
Bangka Island: The WW2 massacre and a 'truth too awful to speak' - rmason
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-47796046
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GreeniFi
In my late teens, in the late 90s I attended university in the United Kingdom.
In my first year, the Japanese Emperor visited the Queen. And was met by
British WW2 soldiers on the Mall, who in photos in the papers, were
respectable old men, wearing their regimental berets and ties, and stood with
their backs to the royal procession, Japanese flags burning. They were
protesting Japanese atrocity, still without apology.

My great uncles had fought against the Japanese during the war, and I grew up
listening to stories of their time in Burma. In fact we had a number of war
souvenirs at home, including samurai swords pulled from the bodies of soldiers
who had committed suicide rather than surrender.

Airbrushed from history is the fact that the battles against the Japanese were
won by soldiers from around the world: Kings African Rifles, Rhodesian African
Rifles, Karen militia who fought the Japanese whilst living in trees.

I don’t know why we don’t tell these stories more often.

Here is a rarity, an Al Jazeera documentary about a Nigerian boy soldier, left
for dead and nursed back to health by locals. It’s an excellent documentary
for anyone interested.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BREOezfAJSU](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BREOezfAJSU)

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pjc50
Horrifying, but atrocities like this were known to have happened in quite a
lot of places and were pretty much condoned by the Japanese high command. I'm
also not sure what the HN specific angle is?

~~~
dosy
Rape of Nanjing, invasion of Manchuria.

I believe the notion that states are driven to war by resources seeking, which
can result simply from incompetent government, poor tax collection, or natural
catastrophe. So global prosperity is the best deterrent to war.

The notion also guides which states you should assess are security or war
threats -- the ones with that have economic capacity to meet their own growth,
or the failed ones, with a large dissatisfied population easily roused to
anger at a fabricated external scapegoat.

Genghis Khan neutralized his powerful competitors by making them rich.
Perhaps, and this is possibly quite a reach, Japan's war mongering was driven
quite a lot by its self-imposed trade isolation that depleted the state
coffers, than by inherent expansionist rhetoric which was simply mobilized to
motivate.

~~~
throwaway2048
[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/955570...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/9555708/We-
mustnt-fall-for-The-Great-Illusion-again.html)

Economic prosperity and co-dependence is absolutely not a barrier to war. This
line of thinking was an extremely popular explanation of why something like
World War I couldn't happen.

And then it did,

~~~
SkyBelow
Is it possible for something to be a barrier but for other factors to overcome
the barrier? One shouldn't call it an absolutely unbreakable barrier, but
there are less absolute barriers.

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adolph
_Ms Silver now wants the Australian War Memorial (AWM), which already includes
the story of the massacre, to tailor its tours to include this account of the
alleged sexual assaults._

I wonder how much this matters in terms of shaping contemporary public
perception of Japan especially in comparison with China?

~~~
ensignavenger
I would hope that most folks are smart enough to realize that the people who
perpetuated these atrocities are all (almost?) dead now. Modern Japanese folks
had nothing to do with it, most of them weren't even born yet.

~~~
tomatotomato37
I doubt it. You have people in the US pushing the atrocities of slavery on to
others even though that was several generations ago and who may not even had
relatives in the US at the time due to the massive immigration surge of the
late 1800s

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aaron695
The identity of sexual assault victims is still often kept secret, is this
also an awful government cover up?

Why does everything have to be an outrage/conspiracy theory?

The media does still self censor, ask a cop for real stories compared to the
media reports if you want a downer of a day. Avicii killed himself with a
broken wine bottle, most media have not reported this for instance, this is a
nice story compared to what no media will report.

In this case, I also see little purpose in telling this story.

It's not even clear to what extent it's true. Some obscure bullet through a
shirt shows they were raped? This is a troubling 'fun' who-dunnit.

It's also a pointless exercise, since there's no reason to think the weren't
raped, there's documentation it happened elsewhere. Besides which tens of
millions were killed, the war was horrific, we already know this, what's the
story here other than salacious tabloid material?

Sells books I guess.

