Japanese "Co-Prosperity Sphere": What was it really?

[Nakena]

Yeah, I was just trying to answer the question of why your run-of-the-mill Japanese person would enlist in the army. There's not a lot of discussion of these things in the West, unfortunately, and most usually people resort to just comparing them to the Nazis.

It's interesting to compare the psychology of the average Wehrmacht soldier and a member of the IJA (the "normal citizen" type, disregarding the obvious psychopaths and the like). While the former was disillusioned by disproportionate reparations and a shattered economy, the latter was being strung along as a supposed member of a divinely-blessed race of superhumans who could do no wrong, as their nation was undergoing a rapid increase in industrialization and economic power.

Both resulted in otherwise-normal people committing horrific acts against civilians and enemy forces, as the circumstances of their indoctrination into Nazism and Hakkō ichiu respectively meant that they were encouraged to show no mercy and feel no guilt for their actions. So while there are obvious differences between the Germans and the Japanese, there is definitely something shared between the two regarding groupthink and mob mentality.

Not even. See, the thing is, people back then had a different mentality. When there was war and you were drafted and told to do X you would be doing it, because society was mentalitywise a hella lot more authoritarian than today. As in people didn made such much a fuss about some things and its not like they thought about things like people do nowadays. Most Wehrmacht and possibly also Japanese (and as well american etc) soldiers fought for their empires and did what they had to do. Because thats the way how things going, and of course, in such perspective "your side" is the central, real and true one. The good one who fights against a world of enemy. There isnt really much of reflecting or big picture perspective in such a situation.

And tbh I dont think it's today much different even. I don't believe a lot of US soldiers send to Iraq or Afghanistan are heavily questioning the geopolitical or cultural context under which their deployment takes place. You know its just how things go.

So and now as for war crimes and such. You do not need to have a special ideology or so, such things tend to happen when stuff is getting rough and nasty in a war and slowly the mask of modern "civilizations" start dropping. (theres countless cases of that from Afg and Iraq) When theres a command or structure that does even encourage such things or even pushes for that then all hell breaks loose and shit gets real.

[Nakena]

yeah uh otherwise-normal germans weren't as beholden to the aryan thing as they were to the killing jews thing

like, germany was drowning in murderminded antisemitism well before the nazis were a thing, to the point that even people who wanted nothing but good towards the jews -- even those who defended them while in great suffering, while inside concentration camps -- still wanted those very same jews to renounce their putative control of german life and their apparently wayward morals in comparison to the german body politic

Haha. No. Bullshit. It's nonsense.

Read up on Milgram experiment and you know how things were being done.

The Milgram experiment(s) on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. They measured the willingness of study participants, men from a diverse range of occupations with varying levels of education, to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to believe that they were assisting an unrelated experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a "learner". These fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real.[2]

The experiment found, unexpectedly, that a very high proportion of subjects would fully obey the instructions, albeit reluctantly. Milgram first described his research in a 1963 article in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology[1] and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.[3]

The experiments began in July 1961, in the basement of Linsly-Chittenden Hall at Yale University,[4] three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised his psychological study to explain the psychology of genocide and answer the popular contemporary question: "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"[5] The experiment was repeated many times around the globe, with fairly consistent results.[6]

[Moscareinas]

yeah uh otherwise-normal germans weren't as beholden to the aryan thing as they were to the killing jews thing

like, germany was drowning in murderminded antisemitism well before the nazis were a thing, to the point that even people who wanted nothing but good towards the jews -- even those who defended them while in great suffering, while inside concentration camps -- still wanted those very same jews to renounce their putative control of german life and their apparently wayward morals in comparison to the german body politic

Haha. No. Bullshit. It's nonsense.

Read up on Milgram experiment and you know how things were being done.

The Milgram experiment(s) on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. They measured the willingness of study participants, men from a diverse range of occupations with varying levels of education, to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to believe that they were assisting an unrelated experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a "learner". These fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real.[2]

The experiment found, unexpectedly, that a very high proportion of subjects would fully obey the instructions, albeit reluctantly. Milgram first described his research in a 1963 article in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology[1] and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.[3]

The experiments began in July 1961, in the basement of Linsly-Chittenden Hall at Yale University,[4] three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised his psychological study to explain the psychology of genocide and answer the popular contemporary question: "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"[5] The experiment was repeated many times around the globe, with fairly consistent results.[6]

it's a daring experiment in human behavior under duress, and such a mentality likely played a part in the willful destruction of millions of jews during the holocaust

so i raise you in response the death marches at the very end of the war in europe, when the piddling survivors of various concentration camps were marched from one point in the rapidly shrinking nazi german domain, evading allied troops while exhausting already the grossly emaciated jews (people of other nationalities did not get so brutal a treatment and were actually treated better, in that they weren't marched to death or beaten to death or forced to sleep outside in the cold cold nights with rags and their meager reserves of fat to guard them against the elements and so freeze to death) way past endurance

it's in goldhagen, it's always in goldhagen

[Nakena]

it's a daring experiment in human behavior under duress, and such a mentality likely played a part in the willful destruction of millions of jews during the holocaust

Of course. That how it works. Thats human psychology. Thats how normal everyday people can be turned into complict into genocide. Theres no escape from this.

[Moscareinas]

it's a daring experiment in human behavior under duress, and such a mentality likely played a part in the willful destruction of millions of jews during the holocaust

Of course. That how it works. Thats human psychology. Thats how normal everyday people can be turned into complict into genocide. Theres no escape from this.

also, if they sincerely believe that the outgroup is not only in real control of the world but is out to get them such that fire can only be met by a conflagration and is out to get them... yeah, that too

not all were coerced, yo

hell, the majority of the perpetrators probably weren't coerced, the nazis just gave them the outlet to act upon centuries' worth of enduring mass delusion

[Baltenstein]

Of course. That how it works. Thats human psychology. Thats how normal everyday people can be turned into complict into genocide. Theres no escape from this.

also, if they sincerely believe that the outgroup is not only in real control of the world but is out to get them such that fire can only be met by a conflagration and is out to get them... yeah, that too

not all were coerced, yo

hell, the majority of the perpetrators probably weren't coerced, the nazis just gave them the outlet to act upon centuries' worth of enduring mass delusion

Antisemitism of the exclusionist/eliminatory kind was not some sort of centuries old reckoning but a relatively recent phenomenon, not older than the French Revolution and its aftereffects throughout Europe, and was in fact far more moderate in pre-WW1 Germany than in other European countries (France, Russia and Poland in particular). Intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles was among the highest in Europe, to the point that Jews would have probably become completely assimilated into German society after a couple more generations (kinda like what happened with the Ruhr Poles during the 19th century and what is happening with the "Spätaussiedler" from the former USSR today).
Unlike other places in Europe, Germany did not have majority-Jewish shtetl or "European Jerusalems" like Minsk, Krakow or Thessaloniki.

Goldhagen works mainly on sensantionalism and emotional identification and does not offer a good analysis.

[Moscareinas]

also, if they sincerely believe that the outgroup is not only in real control of the world but is out to get them such that fire can only be met by a conflagration and is out to get them... yeah, that too

not all were coerced, yo

hell, the majority of the perpetrators probably weren't coerced, the nazis just gave them the outlet to act upon centuries' worth of enduring mass delusion

Antisemitism of the exclusionist/eliminatory kind was not some sort of centuries old reckoning but a relatively recent phenomenon, not older than the French Revolution and its aftereffects throughout Europe, and was in fact far more moderate in pre-WW1 Germany than in other European countries (France, Russia and Poland in particular). Intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles was among the highest in Europe, to the point that Jews would have probably become completely assimilated into German society after a couple more generations (kinda like what happened with the Ruhr Poles during the 19th century and what is happening with the "Spätaussiedler" from the former USSR today).
Unlike other places in Europe, Germany did not have majority-Jewish shtetl or "European Jerusalems" like Minsk, Krakow or Thessaloniki.

Goldhagen works mainly on sensantionalism and emotional identification and does not offer a good analysis.

a fair enough rebuttal

[Borderlands of Rojava]

also, if they sincerely believe that the outgroup is not only in real control of the world but is out to get them such that fire can only be met by a conflagration and is out to get them... yeah, that too

not all were coerced, yo

hell, the majority of the perpetrators probably weren't coerced, the nazis just gave them the outlet to act upon centuries' worth of enduring mass delusion

Antisemitism of the exclusionist/eliminatory kind was not some sort of centuries old reckoning but a relatively recent phenomenon, not older than the French Revolution and its aftereffects throughout Europe, and was in fact far more moderate in pre-WW1 Germany than in other European countries (France, Russia and Poland in particular). Intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles was among the highest in Europe, to the point that Jews would have probably become completely assimilated into German society after a couple more generations (kinda like what happened with the Ruhr Poles during the 19th century and what is happening with the "Spätaussiedler" from the former USSR today).
Unlike other places in Europe, Germany did not have majority-Jewish shtetl or "European Jerusalems" like Minsk, Krakow or Thessaloniki.

Goldhagen works mainly on sensantionalism and emotional identification and does not offer a good analysis.

You're thinking of racial antisemitism. Before the 1800s antisemitism was religious based prejudice, and if a Jew converted to Christianity they usually weren't seen as Jewish anymore (except by the paranoid Spanish inquisition but even that wasn't really "racial"). Under racial antisemitism like that of the Nazis, someone was born Jewish and always would be Jewish. Being a Jew was a biological thing, not a religious thing. The Nazis hammered this home in their theories of an "Aryan Race" and a "Semitic race."

[Baltenstein]

Antisemitism of the exclusionist/eliminatory kind was not some sort of centuries old reckoning but a relatively recent phenomenon, not older than the French Revolution and its aftereffects throughout Europe, and was in fact far more moderate in pre-WW1 Germany than in other European countries (France, Russia and Poland in particular). Intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles was among the highest in Europe, to the point that Jews would have probably become completely assimilated into German society after a couple more generations (kinda like what happened with the Ruhr Poles during the 19th century and what is happening with the "Spätaussiedler" from the former USSR today).
Unlike other places in Europe, Germany did not have majority-Jewish shtetl or "European Jerusalems" like Minsk, Krakow or Thessaloniki.

Goldhagen works mainly on sensantionalism and emotional identification and does not offer a good analysis.

You're thinking of racial antisemitism. Before the 1800s antisemitism was religious based prejudice, and if a Jew converted to Christianity they usually weren't seen as Jewish anymore (except by the paranoid Spanish inquisition but even that wasn't really "racial"). Under racial antisemitism like that of the Nazis, someone was born Jewish and always would be Jewish. Being a Jew was a biological thing, not a religious thing. The Nazis hammered this home in their theories of an "Aryan Race" and a "Semitic race."

Andijudaism (which means hating Jews on religious grounds) largely took the same shape as other similar types of xenophobia, like anti-ziganism, Polonophobia and the like. It was not founded on world-encompassing conspiracy theories and wasn't explicitedly eliminatory. Anti-Jewish pogroms in past times usually meant brutalizing the local Jewish community, chasing them out of town and then kinda forgetting about it, which is like pogroms continue to work to this day and age.
The sort of racist mindset that eventually culminated in the Holocaust did not appear until the later half of the 19th Century and was enabled by a whole set of circumstantial historical events (the scientification of social thought, technology developing at an unprecented pace, Germany losing WW1 in exactly that way, Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the Great Depression, etc)

I feel like we are moving further and further away from the Land of the Rising Sun though.