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WW2-Era Civilian Exterminations - Why?

Well quite. Japanese emperor Hirohito really deserved the death penalty at the end of WW2.
There is no way he wasn't aware of the atrocities perpetuated by his nation, which were every bit as extreme as those of the Third Reich, Ottoman Turks, Soviet Union, Communist China or anyone else.
Some evil bastards do seem to get away with it though.
You would have had a countrywide uprising.
 
Indeed, concentration camps are for concentrating a lot of people in one place. It doesn't mean they are going to get killed.
 
Indeed, concentration camps are for concentrating a lot of people in one place. It doesn't mean they are going to get killed.
No matter, the conditions in these camps led to a large number of deaths. About half the Boer child population died in these camps. Whether deliberate or not, the neg!ect was scandalous.

One which hasn't been mentioned yet is the Bengal famine. Between 2 and 3 million died during 1943 and 1944, partly due to natural disasters but also because of policy and actions of the civilian and military authorities.

Thinking about it the 20th Century was a horrible time for many, particularly the first half of the century.
 
No matter, the conditions in these camps led to a large number of deaths. About half the Boer child population died in these camps. Whether deliberate or not, the neg!ect was scandalous.

One which hasn't been mentioned yet is the Bengal famine. Between 2 and 3 million died during 1943 and 1944, partly due to natural disasters but also because of policy and actions of the civilian and military authorities.

Thinking about it the 20th Century was a horrible time for many, particularly the first half of the century.
I think there is a difference between neglect and deliberate extermination. Not that neglect is in any way creditable.

Maybe like the difference between manslaughter and murder?
 
One which hasn't been mentioned yet is the Bengal famine. Between 2 and 3 million died during 1943 and 1944, partly due to natural disasters but also because of policy and actions of the civilian and military authorities.

I'll be pleasantly surprised if you can point to specific policies or actions.

Especially one that had a greater impact than the Japanese inconveniently occupying Burma. India was never historically self-dependent when it came to rice production, and Burma's surplus served as the safety net.
 
Concentration Camps were not Death Camps.
That's correct. They're similar in style but different in effect. Both 'concentration camps' and 'death camps' were used during WW2 by German forces. The point being though that 'concentration camps' existed long before WW2.
I'm not sure whether 'camps' (prisons) with the specific purpose of exterminating the inmates, existed before WW2. I expect they did, but were probably not described as such.
 
Indeed, concentration camps are for concentrating a lot of people in one place. It doesn't mean they are going to get killed.
This is the key element, and its emergence is one reason the Boer concentration camps are often cited as landmark developments in internment tactics. However, the Boer War example is neither the actual origin nor the sole line of descent for the "concentration camp" concept.

Up until the last half of the 19th century organized internment camps were basically only known from military POW internment / imprisonment facilities and certain restricted enclaves for compartmentalizing indigenous peoples (e.g., native American reservations).

The first official and organized use of internment camps for isolating (and in many cases passively disadvantaging to a fatal extent) a particular population arose in Cuba during the three wars of independence against the Spanish Empire (1868 to the late 1890s). It was in this context the label "concentration" was first applied.

This strategy of "concentrating" problematic populations via organized internment proliferated as soon as the Cuban wars ceased. The Americans had decried the Spanish camps in the run-up to the Spanish-American War, but adopted the concentration camp strategy in dealing with rebellious Filipinos during the Philippine War (1899 - 1902). This was the same period during which the British applied the strategy in the Second Boer War. A couple of years later the Germans employed concentration camps to isolate, control and passively decimate the Hereros of Namibia. And so on ...

These developments were facilitated by progress in communications, logistics, transportation, and management techniques that first made it possible to identify, locate and re-locate members of an arbitrarily-defined group.

The unspoken agenda of fostering deaths in such camps dates back to the Spanish in Cuba. Whether intended or not, the results from the earliest instantiations of the concentration camp strategy made it obvious such outcomes could occur.

The Soviet Union adopted this strategy (and accepted, if not sought, the potentially deadly results) in the gulag system from 1918 onward.

The Nazi innovation was to add the explicit intention to proactively exterminate and to industrialize the process by designing and operating camps for that purpose.

See, for example:

Concentration Camps Existed Long Before Auschwitz
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/concentration-camps-existed-long-before-Auschwitz-180967049/
 
During the Russian Civil War, 1918-21, the White Military committed perhaps the first pogroms on an industrial scale. Daniel Pipes in Conspiracy suggested 100,000 Jews were killed in pogroms by the White forces. More up to date research in The World on Fire: 1919 and the Battle with Bolshevism says 150,000 Jews perished in the White Holocaust.

Winston Churchill warned General Denikin, whose forces carried out pogroms that:

"my task in winning support in Parliament for the Russian Nationalist cause will be infinitely harder if well-authenticated complaints continue to be received from Jews in the zone of the Volunteer Armies."
 
I'll be pleasantly surprised if you can point to specific policies or actions.

Especially one that had a greater impact than the Japanese inconveniently occupying Burma. India was never historically self-dependent when it came to rice production, and Burma's surplus served as the safety net.
Removal and/or destruction of rice in some areas, confiscation of boats, provincial trade barriers, prioritisation of food and medical care, refusal of food imports. They might not have been shot or gassed, but the outcome was the same.
 
Making sure whole communities do not get rice to eat when they are starving, at the political level, meant millions died.

Many Indian studies such as the one conducted by Vimal Mishra of the Indian Institute of Technology (2019) prove that there was not a drought between 1935-1945.
 
Removal and/or destruction of rice in some areas, confiscation of boats, provincial trade barriers, prioritisation of food and medical care, refusal of food imports. They might not have been shot or gassed, but the outcome was the same.

That's a good start.

Your list requires a point-by-point discussion, but I'm in the throes of moving house and can't get my hand to the books I want, notably Wavell's diary. One point I shall return to when time allows is simply: India was under immediate threat of invasion. Another, as ever in this story, is friction between religious communities, notably the predominantly Hindu grain merchants and the Muslim-led coalition that governed Bengal.

The final point is very much more important than you suggest: intent is the crucial distinction.

Making sure whole communities do not get rice to eat when they are starving, at the political level, meant millions died.

Many Indian studies such as the one conducted by Vimal Mishra of the Indian Institute of Technology (2019) prove that there was not a drought between 1935-1945.

Haven't read that, but Brown-spot/Leaf Blight was the proximal cause, and although its presence correlates with reduced precipitation, it does not require drought--at least not when other environmental factors obtain.
 
Stalin and Mao were brutal dictators who were directly responsible for millions of deaths. The famines in Russia and China though should be subject to the same scrutiny as those famines which took place in Colonial countries. Some of it was due to nature, some to uncaring officialdom, some due to ideology.
 
Some of it was due to nature, some to uncaring officialdom, some due to ideology.

Ties in with Bengal.

If you have power, and the people you have power over are starving and dying and you do not do very much to help and millions die.


Well...my jury is out.

Some things don't really bear intellectualising.
 
That's a good start.

Your list requires a point-by-point discussion, but I'm in the throes of moving house and can't get my hand to the books I want, notably Wavell's diary. One point I shall return to when time allows is simply: India was under immediate threat of invasion. Another, as ever in this story, is friction between religious communities, notably the predominantly Hindu grain merchants and the Muslim-led coalition that governed Bengal.

The final point is very much more important than you suggest: intent is the crucial distinction.
As you allude out the situation was caused by a number of factors, some of which were not directly linked. Corruption at various levels was another factor.

I appreciate the point you make about intent. While there may not have been intent to cause the famine it is arguable that by failing to respond adequately as the situation became apparent, the authorities (in India and the UK) then acted intentionally.
 
I appreciate the point you make about intent. While there may not have been intent to cause the famine it is arguable that by failing to respond adequately as the situation became apparent, the authorities (in India and the UK) then acted intentionally.
I think that overlooks the war situation at the time. Had Japan managed to overrun India - even part of India - the deaths would have made the mistakes of the British Empire look like amateur hour.

Much more culpable, IMO, was the British failure to respond to the Irish potato famine, when there was no other crisis to detract from taking sensible action.

But aren't we off the point? Surely implied in the word 'extermination' is deliberate intent to wipe out a whole sector of the population, whether by ethnicity or religion. Not neglect, stupidity, or arrogant indifference.

There have been deliberate attempts at extermination of undesired 'different' people all the way back through history. But this is meant to be specifically about WW2.

Sorry, I'm sounding like a pompous git.
 
Stalin and Mao were brutal dictators who were directly responsible for millions of deaths. The famines in Russia and China though should be subject to the same scrutiny as those famines which took place in Colonial countries. Some of it was due to nature, some to uncaring officialdom, some due to ideology.
Yeah I've heard some stories about how Stalin's bureaucracy resulted in many tons of food getting spoiled due to bureaucratic nonsense. Ineptitude, or deliberate? I have no idea. One of the specific examples was food being loaded in box cars on a railroad... and left parked until it was unusable. The exact reason why is something I don't have, but... that's a lot of food to be left to rot. Also how common was it exactly? I don't really know.
 
I think that overlooks the war situation at the time. Had Japan managed to overrun India - even part of India - the deaths would have made the mistakes of the British Empire look like amateur hour.

Much more culpable, IMO, was the British failure to respond to the Irish potato famine, when there was no other crisis to detract from taking sensible action.

But aren't we off the point? Surely implied in the word 'extermination' is deliberate intent to wipe out a whole sector of the population, whether by ethnicity or religion. Not neglect, stupidity, or arrogant indifference.

There have been deliberate attempts at extermination of undesired 'different' people all the way back through history. But this is meant to be specifically about WW2.

Sorry, I'm sounding like a pompous git.
I absolutely understand the points you are making. I would argue that once the scale of the problem became known that arrogant indifference resulted in something akin to extermination. We're not talking about a few thousand (tragic as that would be), the death toll was in the millions.
 
Yeah I've heard some stories about how Stalin's bureaucracy resulted in many tons of food getting spoiled due to bureaucratic nonsense. Ineptitude, or deliberate? I have no idea. One of the specific examples was food being loaded in box cars on a railroad... and left parked until it was unusable. The exact reason why is something I don't have, but... that's a lot of food to be left to rot. Also how common was it exactly? I don't really know.

It was far worse than that. Look up Stalin's culpability behind the Holodomor (genocide through famine against Ukrainians).
Estimated 3.9 million dead, or 13% of the ethnic Ukrainian population.

https://www.history.com/news/ukrainian-famine-stalin
 
It was far worse than that. Look up Stalin's culpability behind the Holodomor (genocide through famine against Ukrainians).
Estimated 3.9 million dead, or 13% of the ethnic Ukrainian population.

https://www.history.com/news/ukrainian-famine-stalin
hmmm interesting, reading up on it... it's not racially motivated, but a form of "serve me or die". even then the reason for them to say no.... was that they saw it as Stalin more-or-less stealing everything they owned by dictatorial fiat.

Stalin's regime had made quotas and decided that if the people of the Ukraine(and some other nearby regions) didn't fill the quotas... they'd take whatever they did produce and leave them to starve. When that didn't work they started going around and doing stuff like burning all books written in Ukrainian, and literally taking the food off of people's tables. Why? Not really for ethnic cleansing reasons, but because Stalin was one of the worst dictators in human history. Part of this was because Stalin's pencil jockeys had decided on what form of farming to do and... no one in the Ukraine did farming that way.

The end result was bad enough that Stalin's wife allegedly decided she'd rather die than see Stalin ruin the country. :/

Was it technically not genocide? Possibly. Who gives a shit? It's unquestionably an atrocity. It was so bad it eventually started causing food shortages elsewhere in the USSR.

So, yeah, Hitler=bad, Stalin=worse.

But... that aside... this seems unrelated to the comment I made earlier. I was talking about food that had been collected from the farms producing it and simply... not used. Enh, tbh I'm not even sure why that thing happened. The quote I remember was part of commentary on how Stalin's regime wanted to be a model of centralized government making life better for everyone.... and failed miserably. Thus causing life to just... suck for everyone because of a system that could only work if the central authority knew everything local authorities did, but had no way to compile that information.
 
I'm not sure that I agree with Hitler = Bad, Stalin = Worse. Surely they are both terrible beyond measure? Throw in the likes of Pol Pot as well if you want.

I don't think normal people can ever answer the question 'why' We aren't like that. Though I accept given the right propaganda and peer pressure we could all potentially become minions, it takes something that is beyond normal to do what Hitler and Stalin did.

It's why I see a clear difference between idiocy and stubbornness leading to human catastrophe, and deliberate extermination.
 
@Coastaljames

It is a difficult and vast subject.

There had been large scale massacres of Jews before.

1.2M murdered or killed in battle by the Romans - 1st century Bar Kochba uprising.

Many thousands murdered in the Crusades 11th - 13th centuries.

Up to 500,000 murdered in Khmelnytsky massacres - 17th century.


But whilst anti-Semitism has existed since Biblical times, what happened under the Nazis was unique outside of Biblical history on various accounts:

They built an industrial system/process to murder Jews.
They wanted to murder every Jew in the world.
Hitler did this not just for the financial or political reasons, or for the religious reasons seen in medieval and early modern times, he did it because his very immoral nature and worldview was intrinsically opposed to Judaism and Jews.
 
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If we're talking league tables of civilian deaths under 20th century tyranny, then the list is something like this:

10. Yakubu Gowon - 1.1 million deaths in the Niger Delta
9. Mengistu Haile Mariam - 1.5 million deaths in Ethiopia
8. Kim Il Sung - 1.6 million deaths in North Korea
7. Pol Pot - 2.5 million deaths in Cambodia
6. Ismail Enver Pasha - 2.5 million Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians
5. Hideki Tojo - At least 5 million deaths under the Imperial Japanese
4. Leopold II of Belgium - up to 15 million deaths in Belgian colonial Africa.
3. Hitler - estimated 17 million deaths under the Third Reich.
2. Stalin - at least 23 million civilians
1. Mau Zedong - 49 to 78 million deaths.

https://www.jcpe.tv/top-ten-most-evil-dictators-of-all-time-in-order-of-kill-count/
 
The one I would query in the list above was Tojo as, ultimately, I would have thought Hirohito was responsible for Imperial Japan's atrocities.
Tojo did confess and apologise for his nation's actions in his final speech though, just prior to his execution in 1948.
 
The one I would query in the list above was Tojo as, ultimately, I would have thought Hirohito was responsible for Imperial Japan's atrocities.
Tojo did confess and apologise for his nation's actions in his final speech though, just prior to his execution in 1948.
Hmm I wonder if he was taking the blame so his beloved Emperor didn't?
 
Hmm I wonder if he was taking the blame so his beloved Emperor didn't?

I've been mulling over your post about the food being let to rot during the Ukraine famine, I reckon it was likely a mixture aof incompetence and fear. The food arrived but the apparatchiks didn't have instructions on how/when/where to distribute it. So they just left it, maybe helping themselves to small amounts.
 
I've been mulling over your post about the food being let to rot during the Ukraine famine, I reckon it was likely a mixture aof incompetence and fear. The food arrived but the apparatchiks didn't have instructions on how/when/where to distribute it. So they just left it, maybe helping themselves to small amounts.
Yeah, maybe. The pencil pushers didn't send food places arbitrarily.. and if they had no instructions on what to do with a particular shipment... they didn't do anything with it.
 
Hmm I wonder if he was taking the blame so his beloved Emperor didn't?

I think @Naughty_Felid post above was the likely reason.
There was no love lost for a military leader, seen as leading Japan to an unhonourable defeat, whereas had the semi-divine emperor been executed, there would have been national unrest, making the role of the USA as occupying power vastly more difficult.
 
I think @Naughty_Felid post above was the likely reason.
There was no love lost for a military leader, seen as leading Japan to an unhonourable defeat, whereas had the semi-divine emperor been executed, there would have been national unrest, making the role of the USA as occupying power vastly more difficult.
Right, but I suspect that Tojo was willing to take the blame.
 
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