i went back to some bad habits because someone mentioned something on twitter that i'd heard of a few times but always was going to "go back and research" and now i feel like an idiot for not knowing these things and whenever i find out things like this i get so MAD because wtf people should know things about history E V E R Y T H I N G even the REALLY HORRIBLE AWFUL THINGS THEY SHOULD BE KNOWN maybe not to small children, but once you get to a certain age you should know about things, everything, about your country and everyone else's. and the thing that frustrates me the most is that yes sometimes there are just really horrible awful people that enjoy torturing others but a lot of the time it's people who are taught to NOT CARE, most of the time apathy is more deadly than avid hatred

for some reason i am so fixated on WWII i want to know everything, i feel so COMPELLED to know about every horrible thing that happened, and i know that up until now my education focused mainly on europe (bc there were no japanese history classes at the university for one reason) but that doesn't mean that i'm not interested in the pacific side of the war. VERY FAR FROM IT. no i want to know everything about that also i want to know everything that happened since the annexation of korea and taiwan, manchuria i want to know all of it. no i'm not going to shy away from it. people shouldn't shy away from things like this, it only MAKES IT WORSE. and that's one thing that i really... don't respect about the japanese government (note: government is different from people!!) is their repeated failure to recognize things that happened, they obviously happened even if there's not "definitive evidence", if you don't recognize it there's just going to continue to be tensions and resentment (there will be resentment even if you recognize it), if you recognize it that doesn't mean that every japanese citizen has to hang their head in shame, no that's NOT THE WAY TO DEAL WITH THINGS

(sorry i am just so fired up right now please bear with me)

i don't know what it is about WWII but it just really GETS to me and it makes me want to yell at people and get in their faces and ask all sorts of questions about morality and humanity and when people say that you're not supposed to bring philosophy into history, can i kindly ask WHAT IN THE WORLD IS THE POINT OF STUDYING IT. are we just supposed to memorize a timeline and learn nothing else? the past seriously can't offer something more to us than that? i'm sorry but i'm going to punch you what the hell that should be the MAIN reason we're studying history, so we can LEARN from it and not to learn things like "if you start invading russia in the fall you'll probably lose", or "if these two countries are allied it's stupid to attack one if you can't defeat them both" no, not that, yes we can learn practical things, but can't we also learn about ourselves as human beings from studying what the roman emperors did? we can't learn about our own souls, about the essence of humanity, by learning about the SS? i will scream and punch you in the face

honestly i don't know how it came to be that my favorite countries in the world actually form the axis powers. everything i love comes from japan. even hetalia, which made me appreciate the entire world even MORE than i already did, which gave me the best way of looking at the world, came from japan. even way before anime, any fleeting encounter i had with anything japanese, i didn't confuse it with china or korea or any other east asian country, i remember it vividly, and i don't know why! i love japan. japanese is the most beautiful language to me, with its amalgamation of characters somehow it's just perfect for expressing the langauge, i love how the words sound i love how the grammar gives this subtle meaning to certain phrases, i love it. i love japan so much. i can't explain why because i can't explain my feelings and i don't know why i feel these things from the very bottom of my soul. i love germany. i can't explain this either, but the same with japan, even when i encountered it back when i was 10 and we stayed in the german airport for 10 hrs or however long it was, after that i apparently showed so much interest in it mom bought me a tape for learning german (i tried to use it a few times but was quickly too embarrassed to use it much at all). something about germany just feels .... like home? i don't know how to explain this i really do not because i never felt like OH I'M SO GERMAN lol no i'm a really scrambled american egg ok. BUT GERMANY something about it makes me feel so welcome and i just want to hug someone i don't know. i feel like i have almost the exact opposite impression of the country that everyone else does. the german language sounds beautiful and delicate to me just listening to it makes my heart beat faster. i love italy, even if it's from a more recent time than the others i'll always remember sitting in italian class for the first time and thinking i'm hearing real italian from a real italian! i was so nervous and excited that i couldn't hold my pencil correctly my hands were sweating so much (gross i know, but omg you get my point). when my professor lectured about his favorite subject i was just as captivated by everything he said, by the art, by the music, by the culture, by everything. I LOVE THIS COUNTRY. i don't know how it got to be these three, but it is.

and exactly because i love them this much, i want to know everything that happened, i want to know all the terrible things. no, i NEED to know. i HAVE to know. it's like when you love a person in spite of all their shortcomings and in spite of the most awful thing they've ever done, i feel like i need to know every horrible thing that has been perpetrated by these countries during their darkest hour. i want to know and i'm going to love them in spite of it. that doesn't in any way mean that i think lightly of the things that they've done or the things that happened, the exact opposite. i want to know how germany, as a general whole, could turn on its own citizens so suddenly, so easily and so thoroughly, i want to know how japan could go from learning nearly everything from china to treating the chinese as something lower than humans (i know i'm not talking about italy right now, but honestly italy does not have the same war crimes record for this time period, of course they massacred and pillaged their way through ethiopia, i'm not going to say that's not BAD, it's HORRIBLE, they'd randomly chop the limbs of "POWs" who usually weren't prisoners for long, but it's not the same degree as say, human experimentation? alright) it's probably silly of me thinking that i can what, dissolve the sins of these countries into my own soul and forgive them for everyone else and for themselves? (that's not really what i'm trying to do, i don't know what i'm trying to do, or if i'm even trying to do it anymore that i'm not going to become a professor)

probably this is all coming out because current events are really pissing me off, like the entire world watches as hundreds of thousands are killed by their own government but as soon as someone pulls out the gas and kills a few dozen then we have to talk about war. i don't mean to sound heartless, what i mean instead is, hundreds of thousand dead human beings isn't enough of a reason to talk about war?? do people even freaking realize that most of the people who died in the holocaust weren't even gassed? they were lined up and shot in the back of the neck systematically, they were shoved into the enclosed backs of trucks where the exhaust was pumped in as the truck drove around until everyone was dead inside, they were worked to death in ghettos, the GASSING only came after himmler got sick and threw up everywhere when he was shown one of the mass executions. the men doing the shooting started to go insane and drink themselves to death. i thought the UN's purpose for existence was "never again"?

i know for damn sure that things aren't black and white when it comes to things like this. no, not only germans were killing people, there were plenty of collaborators coming FROM OCCUPIED COUNTRIES THAT WERE NOT FORCED IN ANY WAY even the regular german army, or the SS EVEN, there is not one recorded case of someone being punished for "failing to carry out an order" if you didn't want to shoot you didn't have to shoot. your family wasn't in danger, your life wasn't in danger, i don't even think your JOB was in danger, they'd just reassign you to a different area, it works a lot more smoothly if everyone isn't complaining and protesting about their position. i don't know in as much detail how it was for the japanese side, but i know that there were koreans and chinese who participated in all sorts of war crimes, right alongside. it's not black and white. human beings aren't black and white.

sorry i'll try not to be so graphic because earlier i made myself really sick to my stomach reading some things and i don't want to do that to anyone else against their will. but i'm really angry i didn't know about these things before, really angry. what i want to know is how can people look at other human beings as not human? how can people treat each other as less than animals? and in most cases it's completely without hate. instead it's disinterest. in one piece i was reading for class once (that i had to actually physically set the material down multiple times because i could hardly digest it, i started shaking when we were discussing it in class) it said that the reason that the soldiers that worked in the concentration camps were able to think up such cruel and inhumane ways of torturing and killing prisoners was merely because they didn't care. not because they hated jews or poles or whatever. no, they were able do really horrible things (things that you probably couldn't imagine happening to your worst enemy), horrible things to children and BABIES just because they didn't care. i still have trouble understanding this point, honestly, the morning after i read it i woke up halfway and felt like i completely understood what the author was saying about this, but as i got up i lost the feeling and still i only halfway understand it, i don't know. what i want to know is how you can use people for experiments, REALLY HORRIBLE EXPERIMENTS, there is no reason that anyone needs to know what happens when you change the color of one twins eye, does the other twin's eye color change too? why. no one needs to experiment on the use of bubonic plague by releasing infected fleas all over LARGE POPULATED AREAS. no one needs to observe what happens when you submerge people in freezing water (obviously they die, slowly), no one needs to know what happens when you remove random body parts, no one needs to know what happens to a person when you inject them with salt-water, or when you make them exist on ONLY SALT-WATER, no one needs to know exactly how long it takes someone to starve to death, how long it takes to die from dehydration. i'm trying so hard not to describe these things in detail i will spare you, i will spare you, but my god.

and if you think that's the worst of it, it's not, it just gets worse, and worse, and i make myself sick but for some reason i feel so much like I NEED TO KNOW, I NEED TO KNOW ALL OF THIS, i don't know why. and after it was all over, it's not like it was condemned as completely evil and thrown away. how do you think scientists and doctor's all over the world know how to deal with hypothermia now? how do you think the we know so much about biological weapons?

do i think that things would have been different if the same circumstances presented themselves in any other country? no. every group of people has done horrible things, every country has bad parts of their history. obviously i don't think that there's anything particularly or especially sinister about these countries that naturally led to this kind of thing, of course not, that's absolutely ridiculous. and that's also the most terrifying, isn't it? to think that people have the capability to do things like this to each other, without any feeling of individual malice? human beings surely are amazing creatures.





but in the end, even after all of that, i still love the world. what is that? i still love it. even if it's horrible and disgusting sometimes, i still love it.

and when reading the stories of terrible suffering, i know we're not supposed to feel this way, but... how can you help but feel sorry for the person pulling the trigger over and over, the person looking into those faces as they begin a surgery, the person in charge of all this blackness, how can you help but feel sorry? for both people involved to have to experience such horrendous pain, because how can you say that the perpetrator doesn't feel any pain or take any part of that sadness. i know it's probably not the place of the present day to forgive, so removed as we are from the events of the past, but i don't know how anyone could possibly begin to heal at all without it. i know it's not my place to forgive anything, i didn't suffer, none of these horrors visited themselves upon me, but i still want to say to these countries, that i will listen to your darkest secrets, tell them to me, i will listen, i won't run away in disgust, don't keep them to yourself, and after everything is said and done i'm sure that i will still be able to say that i love japan, i love germany, i love italy, i love them from the bottom of my soul

this is turning into a term paper i will stop now
this is like 3% of my thoughts on this subject
and this is why i can't be a "professional" historian there is too much personal emotion invested in this topic for me

but i feel a bit more relaxed now that i wrote this out after seeing those things
though i probably still won't be able to EAT FOR A WHILE i have to calm myself down still somehow ahahaha... if you read all of this i will say wow thank you so much you just read 2600+ words that's like 8pgs double spaced

i just wrote a term paper