I came across an article this week about how a museum at a small Japanese university is going to display pictures of WWII doctors performing dissections on eight United States airmen while they were still conscious.
I got about halfway through reading it before feeling sick to my stomach and closing the browser.
Thankfully, the article didn’t have any pictures.
But I simply couldn’t shake the image of eight of my countrymen being ripped to shreds in a foreign land.
The panic and dread they must have felt.
The shear, unimaginable terror.
It shakes me just thinking about it.
Though these pictures depict perhaps one of the most gruesome ways imaginable to die, I absolutely commend Kyushu University for ?showing them to the world.
No, I am not some sort of maniac that takes a sick ?pleasure out of my own ?disgust.
I just cannot think of a better way to commemorate those soldiers than to turn their gruesome deaths into a lesson for those to come.
I think a lot of the pain in the world can be traced from the fact that everyone absolutely refuses to learn from history.
Not just their own history, but that of others, as well.
Even today, we refuse to learn from the slave trade of the past, profiting off the barely-paid workers from around the globe.
And I think the reason we never seem to learn our lessons is that the horrific parts of the past are covered up, swept under the rug and? simply forgotten.
Facts become legend, legend becomes myth, myth ?becomes nothing.
Though I hate the idea of seeing the horrific final moments of brave U.S. soldiers, the alternative is to act as if the pictures were never taken and that these men didn’t meet their end by the hands of monsters.
And if we were to simply ignore these pictures — sending them to the furnace, never to be spoken of again — what would be gained by their tragic deaths?
Quiet shame on the part of a Japanese society trying to move forward?
Heartache of the families that never had their loved ones come home from war?
It seems crass and disgusting, but the fact of the matter is we need these constant ?reminders of human evil.
We tend to wrap ourselves in our worlds of Netflix and cheap fast food, and ?we forget.
We forget how horrifically deep the hearts of men ?can reach.
War, murder, slavery and all other atrocities happen not because there are bad men in the world.
They happen because good men have decided to ignore them.
If we are to move anywhere as a society, we need to realize the faults in ?our past.
And I don’t mean the past of the country you ?specifically live in.
I mean the entirety of humanity’s past, a history ?written in blood.
It is only after we’ve seen these atrocities that we can truly understand them and, therefore, avoid them.
kevsjack@indiana.edu
