Comments by "Winston Smith" (@kryts27) on "Biographics" channel.

  1. When Hirohito broadcast to the Japanese nation, over the radio, he did not declare, "Japan will surrender to the Allies" (as you claimed), but "the war has not necessarily progressed to the advantage of Japan". Obviously a masterly understatement, but also cleverly deflecting his part in orchestrating it.
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  2. The Weeping Camel, a Mongolian movie. One of the most extraordinary films I have ever seen. The Mongolians seem to have calm shamanic powers when watching this movie. Heartwarming.
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  3. Wrong, he didn't have a plan how to restrain (or poison or exile) Wilhelm II. Hence, a losing war for Germany 47 years later
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  4. 1949, not 1946 was the total victory for the CCP over the KMT
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  5. Dran Drey. If you embrace a monster, you will end up eaten :-)
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  6. Turkic tribes have a tradition of kidnapping women and then marrying them (if they were unmarried). Sometimes this is "arranged". It's a common tradition still often practised in central Asia and Mongolia among tribes that are still nomadic. The young women that are kidnapped are not sex slaves or necessarily trapped by circumstance, they have rights of choice and can refuse the match (despite being kidnapped) and return to their parents. Apparently.
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  7. Khalkhin Gol was the "largest tank battle in history"? How about the Battle of Kursk? Battle of The Brody? Second Battle of the Ardennes (Battle of the Bulge), and so on?
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  8. No Christian Armageddon rubbish. We have enough armageddon on Earth by these so called leaders, thankyou
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  9.  @augusthayek4957  Mr Hayek, you are full of diatribe and solipsism. Whether Qing or Republican China did or did not rule Manchuria (at any time) is a moot point, Japan had never ruled it, legally or under occupation, in history before 1931. Furthermore, the last Qing emperor, Pu Yi, was set up as puppet king by the Kwantung army (Imperial army of Japan branch) in the puppet state of Manchukuo (Manchuria) until Japan's defeat in 1945. The US president, FDR, did not force the Japanese to go to war prima-facie, as a result of the oil embargo on Japan in 1940-41, that was in response of Japan's long ongoing invasion of China in 1937 (and atrocities there such as the Rape of Nanking, surprisingly well documented by Westerners there, including a Nazi, John Rabe), and the invasion of Indo-China in 1940 after the defeat of France. It was Japan going on the warpath in this period, not the Americans. I am not going to exonerate Westerners either, seeing that we're discussing twentieth century history. Equally bad as Japan in this era was Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (until Khrushchev, even though he did not close all the gulags).
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  10. Very difficult to deconvolve mythology from fact for a spiritual figure living thousands of years ago :-)
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  11. Depends on where he was teaching. Many middle and high schools in China, during the Cultural Revolution, full scale battles were going on between teachers and radicalized red guard teenagers. Teachers were not only illegally locked up and beaten, in some cases the violence and rancour was so bad that teachers and students were murdered. This was all about Mao's anti-intellectualism and class conflict mania.
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  12. Why, he was a complete Psychopath? He would exterminate all of his wives and children if it were expedient to him; a Chronos figure.
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  13. That was explained. He died in Austria aged 21.
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  14. Hirohito narrowly avoided being indicted as a war criminal at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial in 1946, as he probably was. As actual emperor at least he should have abdicated in favour of his young son Akihito, at least for the reason, that it looks bad to continue be the reigning monarch after his country surrendered unconditionally. However, that huge egotist general McArthur intervened, and began to fulminate the fiction that the emperor was an innocent victim of a cabal of military officers (who were serving him during Japan's war in China and the Pacific War).
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  15.  @GabeNsApostle  Not directly, but you don't have any evidence that Hirohito was not involved either. Hirohito's grandfather, Emperor Meiji, was highly involved in the government he was forming at the time; the Meiji Restoration (wresting rule of Japan from the Shogunate). Again, the Meiji Emperor tended to act from behind the scenes, not more in the open like Western democracies and post-war democratized Japan. Also in Japan, before the defeat, Emperor Hirohito was worshiped like a deity (direct descendent from the sun goddess Amaterasu, mythology). Japanese at the time were willing to die for him unconditionally. Hence the cult of "honourable" warrior death (bushido) and the Kamikaze pilots for example. How can Hirohito's military officers disobey him in such a system? While royalty in other countries may have had the red carpet treatment, it has been a long time since Western culture has been similarly affected, where the king is worshipped as a god. The last were the New Kingdom Egyptian Pharaohs I think.
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  16. Mongolian women are considerably more equal to their menfolk than, for example, the Chinese and Westerners (until recent decades).
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  17. Also I like you to review famous musicians and composers as well.
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  18. Glory are u freakin serious? Where do u put that tiny brain of yours?
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  19. Yes, and his story is even more interesting than Billy the Kid's. Smaller gang, but the Jerilderie letter to colonial authorities that Kelly dictated to his second in command, Joe Byrne, after he held up the town of Jerilderie and robbed its bank is unusual in the time when literacy rates were not high. Furthermore, the siege of Glenrowan hotel, and the home-made armour that Kelly wore at the shootout there with police is even more memorial. Kelly was a cop killer and hater, without a doubt.
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  20. I'm not a Thatcherite, nor a fan of her but i do admire some things she did. You forgot to mention 2 things that were salient about social and legal changes she put into place. Firstly, she removed peer privileges with members of the House of Lords, making that institution more democratic, more representative (dare i say it, more senatorial) and less like a feudal relict especially for peer of the realm privileges. Thatcher was not a fan of the aristocracy. Secondly, she was an atheist and opposed religious instruction in schools and interference of church and clergy in the matters of state. While i applaud this, she did not unfortunately go further and tax religious institutions on prime real estate holdings and tax free moneys earned, just like a business would.
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  21. This sounds like a non-existant paradise discription out of the many surahs of the Koran. As fictional as Middle Earth in Tolkien's works. Samarkand is quite legendary though.
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  22. How can u make a legitimate claim to a non-French empire Simon? France, as everyone knows, is a republic. Is this made in the same jest as the Dauphin and the Duke of Bilgewater? ;-)
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  23. "Die for the motherland"? The German expression is, " die for the Fatherland". You need to proof read your narrative script a little better, Simon. Otherwise, interesting. Can you do other Nazi henchmen, like Ribbentrop, and Soviet henchmen like Molotov, Khrushchev, and Trotsky?
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  24. Banishment? Sounds like Wikileaks in our day
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  25. Correction: For the public record, Japan invaded Manchuria via the Mukden Incident. The invasion of China proper indeed happened in 1937 via the Marco Polo Bridge incident. Invasion of China was followed by the Rape of Nanking (in which 200,000 to 300,000 people died).
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  26. Mistake. Eisenhower was a General in 1945, not the President of the United States. That election to presidency would come later in 1953
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  27. A powerful narrative of a man passing through a senseless system of brutality and death, which murdered many of his relatives and friends along the way, and coming out the other end sane, focused and reaching for the light. A kind of a twentieth century Spinoza.
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  28. It wasn't just the lumpen proletariat, such as this women and her husband who were attracted to Nazism, also wealthy and educated men like Reinhardt Heydrich (an embodiment of evil possibly worse than Hitler) were as well. Hey Simon, a few more good guys if you please, like Einstein, Spinosa, David Hume, Johann Sebastian Bach, Emmerline Pankhurst, Marie Curie and so on.
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  29. Incorrect that the invasion of Manchuria (to the Showa cabal government, the puppet state of Manchukuo), was not known by Hirohito. Almost certainly, by this time (and later), Hirohito was steering military matters (mainly in China), secretly behind the "Chrysanthemum curtain".
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  30. Here is more evidence that Hirohito secretly orchestrated a devastating war against a weak China, leading to the ghastly Rape of Nanking massacre, something you never mentioned in your podcast Simon (for shame). The Imperial Japanese army leadership badly wanted to settle accounts with the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and was less keen on war with China (the one thing Hirohito preferred was war with China). The secret power struggle with the emperor vs. The army was favoured in continuing war with China (and eventually the United States), was resolved in the historically important Battle of Khalkhin Gol in 1939 (where Japan invaded the Soviet Union and had their asses kicked by the Russians).
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  31. Ah, patterm baldness. You can blame your X-chromosome from your mum.
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  32. Ned Kelly in Central Asia. Did he wear a green silk sash under his short or tunic?
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  33. Too many baddies Simon. Can you review true heroes instead of psychopaths? I've noticed that you have not reviewed Howard Florey and Ernst Chain. The work of these two men have probably saved hundreds of millions of lives instead of taking human life away for egotistical reasons, like Shoko Asahara's cult.
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  34. Bloody hell, i thought Jiang was a man on sight :-P
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  35. Everything about the Illuminati seemed laudable to me, except after I discovered the illuminati practised animal sacrifices as a "rebirth" ceremony. Hence it was highly remnant of similar Abrahamic traditions, and swathed in the ancient death wish superstitions and therefore repugnant. Counter to what I perceive to be the Enlightenment tradition of reason and dispelling such darkly centred phantasms.
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