Originally posted by Byzantine Emperor
Did anyone see the discussion TranHungDao and I had on page 7? It was on topic and quite interesting.
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Yes, though I was much responsible for going off-topic
, I was on-topic quite a bit too.
Pinquin was essentially always on-topic. Our discussion on the
extent of the genocide against Native Americans and the Trans-Atlantic
slave trade is central to the theme of brutality during the conquest of
the Americas by the Europeans.
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Byzantine Emperor,
You know, I think I spoke
too soon in saying the Chinese might
be less brutal than the Europeans to the people of the New World. If you look at the
colonial and WWII Japanese or even the Japanese of the Imjin War (late
1500's), they were quite brutal. Indeed, downright bestial in
WWII. The culture is rooted in Chinese culture (Confucianism),
just as its traditional technology was.
If we compare the WWII Japanese to the Nazi's, they're about equal.
1. They both ran diabolical camps for human experimentation with
chemical, biological agents and whatnot. So they are about equal
in this respect.
2. The Nazi's had the concentration camps for Jews, homosexuals,
dissidents, eastern Europeans. The Japanese killed millions in in
Manchuria; many other countries literally lost millions due to Japanese
brutality due to indiscriminate warfare, outright genocide, famine,
diseases due to famine, etc.
3. Both used rape as a weapon of war. However, in China,
Japanese soliders were known to force sons to rape their mothers and
fathers to rape their daughters. Pretty sick stuff.
4. (a) Generally speaking, Japanese soldiers were more
medieval than their German counterparts. They treated their POW's
like animals at the slaughter, routinely decapitating them with Samurai
swords--this included their Brit and American POW's. There was an
incident where two officers held a contest for who could decapitate the
most Chinese men; they lined them up and started choping. The
winner had about 150 decapitations if I recall. It is not hard to
find pics of Japanese WWII attrocities.
The funny thing is that Brit and American soldiers generally found the
Korean conscripts in the Imperial Japanese army to be the most
brutal. They hated the Koreans even more. This was because
of the culture of brutality that existed in the Japanese military
training prior to WWII. Veterans now talk of being kicked and
punched several times a day by their trainers, i.e. the Japanese
military leadership was intentionally created killing machines.
Koreans were treated even worse than Japanese conscripts, hence they
became more violent.
(b) Cannibalism was not uncommon due to the fact that the US demolished Japanese supply lines.
It was bad enough so that an official order was issued which said that
any Japanese soldier eating a fellow Japanese soldier would be
sentenced to death. Apparently, it was okay to eat European and
American POW's, or the local defeated populations.
This was quite different from how the Japanese treated their POW's in
WWI. Quite a number of German POW's of the Japanese enjoyed their
time in Japan and decided to remain there after they were freed.
Thus training, i.e. context, can bring out animalistic behavior.
Of course, Japanese imperialism was a combination of trying too hard to
copy the European colonialists and their own then native medieval ways.
The whole point here is that it is definitely within Chinese culture,
or rather it's derivatives in Japan and Korea, for things to go
monsterously out of control. The Mongols, who were not sinitic by
culture, were perhaps the most brutal regime of all time.
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Two more things about the Chinese and that
what if scenario:
1. We can't underestimate that age-old theme of young men going off to war in distant lands:
Things go crazy, real fast!
Such Chinese colonies would be half a world away from the
motherland. The Portugese in Brazil were the poster children for
this type of insanity.
2. What was Chinese technology relative to the Aztecs back in the
early 1400's? Could they have even defeated the Aztecs on their
own turf to begin with? Remember, the Aztecs were fatally
fatalistic due to their belief the landing of Hernan Cortes was the
return of Quetzalcoatl. The legend said the conquerors would be
white. Moreover, the conquistadors allied themselves with
disgruntled factions of the Aztec empire, otherwise, I'm pretty sure
Cortes could not have beaten them.
3. The Taiping rebellion was the biggest war on the planet until
WWI, or even WWII. I can't recall the actual numbers but it was
staggering in its scale and violence. (But then again, it was a
civil war which was in turn ultimately the result of European
meddling/colonialism.)