Does NATO stand a chance in a war against Russia?
That depends what kind of war. Russia has quite different military doctrines than the USA and NATO in general.If Russia invaded Europe, according to old Cold War plans, it’d be a defeat for them. They simply lack the necessary force. They are not prepared for this kind of force projection, their army is not designed to face NATO forces as an attacking force. If a Russian invasion ever occured, it’d be in the Baltic states or somewhere else in the buffer zone. In any case, it’ll be very limited and the Russians will try to achieve a status quo before major NATO forces drive them out or their little adventure escalates into a worldwide shitstorm.But if NATO invaded Russia, that’ s a whole different story. In this case, NATO would very well lose. The Russians are well prepared to defend their Motherland, and they have strong traditions doing so. Not to mention that NATO also lacks the necessary ground potential. Most likely they’d grind to a standstill somewhere around the Dnepr, and then it’s either nukes or GTFO.To summarize, a NATO-Russian war would not lead anywhere, in any case. There is no point trying to win small territories from each other while risking to lose everything. (And I am not talking only about a potential nuclear scenario: there are serious economic ties tangling the two factions to each other, and straining them would be almost as bad as bombing each others’ cities.) As neither side could invade the other’s territory and occupy enough land to cripple the opponent into submission, it’d be just a very nasty tug of war.Finally let me point out that no wars are repeated exactly as the previous one, yet military planners tend to fall into the mistake of preparing for it. In WW2, the demise of France was to prepare for trench warfare and mass attacks again, but they got mobile armies and air support. Britain still believed in the might of the battleship, just to have its ass kicked by Japan and have most of its warships locked in Scapa Flow by German submarines. Most people nowadays imagine a war between Russia and NATO as some strange mix of WW2 and Cold War plans. No it’ll never happen. Not that way.
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.