Unit 731 had vivisections (dissecting a person alive) in which scientists conducted experiments by testing people's pain tolerance via torture or inject them with diseases or toxic chemicals using prisoners (civilian or allied forces who are captured, but the majority of prisoners are Chinese). Japan today knows it happened but still remain in denial about the topic.
Sadly I know about that. (As another comment: Sometimes you hear that these unethical experiments gave humanity insights that have been valuable. But at least in general that is not true, not lastly because it was shit science by shit scientists to begin with. )
I just don’t know the extent of these things being known in WWII Japan. I would assume it was similar to Germany but for Germany I have read enough to know it for sure that it has been known at the time and not just for a chosen few.
Shirō Ishii (specialist and microbiologist in Unit 731 who is also in the Japanese army) was granted immunity by the allies in exchange for extensive data, research reports, and details regarding their human experiments and biological weapons programs towards the Americans. US military intelligence officials wanted exclusive access to the biological warfare data desiring to keep it out of the hands of the Soviets. He literally got away with endorsing torture towards people.
And adding to that: People saw what happened to their Jewish/Romani/Disabled/Communist/Queer neighbors. They worked in the clinics where disabled children were selected and sterilized or (sent off to be) killed, knew the police men who rounded up homeless people etc. And people came back from concentration camps as well. Some people did time there for ordinary crimes. German citizens incarcerated in concentration camps even had to pay for social security while incarcerated, so that their insurance history wasn’t broken afterwards.
And that is different from Social Media of today in what way?
I trust the AP a hell of a lot more than anything I see on Youtube or Facebook. Fuck, when it comes down to it I trust Fox News more than any social media outlet, mostly because I know Fox News is propaganda.
Social media is much more likely to be full of information that is NOT true than to be compltely devoid of information that IS true.
But to your point: that is why Israel now controls TikTok in the United States.
yeah. I do find they don't put much into misinformation. I think its because all they need is the headline since most people do not read much more.
His point was “it is up to the audience whether or not they trust the press.”
And that is 100% the case when it comes to social media.
Social Media is much more like to be full of information that is not true that to be completely devoid of information of is true.
That is a totally different topic and completely wrong.
And that is different from Social Media of today in what way?
In so many ways you can't even imagine.
Most of it comes down to: things on today's social media are 99.9% lies, and 1000 different ways of lying are involved all the time. That just wasn't there. If there were lies in the official media, then it was the exception, not the normal, and the audience often recognized it, because they knew in advance what these "critical" topics were.
But there was also the time dimension. Nobody knew at that time what had happened somewhere else in the same hour. Rarely in the same week. Outcries about war crimes often happened only years later. And that was NOT regarded as a problem but as the normal thing, things were just as they were.
That comment is about people deciding to trust social media.
I will “bite” on your ramblings.
Do you really believe that the press of 1940s Germany and Japan was not 99.9% lies and 1000 different way of lying?
Let’s roll it back even before 1940s. Don’t you think it is strange that it is called Spanish Flu, even though the first case was in Kansas, USA?
A lot more Germans knew about the concentration camps than just the ones directly involved in it. People didn't want to know and kept looking away or didn't care for the people they believed were scum.
It's conditioned by the Nazis via indoctrinating Germans to hate minorities (even kids were made to join the Hitler Youth) at that time, or true apathy. Unless they were the ones who are being treated the same way by someone else. Like when the Soviets managed to arrive during the latter years of the war, they did mistreat those people (even after the war).
Don't forget that all of Europe had a very strong antisemitism context. The Nazis didn't start from zero on their hate of the Jews, and help from the rest of Europe (and America) was scarce because of that
… that was only heard from word of mouth or tabloids (newspapers).
I think your question is one of perception.
People trusted “tabloids” (newspapers) back then. They were respected institutions, generally. Public payed attention to investigative journalists, and that’s how stuff got out.
They read news. From newspapers. This was normal.
Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit or Twitter (X)
…And these kind of took over from sheer engagement, not necessarily reliability.
TBH, if someone on X told me the sky is blue, I’d still be skeptical. Hence I’m the opposite of you, I suppose: I find it wild that these artificial spaces have become the world’s de-facto news feed over professional journalism.
Does any of that make social media any better?
It’s the reason why they would prefer a first hand encounter from someone via social media without the narrative being twisted.
This is the lie social media sells.
Nothing is vetted. There's no standard of information hygiene on social media. Anything posted could be a misunderstanding, or fabricated, or deliberate clickbait propaganda.
In fact, that's exactly what engages the algorithms; its why modern social media is such a cesspool, because clickbait is easier to produce and more engaging than professional journalism, and the algorithm boosts that garbage to everyone.
But I'm not in this thread to argue this thoroughly.
Frankly, if you came to Lemmy with the belief that social media (especially corporate social media) is more reliable than news outlets... I don't know what to tell you.
Faking photographs had been a thing for nearly 100 years by that point.
https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/...
This is one of the first examples from 1857.
Here's an article about the progression of it:
You know newspapers, letters, the radio, and movies existed back then, right? The press was around?
Two or three components, the military had press with them.
Also, exploiting war crimes by the enemy for propaganda reasons was very important for morale, so it was a high priority thing to have writers and camera people available to document things.
Regarding distribution, specifically the Germans put the info into weekly cinema productions, https://en.wikipedia.org/... But there was also radio and newspapers.
Ultimately it depended on either the military or reporters uncovering it and then reporting it.
Japan did establish Unit 731
Not sure how that was in that case.
edit:
I actually forgot something crucial: There was censorship. The military opened every single letter that came from or was sent to theaters of war. They would let things go through or censor them, depending on whether they deemed something either bad for political or military reasons.
So in many cases there was NO way to get specific news back home.
or people with stories and maybe pictures sought out reporters/newspapers
There's multiple sources mentioned, but the very brave Witold Pilecki actually infiltrated Auschwitz to get information out to the Polish resistance.
And then then broke out again.
wow. just wow. I mean even though they did not know what was going on there they had to know it was going to be bad. to volunteer for that. and then how it goes on for him after the war. thank you for that read.
There was a concentration camp near my hometown in Germany. It was a "work camp" not a "destruction camp", which just meant they had no gas chambers and people were murdered through extremely hard labour in a quarry. The museum there has a collection of letters that show the interactions between ordinary people and the camp authorities. As far as I remember they had the following conversations on display:
People saw a lot and people talked. Sometimes the Nazis even accidentally spread rumours about atrocities themselves: You probably heard of the story that human fat of murdered Jews was used as soap. Well, this was only a small scale project with about 100kg produced and used localy in an institute of anatomy. It seems like the Nazis themselves exaggerated this because it was useful to intimidate prisoners or made for a good joke among guards. Coincidentally this resembled anti-German propaganda the British had used in WWI. So when British intelligence got reports about this, they started questioning whether the news they recieved about the holocaust were true at all, slowing down their efforts on this matter.
thanks for using Leebra!
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I don’t know about specific programs like Unit 731. But in general: People wrote letters. People came home and talked to their spouses. Concerning the Germans: A lot of people were involved. The Einsatzgruppen were staffed by ordinary police. The Waffen SS fought alongside the ordinary Wehrmacht which had their ugly share of atrocities. All these people wrote and came home and talked. And the concentration camps on German home soil were not isolated. People saw what happened there. People worked there as civilians. People who say the general public didn’t know are lying.
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