11/20/45

[Dan Caviness]

As is usual when treading near political water it's best to seperate the human condition from the political condition. In the East many Japanese were held locally, tried, convicted and executed by local governments as simple criminals rather than war criminals.
Many were executed without being part of any official post war effort.
I believe this is a good way to approach post war crime and punishment issues, although the standards and morality of human conduct during war often becomes an atrocity itself.

So...how do we equate international laws such as the Geneva Convention (unsigned by Japan until after WWII) against the local standards and norms? It's akin to making it more of a crime to kill someone from another race than to kill one of your own. I.E., are "hate crimes" worse than "crimes"?
I believe the answer can be found in human nature itself, the pack mentality, and why we've been killing each other since we could pick up a rock.

Figures such as Stalin's Purges and his estimated (up to) 20 million Russian murders trivializes dehumanizes and makes an abstraction of it all to me.
When I read about one beaten and tortured Polish boy stumbling through the Warsaw ghetto and leading a group of SS into an ambush at the cost of his own life...in retribution for his mother and father who were burned alive...I get it.

MacArthur was accused of being a collaborator during the war crimes. Respectfully and with all due aplomb rendered unto his Caesership, but he was accused.
His legal group functioned as a defense team for the Emporer and the rest of his royal family that were granted immunity from prosecution. He forgave hundreds of convicted criminals including the surgical teams who vivisected Allied aircrew limb by limb without anaesthea. Why? Historians don't seem to know, but I'm sure at least in part he was trying to put down the sword and forge that plowshare, and I'm not sure any more should be read into it.

The official version appears to be that pardoning the Emporer and His Family was the best way to get an unconditional surrender from Japan and this was a guarantee prior to the armistice. It has the ring of truth to it...but how "unconditional" is a surrender with conditions attached?

I believe we may have done a disservice by exempting the Japanese royal family from responsibility. In a culture that has openly accepted paying compensation for it's war crime victims, we still see no evidence of a real apology which would include dogeza.

Such a gesture would be lost on much of the world including my little corner of it, but it appears as though China, Korea, the Phillipines and many other neighboring Asian nations will continue to debate over it for generations to come.