Lesser Evil

[David W.]

Re: Gandhi

I'd like to see how good the Indian people would have fared against the raging Japanese armies who would not give a FUCK if your protests were peaceful or not (just ask the poor souls in Nanking), had the Chinese and British forces been unable to stop them in Burma after 1942.

[Hans]

‘The end justifies the means’ means anything shall be done, honest or dirty, to achieve an end. However, the defect here is that for the time being we may not know what the real end or a higher end, if any, is.

Stephan wrote: "In accordance with Orwell’s following list of totalitarian elitists pertaining the lesser evil:

‘(a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers of the type of d..."

[David W.]

Nanking was the RoC's capital city, a major reason the Japanese went on that killing spree was to cower the rest of China into submission; had the USSR surrendered or routed from Moscow I'd imagine something similar done by the German army. Chiang Kai-Shek sent 100,000 of his best troops (motorized and all) into Burma to aid the British (the de facto capital Chongqing and the Southwest would be cut off from precious supplies if the roads and air routes were lost to the Japanese) and less than half returned with their lives; in the end the Indian people never had to face the waith of the "red plaster flag" as we call it. But history can be cruel: the lives that had been preserved by the British not shooting all the protestors (and then some) were subsequently lost in the religious and territorial disputes post-1947.

As for the atomic bombs, my humble two cents was that the American High Command should have saved one for Tokyo; since they approved of wiping away whole cities with lots o' noncombatants why not take out the enemy government as "collateral damage"?

One less-known fact in the west is that Emperor Hirohito (and his predecessors from 1868 on) had good amounts of Real Political Power similar to the Kaisers 1871-1918; after the war was over E.H. should have been tried as a war criminal along with the army bigshots and the cabinet members—if only to be acquitted later, and at the VERY LEAST he should be forced to abdicate and let the Crown Prince carry on with a relatively Clean Slate. When the Nazis ploughed through Belgium the king surrendered very dishonorably, and after the Allies liberated Belgium he was forced to quit; something like this ought to have happened in Japan as well, and the fact that no serious unheaval happened in the royal family (although the emperor is no longer considered a god after the 1947 constitution) helps people not know about the emperor's share of war responsibility.

ETA

The Japanese government basically said "Fuck you we're never surrendering." to the Allies even after all that was left of their precious empire were the Four Major Islands, some chunks of mainland China (which the Communists and Kuomintang are dying to take back), Taiwan Island and most of Manchuria (soon to be stormed by the Soviets); the Americans had already lost about 300,000 lives by August 1945, and it was calculated that a Landing In Japan would make the bloodsheds in Normandy look like a small potato; they decided that Japan needed a "damn good thrashing" as the British would say before they were forced to land on beaches —— which brings me back to my older point: since you've somehow deemed it necessary to burn a lot of poor, defenseless Japanese people... WHY ON EARTH WASN'T TOKYO A TARGET?!

[David W.]

The Japanese whale so much that the excess meat are being made into canned dogfood. Fancy that.

*

"If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendour of the Mighty One—I am become Death, the Shatterer of Worlds."

——quoth Oppenheimer after the atomic bomb Trinity in Arizona (or was it NM?)

I reserve my own ideas about the human rights in China, but it is indeed quite shameful that I missed entirely the news about the children dying.

[David W.]

And I agree wholly about Orwell: always stay alert about the proceedings about your government, it's one thing to look at nations doing worse and feeling sorry/indignant on their behalf, but don't ever breathe a sigh of relief and think that such and such would never happen here. That's the beginning of trouble.

Case in point (strange as the choice might seem to you): Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts strip for January 1st 1984. A usually ditzy, happy-go-lucky Walter Mitty of a beagle cares about the implication of Orwell's political visions, why oughtn't we?

[Xdyj]

Firstly, both Japan during WWII & China today are dictatorships, i.e. the governments of late imperial Japan & communist China do not represent the people in those countries. Common people all over the world, whether in China or India or Syria or America, are fundamentally the same with the same aspirations for liberty, peace & justice, and they should not be held responsible for the crimes committed by the state & the ruling class. Even in the darkest days of WWII, the RoC still had enough common sense to insist that the enemy was the Japanese state & Japanese imperialism but never Japanese people. Also, @Stephen, what exactly do you think people should do for the dying children in Syria?

I don't know anything about the relationship between those authors & their translators. I don't quite see any reason why Gandhi is better or worse than Mandela. Both of them had high ideals but ended up as leaders of nationalist movements (INC & ANC) that resulted in aristocratic democracies where the ideals of freedom, equality & human rights are enshrined in constitutions but are often compromised whenever they affect the interests of the powerful & the rich. Actually, to certain extend Mandela's ANC was modeled after Gandhi's INC. Also, Orwell is anti-authoritarian but not an absolute pacifist.

Also, I'm not sure what would have happened had India fell to the Axis in WWII. Gandhi was somewhat neutral in WWII while some other Indian nationalist leaders, though no fans of fascism personally, fought on the Axis side because they believed the Axis was the lesser evil comparing with the British.

[David W.]

China is actually closer to an oligarchy. The elite part of the Party are also core members of the government. (i do not understand the appeal of elections paved by money, though)

Sometimes I really don't understand India. When the Japanese war criminals were rounded up for the Far East Military Tribunal, some judges screamed for blood, others for life imprisonment... and the Indian judge(s) argued that they should all be set free of charges, because individuals — no matter if they were in charge or not — should be held responsible for the bad things the state had commited.

What should be done about Syria, indeed. They handed out their share of WMDs, now what? Bomb some buildings and force the government to desert so we might usher in democracy?