We will not forget the casualties, pain, and suffering that the Japanese imperialist regime imposed on the Chinese people. Any attempt to deny or cover-up this tragedy will be met with strongest condemnation.
We will not forget the casualties, pain, and suffering that the Japanese imperialist regime imposed on the Chinese people. Any attempt to deny or cover-up this tragedy will be met with strongest condemnation.
Except for horseshoe theory, which was and still is nazi apologia through and through, and originally even shifted blame for the holocaust on the USSR. Germany does a lot to distance itself from our nazi past, but when you look closely, many of the narratives built around that serve to exculpate a large number of our populace, further an agenda of social conservatism and economic liberalism, improve our image on the international stage, or all of the above. The honest confrontation with fascism and how to prevent its return has almost never come from any German government, but from society at large, and there mostly from deliberately leftist milieus. Because when you're honest about these things, you have to admit the material conditions of late Weimar era Germany, and the superstructural legacy of Prussian conservatism, and the admission that a failing capitalist system willingly enabled a fascist takeover because their values aligned with the hyperconformist, national revanchist militarism of our ruling class would run directly against the agenda of our conservative mainstream.
Yep. Reading blackshirts and reds by parenti really points out how the west, including west Germany, literally rehabilitated literal nazi party members back into society and spun up the myth of the "clean" wehrmacht to sooth the collective conscious of the reactionary west German society.
ofc, when we're getting back to the original topic, Japan's stance on this is a lot more problematic than Germany's. Something like the worship at Yasukuni shrine would be unthinkable for a German politician, just as parts of the Japanese history curriculum absolutely wouldn't fly in a German textbook, and both definitely contributes to Germany's relations with its former enemies being a lot better than Japan's, even when it largely pertains to soft power factors instead of hard, material concessions.
I only wanted to clarify that we should take Germany's official form of WW2 remembrance culture with a grain of salt, and that the idea of an American-led denazification attempt is entirely bogus.