My father is old enough to remember WW2, and when he was younger and his memory was a little better, he told me a lot about the ideological climate he was in as a very young boy. I also heard a bit from my uncle, his older brother, who was already elderly by the time I was born and had been old enough to actually fight in it.
When I lived in Japan, I spent most of my time in rural areas pretty far removed culturally from the kind of urban environments people tend to associate with Japan; Japanese pastoralism is quite different from the Western version; in many cases it feels very much like living literally in the past- some of the villages I've stayed in look almost completely unchanged from their Showa or even Taisho-era photos except maybe with a little more electrification.
Doing traditional martial arts in Japan also means you tend to run into a lot of old people. As a very polite gaijin who respects her elders, I listened patiently to some absolutely insane, outrageous statements from various ojii-samas about how WW2 actually happened (did you know that Pearl Harbor didn't happen, and that the UNITED STATES actually started the war by launching such an attack on the Japanese coast?)- very occasionally, a younger Japanese person would be on hand to privately apologize and tell me that "this was what the government told everyone in schools in those days."
Some time after this I educated myself about the Russo-Japanese war and various other precursor events- there are a lot of them- including American policies of Japanese containment in the years leading up to WW2.
It is not Putin's job to serve the interests of the US, or NATO, any more than it was Hirohito's. Likewise, it isn't any nation's job to allow other nations to get over on them or to amass an advantageous position for an inevitable future conquest. Wars very rarely arise because of a clear unipolar right or wrong; they arise over irreconcilable goals.
Putin had the "moral" right to not want to be contained, and have his governance dictated to him by NATO countries. Ukraine and its NATO friends have the moral "right" to not want Putin to go around doing a reconquista of strategic former Soviet territories.
Likewise, while war is good at killing people, lots of other international policy that isn't war kills people too, also often in large numbers, usually by economically crushing them (or, you know, giving several billion of them toxic injections). It's interesting to me that war is always given the worst name simply because its killing is overt and explicit; what if a short war with (say) Iran would have killed fewer people than starvation or disease from sanctions?
Our hypocrises are endlessly fascinating to me, and I routinely make the mistake of imagining intelligent leaders to at least be aware of them.
I wrote a short story once (in desperate need of a revamp with the benefit of experience and maturity) about a man "forgotten by history" in the Renaissance period who was a sort of genius economist and accountant who sought to end all war through the painstaking development of an ethically impregnable algorithm that would reliably calculate the exact economic value of total war between any two parties with the thinking that making these values public knowledge would ultimately lead to war being completely replaced by leveraged buyouts without a drop of blood spilled. He was killed (in the story) by a de Medici assassin shortly before completing the formula, with the implied epilogue that every scrap of his work would then be hunted down and burned.
But almost immediately after writing it, I asked myself "well, what about the other way around?"
My father is old enough to remember WW2, and when he was younger and his memory was a little better, he told me a lot about the ideological climate he was in as a very young boy. I also heard a bit from my uncle, his older brother, who was already elderly by the time I was born and had been old enough to actually fight in it.
When I lived in Japan, I spent most of my time in rural areas pretty far removed culturally from the kind of urban environments people tend to associate with Japan; Japanese pastoralism is quite different from the Western version; in many cases it feels very much like living literally in the past- some of the villages I've stayed in look almost completely unchanged from their Showa or even Taisho-era photos except maybe with a little more electrification.
Doing traditional martial arts in Japan also means you tend to run into a lot of old people. As a very polite gaijin who respects her elders, I listened patiently to some absolutely insane, outrageous statements from various ojii-samas about how WW2 actually happened (did you know that Pearl Harbor didn't happen, and that the UNITED STATES actually started the war by launching such an attack on the Japanese coast?)- very occasionally, a younger Japanese person would be on hand to privately apologize and tell me that "this was what the government told everyone in schools in those days."
Some time after this I educated myself about the Russo-Japanese war and various other precursor events- there are a lot of them- including American policies of Japanese containment in the years leading up to WW2.
It is not Putin's job to serve the interests of the US, or NATO, any more than it was Hirohito's. Likewise, it isn't any nation's job to allow other nations to get over on them or to amass an advantageous position for an inevitable future conquest. Wars very rarely arise because of a clear unipolar right or wrong; they arise over irreconcilable goals.
Putin had the "moral" right to not want to be contained, and have his governance dictated to him by NATO countries. Ukraine and its NATO friends have the moral "right" to not want Putin to go around doing a reconquista of strategic former Soviet territories.
Likewise, while war is good at killing people, lots of other international policy that isn't war kills people too, also often in large numbers, usually by economically crushing them (or, you know, giving several billion of them toxic injections). It's interesting to me that war is always given the worst name simply because its killing is overt and explicit; what if a short war with (say) Iran would have killed fewer people than starvation or disease from sanctions?
Our hypocrises are endlessly fascinating to me, and I routinely make the mistake of imagining intelligent leaders to at least be aware of them.
I have never thought of this, nor seen it argued before. Richly (not vulgarly) provocative and interesting.
I wrote a short story once (in desperate need of a revamp with the benefit of experience and maturity) about a man "forgotten by history" in the Renaissance period who was a sort of genius economist and accountant who sought to end all war through the painstaking development of an ethically impregnable algorithm that would reliably calculate the exact economic value of total war between any two parties with the thinking that making these values public knowledge would ultimately lead to war being completely replaced by leveraged buyouts without a drop of blood spilled. He was killed (in the story) by a de Medici assassin shortly before completing the formula, with the implied epilogue that every scrap of his work would then be hunted down and burned.
But almost immediately after writing it, I asked myself "well, what about the other way around?"