Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-104.51.53.50-20150415225527/@comment-26183083-20150419030424

@Morgane of the Mists

>Lastly, here's a question to consider. Is it considered cherry picking if high level leadership in an organization holds such opinions?

Before we get there, it is not even clear what is so objectionable about your picked links. Google and Apple abusing their very large grasp on the world's market is *not* a new concept even in the West. As for the idea of increasing soft power, again, can't see the need to object here.

>Moral relativism is not a proper response to arguments I presented above.

Au contraire, moral relativism is IMHO a very vital part of America's self-image. As you have mentioned, Americans do discuss a great portion of their nasty acts during the war. To *have* this discussion without America looking like a complete bad guy, they need people "under" them. That would probably explain why Americans may be willing to discuss their own problems, but when it comes to Germany (which has taken the road of just bowing as low as possible, thus avoiding this conflict) and Japan ... well, it's in essence a monotrack held with religious conviction.

There are also certain mental gyrations used to make America the good guy - such as the concept that killing say a hundred civilians with a sword is extreme evil, but the act of killing 100,000 with an A-bomb (for 10-20000 kills per crewmember) is if not perfectly A-OK, at least only mildly objectionable.

>We didn't go out of our way to destroy military records like the IJA or the IJN did.

America has not yet lost a war so badly that its military records will be freely rifed and its inconvenient portions held up for all the world to see. Besides, I think the whole "destroy military records" thing is partially a form of wishful thinking - I need incriminating evidence, I can't find it, I assume it is in that pile of ashes (maybe its not there but I don't think about it).

>If Japan had the same diversity of opinions and the same level of vibrance in terms of allowing for discourse of different perspectives, you and I won't be having this conversation today. The fact that significant portions of Japanese scholarship deny any forms of wrongdoing and that they aren't fringe elements within the scholarly works should give anyone pause.

You want diversity of opinion and vibrance in allowing different perspectives, yet you express "pause" (objection) to certain parts of the historian community? Are you self-contradictory here?

When it comes to discussing Japan's acts in WWII, diversity is in essence only to be found in Japan. Necessarily, not all of it will be in line with the regular narrative. But it shouldn't be expanded to they deny "any" wrongdoing - such exaggeration paints a worse image of the issue than it really is.

>As I've said earlier myself. My problem isn't that many derived KanColle works is anti-war. Rather, the message they're sending isn't that "we shouldn't fight a war because war is horrible," but rather: "we shouldn't fight a war we couldn't win."

Which isn't all that different from America's position, who constantly finds reasons to get into another scrape.