japanese war crimes-- was hiroshima

From: Charles Gray


On Tue, 13 Jan 2004 05:36:18 -0500, Cub Driver
wrote:


Yep. We were pretty darned nice, for the times.

You neglected to mention that the internees were paid compensation and
given an apology. I don't recall that my friend Dick O'Kane got either
from the Japanese who starved and worked and beat him down to 98
pounds in one year.

all the best -- Dan Ford
email:

see the Warbird's Forum at www.warbirdforum.com
and the Piper Cub Forum at www.pipercubforum.com

Or the Korean "comfort women", or the Korean slave workers, or the
American and British Civilians...or the literally tens of millions of
Chinese, filipino's and other's who had the misfortune to be
"liberated" by the Japanese.
Japan, with some exceptions (mostly personal, not governmental) has
a very large policy of forgetfulness with those actions...and in other
cases continues to try to justify them.
Especially egregious is the lawsuits that are dropped because you
cannot get compensation because "it was already settled" in
peacetreaties that never brought the matter up.

I believe that the internment camps were a disgrace, and an
unamerican act, especially as the 442nd was proving its loyalty in
blood.
But to imagine for the slightest moment that that injustice
compares-- can even be compared-- to the wholesale slaughter of
Germany and Japan's brutal occupations and death camps would be absurd
if it wasn't so popular a point of view.
The internment WASN'T comparable to those acts-- but it was a dark
moment in U.S. history because we are, and should be, judged to a
higher standard than the governments that only worshipped brute force.

I would also mention, that although I think the apology did come
too late, it was an act of congress, signed into law by the
president-- so it wasn't simply an apology by any single group, it was
an apology on behalf of the United States, and its' citizens, from our
elected leaders.


The U.S. DID do medical experiments on par with the Nazis. Think of the black
men in the syphilis experiments who were deliberately left untreated as an
example. In several states "mentally deficient" people were forcibly
sterilized. Maybe the U.S. didn't do these sorts of things to as many people,
but we did do it.

Antisemitism WAS rampant in many parts of the U.S. and was one of the reasons
FDR never included saving Jews in Nazi occupied territories. He was afraid he
would lose support for the war.

Having said all this the comparison between Nazi concentration camps and the
Japanese, Italian and German internment camps in the U.S. is uncalled for. For
one thing German internees were allowed to hang up pictures of Hitler. The
inmates of the Nazi camps weren't allowed to post pictures of Churchill, Stalin
or FDR.

Dan, U. S. Air Force, retired

"B2431" wrote in message
...

The U.S. DID do medical experiments on par with the Nazis. Think of the
black
men in the syphilis experiments who were deliberately left untreated as an
example. In several states "mentally deficient" people were forcibly
sterilized. Maybe the U.S. didn't do these sorts of things to as many
people,
but we did do it.

No, neither of those things is "on par with the Nazis" human experiments.
The Nazis did things like throw prisoners into ice water to see how
long they could survive.

"Cub Driver" wrote in message
...

Yep. We were pretty darned nice, for the times.

You neglected to mention that the internees were paid compensation and
given an apology. I don't recall that my friend Dick O'Kane got either
from the Japanese who starved and worked and beat him down to 98
pounds in one year.

Not to mention the treatment of Brit/Aussie POW's on the Burma Railway
and
Changi to mention but a couple. Some that survived were later shipped
(virtually as
freight) to Japan and put to work in the coal mines. Some survived it
all somehow.
A pretty good accounting is found in the memoirs of Sir Edward 'Weary'
Dunlop, who was a
POW doctor on the Burma Railway.

The CO

John Keeney wrote:

"B2431" wrote in message
...

The U.S. DID do medical experiments on par with the Nazis. Think of the

black

men in the syphilis experiments who were deliberately left untreated as an
example. In several states "mentally deficient" people were forcibly
sterilized. Maybe the U.S. didn't do these sorts of things to as many

people,

but we did do it.


No, neither of those things is "on par with the Nazis" human experiments.
The Nazis did things like throw prisoners into ice water to see how
long they could survive.



How about the time they injected plutonium into hospital patients to see
what would happen? That comes pretty close IMO

John

Not to mention the treatment of Brit/Aussie POW's on the Burma Railway

They weren't alone! Charlie Mott of the AVG Flying Tigers worked on
the railroad. He built a radio transmitter which he hid in a
pipe-tobacco can, and with it got in touch with the OSS. He broke out,
helped build a jungle airstrip, and the first plane that landed there
brought him the news that the Japanese had surrendered. So he spent
more than three years in the Japanese holiday camps.

Actually, many more Malayans and other Asians were slave laborers on
the railroad than the Caucasian prisoners, and a greater percentage of
them died, because they didn't have the military discipline and
medical skills of the PWs.

Here are the numbers of the Caucasians who built the railroad:

30,000 British

18,000 Dutch

13,000 Australian

650 American

Nobody has a count of the "romusha" because nobody cared, least of all
the Japanese. Gavan Daws gives the figure of 250,000, many of whom
were children.

They died at approximately these rates:

20 percent of the PWS

50 percent of the romusha

Thus, more prisoners died building the railroad than were killed at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.


all the best -- Dan Ford
email:

see the Warbird's Forum at www.warbirdforum.com
and the Piper Cub Forum at www.pipercubforum.com

On Thu, 15 Jan 2004 11:01:12 +0000, John Mullen
wrote:

John Keeney wrote:

"B2431" wrote in message
...

The U.S. DID do medical experiments on par with the Nazis. Think of the

black

men in the syphilis experiments who were deliberately left untreated as an
example. In several states "mentally deficient" people were forcibly
sterilized. Maybe the U.S. didn't do these sorts of things to as many

people,

but we did do it.


No, neither of those things is "on par with the Nazis" human experiments.
The Nazis did things like throw prisoners into ice water to see how
long they could survive.



How about the time they injected plutonium into hospital patients to see
what would happen? That comes pretty close IMO

John

I think it comes very close-- in the sense the crimes were
committed. Nobody's saying the U.S was perfect, and in fact I
consider it a great wrong that when these expiriments were revealed,
the surviving doctors and administrators (and since they were done in
the 30's, there would be some), were not prosecuted for their crimes.

From: (robert arndt)

snip

That doesn't excuse the illegality nor immorality of Allied actions
during the war.



Rob



War itself is immoral. I remind you it was your hero who started it in Europe.

Dan, U.S. Air Force, retired

(B2431) wrote:

War itself is immoral. I remind you it was your hero who started it in Europe.


Defending oneself against someone who initiates the use of force is never
immoral. Illegal in some places like England, but not immoral.

-- Charlie Springer

"Cub Driver" wrote in message
...

Not to mention the treatment of Brit/Aussie POW's on the Burma Railway

They weren't alone! Charlie Mott of the AVG Flying Tigers worked on
the railroad. He built a radio transmitter which he hid in a
pipe-tobacco can, and with it got in touch with the OSS. He broke out,
helped build a jungle airstrip, and the first plane that landed there
brought him the news that the Japanese had surrendered. So he spent
more than three years in the Japanese holiday camps.

Actually, many more Malayans and other Asians were slave laborers on
the railroad than the Caucasian prisoners, and a greater percentage of
them died, because they didn't have the military discipline and
medical skills of the PWs.

Here are the numbers of the Caucasians who built the railroad:

30,000 British

18,000 Dutch

13,000 Australian

650 American

Nobody has a count of the "romusha" because nobody cared, least of all
the Japanese. Gavan Daws gives the figure of 250,000, many of whom
were children.

They died at approximately these rates:

20 percent of the PWS

50 percent of the romusha

Thus, more prisoners died building the railroad than were killed at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

For sheer percentage of murdered prisoners, try looking at the Sandakan
death march.

2345 Australian and British prisoners of the Japanese in Borneo were taken
from Sandakan to Ranau in 1945 .

Of the 2345 men, only six survived. Of those who died, most were never
found.

In article ,
(B2431) wrote:



The U.S. DID do medical experiments on par with the Nazis. Think of the
black
men in the syphilis experiments who were deliberately left untreated as
an
example.

You are correct that the US, before WWII, did some long-term medical
studies that definitely violated the Helsinki Declaration of Human
Rights (circa 1952, from memory), written in large part due to Nazi
actions called medical experiments [1]. By modern standards, I consider
the long-term syphilis observation study an utter violation of medical
ethics.

But medical ethics evolve. It's relatively recent that controlled
double-blind studies finally gave up, for ethical reasons, a placebo
control arm guaranteed to be of no benefit to the patient. The current
ethical standard in clinical trials is that the control arm (or arms) is
the best accepted current treatment. Depending on the study design and
the ethical review and approval of at least an Institutional Review
Board and possibly other authorities, the experimental arm(s) of a
treatment [2] protocol uses an experimental therapy that has a
reasonable chance of at least equivalent results, or possibly a
combination of standard and experimental therapy.

[1] Most of what were termed Nazi medical experiments focused on
pseudo-science, racial theory justification, or evaluations of
treatments not reasonably expected to be equivalent to accepted therapy,
At the conclusion of many of these experiments, the subjects were
killed, either for autopsy or simply because they were inconvenient.

A small fraction of Nazi (and Japanese) experiments, while still
absolutely unethical, were of sufficiently careful design that their
results may have at least statistical validity. Last year, IIRC, the
issue reopened again in the New England Journal of Medicine, probably
the most prestigious medical publication. A researcher, with full
condemnation of the Nazi work, asserted that using the results of
certain experiments (e.g., anoxia and hypothermia) for legitimate
treatment-oriented research was at least some ethical recompense that
the victims hadn't died completely in vain.

Other researchers and ethicists maintain that the data from these indeed
murderous experiments should never be used in any further research. A
related question came during the Korean War, where the ONLY data
available on certain hemorrhagic fevers came from involuntary Japanese
BW studies.

In standard pharmacology textbooks, one will find papers on the effect
of cyanides on the heart, with data that came from legal execution.
There's no indication of the condemned agreed to be studied. Indeed,
there is a continuing controversy if physicians may be involved at all
in legal execution -- several state medical associations have forbidden
their members to participate in any aspect, some allow very restricted
participation.

The situation remains other than black and white. Without getting into
details well outside the scope of this discussion, there are very
ethical physicians who maintain the exact informed consent approach used
in the US is culturally inappropriate for their societies -- which have
different decision-making structures (e.g., let the family, not the
patient worry) that are benign in intent. No simple answers.

[2] Not all approved research studies necessarily benefit the patient.
Phase I drug trials most often involve administering single, or small
doses of drug to healthy volunteers in order to evaluate its
distribution in the body, side effects, etc. There are also Phase I
trials for patients with diseases with no known treatment, where the
experimental agent MIGHT do some good. A third category is pure
research, not necessarily clinically oriented at all, or used to get
statistical information on diagnostic information in large populations.

I participate in several such long-term statistical studies at NIH
Clinical Center, where I also volunteer for various experimental cardiac
imaging studies. These studies do not necessarily benefit me, although I
definitely receive an overall benefit from continuing clinical review
and recommendation by top-flight cardiologists. To help keep me stable
as a reference, I also get free regular cardiac medication from them.

In several states "mentally deficient" people were forcibly
sterilized. Maybe the U.S. didn't do these sorts of things to as many
people,
but we did do it.

Antisemitism WAS rampant in many parts of the U.S. and was one of the
reasons
FDR never included saving Jews in Nazi occupied territories. He was
afraid he
would lose support for the war.

Indeed that may have been a decision factor. There were also practical
limitations. While resistance groups and governments in exiles requested
the Allies bomb the death camps in Poland, the flight paths would have
been such that available bombers did not have the range to attack them
without a refueling stop in the USSR. The Soviets refused permission.


Having said all this the comparison between Nazi concentration camps and
the
Japanese, Italian and German internment camps in the U.S. is uncalled
for. For
one thing German internees were allowed to hang up pictures of Hitler.
The
inmates of the Nazi camps weren't allowed to post pictures of Churchill,
Stalin
or FDR.

More to the point, no US camp routinely executed groups, or subjected
them to conditions that would reasonably be expected to produce a high
death rate.