Oppenheimer watched:

I've been watching a lot of western movies recently, the latest of which is Oppenheimer.  A lot have been decent but none really wowed me.  It's good to know more about the Manhattan project, but who cares about the rest of Oppenheimer's life?  Certainly not me.  I would say the best movie I watched recently was foreign -- The 800, a movie about the Sino-Japanese war.  Another foreign film, The Great Battle, depicted Korea's defeat of the Tang Empire which preserved its independence.  But they weren't amazing either.  John Wayne as Davy Crockett in The Alamo was fun to watch, but there was practically no fighting in the whole movie, just a lot of chatting between Jim Bowie and William Travis.

As to the Sino-Japanese war, I'm one of the few people who support Japan in this conflict.  At the time China was a mess and had been for 30 straight years, in a state of continuous civil war, including the dangerous Communist Party of China faction as one of the warring states, ever since the fall of the Qing Dynasty.  There were no good guys in China, the Koumingtang were just another group of bloody infighting ambitious dictatorial people alongside all the others -- just more effective in battle.  Japan saw an opportunity to expand into this maelstrom of death and chaos and impose a more advanced and far more stable rule as part of a vast Co-East-Asian-Prosperity-Sphere.  Can anyone say Japan would have been a worse ruler than Mao Zedong, the eventual winner of the Chinese Civil War after Japan was kicked out?  Was Japan a worse ruler of Korea than the North Koreans have turned out to be?  Was Japan a bad ruler of Taiwan or Manchuria?  Everywhere they went the population and economy boomed.  And everywhere they left is now a geopolitical hotspot we're still suffering from today.

Japan committed mass murder against Chinese civilians.  So what?  The Koumingtang and the Chinese Communist Party did too.  Everybody was killing as many Chinese as possible, including the Chinese, including during the war!  When nationalist China decided to flood their own land as a temporary barrier to Japanese military advances they killed millions of the very civilians they said they were protecting from Japanese misrule.  If Japan had won the war of course the killing would have ended, just like Japan didn't go around killing Koreans or Manchurians long after they had conquered those regions.  But because China won the war, the killing went on and on -- tens of millions under Mao, plus more millions in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos etc., all of whom would have lived peacefully under the centralized advanced Japanese Empire, if we just hadn't intervened in World War II.  Japan was going to win that war and conquer all of East Asia, unite it under one enlightened and unified, competent and prosperous state, until we got involved (first with sanctions on Japan and then eventually nukes).

Over time the Japanese Empire would have been the most populous and powerful nation the world had ever seen.  The Chinese people would be living it up right about now.  As would the Cambodians and Burmese and Filipinos and Indonesians and Papua New Guineans and all the other third world dump heaps the world now sports instead.  What have they all done with their independence from Japan?  Cured cancer?  Won the World Cup?  Or just run up their population while still living off a few dollars a day?  Obviously these economies, if synergistically linked into a Co-Prosperity-Sphere that involved non-corrupt government administration and intelligent corporations manufacturing high tech products, would be much richer.

The Japanese were brazen aggressors attempting an obvious land grab with no other justification.  It wasn't a complicated case of 'he did she did,' it was an attempt at Empire much like the British and French decided to conquer the world 100 years before then.  But when the alternative to the Japanese Empire is the killing fields of Cambodia, is that really so bad?  Maybe the Japanese had a point.  Some people don't deserve to rule themselves.  And I think thirty years of flailing about on China's part was more than enough proof that China fell into that category.

Now, would it be sensible for Japan to invade China today?  Of course not.  For one thing China has nukes.  But for another China has gotten its act together.  It's no longer Communist, has stable centralized rule, is relatively high tech and prosperous, and has a longer life expectancy than Americans do.  But China circa 1937 is an entirely different beast.  Back then there wasn't a single good thing you could say about China's government, or any reason to believe it would be better than Japan taking over and running things themselves.  Honestly I suspect the Chinese who were conquered in 1931, the inhabitants of Manchuria, were thankful to be delivered from the chaos and poverty of civil war, and pretty unhappy to see the Japanese and all their economic investments go at the end of WW2.  The fact is a lot of Manchurians and Koreans were fighting alongside the Japanese against China in the Sino-Japanese war.  You can say they were drafted or whatever, but so were the Chinese soldiers fighting the Japanese, so who cares?  The fact is they were fighting hard, they weren't rebelling or sabotaging the Japanese, so drafted or not they seemed to not be averse to putting in the effort.

This reminds me of another war movie I watched, 1944, about Estonia in WW2.  There were Estonians fighting for both sides during the war, and who can blame the ones fighting for the Nazis?  The Nazis offered them independence as part of a pan-European alliance against the communist menace, meanwhile the USSR only offered eternal slavery, poverty and gulags.  The USSR invaded Estonia before the Nazis invaded the USSR -- the USSR was the original aggressor.  If Nazi Germany had won the war sure the Russians would have suffered greatly, but all the nations freed from the Soviet yoke sure would have been happy -- 50 years without communist rule, plus no stupid Ukraine conflict today.  We're so happy we won these wars but never review what winning the wars actually meant for the people on the ground.  The truth is the west should have stayed out of both conflicts -- we should have been happy to see the Japanese take out the communist Chinese and the Germans take out the Bolsheviks.  Then we could have had a capitalist economy and a scientifically advanced populace worldwide.  Germany didn't want to go to war with the west, it was France and the U.K. who declared war on them, and then later the U.S.A.'s endless provocations against Japan and Germany (the U.S. was literally attacking German submarines) that led to the war expanding to our shores.  Originally all the Nazis wanted to do was fight a crusade for Europe against barbarism and the genocidal maniac Stalin.

Oh well, none of it matters now, it's all counterfactuals so anyone can predict any future events they like and it's impossible to prove them wrong.  One thing I can say for sure is nobody has the right to criticize Japanese or German war crimes when they're at the same time totally fine with Oppenheimer's nukes blasting away Japanese cities or the firebombings of Dresden and Hamburg.  Which means you can only criticize Germany and Japan for their war aims, not their means, since every nation in that war was mass murdering everyone they could get their hands on.  And when you look at war aims -- Japan and Germany wanted to incorporate new lands into the capitalist/scientific/industrial enlightenment, and the West for some reason wanted communism to conquer the world instead.  From this point of view I think it's obvious who were the good guys in WW2.

Meanwhile, Avdeevka has officially fallen, given that Ukraine's top commander has ordered the full withdrawal from the city.  The only question left is how many Ukrainian soldiers will actually get away versus how many will be encircled and killed/forced to surrender.  This is the first major city to fall to the Russian army -- previously it was only Wagner mercenaries who could get anything done, so this is a great boost to Russian reputation and morale.  It looks like Russia's military is finally gearing up for war.  They have the men and the material to get things done that they previously couldn't do.  And this time they don't have to rely on unreliable mercenary traitors to do it.  Avdeevka is basically a suburb of Donetsk, the capital city which started this whole war, it's ridiculous it took this long, but finally some justice is done.  This should reduce the number of civilians getting shelled in Donetsk from here on -- though fear not, Ukraine will still kill them with long range rockets -- just like they killed some more children in Belgorod a couple days ago.  But at least the howitzers can be silenced, one of the main original war aims.

Meanwhile, Irotoridori no Sekai is out, but I'm a cheapskate so I'm waiting for a free downloadable version to appear.