[政治學] 1920: mass-murder on the border between Russia, Japan & China.

so this video is going to talk a little
bit about my life outside of YouTube and some of the research I've been doing I'm gonna provide a link below this video to a specific essay I just finished a few days ago an essay that deals with the political history of the area overlapping between Russia Japan and China many people aren't even aware that Russia and Japan have a direct border but they do and for some periods of history they had a land border rather than just an oceanic border and that border has shifted back and forth in all three directions I think even still today all three countries would dispute where the border should be between China and Russia between Russia and Japan the article itself if you just want to glance at it it does have quite a few illustrations I took the time to add as many pictures as I could and taking a glance at just the first few illustrations on the map of where I'm talking about is fine I mean this is home just say don't feel bad about just having a glance at it rather than reading it I would say if you don't want to read the whole thing you might want to skip to section 5 section 5 is where it starts really talking about the atrocities the crimes against humanity mass murder mass rape and so on so on this channel many many times I've alluded to the fact that I study political extremism and this is maybe the first time when I've given you guys a direct finger pointing to an example of something I've written about political extremism and it's something I've just written now rather than saying I wrote a few years ago in Cambodia or or what-have-you and actually I'd add - although Cambodia is mentioned I managed them to mention Cambodia and almost everything I do but you know all the information in this particular essay this is all stuff I learned within the last two years two years ago I knew much less about Russia that I know today much less about Japan and you know I knew quite a lot about China but I know even more about Chinese politics now so one thing that may be interesting for my kind of regular viewers my vegan viewers there are a few different ways in which this this essay actually connects to what I say in do about veganism in animal rights for one thing one of the reasons why I'm against political extremism is because I have this kind of depth of historical knowledge about real political extremism in practice and you know this shows even in my resistance to sort of cynical and insincere poses of people pretending to be extremists when they're really not I mean a lot of a lot of what goes on in animal rights of people pretending to be an artist sore putting on masks or pretending to be extremists I think a lot of the people involved know that they're not going to do anything any more dangerous than dressing up like a cow and marching up and down the Main Street in front of the Parliament building and that the city they they live in so you know sometimes there's a sense of silliness mixed in with the sort of phony radicalism but even on my blog before I had this YouTube channel and still now on this YouTube channel I really oppose that I really say no let's be rigorous and responsible let's say what we mean and mean what we say and let's think about the implications of what it is we're struggling for and how we're struggling for it in a democratic society so that aside say a few words about what makes this particular essay interesting even for someone who has no particular research interest in this part of Asia or this period of of Asian history so these events transpired in the year 1920 in many ways in 1920 communism was still a new idea the Russian Revolution begins in 1917 or 1917 is the most famous year as opposed some ways it began years earlier in 1920 someone who was watching the events within Russia very carefully would have already had a sense of just how strongly communism really was connected to mass murder to violence on an unbelievable scale to persecution door to door including ethnic persecution including genocide war crimes crimes that resemble genocide so closely there's no point in in you know digressing to redefine the term however the vast majority of the world was still basically optimistic about communism and when you're talking about Asia there were problems of translation in the most literal sense it was not easy for people in Japan to understand what was happening in Europe during World War one why would it be easy and as a huge challenge and Japan really was involved with World War one in a big way including the peace conferences at the end of World War one so for people in Japan to understand Russian politics or for Russians to understand Japanese politics this is already difficult so this particular massacre in 1920 in some way is for the Japanese especially but maybe for all of East Asia for Japan Korea and China this was one of the first big wake-up calls when they realized communism is not just about human equality communism is not just about organizing labor unions communism the stuff they're saying about class warfare it really does involve mass murder now the case study is fascinating in many ways this is about one particular town where particular mass murder happened the bolsheviks says the the russian communist side the Bolsheviks before they came to the town before they conquered it on their march there they were instructed and they discussed among themselves the fact that what they were going to do involve murdering children involved murdering murdering children and infants this is part of the job now the fact that they knew that and talked about in advance make sense both in terms of organization and the sort of Machiavellian and psychological aspect you wouldn't want to you know as the commander of that unit have them be very much surprised or have rebellion or dissent among the troops if you only reveal that at the last minute or when it was too late so in some ways it's natural and obvious that they were in effect training their soldiers that they were not just going into combat against other soldiers that they were going to be exterminating civilian men women and children but detail like that is so important because it again shows these were premeditated acts of mass murder class warfare really did mean killing members of rival classes killing members of rival political parties and that's exactly what we see unfold in you know tremendous detail in this case in this case after the town was destroyed after so many people were killed the survivors were able to escape to Japan because this happened as I mentioned right on the outermost edge where Russia meets Japan and that's a tragic contrast to so many other incidents of mass murder of massacre that could never be examined this way and are never talking about it for history in this way just because the witnesses disappeared with it or there wasn't a sort of international spotlight Shawn on it you know the you know to give the inevitable example of Cambodia Cambodia the main reason why we know so much about mass murder in Cambodia is what happened after is that after Cambodia was conquered by Vietnam and then you had a rival political institution you had a Vietnamese government who were trying to justify their own political situation by showing the world how terrible the events in Cambodia work now I'm not saying what they did was phony it wasn't at all I think actually the vast majority of what the Vietnamese published at that time still holds up as true that they were publishing you know terrible truths about mass murder and persecution in Cambodia but my point is in most cases you would have this type of persecution huge numbers of people killed but if there isn't some sudden change if there isn't something that brings in for that brings foreign observers in to the location where it happened or that shatter is the political status quo so that survivors and witnesses can escape to another country then it it won't be recorded for history in this way another detail that that stood up for me personally was that when these communists were marching towards the town they had a standard that if you wanted to be promoted if you wanted to be promoted to commissar you had to kill 18 people each with your own hands personally and do you mean hands cuz they were killing people with swords knives bayonets because ammunition was scarce that it conserve ammunition so they were killing heejun's people and even if you just think about that detail the idea that men were told you know in order to be promoting you to slaughter a lot of people and then also there must be some reasoning behind that number 18 you know it's not ten ten wasn't enough at some point they must have realized they were killing so many people that if it's only killing ten then that's too low so you know somehow the number eighteen was decided on by by their leader and that was set down in the orders there's one other aspect actually the essay that really does connect to what I've said here on on YouTube it talks about the psychological motivations for the people conducting these massacres and I use a an idiom that I've used here on YouTube and that really comes from my speaking on YouTube or I talked about sex money and fame as motivating people to do these terrible things and I said well among the different soldiers and leaders and actors those who weren't motivated by one of those three might be motivated by the other two or some combination and indeed this essay has a whole section as a chapter devoted to the issue of rape including systematic use of rape in the communist revolution in this atrocity in this in this event which is one of those things that even even the most honest historians and and sort of career academics in a lot of ways they just don't want to think about so again in this case we had enough survivors and eyewitnesses immediately after it ended including men who committed the atrocities interesting I could get into why that is but there were men who participated in the atrocities and who then at the very end led a rebellion against the communist leadership because they were opposed to these types of atrocities and then those guys escaped because they thought they'd be killed by the Communist Party if they stayed in Russia and they would have been um and so we actually get perspectives from both the victims and the perpetrators so this is this is preserved for history the question is of course is anyone learning from history and that's always the sort of sad and haunting thing that burdens me when I study this stuff whether it's Cambodia or Laos or in this case you know the symbol of Russia Japan and China I do come out of it feeling burdened because in most of these cases I may be the only man who speaks English who knows anything about the topic or I may be the only man in my generation who knows anything about the topic or you know in the whole world are there even five people who know about this topic and that burdens you in a way that's very different from just sadness in looking back at this history on my desk right now this is a huge stack of paper of handwritten notes I have more than that just from this year a huge amount of writing by hand and some of that I have notes on Chinese history that indeed involves massacres under communism under the Mao Zedong period and I'm going through my possessions now most of what I own is gonna be thrown in the garbage on some great books here that I'm not gonna take with me to China most of what I own is all going to be thrown away but emotionally more than intellectually I would feel bad throwing some of those handwritten notes in the garbage and again there's that tether of if I don't keep this if I don't study this if I don't research this further or writing it write about it further who will so yeah as always on this channel I like to emphasize the fact that this is not a purely rational exercise there's an emotional component to it but above and beyond all else there are questions of principle there is an ethical component to it