Removed by mod
It’s a valid question that created a lot of interesting answers. When you shut down questions like these, people go elsewhere to ask these questions and get racist answers.
Why is it Germans get spared in the question (it asked about Nazi contributions, not German) but they paint the Japanese with the same broad brush.
If the question was “what were the contributions made by the Axis countries” I wouldn’t have called it out. It’s a reasonable question.
Insert women, or African Americans, or any other minority in place of “the Japanese”, and you’ll see why it reads as bigoted.
Well I don’t hold Nazi and German as both inclusive so I serperated them. We have gotten a lot from German’s but was wondering if something came along from the bad side. It would be calling all German’s Nazi’s which are two seperate entities, at least in my opinion.
I agree it’s not fair to paint all Germans as Nazis. Why then is it okay to treat all Japanese as one?
Sorry I am an American and not really pc or up to date on it. What would the evil side during the period of Japan be called? Seriously asking
I would’ve probably gone with “Imperial Japan.”
I think you either have go with separating those in power and the people (as you did with Nazis/Germans) or with the people at large (because to some degree the people are responsible for those that represent them.)
When the white people are given the benefit of the doubt but the non-whites aren’t, it exposes a bias, perhaps unconsciously.
I tend to think the separation of leaders and its people is the most fair, in part because I too am American and don’t want to answer for my current “leadership.”
Oh, that’s totally fair to call out, but to be honest, I didn’t understand what you meant the first time.
A backhanded kind
Some results Nazi human experimentation is now part of our medical knowledge. However, they actually achieved very little vital knowledge like this, partly because many of the “scientists” who did these experiments were incompetent hacks who only got their positions due to political reasons or lack of good personell. Take Mengele for example. He basically just toyed around trying to support his pet theories. His doctorate thesis was useless and I have found at least one with exactly the same content from the same time.
The first and particularly second world wars brought a lot of investment to R&D. For example, jet engines, rocketry, and nuclear weaponry.
I don’t think that it’s correct to attribute that to the Nazis or Imperial Japanese.
It’s a sad reality…war drives innovation. Always has.
Even the cold war got us landing on the fucking moon. The space race was really a proxy for an ICBM dick-measuring contest.
They got America to the moon.
Nothing they did was new, just some centuries old shit with a new coat of paint. Aggressive colonialism and imperialism with “manifest destiny”, subjugating “lesser races” and bringing “civilization to the barbarians”, all in order to extract everything from said “barbarians” to fill their coffers at home.
At home, they enforced national unity through repression - dissent was treason. Again, nothing new, you can see that happening in Paraguay circa 1860s, revolutionary France in the 1790s and other places before that.
In the science front, Germany is where rocket science was “taken seriously” since the man that was the entire field of rocket science, Robert Goddard, was mostly ignored in the USA
No, the politicians who created the systems of government that led to genocides did not contribute anything positive to society. The scientists who created things that aided in those genocides also did not contribute anything positive because all of the things they created in the name of murder were used for murder.
Did some scientists exist in that time period that contributed to society, yes, did the existence of these empires make it more likely that they created that technology? Who knows, I mean maybe Hitler chose to fund a truly good scientist that the previous system might not have, but maybe a Jewish scientist living in Poland that they killed might have invented the same technology if they hadn’t invaded and killed them.
There are very few advances in all of human history that were suddenly revolutionary. Just because one person often gets to publish the results first, doesn’t mean they even had anything to do with the invention, much less helped it along. Just look as Edison or Ford as an example. They were no different than Musk and what little he himself contributed, we just have a lot more documentation and it’s harder for Musk to hide behind his company than Ford or Edison. Almost all technology is incremental and it’s much more likely that all the money spent on developing weapons during that time period would have been used to develop positive things that would have advanced civilization faster and for the better. Not to mention all of the money spent to fight and then recover from those wars. And even more so all of the brilliant people who were killed in the name of those wars whether as part of the genocide or by being drafted into the military or departments responsible for genocide.
Any minor beneficial gains would have been gotten much more cheaply and quickly by spending on civilian than military research even if that military research might have eventually been used to become civilian technology.
Who knows, I mean maybe Hitler chose to fund a truly good scientist that the previous system might not have, but maybe a Jewish scientist living in Poland that they killed might have invented the same technology if they hadn’t invaded and killed them.
That’s something that is often overlooked in the whole affair. Starting as early as April 1933, universities were purged of all Jewish professors and lecturers, with other political purges following. There just weren’t enough competent Nazi-aligned people around to fill those positions. In many subjects research ground to a halt, went completely askew or at least had to bare with a loss of experience.
Then there was also the implementation of the “Führerprinzip” (literally “leader principle”) into science, which meant there always had to be one leading figure that all others were subordinate to. This meant that most scientific discourse was squashed and research was usually only directed in one single direction. This lead to some well-organized, laser-focused projects. But at the same time, floks of physicians wasted their time on trying to figure out whether cleft jaw was heredetary and whether people suffering from it should be sterilized - just one example.
I think a lot of the so called medical research conducted in the concentration camps was intentionally discarded after the war. Its conclusions not reviewed because its methods of derivation were so heinous.
