Show 63 - Supernova in the East II

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0:17What you're about to hear is part two of a multi-part series on the wars in Asia and the Pacific involving the Imperial Japanese Empire and many other countries and powers. If you enjoy context and don't want to get too frustrated with me referring back to things we talked about earlier, please feel free to listen to part one and catch up. If you don't care about those things, of course, or if you've already heard part one, well, please feel free to continue and hopefully enjoy part two of Supernova in the East.

0:51It's history.

0:56It's hardcore history. Why didn't Adolf Hitler and the Nazis broadcast news and updates of what they were doing as part of the final solution while it was going on? I mean, why didn't they announce to the world through the Joseph Goebbels propaganda ministry that we set up these industrial killing facilities, but we'll work people to death first if they're strong and explain, listen, last month we killed 100,000 more of these people and we won't stop

1:29till they're all gone. Why didn't they do that? Why didn't Stalin get up there and yell and shake his finger and threaten the gulags and then explain what the gulag archipelago, the whole system was? We're going to starve you to death, work you to death as part of a re-education campaign. And all you have to do is leave the country and come back for us to be suspicious enough that you've been corrupted to send you away. I mean, why didn't he get up there and say this is what's going to happen to you if you don't stay in line? No one admitted it, right? Why didn't the Khmer Rouge

2:07take photographs as they wiped out the intellectual class of Cambodia because they thought people with glasses were intellectuals and that intellectuals were a threat to their new world that they were creating where everyone was going to go live back on the land again? Why aren't there photos of that? Go check out the killing fields and you know what you'll find? Artwork. Why didn't they take photos full color, blow them up and put them all around the town and send some to the foreign media outlets too?

2:38That's what an Assyrian king would have done back in the Iron Age. Get a guy like Sennacherib, going to level a place like Babylon, and then he's going to make sure everyone knows about it in detail. Now, a good historian of that era will point out that a lot of what the Assyrians carved into stone, including, you know, their version of photos, right? Artwork with commentary and statements by the king. A lot of that stuff was a court style after a while. In other words,

3:09it was what everyone would expect. That's why you still see Egyptian fashions in the new kingdom that look, you're really familiar, like Egyptian fashions from the old kingdom. There's a style that becomes the style you use. But what does it say about you if the style you use is to announce the atrocities that you commit and as close as possible replicate them on the walls of your waiting room in the embassies while people wait to talk to the Assyrian ruler? I mean, Sennacherib destroyed

3:43Babylon and wrote about it. Here's what the scribes record the words of Sennacherib being. Again, this is a court style also. But what a style, Sennacherib said, of his leveling of one of the great cities may be the greatest city of all time if you started a top 100 list, Babylon. And he leveled Babylon in the 600s BCE, by the way, quote, like the oncoming of a storm, I broke loose and overwhelmed

4:16it like a hurricane. With their corpses, I filled the city squares. The city and its houses from its foundations to its top, I destroyed. I devastated. I burned with fire. The wall and outer wall, temples and gods, temple towers of brick and earth, as many as there were. I raised and dumped them into the Eratu canal. Through the midst of that city, I dug canals. I flooded its site with water and the very foundations thereof I destroyed. I made its destruction more complete than that by a flood,

4:47that in days to come on the site of that city and its temples and its gods might not be remembered. I completely blotted it out with floods of water and made it like a meadow, end quote.

5:00All those later kings were probably trying to emulate the badass of them all, Asher Nasirpal II, from, you know, a couple centuries before that time. Nonetheless, you got to appreciate the Assyrians for owning it and using it. Their foreign policy was based on scaring the hell out of people. They didn't want you to rebel, and the best way to do that was to punish anyone who did rebel horribly. Now, that was more the style of the times in the Iron Age, though. One could see that

5:32not playing particularly well in the 20th century, but then let's ask why. If you were to make a list of all the genocides and attempted genocides, atrocities, war crimes, and all these things, you know, that would fall broadly under that heading and involve enough people to sort of make a list of the 20th and 21st centuries, how many of the, let's just call them accused perpetrators of these acts, admit to it, own it? And if they do, how many of them do so in an unqualified way? Because

6:09sometimes the evidence is so overwhelming that even, you know, deniers can't figure out how to wiggle out of the facts. So they start rationalizing, and they'll say, well, the numbers are inflated, or there's mitigating circumstances, or what have you. And here's what makes life so complicated. Sometimes they're right. If you look at the history of the 20th century, you will note that we start off relatively quickly with some of the more famous genocides or attempted genocides or alleged attempted genocides in history, and we keep going from there. We have spent more than 100 years now

6:47as a global society trying to codify rules and laws and courts of adjudication and systems and organizations to help create rules about atrocities and war and genocides and killings and crimes against humanity, right? You could create a timeline. I mean, you could start before the Hague conventions and things like that. But you go all the way through, you know, the League of Nations creation. You can get to the United Nations creation. You can get to the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials. I mean,

7:21there's all these sorts of things. And now we have this extensive body in many of these global organizations created in large part in reaction to horrible atrocities and genocides and things that must never happen again. And yet, let me ask you what you think would happen if it happened again. I mean, we've spent an enormous amount of time and human effort on a fantastic cause, right? Let's never have a final solution, for example, happen again. But what if it happened tomorrow?

7:52And of course, if this is going to be some sort of analogy that works, we have to imagine it happens in a powerful state. If it happens in Albania, there'll be no problem. The bombing will start, you know, soon afterwards and there'll be an invasion. If it involves, if this crime against humanity involves an important ethnic group that's in many countries so that many countries have an interest in this, Jewish folks are an example of that, then it's going to be a different kind of situation. If we're talking about a people that almost nobody really knows about in some faraway place and they're being persecuted by a powerful state, the ramifications of confronting, you know,

8:27would not be like Albania. You'd be committing to some major stuff. Do you think we do anything different today if Holocaust number two starts tomorrow? If it's China or Russia, apologies to both those nations, but I mean, they're the obvious powerful choices if I'm not going to choose my own state. If they start killing a million or two million of some unpopular minority there that most of us in the rest of the world don't know a lot about, don't have a whole lot of dog in that fight, how well are all these wonderful organizations that we have created over more than a hundred years,

8:59how well is this mechanism going to click into place and function to stop something like that?

9:05The people at the time get quite a bit of blame for not doing more to stop the Holocaust or atrocities that happened all throughout the Second World War on many major fronts, but I think we sometimes forget how hard it is to do that. We have many more mechanisms and, you know, tools at our disposal created in many cases specifically for this purpose that I still think, and remember, I'm not cautiously optimistic personality-wise. I'm cautiously pessimistic. I'm not all hardcore, cynical, and pessimistic, but I'm mildly both, and I think if the

9:39state is powerful enough, we could have, you know, the Uyghur version of the final solution happen over the next year, and the world kind of sit around and look at each other most of the time going, you know, let's have some sanctions maybe. I mean, what should we do? I bring that up because we're coming to a part in the story where it's, let's call it a milestone or a potential milestone on that timeline that begins maybe you could say in the 20th century and keeps going to now concerning these kinds of events. And I mean, look at your newspaper today. We still haven't

10:14figured out how to deal with this. We just had some problems in the Middle East where everybody was going, you know, how do we influence this humanitarian crisis? We had it when the former Yugoslavia broke up. You had a genocide in Rwanda going on and everybody looking at each other thinking to themselves, well, what do we need to do here? Meanwhile, you know, the killings are every day and everybody's sort of deliberating and everybody's got to consider, you know, their own personal country's strategic interests and, you know, realpolitik questions. It's all understandable, but it boils down to the same thing. If this is 1943 and this is how we're behaving, more Jewish

10:48people and gypsies and homosexuals and Polish people and priests are dying every day. And yet what's a responsible speed and what's a responsible level of force we can expect nation states to employ in situations like this. So as we ask ourselves that question and realize that the people in the in the pre Second World War era had less in the way of tools and less in the way of structure and probably less in the way of leverage. I mean, we're talking nuclear weapons now, which changed the game completely. And they're confronted with a similar sort of situation. And by the way, this is one we

11:22still deal with today and it is still controversial. And that's why I brought up the point about denial or minimization or rationalization when it comes to questions of atrocities.

11:35When last we spoke, we were talking about the Battle of Shanghai, a little known battle, by the way, in the West. But as participants liked to point out, by the time it's done and it went on like three months, something like that, you have as many dead on the Chinese side as either side, kind of a little less, I think. But but at the Battle of Verdun in the First World War, a historically nasty battle that went on longer.

12:01The strategy at the Battle of Shanghai was influenced by global public opinion or a desire to influence global public opinion. Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese wanted to prove that the Chinese could put up a fight against the Japanese and they wanted to send a message to the world that we're here. We can resist if you want to help us. It's a worthwhile investment and it's awful and you should help us. There were photographs making it to the global media stories, accounts from Westerners. Shanghai had quite a lot of Westerners in it. And so the Chinese threw in all their best

12:32units, stuff that they had stockpiled for a long time. In other words, they were going to shoot off all of their fireworks at once to make the biggest bang they could make and see if they could attract global attention while they did so. The upside of this is they did. The downside of this is when it's gone, it's gone. And when the Japanese, after several months of fighting, launch an amphibious invasion and open up another front on the city of Shanghai, that's the story in terms of resistance. And the Chinese resistance collapses. They've suffered a bazillion casualties. They're out of

13:05stuff and they stream back, sort of routing and trying to get their act together towards the capital Nanking. Now, Nanjing. The Japanese are close on their heels. And as they chase them, an atrocity begins to occur. Now, let me back up here because I was fascinated and yet I got pulled down the rabbit hole reading about the various points of view on what history calls, some people call it the rape of

13:37Nanking. Other people call it the Nanking incident, the Nanking atrocity. And the reason there are all these different names is because it's very controversial. In fact, it's about as controversial as all those other genocides, war crimes and atrocities that you will see on your list if you made a timeline, as I said, from the start of the 20th century. Go to the people accused of the crime and ask them to admit it or ask them to talk about it. You'll find a percentage always that will, but most people reflexively get defensive. Let's understand this is a human thing. And let's

14:11understand just how widespread it is. Every now and then, but regularly, you will see a news story involving the Japanese education system. And the story is always the same. The Japanese textbooks, specifically the history textbooks, are not, are whitewashing is the way someone will always, whitewashing, downplaying, covering up Japanese atrocities during its aggressive period in the Second World War and pre-Second World War era. Oftentimes, these complaints will come from people

14:43who suffered at the hands of Japanese aggression. China, the Philippines, the entire area around Malaysia. I mean, there's a bunch of places that were in the Japanese orbit for a time. And those are often the people that get angry when Japanese atrocities are downplayed. The people that are sometimes the most angry are the Americans who fought in that war, veterans from Australia, Canada, Great Britain. All these people want the Japanese to confront what they did. But here's the way I want

15:18to portray it in human terms. We have similar textbook issues here in the United States and many other countries do too. And they often revolve around history class for middle schoolers and junior high schoolers and high schoolers. And the arguments are over how your own country's bad periods are portrayed. And in the United States, we often have these controversies because the nasty things that happened in the past are downplayed or sometimes excised altogether. And the more patriotic good

15:52things are played up. Now, the Japanese will often come back with a similar sort of response. I don't mean to get political, but both of the right wing extra patriot sides of both countries actually have similar views about what they want portrayed in their textbooks. They want their people portrayed positively, creating a sense of citizenship, pride in your heritage, all that kind of stuff and appreciation for the things that make your people special. And yet I do find it sort of ironic that if you went to the people in my country that feel that way and asked them about Japanese textbooks,

16:24they would definitely want the Japanese in most cases to have to confront, you know, these sorts of things, right? The real patriots in the United States are pretty aware of Japanese conduct in the Second World War against our troops and others, and they want that shown. But if you then tried to put the shoe on the other foot and say, OK, in our own history books, when we're talking about the Vietnam War, how much full color photography and witness accounts should we devote to something like the My Lai Massacre? Those of you who don't know about the My Lai Massacre, shame. 1968, Vietnam War,

16:59American soldiers went into a hamlet or village. And when they came out, 300 to 550 villagers, men, women and children were dead. Rapes occurred. I mean, it was very, very nasty, very disillusioning for I can speak from experience from in the 10 years afterwards as Americans confronted the fact that we were actually just like everyone else. We were not this special Lone Ranger come in, save the world in a couple of world wars, rebuild it afterwards with the Marshall Plan,

17:32defend it during the Cold War. I mean, we were all those things, too. But if you had said to American people in the 30s or 40s that Americans would do a My Lai type thing, I think they would find it hard to believe. I think what men in combat, although, you know, I've only read it, so take this with a grain of salt. But I think what they would say is that in certain situations, things can become very unpredictable. And when there is a lack of strong leadership in those situations, they can become deadly. I'd like to draw a distinction

18:06between two kinds of atrocities here. You saw both kinds in the Second World War, by the way, and trying to link the two of them not only twisted some of the post-war war crimes trials into knots, but affects us even today. The difference between a top-down atrocity of the sort, for example, that Hitler and the Nazis were doing with the final solution, the kind an Assyrian king would do for a

18:36Babylonian final solution, a top-down order. And if you're the guy on the ground, you're killing people and executing people and committing an atrocity because you're ordered to. Or the kind that happens of the sort, for example, that the ancient Roman slash Latin historian Tacitus says happened during a Roman civil war at a city called Cremona. This was a scandal, so he wrote about it, and he's almost a contemporary. And the story basically goes, it's a story about troops when they get their bloodlust up. And it reminds us that, you know,

19:12people can be venal too, in large groups that can come out even in a more pronounced way. And what made Cremona so terrible is it's a sacking of a city, which is what the destruction of Babylon was, and what the destruction of the city of Nanjing is going to be. That would be Nanking back in the Second World War. It's a sacking of a city. And Tacitus says that these soldiers wanted to sack the city, that they were worried that the city would surrender. And if it surrendered to their commander,

19:44the Roman general, well, then he got the spoil. So the army, Tacitus says, and he was a veteran, by the way, really wanted the city to not surrender so they could loot it. The city did surrender. It was a Roman city, by the way, and the citizens in it were Roman. The Roman army outside the city still wanted to loot the city. So they did for several days. The account is one of the really wicked accounts in the ancient world. And it's funny, though, because if you took out the particulars,

20:20it would probably work as a reasonable description of 10,000 sackings of cities in human history. Tacitus wrote about the destruction of Cremona, a Roman city, by Roman soldiers after surrendering. And he says, quote, 40,000 armed men forced their way into the city. Neither rank nor years saved the victims from an indiscriminate orgy in which rape alternated with

20:51murder and murder with rape. Gray beards and frail old women who had no value as loot were dragged off to raise a laugh. But any full-grown girl or good-looking lad who crossed their path was pulled this way and that in a violent tug of war between the would-be captors. A single looter trailing a horde of money or temple offerings of massive gold was often cut to pieces by others who were stronger. In their hands, they held firebrands, which once they got their spoil away, they wantonly flung into empty houses and rifled temples.

21:22There was a diversity of wild desires, differing conceptions of what was lawful and nothing barred. Cremona lasted them four days. End quote.

21:34We would be mistaken thinking that this is something particularly Roman or particularly ancient. There's something that goes on in certain situations and you can reliably see it again and again. In December, 1937, you see it in Nanking.

21:59Nanking, though, is so much harder to deal with than something like a Cremona or the Iron Age destruction of Babylon because it's still a white-hot, it's incandescent in terms of how passionate and upset and how visceral the arguments over it can get. People get death threats regularly.

22:23One of the books I bought for this subject, and by the way, we post all of the research materials in the show notes on the website for the shows. Encourage you to buy these books, by the way, especially if you like this stuff. Some of the Nanking stuff is positively Kennedy assassination-esque in terms of the minutiae and detail and how big points can often revolve around small little things. You know, think Magic Bullet. A lot of people love that stuff and reading it. One of them, a great book, The Nanking Atrocity, 1937-38, Complicating the Picture, has different scholars

22:56writing each chapter from a wide range of people. And one of the things that the Japanese editor of the book said in the introduction is that several of the contributors had had their lives threatened, some of them face-to-face for their writings, research, teachings, and lectures on this stuff. Don't have a whole lot of people threatening to bash your head in because of your views on Cremona, do you? I'll give you an example of a problem that a history fan faces trying to talk about this.

23:27If you wanted to make a graph of the range of opinions on what the death toll is in Nanking in December and onward for months, on one side of the spectrum, you have the Japanese people who fall into the class that are known as the deniers, who consider everything that we're going to talk about here to be an illusion caused by a combination of contemporary wartime propaganda and a lot of Marxist stuff, especially by leftist Japanese Marxist teachers who are polluting the

23:59minds of their own children. I mean, it's a super patriot point of view with a tinge of conspiracy that would probably resonate in a bunch of different countries with that same group of people, you know, there, probably all countries, actually. We said in the earlier conversation that like the Jewish folks that this phrase was originally applied to, the Japanese are really intense. They're like everybody else, only more so, or just like anybody else, only more so. And I think you see it in the passions here, too, when people get so upset about,

24:30you know, besmirching the reputation of the Imperial Japanese Army and the country. They get angry, as patriots will do, especially if they don't think it's deserved. And the people on one side of the spectrum here will claim that maybe 45 people died in this Nanking thing, and those may have been justified one way or another. Now, on the far opposite end of the scale and the spectrum, you have Chinese historians and the Chinese official government line.

25:03They've actually carved a number, their number, into a rock. I saw a picture of it. It's a little like, you know, proverbially carving it into stone. I guess that is what they're doing. And the attempt is to create, it's pretty clear, a number that has the same sort of intellectual resonance with the global population that the six million number has for the Holocaust. I mean, everybody knows six million. OK, where'd you come up with that number? Could have been six million and one. I mean, nobody knows, right? Five million, seven million. But you come up with a nice round number and eventually people go, oh, yeah, the Holocaust, about six million people died there.

25:36The Chinese are trying to do this with the Nanking atrocity, and the number that they've settled on is 300,000 dead. 300,000 dead. And there are Chinese historians, and let's acknowledge here, maybe not operating with complete freedom in terms of being able to follow the historical evidence wherever it takes them. But there are Chinese historians that will bump that number up considerably. The 350,000 range is not unheard of at all. If you want to go to crazy town and find the very end

26:07of the spectrum, what's the largest number you've ever seen? What's the insane largest? 500,000. I saw a half million once. Not credible, but that's what I saw. 45 is not credible either on the other end. But now on that scale are a bunch of different gradients of people's and their views on this subject. That's why it's really difficult to talk about, because it's not just an it didn't happen. Yes, it did thing. It's well, sure, it did, but it only happened here. Or yes, it did, but it only happened to these people. It's I mean, just the lawyerly breakdown over the geographical boundaries

26:39where someone who dies in this quadrant counts as a Nanking atrocity casualty and someone who dies outside that quadrant doesn't. I mean, it gets silly like that. The Chinese historians point out and supposedly this is why China didn't make a huge deal specifically over the Nanking situation in the first few decades after the war was because this was more par for the course than not.

27:05And part of the way you get some of these really large number counts is the Chinese historians sometimes include these soldiers from the Battle of Shanghai who died in part because the Japanese troops who took their surrender or who captured them or who found them wounded on the battlefield executed them there. This is another part of the gradient in the discussion, right? Who do you count? If you're talking about soldiers, do they count in the atrocity? Well, what if you killed them after

27:38they surrendered? As I said, a bunch of different people have different opinions along the spectrum. Now, if you're looking for a mid-range to try to get sort of a little ballast on this question, a lot of the mainstream historians will range from like 100,000 dead to 250,000 dead, and that is a huge number no matter which it is. The other question that always comes up in a case like this, and this is connected to the Nazi situation in Europe, but is who's responsible? Where does the

28:10responsibility lie? Because you will often hear these situations, and sometimes it's valid compared to the sacking of Cremona where you have troops, you know, a loss of institutional control, maybe on the part of the leaders, or a callous disregard for the plight of people, you know, that your lower level troops were despoiling, whatever it might be, you'll hear that. Some people will make the case that all of this is premeditated. It might as well have been Nazi stuff. And once again, we get divided into separating soldiers from civilians, but there's an interesting

28:43little bridge between the two, and that's soldiers who dress up as civilians.

28:53Now, before we get into this story, you're entitled to know how I come to my thinking, and if anything, my own bias. To me, my normal approach is to put myself in other people's viewpoints to try to see their perspective, but trying to see the perspective of the side that thinks there's 45 or 100 or 200 deaths here and they're explain awayable feels like trying to be a defender of a Holocaust denier. It's a really difficult position for me to put

29:24myself in. I think you should point it out. I have to have a very hard time putting myself even if you were in debating class and they said, you have to take this perspective and defend it. I am usually open-minded enough to keep a lot of doubt open, though, depending on the other circumstances involved. For example, if this was a very unusual incident in the Second Sino-Japanese War or the Second World War, I think I'd be inclined to say, listen, wartime

29:55propaganda, I mean, those people might have a point. The problem is, is that the Japanese army and navy to a degree, but the army certainly is a repeat offender in this war, both the Sino-Japanese one and the Second World War. By the way, by 1937, a lot of people think the Second World War has started, so it depends. A lot of people, when I was a kid, always started it with the invasion of Poland. But since then, a lot of opinion has shifted and said, you know, really, 1937, the Japanese are in World War II. The other powers just aren't in yet themselves. The Chinese and the Japanese are starting the

30:30Second World War. And in this case, the Japanese will behave toward the Chinese atrociously. And you have to really write off a ton of evidence, including your own soldiers' and commanders' diaries, if you want to explain it away. You also have to deal with the, you know, remembrances of combat veterans from pretty much every power that fought the Japanese in the Second World War, where atrocious behavior

31:05and a certain brutal level of conduct was always remarked upon. And that's after you factor out racism and hatred of the enemy who killed your buddies and all that other stuff. I mean, there's a ton of evidence. And the questions over why and what's going on here have been ongoing. And they sort of, in a smaller way, parallel the ones going on after the Second World War with the Nazis, where you had things like the Milgram experiment and all these other things where people were trying to figure out, listen, you know, how do you get people to turn off their moral compass? Could we all be Nazis? And it was trying to figure out motivations and how you do

31:38that. I mean, in the Second World War and afterwards, and let's remember, the Japanese public knew very little of this stuff. Although some of the stuff that they did know and sort of celebrate is once again a little weird by Western standards. For example, there's a famous incident in Nanking where two soldiers were having, supposedly, this is in the Japanese news media, a contest, a Chinese head-shopping contest. And the tally was being kept score regularly in the newspaper. You know, this guy is up to 75 now. Oh, but three heads today by the other guy, and he takes the lead.

32:13And it was always used as evidence of, you know, you're looking for a sign that this brutality happened. Well, my goodness, they were celebrating in Japan's newspapers. Turns out most mainstream, excuse me, but you know what I mean, historians that I've been reading suggest that that never happened and that it was a figment of the press's desire to whip up an interesting story that got people reading, which it did. It does, of course, beg the question about an audience who thought that that was worth celebrating. But there have been speculations forever. And the early ones during

32:47the war were always, you know, racist and cultural with this is just how the Japanese are. Since then, there have been a lot of interesting ones, including ones from Japan. And just to give you an idea of one of them, they'll talk about the brutality in the Japanese army, where apparently being punched in the face hard with a closed fist by your superior was not uncommon. And there's plenty of reports about people having to commit executions or the killing of POWs as part of a sort of blooding you. It's a

33:17very old fashioned idea. Once again, a lot of the things the Japanese are going to be in trouble for in the Second World War are things that people didn't even bat an eyelash 500 years ago about. In fact, 500 years ago, they wouldn't have known it ever happened outside of a very close geographical area. That's another thing that's different about Nanking. There's telegraphs there. There's embassies. There's Westerners. There's U.S. and British boats, ships in the Yangtze River.

33:50The real world outside this area is going to hear about what's happening inside Nanking, and they're going to hear about it while it's going on. It's a thoroughly modern situation that we have seen over and over again since, where there will be some terrible atrocity, crisis, humanitarian disaster, genocide, war crime going on somewhere in the world and unfolding in real time. And all the great powers are kind of under the gun at that point when everybody says,

34:21my goodness, something has to be done or more people will die. But the world global geopolitical powers rarely react at speed on these kind of things. But it's been a little bit of an unsolvable problem. You see it in Nanking for sure, because what's going to happen there will unfold over a period of weeks. And the world will be put into a moral quandary over what to do. So picking up the story, after the Battle of Shanghai, the Chinese forces retreat toward the

34:53capital, Nanjing, Nanking. I think it's like 140, 150 miles west of Shanghai. And during the retreat, the Japanese lead elements are trying to surround the Chinese. So this is a flight with the Japanese in hot pursuit. There are also civilians along the path. There are aircraft strafing and bombing the roads. You get this sense of chaos and bedlam and claustrophobia and panic. And, you know, I've seen, you've seen war footage since that time that you really get a sense, and the camera gives you a

35:27very good sense, of a combination of things that must have been working on these people too. The fluidity of the situation, right? Everything is moving quickly and you're in the middle of it. And also a complete lack of knowledge about what's going on outside your field of vision or whatever the person next to you can say. The combination of those two things is panic-inducing.

35:50So imagine a sort of a bedlam as these, this line of humanity pursued by the Japanese runs toward Nanjing. The Japanese arrive close on their heels and mostly surround the city. And on December 9th, they're outside this walled city of Nanjing. It looks like a sort of a European medieval city demanding its surrender. There is a Chinese general in command of a hastily thrown together, but relatively, you know, it's China, a large number of soldiers, some of them green, some of them old

36:24and reservist, some of them from the battle that just was over in Shanghai. And they're, you know, not fed. They don't have their weapons. They're maybe defeatist. I mean, it's a bit of a motley crew, but they're going to defend the city. So for four days, they hold out before that general orders a retreat. He leaves, the government leaves, and you have now a city with hundreds of thousands of people, including refugees, that's being bombed and no governmental services or anyone in charge.

36:54The Japanese have yet to take over. And it's one of the great stories, by the way, of this city's plight. And that's that there were a group of Westerners in the city. Most of the Westerners ran away as soon as the Japanese army came, but a bunch of different people, businessmen and others, humanitarians, doctors, stayed. And they weren't there to take care of all these people. But when that fell into their lap, they stepped up to do it. There's a little ironic twist to the story, too. And they recently made a movie out of basically almost playing on

37:30that twist. And it's that the guy that was sort of elected by this ad hoc group to be the leader was a Nazi, an ardent Nazi, as the sources describe him, a businessman, John Rabbe. And part of the reason he gets the gig is because the Japanese government and the Nazi German government have been moving closer together. And maybe he has a little bit more pull with the Japanese that are just about to take over the city than maybe a British or American or I think there was a Danish guy. Maybe they don't have as much pull. So this guy gets the gig and the movie, I saw the tagline,

38:03you know, of the of the preview. And I think it said something like, you know, he saved 250,000 lives and you see scenes of him with huddled Chinese refugees and he hides them from aircraft under a giant swastika flag. So there's sort of that that playing with the idea that here you have the evil Nazis and yet there's a good person mixed in. It's a juxtaposition that you can hang a whole movie theme on. I don't know about 250,000 lives in terms of the number. I do know that this is 20 or 30 people.

38:34There's women in the group, doctors, ministers, businessmen, and they save a ton of people. And it's in large part because of the documents that they sent or the information that they kept track of, that we have a lot of these accounts. And when I wanted to spend three hours on it, I was going to go through all of the letters. Let me encourage you to get another book if you're interested in this. And it's one of the few I've ever read that should be dry as a bone,

39:04but it's actually in its own way terrifying because it's it's chronological primary source documents. So the cables and the telegrams and the letters and the pleas from these people, John Rabbe and all these people who make up the Nanking International Safety Zone, folks, as it's called. And you can read every day. These letters get more beseeching, more terrified, more outraged as the situation descends into monstrous chaos.

39:35On December 13th, the Japanese enter Nanking. There's a letter from John Rabbe saying, thank you so much for not shelling our little international safety zone that we've created, which, by the way, is nothing more than a part of the city blocked off. And on the sides of the streets where the border is, they put international flags. I think it was December 1st that the Nanking mayor, before fleeing the city, tells all the civilians to run into the safety zone because they'll be safe there, which allows the Japanese to then say that anybody who's not in the safety

40:05zone is ipso facto a bad guy. And what begins to happen right away is the Japanese start searching for Chinese soldiers because there's, as we said, a lot of them there. Another part of the atrocity here is if you are a defender, basically, of the Japanese army in this case, do you count the killing of Chinese soldiers as a war crime, right? I mean, officially, there's no question, but that allows some people to diverge here and say, well, we admit that these people who died were soldiers, but I deny the civilian side of this. In this case, what happens is there's a river. It's the

40:41Yangtze that runs behind Nanking. And if you look at it, in order for Chinese troops to get out of Nanking and get away from the oncoming Japanese, they would have to cross the river, sort of go over to the more Chinese side and keep going. Normally not a problem, but of course, you know, they were trying to create a defensive zone to thwart the Japanese. So they've been blowing up the bridges and everything that would allow the Chinese to get away too. And now they have to. So there are these harrowing stories of Chinese troops just at the riverbank waiting, you know, thousands and thousands of people waiting for one little boat that can carry three people like a

41:13canoe across the river and the Japanese are on the way. And if there's one group of people that knows that the Japanese are not taking Chinese prisoners, it's Chinese soldiers. So this sense of panic is palpable. And let me turn to some of the sources now. And I have a wide mix of them. And my apologies, as I said, I'd like to do three hours and I'd like to just read the documents to you because there are several that are like police blotter reports where they're trying to

41:43tell the Japanese commander at this hour, this woman was raped over here and the Japanese soldier spilled her sugar. I mean, it's literally like police reports, but it's, it's. All I could think of when I was reading it is how unusual it was to have something like this. And if you could have had a similar document, it would apply equally well to the sack of Carthage by the Romans, you know, in ancient times. I mean, this is a modern day account of something you just don't get a whole lot of, but that's happened a lot of times in history. It seems woefully out of

42:14place in time though. Here's the way Fujiwara Akira contributor to, um, the Nanking atrocity complicating the picture said that the attack on Nanking was out of control from the start with all sorts of units that were glory hungry and wanting to be the first inside the city. And there's a sense of out of control troops, such as the battle of Cremona with that psychology going on. So here we get another gradient in the responsibility spectrum that we've been talking about. Do you blame

42:46Japan for what's about to happen here? No, it was a bunch of out of control troops. And in some ways it was. Akira writes about the Japanese units finding out on December 13th that the Chinese were retreating and leaving and trying to get away. And he writes, quote, Japanese units learned of this retreat on the morning of the 13th. Skirmishes broke out in many areas as small groups of Chinese troops outside the city, now lacking a chain of command, desperately tried to slip past advancing Japanese forces.

43:21Then the surrendering began. Most of the Chinese troops still inside Nanking rushed to escape helter skelter through the Pa Chang Gate, which led to the Shaquan Wharf area. From Shaquan, they hoped to cross the Yangtze by boat, by raft, or by clinging desperately to scraps of lumber, where they madly ran up and down the riverbank, only to encounter Japanese forces sent to cut them off. Huge numbers of Chinese troops became prisoners of war on the 13th and 14th at Shaquan, Mufushan, Changtun Gate,

43:51and the Shaoha Gate. With no avenue of escape, Chinese soldiers lost all will to fight. Despite trying to surrender in droves, most were killed in the pell-mell of battle. End quote. He then quotes from the diaries from December 13th, 1937, of two Japanese commanders, 16th Division Commander and 30th Brigade Commander. These are primary source documents. And 16th Division Commander Nakajima

44:25Kisago's diary writes, quote, We see prisoners everywhere, so many that there's no way we can deal with them. The general policy is, accept no prisoners. So we ended up having to take care of them, lot, stock, and barrel. But they came in hordes, in units of thousands or five thousands, so we couldn't even disarm them. Later I heard that the Sasaki unit alone disposed of about 1,500. A company commander guarding Taiping Gate took care of another 1,300. Another 7,000,

44:55to 8,000 clustered at the Shinho Gate are still surrendering. We need a really huge ditch to handle those 7,000 to 8,000. But we can't find one. So someone suggested this plan, now quoting someone else's plan, divide them up into groups of 100 to 200 and then lure them to some suitable spot for finishing off. End quote. 30th Brigade Commander Major General Sasaki Toichi wrote in his diary on the 13th of December, quote, The number of abandoned enemy bodies in our area today was 10,000 plus

45:26thousands more. If we include those Chinese whose escape rafts or boats on the Yangtze were sunk by fire from our armored cars, plus POWs killed by our units, our detachment alone must have taken care of over 20,000. We finished the mop-up and secured our rear area at about 2 p.m. While regrouping, we advanced to the Hoping Gate. Later, the enemy surrendered in the thousands. Frenzied troops, rebuffing efforts by superiors to restrain them, finished off those POWs one after another. Even

45:56if they aren't soldiers, for example, medics or priests, men would yell, kill the whole damn lot after recalling the past 10 days of bloody fighting in which so many buddies had shed so much blood. End quote. So right there you see another one of those lines that some people take, which is the superiors tried to restrain them, but, you know, their buddies were killed and they were understandably upset enough to commit atrocities. There's also a ton of evidence, though, that there was a take-no-prisoners policy. Historian Herbert P. Bix, in his book on Hirohito,

46:33his Pulitzer Prize-winning book on Hirohito, writes this, quote, There were no orders to rape, in quotes, Nanking. Nor did Imperial headquarters ever order the total extermination of the enemy as the ultimate goal of the Nanking encirclement campaign. Standing orders to take no prisoners did exist, however. And once Nanking fell, Japanese soldiers began to execute en masse military prisoners of war and unarmed deserters who had surrendered. They also went on an unprecedented and unplanned rampage of arson, pillage, murder, and rape.

47:07The resulting slaughter continued in the city and its six adjacent rural villages for three months and far exceeded earlier atrocities committed during the Battle of Shanghai and along the escape routes to Nanking. General Nakajima's 16th Division, in just its first day in the capital, killed approximately 30,000 Chinese prisoners of war and fleeing soldiers. End quote. There are charges that these orders to kill all prisoners come from the highest up on the scene, which by the 13th, I believe, is the Emperor Hirohito's uncle.

47:41There will be an execution or two after the war for what goes on in this city, but trying to figure out who's responsible for it has been an ongoing part of the debate. How high up the food chain do you blame this? What it really seems to be is this combination of two things. A ordered war crime from, you know, Western perspective, the killing of surrendering or captured POWs, because after all, you go look at the Soviet Union and the number of prisoners that fell into German hands after the June 1941 invasion there. And, you know, they would have these giant

48:15Kesselschlacht, these cauldron battles, and they'd capture 250,000 people at a time. And you have these photographs of huge crowds of people or long columns stretching off into the distance, kicking up tons of dust, and them trying to figure out how do we, how do we barbed wire these people in a pen and keep them? And then how do we feed them? You didn't see any of that in this part of the war between China and Japan, because they're not taking prisoners. And nobody knows that better than the Chinese troops. So this sense of panic that's going on in the city, I was trying to think of an analogy.

48:51It's a little like, you know, getting 100,000 or more people in a soccer stadium and then having somebody tell you over the public address speaker that the doors out have been barred and armed gunmen are coming in to kill all 100 or 150,000 people in the stadium. I mean, what is the mood like then? Well, if it's panic stricken, that would be understandable. And this is when incidents begin happening in the story that become a sort of a hinge moment. If we were talking about communicable

49:25diseases or an epidemic, this is when it jumps species from merely affecting the soldiers and now affecting the civilians. Because in their panic, and quite understandably so, a lot of these Chinese troops, an undetermined number of these Chinese troops are going to throw off their uniforms and throw their weapons away and dress in any civilian clothing they can find. They may be aided in this by the population, because after all, this is a Chinese city and these

49:58are Chinese troops. But the Japanese start looking for Chinese troops that have thrown away their uniforms and are dressed as civilians. And they start picking people out of crowds, many of whom are civilians, and executing them. And then you have the part of the story that just takes this to unbelievable, crazy levels, which is what starts to happen to the civilians. And this is where it looks like Cremona. Because you have, and it starts, if you read the primary source materials, it starts

50:30on the 13th, and you start to get these requests. Can you please put more military police officers out on the streets? Because the soldiers are out of control. The main thing they're out of control with, although there's a lot of looting, is rape. And it's crazy to read. As I said, I wanted to do three hours on this and just go from one police blotter account to another, because it gives you a real time, in a way, sense of what's going on all over the Nanking International Safety Zone, where they were getting more than a thousand reports of rapes a night. And as one of the humanitarians

51:04working there said, the Japanese have turned the International Safety Zone into a public house, meaning a whorehouse. And they were often killing the women that they raped. It's worth giving an account from the victims here, the Chinese side. And in one of the books that I have, Nanking 1937, Memory and Healing, they have a Chinese historian who's giving what is, I guess it's the recognized Chinese view of this thing. And he pulls no punches. He wants you to know how nasty it got.

51:37And a person who says there were only 45 people who died in this whole incident would call the Chinese a liar, or their government, a bunch of people just wanting to hold this over Japan's head. But here's what Chinese historian Sun Xiaowei says happened in Nanking. Quote, In general, the massacre itself can be divided into two types of killings, mass killings and sporadic killing. Incidents of mass killing ranged from the murder of 10 to 20 to the slaughter of tens of thousands of people, with the greatest number in any one incident reaching more than 50,000.

52:10Sporadic killing included varying numbers of three to eight people. Among the mass killings, in addition to those who died by the sword and firing squad, others were burned, buried alive, or drowned. Several, after being soaked with gasoline, were set on fire by gunshot, causing the wounded person to lie covered in flames, rolling and writhing on the ground, until finally dying a miserable death. Individual sporadic acts of torture and killing included splitting, gutting, gutting, slicing, piercing alive, and dog biting. Some were even burned with acid and then

52:43left burning all over. Others were tortured to death. Two Japanese lieutenants amused themselves by having a killing contest. The first one to reach 100 killed won the game. Then they raised the limit to 150. In addition to killing, he writes, the Nanking massacre also involved rape, arson, theft, and other violent crimes. The Japanese troops who attacked Nanking raped tens of thousands of Chinese women, many of whom were then murdered. End quote.

53:12Anytime I find myself thinking that those numbers that the Chinese historians give are way too large, I recall that according to Tacitus, the Roman legionaries completely picked Cremona clean in four days. Nanking is going to continue for months. How much evil can you do in a time frame like that? And admittedly, they're not ripping Nanking apart with quite the efficiency or rapacity as the Romans

53:47were ripping Cremona apart. But if you've got months to do it, I imagine it's going to be pretty thorough. Now, if you say that we have spent too much time focusing on a single atrocity, when we're talking about a conflict that's going to go on to 1945, I would agree with you. Except that we're not going to spend a lot of time necessarily on all the atrocities between now and the end of the war that deserve attention. What's more, you look at the raw death totals that the Chinese are going to suffer

54:21between 1937 and 1945 alone. And if you include the indirect causes of death because of the war, things like famine and disease, your numbers get to the 15 and 20 million people levels. If you want to go just with directly caused by violence, it gets down to maybe 12 million in a lot of sources. 12 million, two thirds of which, by the way, are civilian. Where are their stories? Most of those people die individually or suffer in anonymity or are killed in small,

54:56out-of-the-way villages or hamlets. Who speaks for them? Let's let the relatively and comparatively well-attested-to situation in Nanking, allegations if you're a denier, but still well-attested-to allegations in the worst-case scenario, let's let those speak for all those other people whose stories didn't make it into the history books. The second reason to focus perhaps inordinately on an atrocity like Nanking is that it's one of a bunch of pre-war atrocities, and these will continue by the way

55:34during the conflict as well, that seem to set up this era where you have these brutal totalitarian type armies, at least the way the western liberal democracies look at these things, that seem to be on the march, and they seem to be the bad guys in the story. Now, bad guys is an interesting thing to ponder, because in most wars, especially all the recent ones where you can get into the newspaper

56:05accounts and stuff like that, pretty common to portray one's adversary in almost apocalyptically evil terms. In the First World War, the Germans were called the Huns, because Huns were about the nastiest thing British propaganda and others could think of in terms of slapping a label on them, and they helped out all they could on the German side by doing things that had been named the Rape of Belgium and stuff at the time, shocking the genteel 19th century sensibilities of the age.

56:38Let the record show how exponential that can grow in a mere generation, because the outrage over the rape of Belgium involved about 6,000 people killed directly, maybe those are the modern numbers, and we've already talked about what the numbers are in China. It's worth pointing out that if you take standard numbers for both world wars and compare them, look at the difference in the ratio of

57:09civilian to military casualties. In the First World War, standard number you get for soldiers killed is about 10 million people. About 7 million civilians in that war, it's estimated. In the Second World War, more like 20 to 25 million military deaths, and more like 35 to 60 million civilian deaths. So several times more civilian deaths in the Second World War, less civilian deaths in the First. And that's the

57:41part that by the standards of most war crimes or just individual perception makes the Second World War so much more atrocious. A lot of people are willing to forgive all sorts of nastiness if it's done to soldiers. Women, children, old people, the infirmed, the sick, the noncombatants. It's much more harrowing and shocking when they're killed. And here's the problem with the good and evil narrative. Do you think that the Japanese textbooks are teaching their kids that they were on the evil side of this war the way the

58:16Western Democratic textbooks tend to frame the Japanese side of this? Obviously, the Germans are Sauron, but the Japanese are one of the powers that work with Sauron, the Haradrim, the Easterners, one of those people. One of the reasons that countries like China have problems with Japan's textbook is in their minds, they're not confronting this fact that, wait a minute, let's acknowledge you were the evil side of this war. Good and evil is a strange thing, though, isn't it? I had to think about this for a while because who says a particular behavior is evil? You go talk to Genghis Khan about

58:55good and evil in the 13th century from the Mongol point of view, and he may have, I'm going to guess he has, a different interpretation of what constitutes one or the other, right? This is a perception thing. If the Nazis had somehow won the war and we were all having our concepts of good and evil framed under that regime, how different do conduct, for example, that the Wehrmacht carried out on Hitler's orders in the East after they invaded the Soviet Union and it was this, you know, no holds

59:29barred, all laws thrown out the window kind of conflict, how different does that look? You think the Germans or the Nazis, because it might be a pan-Nordic sort of empire, do you think they frame that in good and evil terms? And if they do, do you think they're framing their side as evil? The perception thing is hard to get past, isn't it? Because from the perspective of someone who grew up in what the post-war history books always called the great liberal democracies, the western democracies, you have concentration camps that are being used as genocide factory assembly lines,

1:00:06you've pretty much, by our value system, staked out where you are on the good evil side of the divide, pretty clearly. The Japanese had something that reminds you of some of the Nazi medical science, I put that in parentheses or quotes, they had a unit 731, it was called, in Manchuria in northern China, that conducted experiments on humans and had vivisections and, you know, infected fleas with bubonic plague and then dropped them by air over Chinese cities and recorded the data, evil stuff

1:00:39like that. From our western liberal enlightenment era based value system, that's unrepentantly evil. Now, if you take yourself out of those shoes, though, I went and read the arguments, as anyone should, that the people who defend other points of view on this make. Usually, if they don't just deny the information outright, as the deniers of the Nanking atrocity or of the Holocaust do, they will say, yes, but. Yes, we did these things and people are terrible, but you did terrible things

1:01:16too. Things that are often not admitted to or accepted by the liberal democratic post-enlightenment side of this thing. For example, strategic bombing. You talk to people in Japan or in Germany who lived the reality of their cities being bombed by sometimes hundreds of aircraft, sometimes multiple times, sometimes with atomic bombs, and they have an interesting perspective on it. I'll never forget one of them saying to me, if the same result had been achieved the old-fashioned way,

1:01:51if you'd come in here and done with bayonets, the functional equivalent of what you did with bombs from a distance, how does it look then? Hard to get over the idea. It looks a little like Nanking, doesn't it? Here's the thing. If you go to someone on the British end of things, though, that were on the receiving end of the Blitz, the Luftwaffe's bombing of London and Britain, instead of saying, yes, that's how we felt too, you'll often hear them say, you know, tough.

1:02:24You started it. What you got back was reaping what you sowed. And that's an interesting argument and kind of understandable in human terms. Here's the problem. There's always been an implication that the people that are being bombed somehow deserve it. And I always try to remind myself if my country ever got into a war with someone else and I got bombed by them, would I somehow think I deserved it because of the role I played in supporting my country's policies or supporting

1:02:56my country? Or would I think that I was just a person caught in the gears of history, that I had little control over what really happened, and that there's really no good excuse for these bombs to fall on me. The other argument you will sometimes get, sometimes from other Asian people, sometimes other Asian people who were also victims of the Japanese, is they will bring in the question of colonialism. And they will say something like, sure, the Western democracies were on their good

1:03:26behavior and did relatively well in terms of controlling their troops and behaving well, militarily speaking, during this conflict. But look at the situation after the conflict. And more importantly, look at the situation beforehand with centuries of colonialism. Add up all that stuff and all those evils and put them on the balance scale, too. Sure, the Japanese were terrible, but let's not pretend that we're only talking about the Second World War here when we're adding up who's been terrible to whom when. This is about walking a mile in the other person's moccasins, and it's important to

1:04:00consider those points. It is worth pointing out, and many here in the West would, that the terrible things done as part of the effort to win the Second World War comes after these sorts of incidents that we're discussing here and maybe are necessary because of the kind of incidents we're talking about here. That's why we spent so much time on this Nanking atrocity, because it's hardly the only thing going

1:04:31on. This would be an appropriate time to zoom out of the story here. Keep one part of your peripheral vision always on China, though, because the Japanese biggest fear of getting bogged down in an endless war in China is going to come true. We compared it to an addiction earlier. They're fully addicted. They don't know how to get out, and the more they conquer, the worse their troubles are. When the atomic bombs are dropped at the end of the war, the Japanese are still bogged down in China.

1:05:04I have this weird upside-down backwards mirror image funhouse sort of view of the strategic situation facing the Japanese in China. It's like this weird turnaround of the United States' strategic dilemma in the Vietnam War. I mean, there you had this giant continental power, the U.S., bogged down and unable to extricate itself with any sort of peace terms that it can live with in a place, what would you say, roughly, just vaguely the size of something like California?

1:05:36The Japanese, in the Chinese version of this, they're more like the size of California, and they're bogged down in a guerrilla war, and not always a guerrilla war, in a continental landmass the size of the U.S. The first thing I'm thinking about if I'm in the Japanese leadership is, I don't want any more trouble with anyone else. I'm busy. And the Japanese will continue to conquer city after city after city. They will control the railway lines that connect these cities,

1:06:06the roads that connect these cities. And the Chinese can just keep moving their capital as far away as they need to go to be out of the Japanese, you know, range of the bombs, although they do fall on the Chinese capital from time to time. And the countryside is infested with nationalist armies, communist armies, guerrillas, insurgents, warlord troops, bandits. And there will be hundreds of thousands, usually close to a million Japanese troops, some of their best forces too, all requiring

1:06:37supplies all the time in this theater for the entire war. Now, as we said, we have to zoom out at this point in the story because events elsewhere in the world are going to have more of an effect on what happens in this part of the world than anything that's happening in this part of the world. I mean, for example, as the Europeans begin to slide toward the Second World War, the Japanese are watching. And as that war breaks out and gets underway, they're paying attention to the results and

1:07:10reacting accordingly. In other words, like many powers, they're trying to read the lay of the land. And as the Second World War will break out, the lay of the land is going to change quickly. Tough to know which horse to bet on when things are so fluid. The 1930s, as we should point out, and it is important to understand the context, is a pretty crappy decade for most countries.

1:07:35It is in the great depths of the Great Depression, and it is hard to exaggerate what that means. I mean, people think of economic hard times, but it opens the door to all sorts of political instability and problems on every front. And so people like Franklin Roosevelt in the United States and leaders everywhere had their hands full trying to pull out of this economic nosedive. Nobody was prepared to spend a lot of money or a lot of political capital or ask the country to give

1:08:10some great sacrifice for some cause around the world when you hardly could handle the problems that, you know, put people in soup lines in the streets of your major cities. 1938 is the key year where things really spiral out of control, although it's not always apparent that that's what's happening. Many people have suggested that it would have been very easy to imagine the Second World War breaking out in 1938. I mean, you have a lot of things happening. You have the Anschluss, where Germany annexes Austria. You have the huge situation over Czechoslovakia

1:08:46and the Sudetenland and all that stuff. You have the peace in our time Munich agreement. And I should point out something because it's and I'll try not to get on my soapbox here, but it drives me crazy. The Munich agreement, of course, is where the prime minister of Britain, who had gone to a conference with Herr Hitler, comes back, gets off a plane. And I've seen this, you know, you can go see it in the museums over in Britain, waves this document with his signature and Hitler's signature on it and declares basically that this is peace in our time and people applaud. Good. Chamberlain is a reviled figure to most people today. He's seen as a weak appeaser that

1:09:23should have confronted Hitler. I mean, there's a million things we throw at all these people, these weak-kneed pre-Second World War political leaders, totally forgetting two major things and about a thousand minor things. Let's go into the two major things. The first one is these people had already lived through the worst war that they could ever imagine. 20 years ago before the First World War, nobody really knew what they were getting into. In the 1930s, everybody knows what they're getting. They're getting the First World War only worse again. And to many of these people,

1:09:58they thought they saw their civilization nearly knocked out in that war. If you're going to have another one and it's going to be worse and you're starting it from the Great Depression levels of economic health, what's the likelihood you're going to survive this time? What's the proper price to pay to avoid that outcome? Now, what about the public support for any policy like that? This is the other

1:10:28thing that is widely forgotten in a place like the United States especially. People who we laud for being ahead of the power curve on this. Guys like Winston Churchill who foresee all this sort of screaming for confrontation and a more bellicose policy to ward off all this stuff. That's his rationale, right? We'll avoid this war if we're tougher now. The guy is like in the political wilderness in this period and he's derided by many as a warmonger. So he's sort of out of steps with the attitude of the times.

1:11:02As we all know, this war is going to break out in 1939, a month after it breaks out, a month after it breaks out. There's a public opinion poll of Americans on the issue of the war. It's quoted by Francis Pike in Hirohito's War. I think it's a Gallup poll, but I'm not sure. The poll taken had 84 percent of respondents saying that they wanted Britain and France to win the war. Only two percent wanted the Germans wanted the Germans to win. But 95 percent, 95 percent wanted to stay out of the

1:11:35war. Well, first of all, this is more reflective of the America of that time period, much less interventionist throughout its entire history than now. But when you think of those kind of overwhelming numbers in a system where the political leaders are elected, what is it responsible to expect them to do? How many people are going to go against that kind of supermajority? What's more, in a philosophical sense, in a system where the people are supposed to sort of broadly decide the

1:12:08course of the nation, if 95 percent of them wants to take a left turn at the fork in the road, where's the moral justice and the political leaders making a right instead? So I think we judge these people harshly and assume, you know, that they had more ability to do what we want them to do than they did. And of course, let's remember the most important part, whenever you do something like the Monday morning quarterbacking in history, we know how things turn out. They don't. Now, that having been said, famously, the Munich Agreement falls through.

1:12:42Poland is invaded September 1st, 1939. Poland had been given a guarantee by Britain and France because they'd finally had enough of Hitler's, I don't want any more territory, don't worry. And when the Nazis refused to leave Poland after it's demanded of them, the war is on in Europe and the Japanese are watching. Now, as we know, Poland is overrun quickly. The post-war propaganda calls it Blitzkrieg. What it really looks like is just the first world war tactics and strategy

1:13:16and philosophy developed over 20 years. Then there's this period that's sometimes called the phony war where nothing much is going on. And then in April 1940, Germany invades Denmark and Norway and conquers them pretty quickly. And then a month later, not even a month later, I don't think, you know, in May 1940, a bunch of things happen. Not necessarily in this order. Winston Churchill becomes prime minister of Britain. So now we have one of the major players in this story,

1:13:48ensconced in power, a decision maker, famously pit bull like in his bellicosity. And yet at the same time, seemingly the right man for the job. Because I mean, if Churchill was a bit of an antagonist and a fighter that was a little bit embarrassing in more peaceful times, he's exactly what you need now that the war is going, isn't he? But May is also the month where the phony war ends on the Western Front. The Germans blow through a couple of neutral countries and then into France. Now we

1:14:21should point out another reality during the time period that's often forgotten now. France is widely considered to be the strongest land power in the world at this time period. Many international calculations are based on this assumption. This assumption will prove to be false quickly.

1:14:42France will be defeated in a mere six weeks. To put that in perspective and to understand how incredibly shocking that is for this time period, you're talking about a country here that only 20 years previously had spent more than a million of their soldiers' lives holding off arguably the greatest army of the age, the First World War German army, for more than four years. And remember, not only is France defeated here, but the Dutch are defeated as part of the Germans

1:15:21blowing through this area, and the British look like they're five minutes away from succumbing as well. If you're making calculations based on world events in Japan, all of a sudden all of these valuable areas in your neck of the woods that are controlled by the Dutch and the French and the British don't seem so formidably defended anymore. And remember, if you're Japan, you might not even be looking at those places. If you could just hold on to China and conquer it and use its resources,

1:15:55that's all they need, really. I mean, it wouldn't give you everything you wanted, but I mean, if Japan's looking to be a great power and they think they have to suck up China to do it, everything in their policy is based on being able to maintain that addiction. They only start looking towards some of these other tempting areas like French Indochina, modern day Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, because some of the more obvious avenues towards supplying your war machine are being squeezed by other powers.

1:16:31If you go look at the economic side of the Second World War, which is a very popular way to look at it lately, and I find it very valuable in terms of understanding some of the deeper motivations, all of the Axis powers were concerned with self-sufficiency. Autarchy is what it's called. And this is actually playing into the global trade situation and involves economics in a way that kind of explains war motivation very well. But the reason that countries like Germany, for example,

1:17:01wanted self-sufficiency was in part because they had been starved to death in the First World War when their shipping and trade was cut off by the British Navy. These countries wanted the flexibility to be relatively immune to other countries' economic pressure. The Japanese wanted to do what they wanted to do in China and wanted to be able to flip the middle finger to countries that told them to stop. Unfortunately, in this time period, they depended on other

1:17:32countries too much. Historian James L. McLean writes in A Modern History of Japan, quote, To the regret of many Japanese economic planners, in the late 1930s, Japan still depended upon the United States for nearly one-third of its imports, from cotton to scrap iron and oil, and matter seemed to be growing worse. Between 1929 and 1932, Japan purchased from the United States 36% of its scrap iron used to manufacture steel for munitions and ships. By 1938, American sources were supplying 74%

1:18:09of Japan's scrap. Similarly, in 1938, Japan received more than 60% of its imported machine tools and nearly all sophisticated alloys, such as vanadium and molybdenum, from the United States. Traditionally self-sufficient in copper, Japan in 1939 extracted 90,000 tons of that metal from its mines. But industry was gobbling up so much for detonators and shell casings that the nation that year had to import 105,000 tons of copper, 93% of it from the United States. The situation for oil, the most critical of all commodities in the estimation of

1:18:44military planners, was extremely desperate. Japan relied on America for almost 80% of its fuel, and for special distillates, dependents stood at more than 90%. In the eyes of economic and military strategists, by the summer of 1940, Western colonies in Southeast Asia had come to represent a treasure trove of raw materials, whose possession would allow Japan to vault into the ranks of the economic halves, to recall one of their prime minister's phrases, and thus to free itself from dependence

1:19:14upon an increasingly hostile West. End quote. You can see why a concept like national self-sufficiency might be attractive to someone like the Japanese who are dependent on these outside powers to sell them what they need, especially what they need to keep the war machine running. So what happens if the people who sell you the stuff you need to keep the war machine running stop selling you the stuff you need? And that becomes kind of the crux of this story. I know many of you are as fascinated

1:19:50as I am by how wars get started, and there is no template. I mean, they're all different, and the variables are never the same. But you can see, you know, similar patterns. In this particular case, you see the pattern of a sort of inertia developing. You saw this in the first World War II, I believe I described it like someone pulling the pin out of a hand grenade, but you could also think about it like a fuse being lit. It's when events start to move towards collision, and at a certain point, it almost

1:20:21becomes easier to run into each other and have a conflict than to break out of the pattern. And in this case, it's going to be a question of feeding the Japanese war machine that gets this dynamic going. And I was trying to get into all the tit-for-tat things, and it got very complicated because there's so many players. And as we said earlier, and it's important to remember, that in the Japanese government, just like the Western democracies, there is no hive mind at work. There are lots of different ideas over what the best foreign policy directions are to go, and different factions favoring

1:20:56different things. And based on events, some factions are exalted and others are in decline. So there's no concerted foreign policy effort that is without fits and starts and a certain level of chaos. But in the case of the Japanese, and we talked about this earlier in the story, their governmental design is already not wonderful in terms of accountability and the lines of command and all these things. When we start getting to a moment where the stress level and the need for

1:21:31efficiency and clear thinking and clear lines of authority become really important, this government's going to break down in such a way that if you were a Japanese citizen, you'd have every right to accuse them of some kind of criminal negligence. Because look what the Japanese are. You know, right around the time France falls, where they have a major war and commitment going on in China, they're already rationing luxury goods and fuel at home. The people are already grumbling. And then what, 18 months later,

1:22:02when you add to that burden, a war against the United States, Great Britain, France, all their former colonial dominions and Commonwealth nations. I mean, how the hell does that happen? Well, in a broad sense, it happens because of a decision to stop the Japanese war machine.

1:22:28If you look at it objectively, that becomes the issue where there's no give. And this is very controversial because everybody's argued forever what the cause of the Pacific war was and who's at fault. And but if you look at it, it becomes pretty simple that the Japanese priorities and the Americans and British, the Anglo-Americans, maybe we can call them priorities, clash. And the priorities have to do with what it is the Japanese are addicted to. China. The whole reason I liked the addiction

1:22:59analogy was because of where we're coming to now. There's going to be the global equivalent of an intervention here. And the Japanese are going to be told that they have to stop inflating themselves on the steroids that are the Chinese resources and landmass and all that. And if they don't stop, they're going to get the means to that cut off. The means are things like oil. Now, worth pointing out, because it's interesting from a military history standpoint, the Second World War is really the first big war where oil is this super important

1:23:30resource, a war winning or war losing resource at a certain point. And we all understand most wars throughout history, not all wars, of course, but most wars have a component of resources involved some way or another. Now, what's interesting is over the eras, often the important resource that you need to have changes right during the late Bronze Age, having the monopoly on the making of iron and stuff like that. That's a national security thing. Well, iron is still important in the 20th century, but something that wasn't all that important at all, petroleum in the Bronze Age is critical in this era. I mean,

1:24:05think about the need to have it for your air force, if nothing else. But also, you know, since the First World War and really before the First World War, they started changing over from coal to oil for the fuel for all of their ships, all the major powers. Well, gee, that creates a dependency you didn't have before. And countries like Japan, which didn't have a lot of oil to begin with, let's just say almost none, a little in the Sakhalin Islands up north, but almost none are in a bind if the people you normally buy oil from decide to squeeze you. This is an interesting thing to look at because

1:24:41I remember as a kid growing up, I lived through something that if you look in your history books now is a known historical event with long-term huge ramifications that we still live with today. At the time, we just called it the oil crisis when I was a kid in 1973. Long story short, a cartel of oil-producing nations who wanted to get the United States and friends to change their foreign policy priorities as they related to Israel, because there was a war in the Middle East going on,

1:25:11decided to squeeze the United States and friends' oil supply to get the price to rise to sort of coerce might not be a strong enough word. Petro-blackmail is a word they sometimes use to get the United States to change its foreign policy. The attitude that the U.S. government had was completely understandable and predictable. The attitude they have is no great power is going to let anybody dictate what their foreign policy priority should be. And there were a few people in the Nixon administration that were basically talking about, you know, listen, if you don't sell the

1:25:46oil at a decent price, we're going to come and take the oil. You can't monopolize a world resource that everybody depends on like this. So you can understand the idea of no great power is going to let another country dictate what its priority should be. But during this period in time, that's exactly what the Anglo-American nations are going to do to the Japanese. And in the same way, it's hard to imagine the United States knuckling under to the demands of an oil cartel and changing its foreign policy.

1:26:18It's hard to imagine the Japanese publicly with their tail between their legs, completely altering more than a decade's worth of foreign policy and doing what the great power tells them to do. Otherwise, they won't get any oil, which they really needed to run the war machine in China, which they wouldn't be in anymore. But because it is so obviously something that might lead directly to war, there has always been one side of the debate in the United States and elsewhere about

1:26:49how much what we're going to talk about now, these economic embargoes and sanctions and asset freezes and those kinds of things, how much that was a nonviolent way to express the moral outrage of the public at the Japanese treatment of the Chinese and all this kind of stuff versus a shove in a direction that the people in the know understood would lead directly to war. That's why we're going to deal with a couple different sides of the debate here, because this is not settled stuff.

1:27:23Unless, of course, you're a very hard ideologue and believe what you believe. But there are a number of different ways to look at it. There's a place where power politics and moral outrage intersect. And power politics, you know, realpolitik and moral outrage from a country like the United States or Great Britain or any of these Western democracies, these things are usually at odds with each other. I mean, a lot of times you have people like National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger,

1:27:54who was Nixon's National Security Advisor, lamented the idea that he should be constrained by the public's sort of weepy attitudes towards nation states when he's trying to, you know, create treaties that keep nuclear war from breaking out. Let's keep our eyes on the prize here. You know, nations have interests, right? And yet at the same time, how do you expect a public who's reading all this terrible stuff coming out of the war in China and babies being bombed and, you know, people being beheaded and rapes of cities about to happen any minute now in the story? How do you tell that public that they

1:28:26should just sit idly by and do nothing? What's more, what if your country is providing the means necessary for these events to even take place? Well, it's certainly understandable that people might react. In fact, you might worry about a country's population that didn't. In this case, with a nation so against going to war, what are the options that a president has in a situation like this, right? Well, this begins to become clear in October 1937 in a famous speech

1:29:03that the president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, gives. This is about a month or two before the Nanking Massacre happens, but it's on the horizon. In the Battle of Shanghai, all that's happened. And Roosevelt gives this speech where he talks about aggressor nations and he talks about their conduct being like a contagion, like a disease that will spread. And he compares it to what you do when people have diseases, you quarantine them, right? And he's suggesting that that's what should be done to these aggressor states. Here's a sample of the 1937 quarantine speech by President

1:29:41Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It seems to be unfortunately true that the epidemic of world lawlessness is spreading. And mark this well. When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community

1:30:11against the spread of the disease. It is my determination to pursue a policy of peace. It is my determination to adopt every practicable measure to avoid involvement in war.

1:30:44It ought to be inconceivable that in this modern era and in the face of experience, any nation could be so foolish and ruthless as to run the risk of plunging the whole world into war by invading and violating in contravention of solemn treaties the territory of other nations that have done them no real harm and which are too weak to protect themselves adequately. Yet the peace of the world and the welfare and security of every nation,

1:31:23including our own is today being threatened by that very thing. Now, if this seems like a rather weak speech in terms of specifics and whatnot, you wouldn't be the only person that said so. I mean, Francis Pike seems to indicate that Roosevelt kind of weak on all this stuff for a while. He said that this speech was just, you know, Roosevelt sort of testing the waters. But we gave some polling information earlier that gives you an idea about the attitude of the American electorate during this time period.

1:31:54If the president of the United States thinks that there's a very important direction that the country needs to go, but the country doesn't want to go there, what should the president of the United States do? It's worth examining this enigma that is President Franklin Delano Roosevelt for a minute, because he's a key part of this story. He's unlike any other U.S. president in history. He was elected to twice as many terms as any other president in U.S. history. And they changed the

1:32:28constitution after he left the scene so that that would never happen again. But it gave him an unparalleled amount of actual practical hands-on experience with the levers of government. Nobody ever moved them any better than Franklin Roosevelt did. Roosevelt, an unusually hard to figure out U.S. president. You would think a guy that was on the scene as long as he was would have all sorts of information attached to, you know, his feelings about things. But he died in office

1:33:02early into the fourth term, by the way, which meant we didn't get the normal run of presidential memoirs and all that stuff afterwards. Because even if it's a pack of lies or self-serving justifications, historians have a way of using that to really flesh things out and compare them to other events and whatnot, triangulate. But you don't even get that from Roosevelt. And he was a hard to read guy anyway, almost by his very nature. He still elicits extremely strong emotions in

1:33:34many directions. I mean, at the time there was a euphemism for him that people who hated his guts used. They wouldn't mention his name. They'd call him that man in the White House.

1:33:46Conservative Americans often saw Roosevelt as damn near socialist. A man who exploded the size of the American government. Put it in all sorts of areas where it had never stuck its nose in before.

1:34:03Transferred money from the wealthier classes to the poorer classes. Set up all kinds of agencies. Appeared to be doing all kinds of things. Spending all kinds of money. But were there really any results? Changing America fundamentally. There is a before Franklin Roosevelt and after Franklin Roosevelt, America. He's arguably the most transformative president that's ever been. Again, part of it being how long he served. But also because when you serve during such major events

1:34:36as the Great Depression followed by the Second World War, you're going to be around when all kinds of things are transformed. And you're going to be trying to ride the storm, you know, as the captain of maybe, maybe the most powerful ship in the world. To a lot of Americans, liberals certainly, but a lot of poor, destitute Americans in the Great Depression, Roosevelt was a hero. If he wasn't achieving things, it wasn't for lack of trying. He was literally doing, you know,

1:35:06programs where people did all kinds of things that weren't even necessary and the government would hand him out a paycheck, although they also did a ton of things that we still benefit from today. All kinds of, you know, conservation cores and all these things that would put people to work simply to put them to work. Try to prime the pump of the American economic engine and get things going again. There were a lot of Americans who had food on the table because of Franklin Roosevelt. That'll make you pretty popular. Might even get you elected four times.

1:35:38Defenders would argue that if Roosevelt put in a lot of programs that conservatives thought of as socialist things like social security, by the way, or a Roosevelt New Deal program, he was up against competition from other forms of government like Bolshevism and fascism that took over in countries where political instability had taken hold due to horrible economic situations in part.

1:36:08Defenders would argue that Roosevelt managed to steer the United States away from either one of those extremes. And as one of my professors put it, gave the country a little socialism to avoid having them demand a lot. Views on Roosevelt run the gamut. Francis Pike in his book about the Pacific War, Hirohito's War, talks about Roosevelt, and points out that the guy is a hard man to figure out. He writes, quote,

1:36:40At the best of times, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a difficult man to read. Henry Wallace, his former vice president, said of him, now Wallace speaking, he doesn't know any man, and no man knows him. Even his own family doesn't know anything about him. Now quoting Roosevelt, I am like a cat, he said about himself. I make a stroke and then I relax. Pike says, quote, Loved and respected as a leader, seemingly happiest in the company of women, he was an enigma,

1:37:11detached, enigmatic, and ruthless. While flying over Cairo, Roosevelt glanced out the window and said, ah, my friend the Sphinx, end quote. Former Time editor-in-chief, Hedley Donovan, who had met like seven presidents personally, knew Roosevelt. Roosevelt was the first of the presidents that he knew, and he then wrote a book about all these presidents. And in it, he said about Roosevelt, quote, FDR could brilliantly oversimplify. His best remembered single statement,

1:37:45the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, is patently absurd, and was probably excellent tonic for a country whose banking system had collapsed. But in the early and middle stages of decision making, before it was time to simplify and oversimplify, Roosevelt could be impenetrable. Rexford Tugwell, one of the early New Deal brain trusters wrote, now quoting Tugwell, no one could tell what he was thinking, to say nothing of what he was feeling. Donovan continues, he clearly relished being hard to figure out. He liked secrets and had a few.

1:38:21He was often devious for good reason, but could also be devious just for the fun of it. General Douglas MacArthur, who despised him, said Roosevelt, quoting MacArthur now, would never tell the truth when a lie would serve him just as well. Donovan continues, quote, This was considerable slander, but FDR unquestionably did enjoy manipulation and maneuver for their own sake, all part of the great game of politics and power. But then he says, he was also a man of deep

1:38:52convictions and dedication and unquenchable idealism. He was firm and serene in his religious faith and had a decent sense of privacy about it. It is impossible to imagine him at a congressional prayer breakfast. He was impatient with the abstract or theoretical, in no sense profound, but spacious in vision for America and ultimately all the nations. He believed, if not in the perfectibility of man, in a rather spectacular improvement in man's behavior worldwide, end quote.

1:39:25This impenetrability of Roosevelt's, though, has kind of worked against him in terms of his place in history because it leaves a lot of room for people to speculate about his motives. And oftentimes it gets wrapped up with people's politics, ideologies, worldviews, and even conspiracy theories.

1:39:49Roosevelt's everything from a well-meaning moral crusader desperately trying to avoid war with Japan while still getting them to change their evil ways to, on the very far side of the other spectrum off in conspiracy land. Roosevelt is a man who engineers this war years in advance, organizes it, pushes the Japanese into it, knows about it in advance, and then luckily orders the carriers out of Pearl Harbor just in time so they don't get hurt. Because he's also aware the carriers are going to be, you know, the new

1:40:24battleships in the modern age, which of course, you know, nobody quite knew yet, but nonetheless runs the gamut. So who is this Franklin Roosevelt guy, right? Sneaky, conniving. But let's remember, he was elected originally, way back in 1932, to deal with the Depression. The things he did to deal with the Depression were really effective at the time, at least in making people feel like somebody was finally doing something. He left behind a lot of legacies that people in the United States argue

1:40:58over, everything from, you know, a bunch of different government departments to things like Social Security. Roosevelt looks to me like one of those people who has the reality distortion field ability. That was something Steve Jobs was supposed to have, too. Supposedly, a guy like Jobs or maybe Roosevelt could convince you that a job that was really hard to imagine anybody doing anything about

1:41:29was totally possible and were on the way. Maybe Elon Musk has that ability, too. But I read that Andy Hertzfeld was the one who said that the reality distortion field was a combination of charm, bravado, charisma, hyperbole, marketing, appeasement, and persistence. And that really sounds like a pretty good description of Roosevelt to me. I always thought one of the best examples of the fact that

1:42:00Roosevelt possessed this ability was that while never not admitting and being open about the information, he sort of made the country just forget that he was paralyzed below the waist. He got polio as an adult. He was confined to a wheelchair. He didn't see pictures of that. The pictures usually show him at a lectern or seated with other world leaders, fully appearing, completely able-bodied. He didn't but he didn't hide it, really. I mean, there was talk of it.

1:42:32Everybody knew, but he could just make you forget. Nowadays, it would be something that was celebrated and exalted and used as an example, right, of the possibilities. Don't let anything hold you back. The president himself or herself uses a wheelchair, right? But I mean, that's just Roosevelt was an interesting, had an interesting sort of a Steve Jobs-ish is not a bad description of him. But if you didn't like his policies, the reality distortion field almost seems nefarious, doesn't it? Now, some of the people who thought Roosevelt most nefarious are the people who wanted to see the

1:43:06United States stay clear of this new world war that had broken out in Europe. You know, by 1940, as we said, you have the German army blowing through France and occupying Western Europe. And by the way, the stories coming out from that, what a harsh occupation, how horrible it is, is something that moves public opinion yet again. It should be pointed out because it probably played into it in a major way that 1940 is a presidential election year in the United States and Roosevelt is running for an unprecedented third term. I read one history that put it this way when they said that Roosevelt and

1:43:41his Republican opponent were vying to outdo each other with their promises that they would keep the country out of the European war. In other words, there was no opponent running that said that they would get them in the war. It was a competition to see who could be most passionate about saying they would stay out of it. And when Republican hopeful Wendell Wilkie charges that the president is secretly trying to get the U.S. into the war or doing things that would get the U.S. into the war, Roosevelt issues a denial and then it becomes one of these big planks. They put it in the Democratic Party platform and Roosevelt on the stump says it over and over again. I mean, this is from a campaign

1:44:14speech, not long before the election given in October 1940, where Roosevelt references all the other times that he said it. He says, quote, I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again. Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars, end quote. Now, can you write that off as a campaign promise if he breaks it? Is this like, you know, I won't raise

1:44:47your taxes. Oh, well, I guess I have to after he wins. There's a problem with this in the American system, too, because there's precious few ways for the public to weigh in on foreign policy in the country. The presidents or people who want to be the presidents often make promises about foreign