[lit-ideas] Re: Japan, Turkey and those aggressive Armenian children
- From: "Andy Amago" <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2006 22:02:34 -0400
I'm not sure where you get how I would have treated the Japanese. I would have
sent them all to therapy, that's what I would have done. They're a bunch of
wackos. Imagine if a murderer in this country said, I'm too proud to
apologize. Yet we accept it in the Japanese and even *admire* them. Go
figure. I'd like to know how the ordinary people felt about the war. I know
they followed the Emperor blindly. I guess the soldiers came out of the
people. Racism and hatred isn't bred in a healthy environment.
Also, I don't understand your comment about not being as hard on the Turks as
on the Japanese. Because it's a civil war means that genocide is acceptable?
That is a bizarre statement.
As far as discussing a movie, I thought we could all watch one together. Some
of the BBC dramatizations are wonderful. It is a lot of work writing them up,
might not be worth it.
----- Original Message -----
From: Lawrence Helm
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: 4/11/2006 6:39:59 PM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Japan, Turkey and those aggressive Armenian children
In How America Got it Right, Bevin Alexander on page 90 writes about the
aftermath off WWI, ?The Paris Conference produced precisely the dictated peace
that Wilson had feared ? begetting an angry Germany thirsting for retribution.
Niccolo Machiavelli, the sixteenth-century Italian political theorist,
prescribed two ways to deal with an enemy: destroy him altogether, or treat him
so generously that he will become your friend. A middle course is dangerous.
Wilson and the Allies chose a middle course ? and begat a whirlwind.?
[Alexander here references pages 504-505 of A History of United States Foreign
Policy by Julius Pratt, 1955]
Machiavelli would have approved heartily of the way we treated the Japanese
after WWII, treating them so generously that they became our friend. Irene if
she were true to her words would have treated them more along the lines of the
treatment imposed on German by France, Britain and the U.S. after WWI: ?On June
28, 1919, Germany was forced to accept the loss of its colonies,
Alsace-Lorraine, the Saar for fifteen years, a corridor to the sea for Poland,
and border areas to Belgium and Denmark. It had to agree to a demilitarized
Rhineland and to provide reparations set in 1921 at $33 billion, well beyond
its ability to pay. These reparations included the full cost of pensions for
Allied soldiers. The German army was limited to 100,000 men, and the navy
reduced to insignificance.?
Note to Irene: On April 17 on PBS there will be a program on ?The Armenian
Genocide.? Over one million Armenians and tens of thousands of Kurds were
killed. Maybe you won?t be as hard on the Turks as you are on the Japanese
because, as Yusuf Halacoglu, head of the Turkish Historical Society says, ?the
fact is there were two sides involved in a civil war.? Ellen Bork reviewing
the film for The Weekly Standard, comments, ?The argument boils down to a claim
that the events were not genocide but a response to provocation in which the
victims, including unarmed women, children, and the elderly, brought on their
fate.?
Lawrence
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