Deep themes run through this show, with allegations of Japanese war crimes and atrocities in China at the start leading to eerily familiar, almost modern questions over how the world should respond. And then Dec 7, 1941 arrives...
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What you're about to hear is part two of a multi part series on the wars in Asia and the Pacific involving the imperial japanese empire and many other countries and powers.
If you enjoy context and don't want to get too frustrated with me referring back to things we talked about earlier, please feel free to listen to part one and catch up if you don't care about those things, of course, or if you've already heard part one.
Well, please feel free to continue and hopefully enjoy part two of supernova in the east.
It's history.
It's hardcore history.
Why didn't Adolf Hitler and the Nazis broadcast news and updates of what they were doing as part of the final solution while it was going on?
I mean, why didn't they announce to the world through the Joseph Goebbels propaganda ministry that we set up these industrial killing facilities?
But we'll work people to death first if they're strong and explain.
Listen, last month, we killed 100,000 more of these people, and we won't stop till they're all gone.
Why didn't they do that?
Why didn't Stalin get up there and yell and shake his finger and threaten the gulags and then explain what the Gulag archipelago, the whole system was, I'm gonna starve you to death, work you to death as part of a re education campaign, and all you have to do is leave the country and come back for us to be suspicious enough that you've been corrupted to send you away?
I mean, why didn't he get up there and say, this is what's gonna happen to you if you don't stay in line?
I mean, no one admitted it, right?
Why didn't the Khmer Rouge take photographs as they wiped out the intellectual class of Cambodia?
Because they thought people with glasses were intellectuals and that intellectuals were a threat to their new world that they were creating, where everyone was going to go live, back on the land again.
Why aren't there photos of that?
Go check out the killing fields, and you know what you'll find?