mdiehl
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Joined: 10/21/2000
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I believe I have seen many times that the ABCD nations and the US acted jointly in the embargo. If I'm correct in that, then there would have been nowhere else to get oil.
French Indochina and also the USSR (with whom Japan had a nonaggression treaty). Notably NOT enough to keep Combinedfleet running for the duration, but with that (and coal from Manchuria and Korea) plenty to keep basic industry and domestic food production going.
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I just read that the Arikara were so decimated by smallpox in the 1830's that they had to join with the Mandans and Hidatsa. Also at this time there are only 20 leaving elders that can speak their language.
That sounds ballpark correct. But the thing is smallpox was largely out of the control of the US government. Even the scratch method of inoculation was unavailable through the period when smallpox ran wild. While agreeing that smallpox was devastating, the evidence of intent and moreover that smallpox was a part and parcel of US expansionist policy is lacking. Thus, comparisons with Japanese treatment of Manchurians, Chinese, and Filipinos don't really work.
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I don't think the Crows, who would also fit as they were always US allies are any better off on their reservation than the Dakota.
We were talking about genocide and murder of prisoners. Not injustice. No one has made the claim that NA were well-treated universally. I think there are some legitimate issues in re reservations. Ironically, the period in which the reservation concept most lived up to its Idealized State was when the US Army administered the reservations and, later, starting in the 1970s. But the biggest injustices have less to do with reservations than they do with sheer corruption and stupidity (the Dawes Act in particular). Fortunately now, at least, NA have much better control over their own economic desttiny. Casinos are no place I'd want to be, but the 1st nations are using them to good effect, although it is clear that many social problems persist.
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Well I think your now dealing with semantics. I don't think it matters to a race that genocide and wholesale slaughter was government sponsored or not.
I'm not dealing with semantics. I'm dealing with intention and with foreseeable consequences. Smallpox was not understood very well until after its worst effects had swept through North America (most of which occurred before the United States existed as a political entity). In contrast, the effects of a beheading contest between Japanese infantry officers were rather predictable.
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I've never seen anything written from the Japanese that said they intended to wipe the Chinese off the face of the earth,
Not in so many words. And yet as Iris Chang has noted IJA policy in Nanking (and other cities, Nanking was not the only one) was directed from the top down and that policy has been documented to the degree that one can (considering that the Japanese artfully burned documents and generally sanitized all records in re the Emperor, the cabinet, the generals, and orders to troops in the field). But there are literally dozens of documents and decrypted transmissions of Japanese orders to execute prisoners. So, it's not like there was any sense of Samurai morality at play there.
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Most of the nations of the world felt the chinese ( no offence ) were lower than dirt and not even humans. Russians considered them " monkeys " and the colonial powers couldn't have cared if the coolie who drove them around yesterday died from starvation as long as a new coolie was here today .
I do not think that claim is substantially supported by the data. Nor do I think it is universally true for the whole period of western colonialism in China (especially not after the 1st WW) and it is not specificallt true of US efforts in China (where the US never had a colony and in which US goals seem to have differed somewhat from others' goals).
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I understand completely that your point is that all the Japanese had to do was just cave in to all the Allies demands, leave China ( while some of the Allies still owned some of it ).
Qua your claim that the west should have just "caved in" to Japanese demands to be allowed to continue the genocide. I don't really see how the US can come off OK in any analysis you would make. On the one hand the US was wrong to embargo oil. On the other hand, had the US not embargoed the oil, it would have been tantamount acquiescence to (if not actually abetting) Japanese injustices in China. The US took a moral position when it made the embargo. It was known by both the US and Japan to be the most moral position, but Japan did not like that position because it was inconvenient for their imperialistic agenda. We know that Japan knew that their conduct in China was immoral because their conduct was specifically in contradiction with their stated goals in the "Co-prosperity sphere" documents, their conduct was specifically contrary to Samurai traditions in regards to the treatment of noncombatants, and because they made a substantial effort to hide their conduct in the terminal days of the war by burning all evidence of same.
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Do you think that if the US were to make such demands on other countries they would just follow along? Lets say in a slightly different history shift the US determines that what England is doing in India is not right. Do you think England would just walked away?
I do not think the UK would have attacked the US under such circumstances, because the UK did not do so during the American civil war. Isolation from southern cotton was a problem for the UK, but they turned to other sources by developing same, most notably India and Egypt.
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They could only conceive of their way of thinking and could not grasp the Japanese mind.
The Japanese mindset was pretty well understood in summer 1941. Nonetheless, a time comes when responsible people don't abet genocide. I think there is more compelling evidence to indicate that the Japanese did not understand the Japanese mindset, since their behaviors were consistently in contradiction to the values they claimed to embrace.
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Any idea that they could discuss the situation with the Japanese was idiotic on their part.
Ah. So since the Japanese were unwilling to negotiate in good faith or embrace their own stated values the west should have simply provided them with the desired resources to carry on as usual?
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So in a sense Pearl harbor can be laid right at their feet.
Only in a very warped and immoral sense. It's a bit like blaming the rape of an attractive woman on the woman rather than the rapist. It was her fault for looking so tempting etc.
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Anyone who had sent demands as we did to a nation like Japan in 1940 and did not put it's armed forces on full alert or even wartime status was just plain wishing all would be well.
Here we're off the topic of intention and onto the topic of preparedness. The US armed forces were in fact on alert. The alertness arrived about 24 hours too late though. PacFleet ordered on Dec 6 a full alert status to begin on Monday 8 Dec. because the decision to make the alert (late on Dec 6) would have been impossible to implement on Dec 7 with so many crews on leave. The US was rather lulled into a state of uncertainty by the fact that the Japanese made a pretense of negotiation until well after Mobile Force had sortied for it's attack on Pearl Harbor. Naive perhaps. That said, it remains true that:
1. The US made no form of aggression against Japan prior to Japan's attack.
2. Japan had no causus belli against the US.
3. Japan was in violation of all standards of morality (including their own) vis their policies in China beginning in 1936.
_____________________________
Show me a fellow who rejects statistical analysis a priori and I'll show you a fellow who has no knowledge of statistics.
Didn't we have this conversation already?
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RE: WWII boming debate - 
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