Historically, why is Spain's economy so bad? Why does Spain stay so far behind the rest of Europe? How do Germany and France get destroyed in two World Wars and still end up so far ahead of Spain?
Alejandro provided a great answer.Also, your examples are wrong. Germany and France were flooded with American money to re-construct after WWII - partially because the main goal was to keep them prosperous so that communist vote would remain a very tiny minority.Spain didn’t have that. It self-destroyed in a civil war, then decades of isolationism followed. And remember before the civil was it wasn’t doing great either. Basically the 200 years prior to the current Spanish democracy were terrible for Spain’s economy and mindset. It lost colonies while retaining an old-fashioned mindset in its elites that despised actual work and rather seeked to remain big landowners or be paid by the Crown as the peak of a noble family’s achievements.All things considered, the progress 1975–2017 has been awesome.
How cruel were the Japanese in WW2?
Warning: NSFW pictures belowI believe that the cruelty of the Japanese during the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War 2 is severely understated.When they first invaded China in 1937, they went around the city of Nanking (former capital of China) killing and raping women and children. They had contests to see who could kill the most civilians with a sword.The Nanking Massacre was disastrous. It is reported that somewhere between 50,000 and 300,000 people lost their lives during the barbaric and brutal invasion. It was six weeks of pure horror for the unarmed populace of the city.But what followed was even more evil and monstrous. The Japanese decided to experiment on the victims in what is known as Unit 731. The activities that went on in there included vivisection (live dissection), germ warfare attacks such as dropping plague infected fleas from the sky onto major cities, frostbite testing that involved dipping various appendages into freezing water. After this, according to testimony from a Japanese officer, which said that it "was determined after the 'frozen arms, when struck with a short stick, emitted a sound resembling that which a board gives when it is struck”, ice was chipped away and the limb was doused in water.They would also force syphilis-infected individuals to have sexual intercourse with non-infected individuals to transmit the disease. According to a prison guard…“Infection of venereal disease by injection was abandoned, and the researchers started forcing the prisoners into sexual acts with each other. Four or five unit members, dressed in white laboratory clothing completely covering the body with only eyes and mouth visible, handled the tests. A male and female, one infected with syphilis, would be brought together in a cell and forced into sex with each other. It was made clear that anyone resisting would be shot."There was also rape and forced pregnancy, weapon testing and other experiments such as starvation, high-pressure chambers, temperature experimentation, placed into centrifuges and spun until death, injection with animal blood, lethal doses of X-rays, chemical testing in gas chambers, injection with sea water and being burned or buried alive.And those were only the crimes against civilians. Imagine what they got away with in POW camps.Awful, so awful.