calliope5431.bsky.social profile picture

Calliope

@calliope5431.bsky.social

93 Followers

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Not the Greek muse, just a casual fan. I study the Third Reich. The demands to READ THEORY will continue until you have actually read Christopher Browning and Ian Kershaw.

  1. mcopelov.bsky.social profile picture

    Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social

    We're sending out cancellation of FLAS (Foreign Language & Area Studies) fellowships to dozens of students today, bc Trump has illegally refused to disburse year 4 of our DoE grants. Congrats to everyone in the GOP who is laser-focused on 🇺🇸 national security & the threat of rising 🇨🇳 to 🇺🇸 hegemony.

    mcopelov.bsky.social profile picture

    Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social

    Yes, we’re literally about to zero out funding for every Title VI area studies center at every university in the country, along with FLAS fellowship funding. A generation of human capital that feeds into our diplomatic & intelligence corps that will simply not exist. National security madness.

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  2. calliope5431.bsky.social profile picture

    Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social

    Reply to calliope5431.bsky.social

    Both governments perpetrated atrocities. Both were morally reprehensible. The Third Reich likely murdered more people and certainly killed more people deliberately, but the numbers we are talking about here are so staggeringly large and so ghastly that "more" barely means anything.

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    Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social

    Reply to smullins3000.bsky.social

    No offense taken, speaking as someone who studies the subject in an academic context it's immensely tiring. Every historian I've ever talked to HATES getting asked it. The bottom line is that trying to brandish the corpses of innocent people around to back ANY ideology is sickening and wrong.

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    Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social

    Reply to justinsf1.bsky.social

    The Red Army was barbaric and its actions unspeakable, but even its many and monstrous sins still paled in comparison to what the Wehrmacht did on Polish and Soviet territory. Yet the Soviets behaved nearly identically in liberated Korea and Manchuria, and that more than anything speaks ill of them.

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    Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social

    Reply to calliope5431.bsky.social

    Obviously the greatest sin Japan committed was in launching its wars of aggression against China and Southeast Asia in the first place. But the knowledge that Japan would lose was obvious by the summer of 1944 at the latest, and they remained unwilling to act for fear of dishonoring the country.

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  6. calliope5431.bsky.social profile picture

    Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social

    Reply to jingo-strange.bsky.social

    It is to the VANISHINGLY small credit of Hirohito and the Japanese cabinet that they chose capitulation. Unlike Hitler, they did not put Japan through what Germany endured. At the same time they did not do so until well after the war was irretrievably lost, and that is a moral abomination.

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    Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social

    Reply to smullins3000.bsky.social

    Absolutely a contributing factor, yes. Most mass suicides occurred during and after Red Army atrocities. They were basically all in the East (though individual suicides occurred in the West as well). The point was largely to die with a little less pain than the Soviets would afford them.

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    Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social

    Reply to christinedaae.bsky.social

    Okinawa was absolutely a case of Japanese propaganda mixed with forced "suicides" encouraged by the IJA. Many people killed themselves only at gunpoint. There was also the racial issue - Japanese soldiers referred to Okinawans as "little brown monkeys" and were nearly indifferent to their lives.

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  9. calliope5431.bsky.social profile picture

    Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social

    What has always struck me about Japan's surrender is how unlike in Nazi Germany or Okinawa, there was no wave of mass suicides that swept the country. Some in the military killed themselves, but in the Third Reich deaths soared to tens of thousands. Dower's Embracing Defeat captures the sentiment:

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  10. calliope5431.bsky.social profile picture

    Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social

    Of course, this is also one of the easiest things to co-opt if Trump loses power. Decades of conservative legal movement abuse could be undone at a stroke without the need for politically damaging fights.

    segyges.bsky.social profile picture

    SE Gyges @segyges.bsky.social

    propter had a thread about this and my takeaway from the ensuing arguments is that probably doing actually-random assignment is on the honors system and is not being enforced

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