I guess I’ve seen it all now. Up is down on tumblr.
Tumblr is a grotesque trainwreck when discussing WW2 precisely because the crimes enacted by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan don’t at all fall neatly into the US racial paradigm where “white” = oppressor and “POC” = oppressed dichotomy. Yet people feel a need to shoehorn it into the conversation no matter how offensive it is to us. Both were cases where the primary victims were other European and Asian ethnic groups, who by US standards, inhabited the same race category as their oppressors. It therefore doesn’t fit at all into “White/POC”. It just DOESN’T. Privilege in 1940s Europe was some warped version of German/Nordic/Aryan supremacy. Privilege in 1940s Asia was about being Japanese.
I really wish this website will stop this crass appropriation of WW2 crimes to it into a “white/POC” dichotomy. All too often, it’s done to minimise hideous crimes committed by Imperial Japan and to trivialise the suffering of Holocaust victims just because some of them are “white” by US standards. Because there’s the tiresome, incessant need to somehow force it to cohere to the US race paradigm where white people have power and POC don’t.
A mass murdering, brutal and expansionist empire killed millions of people because of its mad vision of Japanese superiority and people are so keen to make some bullshit statement about their lack of “white privilege”? Plus the obligatory “some European country made them do it! Waaaahhh!” (Btw, the first atomic bomb wasn’t operational until after Germany surrendered. Not to mention overall, more German than Japanese civilians died in the Allied bombings. Also, the Sino-Japanese War already started in 1937, which is before the invasion of Poland in 1939 that marks the official start of WW2. Tell me again how the Soviet Union tricked the poor, gullible Empire of Japan into conquering and slaughtering millions of their neighbours?)
At the same time, one can suffer from a hideous, internationally recognised genocide but hey, you have light skin and you are an ethnic group that lived in Europe? WHITE PRIVILEGE~!!!!!! As if antisemitism, antiroma racism and anti slavic racism died with Hitler, as if European racism today isn’t still based on ethnicity and doesn’t involve hatred of these aforementioned groups of people. As if everybody killed in the Holocaust even looked “white” by US standards. As if Europe doesn’t have racist, far right parties actually in the EU Parliament and prominent politicians who are Holocaust deniers.
Is that supposed to make us feel all warm and fuzzy? Like seriously, what even goes into this kind of thinking? Do they think my grandmother would have felt ANY sympathy or kinship with the Japanese soldiers who wanted to rape Chinese women and who were brutalising the entire region because, “yeah dude, we both don’t have white privilege!” Do they think those “you would have white privilege if you were American” or “people will bother remembering you because you’re white!!!” is supposed to be comforting to the people stripped of their humanity, turned to ashes before their time, of entire ethnic groups that bear the scars of an attempt to utterly destroy them?
Is it that hard to understand that where we would sit in the power structure in the US is totally irrelevant to where the crimes of Germany and Japan were committed because they did not happen in the US?
People talk about not derailing, and putting in US dynamics into a non-US tragedy IS derailing. If we’re talking about an intra-European genocide where the light skin didn’t confer any privilege to its victims, bringing US white privilege to the picture IS derailing. If we’re talking about a brutal Asian empire, your comments about how European imperialism was “so much worse anyway” is derailing.
The blatant disrespect for WW2 tragedies by people on this website pisses me off to no end honestly.
Ok but the us dropped the atomic bomb on Japan after they attempted to surrender. The fact that the US chose to drop nuclear bombs on Japanese civilians to send a message to the USSR about their nuclear capabilites had EVERYTHING to do with them not seeing Japanese lives as valuable. Are you honestly trying to pretend like the US wasn’t extremely racist? Also, whitness is a flexible,context-sensitive entity. The ethnic groups that were targeted by the Nazis were not white, by the very definition of whitness. But hey, I’ve literally never seen anyone try to deligitimize the suffering of Holocaust victims anyway and as such I think that OP is just mad that people are talking about race in history. Not here for it.
Please don’t try and retell the history my family lived through for me. I am a diasporic Chinese, and all too often, the virulent ethnic nationalism and racism that compelled the Japanese to commit their vicious war crimes against Asians is ignored to focus on Japan’s conflict with “White” countries.
1. And no, Japan had not yet “attempted to surrender”. Factions within the government were THINKING of surrendering, others were against it. But there had been no official attempt to surrender endorsed by the Japanese emperor yet. The Allies wanted unconditional surrender, Japan was unwiling to accept those terms. So there was NO agreement to surrender, there was no “we will surrender” declaration. Even after the SECOND atomic bomb was dropped, there was an attempted coup by military hardliners who wanted to fight to the death, after the emperor said he intended to surrender because he saw it would only lead to more deaths.
2. I can very well be against dropping a bomb that killed thousands of civilians, while being against centering the discourse around “Japan is a victim of WW2” because it erases the war crimes my family members were subject to and plays into the revisionist narrative of Japanese government. 70 years on, and they still deny it, they still don’t teach it in their textbooks, their Prime Ministers spit in our faces all the time by visiting the shrine where their Class-A war criminals are enshrined.
3. Global politics do not operate on white/POC. The US sees the lives of other people as expendable if it will further its interests but it does not proceed strictly on colour when it comes to entire nations for the simple fact that non-white nations have important things like oil and or may have a strategic location. The US immediately rushed to the rescue of Kuwait in 1991, but dragged its feet when it came to the genocide in Bosnia (in Europe). Why?Because the former had oil and the latter didn’t really affect any strategic US interests! Why did the US intervene in Libya and let Syria bleed? OIL. Oil and money are more important than skin colour when it comes to the US deciding to value or not value other people’s lives. The US would very well have dropped the bomb on Germany if it hadn’t surrendered before the first one is operational- I mean why not? It’d end the war in Europe faster, it would be a much closer warning shot at the USSR (much closer to Moscow) as well as an “this will be you next if you don’t surrender” to Japan. The US was also reluctant to get involved in WW2 itself, where Europeans of all ethnicities were getting slaughtered. I don’t doubt the US is a country with institutional racism, that this racism plays into how your media (if you’re American) portrays global events- but your internal race dynamics do not play out the exact same way between nations, and so please leave it out.
4. I have no way of knowing if you are American, but to me it seems you are Americanising a European genocide. European racism is a lot more like how US racism worked in the past- centered around ethnicity rather than skin colour. It is not accurate to describe it in terms of “white supremacy” so much as “Aryan/nordic supremacy”. There is an element of whiteness within “Aryan-ness” (they thought Africans were inferior) but they very much thought even people who had “Aryan” features were subhuman if they were Slavic, Rroma or Jewish. It was also related to civilisation superiority- Hitler had admired the Japanese ever since the Russo-Japanese war for beating Russia, and for the age of their civilisation. So, it is a lot more complex than the colourist variant of racism that exists in the US. Contrast how Jewish people of all appearances were murdered in Nazi Germany to how in the US lighter-skinned POC CAN access better treatment. Describing it in terms of colour erases the ethnic dimension, distorts how privilege flowed: how someone like me would have probably be considered an “honorary Aryan” because I pass as Japanese, whereas the blue-eyed blonde Polish girl in my class would have been seen as less-than-human.
5. You’ve never seen anyone try to delegitimise the suffering of the Holocaust? Okay, good for you. You’re fortunate. I’m honestly glad you’ve never seen such infuriating garbage. But do not take the sum of your experiences to be definitive, when those of us living in Europe can see very well how antisemitism and Holocaust denial is on the upswing. Other things like racism against Polish people and Romani people are also an issue. We have somehow ended up with neo-Nazis in the EU Parliament, only weeks ago, four French Jews were killed in an antisemitic attack. Having to see people on the internet feeling a need to derail a post about the Holocaust memorial, and to erase the disturbing rise of European antisemitism in recent years because of the perceived “White privilege” of the victims. And I have personally seen many US bloggers trivialise antisemitism, by using it to engage in an oppression Olympics, by comparing it to slavery or European colonialism and saying the latter are worse. Comparisons of any sort are wrong because they devalue anyone being compared. Also, this proceeds on the usual assumption that antisemitism, anti-romani and anti-slavic racism was born and died with Hitler. It didn’t. Antisemitism has been around since the Romans, anti-romani racism is old too. Racism against the former two groups and Eastern Europeans is still happening in Western Europe.
It is rather insulting that you suggest I am “mad that people are talking about race in history” when my family had the lovely privilege of being put through both European and Japanese imperialism. I am criticising the Americanisation of the discourse as a non-American and how people play football with our WW2 history in some of the most disrespectful ways. US imperialism is a thing, and that extends to the casual projection of US race politics on foreign contexts.
You do not get to twist this into me “not wanting to talk about race” in history. No, I very much want to talk about race in history, but not through a distorted US-centric lens if it is not an internal US issue.
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But hey, I’ve literally never seen anyone try to deligitimize the suffering of Holocaust victims” – How have you never seen this though? Holocaust denial is so common it’s a crime in many countries. In fact, many far-right politicians and Islamic extremists officially deny the Holocaust.
“I’ve literally never seen anyone try to deligitimize the suffering of Holocaust victims” IT’S IN THE ORIGINAL POST