kill the people you love to force you to obey