UKC

...so what, might be your reaction. If so, it's worth finding out a little more about Hiroo Onoda as his is a remarkable tale.

News report here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-25772192 but there's also a good Wikipedia entry here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroo_Onoda

His tale also inspired a fine album by Camel too.

T.

In reply to Pursued by a bear: Sounds like a very admiral person and someone who's had quite a life !

In reply to beththeclimber:

Onoda continued his campaign as a Japanese holdout, initially living in the mountains with three fellow soldiers (Private Yûichi Akatsu, Corporal Shôichi Shimada and Private First Class Kinshichi Kozuka). During his stay Onoda and his companions carried out guerrilla activities, killed some 30 Filipino inhabitants of the island, and engaged in several shootouts with the police.

I think others may disagree, such as the relatives of 30 citizens needlessly killed.

In reply to Pursued by a bear:

Japanese soldier dies Pursued by a bear

Made me titter...

In reply to beththeclimber:


I think he was a Second Lieutenant

In reply to Pursued by a bear:
I remember reading about him as a kid.

apparently he was awarded 200,000 yen in back pay almost all of which was eaten up by his library book fines.

In reply to John Rushby:

I remember these guys coming out of the jungle in the 1960s and 70s. Quite amazing how they survived, and totally unaware that the War was long over.

They believed that leaflets dropped were Allied propaganda. Amazing loyalty to their country and Emperor.

In reply to Pursued by a bear:

I remember reading the book he wrote about his 'fight' and eventual return to japan. Amazing story if you can still get hold of the book - I've forgotten the title of course.

In reply to Pursued by a bear:

As Flinticus says - extraordinary story, extraordinary bloke but the cause of a lot of needless deaths.

A sense of loyalty he may have had, but it was also misguided.

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

One wonders how many of the people he killed were civilians and how many were attacked without warning.

He sounds like a typical Japanese soldier from WW II. A group who were rightly despised by the rest of the world. A cruel and heartless criminal despite his talent for living in the jungle.

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:



Aye, sounds like a bit of a douche-bag to me.

E

In reply to Removed User:

In an interview - which I've just watched on the news he said he fought on because he was ordered to stay behind and fight a guerilla war and being a soldier he followed his instructions. he refused to surrender because he believed all the plots to get him to surrender were allied deceptions.

We cannot/should not judge everyone by our own values. As Machiavelli said; "in my country, your wrong is our right".

In reply to Dave Perry:

An extended guerrilla war against civilians, with no sign of hostilities? Seems both common sense and common humanity were sadly lacking.

In reply to Dave Perry:

'As Machiavelli said; "in my country, your wrong is our right".'

I know this bloke was not involved, but in which country would the Rape of Nanking be right? Because they would be wrong. To not realise this is to teeter on the edge of the abyss.

In reply to Dave Perry:



Machiavelli was a douche-bag too sometimes then. I saw a video the other week (wish i hadn't) It showed some withches being burned to death somewhere in Africa...........

E

In reply to Dave Perry:

Whilst much of what Hiroo Onoda did was indefensible by our 21st century western world standards, I suspect that the structure, moral codes and values of Japanese society during the second world war are so alien to us as to be beyond easy understanding; and hence the morals, values and sense of obedience to his instructions that underpinned Onoda's actions are beyond us, sat in front of our computer screens in the 21st century western world.

Right or wrong, I still think his tale is a remarkable one.

T.
And that's not a direct reply to you as such Dave, more a comment on the points raised generally in the thread.

In reply to Pursued by a bear:

Bit of a sad situation all round. There are no winners in war.

In reply to Pursued by a bear:


I typed Japanese war crimes into Google and spent a few minutes reading. I hope what follows doesn't get this thread pulled because it's worth remembering that even the most civilised of societies are only a short step away from depravity.

"When a Filipina, about eight months pregnant, passed a rice ball to a friend of Drake’s, “the guard ran up screaming and jabbed her in the belly with his bayonet — right through the fetus. She fell, and he bayoneted her again in the heart. Then two other Japs came up, and one took out a hunting knife. They ripped her clothes off — cut her belly open — dragged that fetus out, held it up, and laughed like the fiends of hell.

“I had to turn my back. I had nothing to vomit, but I heaved until my socks came over my kneecaps.”

— Memory H. Cain, Sr.
“Beyond Courage”

http://www.angelfire.com/nm/bcmfofnm/atrocities/atrocities02.html

This Japanese medic's accounts of war crime in the Philipines does not make pleasant reading: http://www.asiapacificedcrossings.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/M12-Taipei...

...and an account of what happened after the defeat of US forces in the Philipines.

....For entertainment during the march, the guards would push their prisoners off cliffs. The Filipinos, as http://www.jacksonville.net/~rgrokett/POW/POW8.htm recounts, fared even worse: "Young girls were pulled out of ranks and raped repeatedly. Anyone who resisted was shot. Frightened mothers would rub human dung on their daughters' faces to make them unattractive to the guards." Sometimes the guards used their captives for bayonet practice or forced prisoners to bury other prisoners alive (http://www.jacksonville.net/~rgrokett/POW/pow10.htm).

http://library.thinkquest.org/26074/japanese.htm

This bloke was part of that army and who knows what he got up to before the Philippines were re taken although we do know he carried on murdering civilians for years after the war ended. The best you could say for him was that "he was only obeying orders".

Relative moral values, my arse. It's to the credit of the Philipinos that they didn't hang him as soon as they got their hands on him.

In reply to Enty:

Whats Machiavelli got to do with witches in Africa?

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

How terrible. Do you know how many civiliians were killed/targeted by the allies during WW2?

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

And what about our guerilla wars since WWII, malaya, Borneo, and so on........oh, and don't forget the black folk who lived in Kenya. I think we emasculated a few of them too! After all they were only blacks.

Civilians? Since when does that make a difference? OK by recent standards a lot of countries try to reduce 'collateral' damage but it wasn't long ago, when so called civilised western countries really couldn't care less whether they slaughtered civilians or soldiers.

If we were to judge our past actions by our present morals it might just be that we put ourselves on trial and wouldn't be too happy with the outcomes.

As anyone with military experience will tell you, you are on a looser either way by disobeying orders. IF you don't you'll be judged by your own side. And if you do you'll and you loose you'll be judged by the winning side.

In reply to camalins:


Well, apart from the winners.


Chris

In reply to Dave Perry:


You know very well that there is no comparison between what the Japanese got up to and what the allies got up to in WW II. Or what the Japanese got up to in China either.

If the Allies had behaved like the Japanese you can imagine that most of the population of Berlin (at least) would have been massacred when it fell to the Russians.

In reply to Dave Perry:

"What's wrong in your country" ... etc.

In reply to Removed User:


The Russian advance to Berlin was pretty grim too, but they were repaying their debts to the Germans on the Ostfront. Sadly it was the guys in the middle who got it from both sides, pity the Poles.

In reply to Removed User:

Do you not think, if the allies had lost the war, that we would have a pretty horrific number of war crimes and atrocities attached to our nations histories, with the axis looking down their noses at our barbarous ways?

The moral righteousness is a bit rich.

In reply to Pursued by a bear:

Would anyone be so nostalgic if a member of the SS had been hiding in Poland or Ukraine for 25 years, carrying out random attacks on civilians ?

Do we really accept the defence of culture/brainwashing/obeying orders when it comes to acts of violence committed for reasons of racism. And if we are more lenient towards the Japanese than the Germans for such acts, is that not itself racist ?

In reply to Removed User:


Only because we won the war. If we hadn't, Dresden, Hiroshima, etc, would have marked us out as bigger war criminals.

In reply to David Martin:


Would the Axis powers have discovered our slave labour, extermination or medical research camps ?

Yes there were appalling civilian casualties in Dresdan, Hiroshima and Nagasaki and lets never forget that, but this was total war and it can be argued that they saved lives by hastening the end of the war. How difference is there in killing civilians to conscripts ?

In reply to David Martin:

Are you trying to draw an equivalence between say the Holocaust and the bombing of Caen?

In reply to Removed User:

Hmmmn. Met a couple of Chindits who both said 'we were much worse than the Japanese'. Plenty of German POW's got 'played with' and then slotted on the battlefield, whatever that was.

D

In reply to David Martin:

I think there is a difference between the "surrender or reap the consiquences" war (terrible as it was) and the casual brutality of total war, usually committed against defenceless citizens.

The citizens of Dresden and Hiroshima could have stood up and said "not in our name" (some probably did).

To condone the wholesale industrial slaughter of your {next door} neighbours renders any moral argument indefensible.

In reply to butteredfrog:
There is a scene in The Magus where the mayor of the village is ordered to kill some of the resistance fighters who have been caught by the SS, these people are his friends and his sympathies lie with them, so he refuses.
The SS then tell him that if he does not kill them 10 innocent villagers will be killed every few minutes until he kills the resistance. Collateral damage.
After agonising he goes up to kill the victims, picks up the rifle that the germans have given him, aims at them tied up to stakes and pulls the trigger.
No bullets 'How do I kill them', 'Your problem'.
He is supposed to bash their heads in with the rifle butt. This is a great philosophical problem for the mayor, if he does as asked he saves the villagers but loses his humanity. What would you do?
It's a while since I read The Magus, but John Fowles was always a good writer for setting a philosophical problem. You'll have to read the book to find out what happens, but try and get an early paperback edition. His rewrite of the book is not nearly so good.
By the way it might not be exactly as I've written it here, my memory fades after 10 years or so all too often these days.

In reply to Al Evans:
Along a similar theme, I once read a book where a mother with two children is captured by the SS. To amuse themselves they give her a revolver and tell her to shoot one and they will release the other. If she refuses they will shoot both. It's all about her terrible dilemma. She must shoot one to save the other, but which one should she chose?

I wish I could remember the title.

In reply to Dauphin:

Interesting to hear that about the Chindits.

I remember various accounts of WWI where our regiments had local understandings or orders that POWs who left the front lines would never make it back to the support lines...or would never be taken in the first place.

In reply to Trangia:

Sophie's Choice.

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:


Thank you

In reply to Bobling:




Although never officially admitted such orders were sometimes implied prior to a raid or attack. The orders were usually made in ambiguous language so that the officer giving them could hide behind this if subsequently investigated, but a "blind eye" approach would be taken, so there were very few, if any, serious investigations after the event.

Actually in the heat of a WW1 trench battle surrendering was a very dangerous and difficult thing to do, because the attacking troops would be extremely jumpy and fired up, and genuine mistakes were common.

Once the surrender had been accepted and everyone had calmed down, prisoners were generally safe, or as safe as could be in the circumstances as they often had to run the gauntlet of their own artillery on their way back to the rear and POW cages.

In reply to David Martin:

That's total, relativist rubbish How do I know? Because we were and remain ashamed of wars that we did win - from our reaction to the Indian Rebellion, our use of concentration camps in the Boer war, to ongoing investigations and compensation for atrocities committed during the Mau Mau rebellion.

I'll give you a specific example: the Amritsar massacre in 1919, where at least 300 unarmed Indians were machine gunned to death by the British Army, commanded by Dyer. One of the most shameful events of the Raj. What's also notable though is that a) the size of the massacre would barely register in a list of massacres against unarmed civilians perpetrated by the Germans and Japanese in WW II. 2) It was *immediately* condemned by leading politicians back in the UK: 'Both Secretary of State for War Winston Churchill and former Prime Minister H. H. Asquith however, openly condemned the attack. Churchill referring to it as "monstrous", while Asquith called it "one of the worst outrages in the whole of our history".' You have to imagine Hitler criticising the SS or Tojo apologising for Nanking to get some idea of the gulf. 3) Dyer was ultimately stripped of honour when he returned home; it was generally felt that what he had doe was well beyond the pale.

Of course armies do bad things in the heat of conflict; of course special forces do inflict terror on the enemy and, on occasion, civilians too. But to think that there isn't some gulf between what happened in, say, Nanking, where rape, torture and murder were actively encouraged by the army command - and even, God help us, the miseries that the Russians inficted on Berlin, is to lose any sort of moral compass.

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:
But Dye was not convicted of any crime though was he?

Nor were any of the soldiers.?

In reply to Dave Perry:



No, Dyer was urged to resign and then given a purse of £26,000 (£550,000 in today's money) on his return to Britain. Opinion about him ranged from outright condemnation to being described as the "Saviour of India" by Kipling.

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

The point about Sophie's Choice and The Magus is what takes away your humanity, does bombing Hiroshima to save millions of other peoples lives constitute a war crime? It is the same question in a microcosm. Except that in The Magus the act of saving people would have taken away his humanity, I think that the inventors and users of the Atomic bomb would have had the same dillema.

In reply to Trangia:

It's worth noting that the money he was given was raised by an appeal by a right wing newspaper - presumably every Home Counties imperialist contributed. A bit like the Daily Mail of its day.

In reply to Al Evans:

There's a load of thought experiments been done on topics like this, e.g. if it is acceptable to push a fat man under a train to stop that train killing more people (most people say it isn't), vs diverting a train to avoid killing more people even if that accidentally means someone sitting on the line n the diverted path will be killed (most people say it is.)

The interesting thing about these experiments is that even when adjusted for different cultures, most people have similar responses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

In reply to Al Evans:

But then the Japanese view may have been that killing of civilians and so on would achieve the same results as we justified by our use of the atomic bombs?

It doesn't make either side's argument 'right', as 'right' is a subjective matter?

In reply to Dave Perry:

But killing them by person to person outrageous brutality has got to be different to dropping a bomb on people you will never meet, it's surely different.

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:


Really? Who are the "we"? Iraq and Afghanistan we seem content with (not the outcomes but the 600,000 additional Iraqi deaths). The Falklands are glorious. The Mau Mau compensation has taken how long and against how much resistance? Chagos Islanders. Have there been apologies for British concentration camps in the Boar war?

Isn't it just more a case of us being the "good guys" with a few indiscretions here and there (or as you put it, things just happen in the heat of war every now and then). While we have the "bad guys" on the other side who are clearly identifiable.

In reply to David Martin:

You miss the point. Boer War concentration camp were a matter of shame in the UK at the time. Do you really believe we have something like Nanking or Auschwitz in our past, institutionalized, officially sanctioned evil, hidden away?

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:


Our part in the slave trade?

In reply to Morty:

Oh yes, that's well hidden that is.

As is the fact that we were one of the first countries in the world to abolish it - and we committed significant military resource to suppressing it as well, despite that - at the time - that was generally considered to be against our interests.

Slaves were pretty much an inevitable feature of any economy based extensively on physical labour.

In reply to Al Evans:

You are absolutely right I'm sure.

Killing someone by face to face by cruelty takes far more courage than sitting in an aircraft a couple of miles up and dropping a bomb on someone you can't even face.

In reply to Pursued by a bear:

Sounds like he died 30 civilians too late.

In reply to Dave Perry:

Right on. If a homicidal nutter slaughtered my mum, I'd be really upset and angry. But if I found out later that he came from a different culture, then I'm pretty sure I'd be OK with it.

In reply to Tony Naylor:

Fair point But the point I was trying to make wasn't about how you or me feel about it (and I've had a brother murdered so I'm not totally senseless).

it was more about the issue of moral righteousness and our own subjective view of others from our artificial and self made high ground.

In reply to David Martin:


Only because we won the war. If we hadn't, Dresden, Hiroshima, etc, would have marked us out as bigger war criminals.

If that was the case, we would have classed the bombing of Britain during the blitz as a war crime and put the perpetrators on trial in Nurnberg.
They weren't and in essence, the bombing of civilians was considered a 'normal' factor of war and not a war crime.

In reply to Al Evans:

I don't think your correct, the people that ordered the use of the atomic bomb were well used to ordering massive fire bombing against Japanese cities, I doubt if they thought of the bomb as anything other than a work winning weapon. Interesting to speculate whether they would have used it in Europe if the Allied landing had not worked.

In reply to FactorXXX:


The US and the UK suffered how many losses through strategic bombing? 60-70,000? The Germans and Japanese? Around a million.

The only reason it wasn't considered a war crime is because we won the war. And if that hadn't been so, I expect we'd still consider it an inalienable right for our heads of state to visit cemeteries for bomber command.

In reply to David Martin:

Did we really fight a porcine enemy?

In reply to Morty:


You overlook our part in the abolition of it.

Aren't actions like this how we evolve as a society? Otherwise we'd still have "Droit du seigneur" and peasants wouldn't have a vote.

In reply to Cambridge-Climber:


Lol

In reply to Cambridge-Climber:

Your totally right, in Scotland , I know we paid out millions ( over a billion in today's money was paid out , in compensation .....

(The only snag was , it was to the plantation owners for THEIR loss,( the slaves got nothing)

"About 3,000 British slave-owners received a total of £20m (£1.8bn in today's prices) in compensation when slavery was abolished in 1833"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21601374

Still feeling proud of our part in abolition?

In reply to Jim C: Yes, at least we changed the mindset.

Everything comes at a cost.

In reply to Cambridge-Climber:


You have missed the fact that there IS still slavery in the UK/Europe, but I take your point that it is at least illegal.

(However, IF you take the view that as there is no legal 'living wage' set, and therefore people are being exploited by some employers, and these employees rely on the state for benefits to live, that is arguably a form of slavery that is 'legal'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-25389760

"In an article for the Times newspaper, she said :- "harsh reality" was that there were people in the UK "forced to exist in appalling conditions, often against their will".

In reply to Jim C:


I haven't missed the point, I said we changed the mindset, to most people in the UK/Europe, the concept of slavery is abhorent, as is murder, rape, paedophilia, genocide and other crimes.


Best suggestion that I've heard for resolving that problem is that if an employer has staff that require state subsidies (tax-creidts, etc) to bring them up to a living wage, then these subsidies should be added to the employers tax liability at the end of the year. Of course it wouldn't work for employees of Amazon, Starbucks, Vodafone et al as we all know they're teetering on a knife edge of profitability and stuggling to maintain their financial viability. What a good job that the UK Govt. see fit to support them and prop up these ailing industries despite EU legislation to the contrary.

In reply to David Martin:

Utter nonsense. Only the lack of technology stopped the nazis or japanese doing similar. Atrocities committed by the japanese were orders of magnitude greater in scale and brutality to anything carried out by the allies. But carry on with the righteous self loathing, I'm sure someone's impressed.

In reply to Dave Perry:



No it doesn't, it just requires enjoying torturing people. Obviously some new definition of 'courage'.

In reply to Ridge:

My choice of words was rather badly chosen I agree.

But there is a difference in the personal inner-concsiousness or whatever word/s I'm searching for, than some bomber crew dropping bombs on people they can't see, neither seeing or hearing the results, returning home (mostly) and having a drink in the pub that night and so on.

There is some difference between killing face to face and/or torturing people. I'm not sure you always have to enjoy it either, I do recall a programme years ago where they interviewed someone who'd used torture to get information. According to the interviewee as far as he was concerned it was simply a job and personal feelings didn't come into it. Much like our soldiers who are sometimes/often? asked to do things that they don't necessarily agree with or share the same moral views. Waterboarding Iraqi suspects comes to mind as a recent example.

If you google the Hawthorne experiments you'll see that it doesn't take much for ordinary people to administer what appears to be strong electric shocks on other people they don't know!!

This was an experiment in the 1950's or 60's I think, where volunteers were asked by a researcher to conduct an experiment in something or other, which basically involved them giving increased amounts of electric shocks to victims in another room. They were able to observe the resulting screams, shouts and convulsions (but of course they did not know that it was fake and that there was no electric shocks at all!!). The vast majority of volunteers, male and female carried on administering the shocks up to the 'maximum level' despite believing they were delivering extremely painful electric shocks.

Given a justification, we are ALL capable of torturing our fellow human species.

In reply to Dave Perry:


'returning home (mostly) and having a drink in the pub that night and so on.' There was a 44% death rate among Bomber Command, so I don't suppose much celebrating went on after most raids; and although I believe that Bomber Harris was a murdering b*stard I also believe that he - and particularly his crew - genuinely believed they were doing something that would bring an end to the WWII. Crucifying PoWs , burying Chinese alive or building and then dismantling death camps (which ironically actually compromised the German war effort) doesn't really compare.

The experiment you refer to is Milgram actually, and the results were rather more nuanced than you suggest.

Amongst other things one of the justifications offered was that the subjects were being asked to act in the name of science; that they were being asked to act by civilian figure in authority; and above all, most were deeply distressed by the experience. It wasn't something that they boasted about afterwards, unlike the Japanese officers competing to be the 1st to decapitate 100 prisoners.

Yes individuals within the British Army have on occasion acted in a reprehensible and despicable manner. But if you think that what was done by rogue elements within it was in the same league as what was done by the Japanese or Germans, (or for that matter Saddam Hussein and his psychopath sons) you really need a clearer perspective.

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

I really don't think the amount of casualties on either side make a difference when you are discussing moral issues. I know a lot of bomber command didn't come home. But I know from talking to many survivors there was lots of celebratory drinks down many pubs afterwards. It's neither here nor there in terms of this thread.

I knew I might have mis-named the Milligram experiments. Thanks for correcting me.

My point was, and is, we can all become torturers if we can justify it. Despite some controversy over how the milligram experiments were conducted, what is abundantly clear is that you can turn ordinary folk into torturers. And the main outcome of those experiments prove that regardless of of anything else.

Trying to justify their behaviour by explaining they were doing it in the name of science is a red herring. So were some german doctors such as Dr J Mengels, (A rogue element?) in concentration camps when they carried out numerous medical experiments on inmates. The Japanese I'm sure saw could and did justify their behaviour. Their code of Bushido helped too. I'm sure you know that. Bomber command justified their behaviour by believing it contributed to the war effort and thats what they were told/asked to do. Do you really think the Japanese, and many others others who've committed similar types of crime, could not justify it? The desire to win? They were acting under orders and so on? and so on.

We can all, easily justify our own actions whilst at the same time condemn others for similar crimes.

No doubt if we'd lost the war Mr Harris (a rogue element) and countless others would use exactly the same defence as German?Japanese etc., etc., etc., etc., do and did. "I was acting under orders".

Just remember when you sit upon your high horse it wasn't that many years before 1940 when so called 'civilised' western countries were carrying out our own genocides, mass ethnic cleansings, using commercial slavery, and as I'm sure you know chopping hands and feet of runaway slaves, we divided countries we invaded without permission into 'manageable' chunks without any thought for the indigenous loyalties and we are still struggling with the problems this has caused.

In reply to Dave Perry:

It's not about high horses, it's about knowing history and learning from it so we don't repeat the errors of the past; in some way we progress.

To say that we are all equally bad as each other and that there is no distinction between, say, Rudolph Hoss and Bomber Harris; or no difference between how we administered our African territories and how the Belgians or Germans did, is to close your mind to the important questions: what could we have done better? What can we do in the future to avoid the same mistakes?

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

This thread makes me think about the Mongol habit of killing pretty much everybody in the towns and cities they overran as they swept westwards. Thousands upon thousands, time after time. What sort of effect did it have on the people doing it? And by hand, too - they'd obviously be seeing it all up close, with all the terror and mess. Did they get PTSD, and is there some basic level of morality that is ingrained in people, or is morality just a cultural construct? Who can say

In reply to nufkin:

I've often wondered about that too - the PSTD whether that has/was an outcome for some tribal people such as north american indians and the like - and indeed the Taliban too for that matter. I'm not sympathising just curious.

But like Rob states in his last sentence "what can we do in the future to avoid the same mistakes.?"
Unfortunately human nature being what it is...............

In reply to Dave Perry:


I wonder too are the symptoms the same across time and different populations/cultures? The physical symptoms of the WW1 soldiers seem so strange now looking back at archive footage, I wonder whether present-day PTSD suffers experience for example changes to their gait and the strange facial tics of the shell shock victims or were they an artifact of the time and place in which those people were harmed. Did the German soldiers of the same era present with the same symptoms? Similarly, do the 'other side' in our recent wars experience the same symptoms of PTSD or is there a cultural influence on how it presents?

jk

In reply to jkarran:

I can't claim any expertise on the subject, but I think PTSD is a very interesting phenomenon. I wonder if the extreme physical reaction suffered by many of the First World War patients was influenced by the length of time they were subjected to horrific conditions and the arbitrary nature of death at the Front - to a much greater extent than most other historically brutal events I can think of. The culture of the stiff upper lip and of regarding mental breakdown as cowardice can't have helped.
My understanding is that certain forms of PTSD involve events being replayed in the sufferer's mind very vividly, re-lived effectively, so things they've seen or done keep happening. Perhaps one's culture is of significance in these cases - if a Mongol or Comanche or Japanese soldier is brought up with martial expectations and encouraged to regard opponents in a particular way, maybe actions others regard as atrocious don't seem so to the individual committing them, and so mental trauma doesn't become instilled.

In reply to Pursued by a bear:

It seems like this boils down to who was worsererererer than the other side who was wery wery bad. Come on guys, Britain has done some properly shite things in its time - in recent history too - just look at what happened to the Aboriginals in Australia - minding their p's and q's in vast country in which there was room for everybody and our government effectively instituted concentration camps in which hundreds died, took children away from parents on the basis that they were not fit to bring them up, with the express intent that the aboriginals would eventually die out. Half castes would be interbred with whites, mass graves have been found containing hundreds of prisoners, and the current population is still reeling from the effects. It might not be on the same level as what the Germans, Japanese, Russians or Chinese managed, but still, we can't pretend that we are squeaky clean, when clearly only a small percentage of the wrongs we as a nation have committed across the decades are ever really paid any attention...

In reply to mike kann:

eh? that was Australia not Britain.. taking kids away was still happening til quite recently..

In reply to IainRUK:

May have been australia, at the time it started, we had quite a bit to do with australia... Pretty much everything as i recall.