Comment by gozur88 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gozur88 | Hacker News Reader

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That was six million from the 1937 to the end of the war, and it includes things like death from disease and forced labor. It's not that the Japanese had a plan to exterminate the Chinese. It's that they viewed the Chinese as inferior to themselves and didn't care about Chinese deaths.

The Germans (or at least, the Nazis) had a plan, on paper, to kill everyone in the east and replace them with Germans. Hitler was a Malthusian who believed populations would grow until resources were exhausted, he viewed non-Germans as competition for those resources, and he thought birth control and abortion would reduce genetic competition and make the German race weak (like the French...). So the only solution was to kill everyone who wasn't German.

Here's a quote from Himmler's wiki page: "It is a question of existence, thus it will be a racial struggle of pitiless severity, in the course of which 20 to 30 million Slavs and Jews will perish through military actions and crises of food supply." This was all planned out, and it was going to be on top of the deaths that actually occurred.

> It's not that the Japanese had a plan to exterminate the Chinese. It's that they viewed the Chinese as inferior to themselves and didn't care about Chinese deaths.

I regard it as a distinction without a difference. Six million people are dead because of Japan's actions. Without intervention, that number would have continued to climb.

Certainly considering the uncountable victims, quibbling over semantics might seem absurd.

But I think it is very productive to look very closely at the exact rhetoric that caused murderous excesses of WWII with a view toward prevention.

After all, both Germany and Japan were not very unusual in the generations before the war. And are today among the most charmingly pacifist countries on the planet.

But somewhere in the 1930s their leadership whipped their people into a murderous frenzy using what looks like different rhetoric (and with absurdly primitive media technology too). It would be informative to know exactly how and that I suggest requires looking closely at the details of the propaganda.

But had the Axis powers won the number of deaths would have diminished rapidly as the situation stabilized. The Japanese wanted to rule China, but they didn't have any desire to eliminate the Chinese people and culture.

The Nazis were planning to kill hundreds of millions of people. It's not a distinction without a difference. The difference is enormous.

Incidentally, what do you think was going to happen as the Germans conquered China from the West? The Germans and Japanese were destined to come to blows even if they'd destroyed the allies.

as a person coming from Slavic territory (Slovakia), well I am damn happy they failed in their plans

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