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Because we are missing the objective of the Holocaust Remembrance. It was never about remembering the Jews, it was about depoliticizing and deracialise European cultures, imprinting self-hate and leftists narrative control of reality. The moment the Jews became outmoded for several reasons (Israel, too European-like, whatever) Holocaust Remembrance will shift to gays, trans,gypsies or actual communists.
Humiliate the old regime and allowing a new one to root itself in place. The Japanese killed millions here in Asia, with two branches of my family snuffed out directly, but after a few apologies the Japanese moved along and got on with their own lives, letting the remembrance be for the smackdown they received for being such dicks as opposed to grovelling for eternal forgiveness. In turn the Japanese are able to adapt as the situation changes and consider abandoning pacifism in the face of Chinese militarism and ignore complaints from activists seeking to use Japan as a punching bag. I extract penance from the Japanese by not paying for my JAV, which I'm sure my ancestors smile upon me for.
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Makes perfect sense as the reasons we actually tell the story of the holocaust generally don’t have anything to do specifically with Jews or Judaism.
Firstly, it’s a moralizing myth casting the Nazis as a secular Satan who must be stood against at all costs. It casts the allies (and NATO which grew out of the non-Soviet part of the alliance) as heroes who beat back an evil, expansionist, and genocidal regime. Now the point of this is to set certain international norms and standards. You can’t be with the good guys and do Nazi things. Thou shalt not invade. Thou shalt not make prison camps. Thou shalt not ethnically cleanse. Thou shalt not genocide. Thou shalt not think more highly of your own civilization, race or religion than anyone else’s. It’s a new religion in essence, to replace the moral system that Christendom used to provide before the First World War. Antifascism was the religion of the post war era.
Second, it provided an opportunity to sell alignment with NATO to third world countries. We saved Europe. We defeated people who invaded France and Poland. We liberated the continent. We are strong enough to protect you if you ally with us against the Soviets. This is why the Soviets end up airbrushed out of the picture. We almost immediately started a Cold War with the USSR and her allies. Telling southeast Asian people to side with us sounds a lot less impressive when it turns out that the Soviets did a fair bit of the liberating and at much greater cost.
Third, it forced through a lot of changes that liberals wanted. A turn toward internationalism with the UN leading the way. The ascendancy of cultural relativism where it’s now forbidden to suggest that some ways of doing things are better than others. The beginnings of globalization and the transition to thinking of countries as economic development zones rather than places with a culture and people who belong there and have a right to sovereignty. It meant a lot of rules to formalize these changes and therefore more control over people.
We handed over half of Europe to the USSR to administrate because we trusted them so much, going so far as to gerrymander half of Berlin into an exclave 100 miles deep in the Soviet zone because what tactical and logistical problems could possibly come of that?
We then reduced our military force in Europe from 12M to 1.5M men in the space of 2 years, obviously not because that's a great way to prepare for a new conflict, but because we were dumb enough to believe the Soviets didn't want more conflict either. Stalin, on the other hand, was already making plans for a unified Soviet Germany in 1945, though it wasn't until their Berlin Blockade that the plans became too obvious to handwave away.
I sometimes wonder just how much William Bullitt exaggerated his posthumous quotation of FDR:
"I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of a man. Harry [Hopkins] says he's not and that he doesn't want anything but security for his country, and I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask for nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace."
That seems like it almost has to be slander, right? Even if it's consistent with US policy, there's no way FDR could have been that naive in his beliefs? But I guess if someone could today think the US started the Cold War, with the benefit of hindsight, it's at least conceivable that FDR was legitimately equally foolish about his expectations for the future.
The Soviets' idea of "liberating" Poland, a country they originally invaded as part of their secret pact with Nazi Germany, was to halt their forces during the Warsaw Uprising to give the Nazis a chance to beat down on the Polish first. The use of the word "liberating" to describe strategy like that is utter nonsense.
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The Soviet Union relied on the anti-Nazi mythos to legitimise the post-war regime domestically even more than the West did.
But the anti-Nazi mythos didn't really work in the post-colonial third world - Germany lost its colonies after WW1 and Italy was about as effective at imperialism as you would expect a bunch of Italians to be, so essentially almost all of Africa and large parts of Asia were former colonies of western Allies, who could credibly claim that for them WW2 meant being dragged into someone else's war against their will.
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I think people in southeast Asia care a lot more about their liberation from Japanese occupation then anything going on in Europe. WW2 wasn't just a European war.
tbh it’s just pathetic that the Japanese blew their potential goodwill with anti-colonial Southeast Asians as badly as they did. They had every opportunity to back “freedom fighters” a la Reagan inviting mujahideen to the White House; the stars were perfectly aligned for them to portray themselves as stalwart supporters of liberty and self-determination against the evil white oppressors, aaaand … they ended up being even more reviled than the Western colonial powers to this day 🤦♂️
At least the (non-KMT) Taiwanese still generally look back fondly on the Japanese colonial era.
With what resources? After FDR's sneak attack on Japan's oil supply, Japan could barely fight to end the chaos in China, let alone send aid abroad to rebels, which were considered the enemy of the European colonial powers (and in the Phillipines the US), but also the US which was allied with them.
As the US showed after it declared war on Japan, it considered any ship flying non-Allied colours to be legitimate target, which leads me to believe that ships carrying aid to rebels would be sunk.
After the Pacific War began, the aformentioned Unrestricted Submarine Warfare meant that supplies were lost to the sea, thus creating a general deficit of goods.
The equivalent of Reagen inviting the Mujahadeen did occur, but only in late 1943. Perhaps you don't consider that conference to be similar or perhaps you were ignorant of it.
Or maybe the US backed the most anti-Japanese faction which then portrayed the Japanese poorly as to make their (most often poor) governance seem reasonable.
This is certainly the case in South Korea, where the Allied influence was the strongest: Japan brought literacy and industry, but the South Korean narrative literally inverts facts that instead Japanese rule improving the Hangul, it attempted to stamp it out.
It is easy to convince a population to hate another country, if instead of seeking co-operation and cultural exchange, you enact as strict a censorship of foreign culture and punish even [professors](https://www.universityworldnews.com/post-mobile.php?story=20191009153231491 for underming the regimes narrative, while distorting history in textbooks.
South Koreans are apperently withheld the truth about Japan's contribution to public education in the Korean language and improvements to Hangul, instead they are taught that the Korean language suffered. Queer sentiment in light of English language infestation the American rule brought, yet for which the South Korean government alters history to defend.
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Makes sense. I'd also add that it meant the Allies could tell themselves they were the heroes in the conflict (don't get me wrong, I'm glad they won, but they fought against the Nazis for entirely self-interested reasons).
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