title: Pax Americana

text: The United States lost its Pacific and regionally bounded nature towards the end of the 19th century. The government adopted protectionism after the Spanish–American War and built up the navy, the "Great White Fleet", to expand the reach of U.S. power. When Theodore Roosevelt became President in 1901, he accelerated a foreign policy shift away from isolationism towards foreign intervention which had begun under his predecessor, William McKinley. The Philippine–American War arose from the ongoing Philippine Revolution against imperialism. Interventionism found its formal articulation in the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, proclaiming the right of the United States to intervene in the affairs of weak states in the Americas in order to stabilize them, a moment that underlined the emergent U.S. regional hegemony. By 1900, the United States possessed the world's largest industrial capacity and national income, having surpassed both the United Kingdom and Germany.


title: Pax Americana

text: The United States had been criticized for not taking up the hegemonic mantle following the disintegration of "Pax Britannica" before the First World War and during the interwar period due to the absence of established political structures, such as the World Bank or United Nations which would be created after World War II, and various internal policies, such as protectionism. Though, the United States participated in the Great War, according to Woodrow Wilson:


title: Pax Americana

text: [...] to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power and to set up amongst the really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth insure the observance of those principles.


title: Pax Americana

text: [...] for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own government, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.


title: Pax Americana

text: The United States' entry into the Great War marked the abandonment of the traditional American policy of isolation and independence of world politics. Not at the close of the Civil War, not as the result of the Spanish War, but in the Interwar period did the United States become a part of the international system. With this global reorganization from the Great War, there were those in the American populace that advocated an activist role in international politics and international affairs by the United States. Activities that were initiated did not fall into political-military traps and, instead, focused on economic-ideological approaches that would increase the American Empire and general worldwide stability. Following the prior path, a precursor to the United Nations and a league to enforce peace, the League of Nations, was proposed by Woodrow Wilson. This was rejected by the American Government in favor of more economic-ideological approaches and the United States did not join the League. Additionally, there were even proposals of extending the Monroe Doctrine to Great Britain put forth to prevent a second conflagration on the European theater. Ultimately, the United States' proposals and actions did not stop the factors of European nationalism spawned by the previous war, the repercussions of Germany's defeat, and the failures of the Treaty of Versailles from plunging the globe into a Second World War.


title: Pax Americana

text: Between World War I and World War II, America also sought to continue to preserve "Pax America" as a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Some sought the peaceful and orderly evolution of existing conditions in the western hemisphere and nothing by immediate changes. Before 1917, the position of the United States government and the feelings of the nation in respect to the "Great War" initially had properly been one of neutrality. Its interests remained untouched, and nothing occurred of a nature to affect those interests.


title: Pax Americana

text: The average American's sympathies, on the other hand, if the feelings of the vast majority of the nation had been correctly interpreted, was with the Allied (Entente) Powers. The population of the United States was revolted at the ruthlessness of the Prussian doctrine of war, and German designs to shift the burden of aggression encountered skeptical derision. The American populace saw themselves safeguarding liberal peace in the Western World. To this end, the American writer Roland Hugins stated:


title: Pax Americana

text: The truth is that the United States is the only high-minded Power left in the world. It is the only strong nation that has not entered on a career of imperial conquest, and does not want to enter on it. [...] There is in America little of that spirit of selfish aggression which lies at the heart of militarism. Here alone exists a broad basis for "a new passionate sense of brotherhood, and a new scale of human values." We have a deep abhorrence of war for war's sake; we are not enamored of glamour or glory. We have a strong faith in the principle of self-government. We do not care to dominate alien peoples, white or colored; we do not aspire to be the Romans of tomorrow or the "masters of the world." The idealism of Americans centers in the future of America, wherein we hope to work out those principles of liberty and democracy to which we are committed. This political idealism, this strain of pacifism, this abstinence from aggression and desire to be left alone to work out our own destiny, has been manifest from the birth of the republic. We have not always followed our light, but we have never been utterly faithless to it.


title: Pax Americana

text: It was observed during this time that the initial defeat of Germany opened a moral recasting of the world. The battles between Germans and Allies were seen as far less battles between different nations than they represent the contrast between Liberalism and reaction, between the aspirations of democracy and the Wilhelminism gospel of iron.


title: Pax Americana

text: The modern "Pax Americana" era is cited by both supporters and critics of U.S. foreign policy after World War II. However, from 1946 to 1992 "Pax Americana" is considered a partial international order, as it applied only to capitalist bloc countries, being preferable for some authors to speak about a "Pax Americana et Sovietica". Many commentators and critics focus on American policies from 1992 to the present, and as such, it carries different connotations depending on the context. For example, it appears three times in the 90-page document, "Rebuilding America's Defenses," by the Project for the New American Century, but is also used by critics to characterize American dominance and hyperpower as imperialist in function and basis. From about the mid-1940s until 1991, U.S. foreign policy was dominated by the Cold War, and characterized by its significant international military presence and greater diplomatic involvement. Seeking an alternative to the isolationist policies pursued after World War I, the United States defined a new policy called containment to oppose the spread of communism.


title: Pax Americana

text: The modern "Pax Americana" may be seen as similar to the period of peace in Rome, "Pax Romana". In both situations, the period of peace was 'relative peace'. During both "Pax Romana" and "Pax Americana" wars continued to occur, but it was still a prosperous time for both Western and Roman civilizations. It is important to note that during these periods, and most other times of relative tranquility, the peace that is referred to does not mean complete peace. Rather, it simply means that the civilization prospered in their military, agriculture, trade, and manufacturing.


title: Pax Americana

text: From the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 until the First World War in 1914, the United Kingdom played the role of offshore-balancer in Europe, where the balance of power was the main aim. It was also in this time that the British Empire became the largest empire of all time. The global superiority of British military and commerce was guaranteed by dominance of a Europe lacking in strong nation-states, and the presence of the Royal Navy on all of the world's oceans and seas. In 1905, the Royal Navy was superior to any two navies combined in the world. It provided services such as suppression of piracy and slavery. In this era of peace, though, there were several wars between the major powers: the Crimean War, the Franco-Austrian War, the Austro-Prussian War, the Franco-Prussian War, and the Russo-Japanese War, as well as numerous other wars. "La Belle Époque", William Wohlforth argued, was rather "Pax Britannica", "Pax Russica" and later "Pax Germanica", and between 1853 and 1871 it was not "Pax" of any kind.


title: Pax Americana

text: During the "Pax Britannica", America developed close ties with Britain, evolving into what has become known as a "special relationship" between the two. The many commonalities shared with the two nations (such as language and history) drew them together as allies. Under the managed transition of the British Empire to the Commonwealth of Nations, members of the British government, such as Harold Macmillan, liked to think of Britain's relationship with America as similar to that of a progenitor Greece to America's Rome. Throughout the years, both have been active in North American, Middle Eastern, and Asian countries.


title: Pax Americana

text: After the Second World War, no armed conflict emerged among major Western nations themselves, and no nuclear weapons were used in open conflict. The United Nations was also soon developed after World War II to help keep peaceful relations between nations and establishing the veto power for the permanent members of the UN Security Council, which included the United States.


title: Pax Americana

text: In the second half of the 20th century, the USSR and US superpowers were engaged in the Cold War, which can be seen as a struggle between hegemonies for global dominance. After 1945, the United States enjoyed an advantageous position with respect to the rest of the industrialized world. In the Post–World War II economic expansion, the US was responsible for half of global industrial output, held 80 percent of the world's gold reserves, and was the world's sole nuclear power. The catastrophic destruction of life, infrastructure, and capital during the Second World War had exhausted the imperialism of the Old World, victor and vanquished alike. The largest economy in the world at the time, the United States recognized that it had come out of the war with its domestic infrastructure virtually unscathed and its military forces at unprecedented strength. Military officials recognized the fact that Pax Americana had been reliant on the effective United States air power, just as the instrument of Pax Britannica a century earlier was its sea power. In addition, a "unipolar moment" was seen to have occurred following the collapse of the Soviet Union.


title: Pax Americana

text: The term "Pax Americana" was explicitly used by John F. Kennedy in the 1960s, who advocated against the idea, arguing that the Soviet bloc was composed of human beings with the same individual goals as Americans and that such a peace based on "American weapons of war" was undesirable:


title: Pax Americana

text: I have, therefore, chosen this time and place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth too rarely perceived. And that is the most important topic on earth: peace. What kind of peace do I mean and what kind of a peace do we seek? Not a "Pax Americana" enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, and the kind that enables men and nations to grow, and to hope, and build a better life for their children—not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women, not merely peace in our time but peace in all time.


title: Pax Americana

text: Beginning around the Vietnam War, the 'Pax Americana' term had started to be used by the critics of American Imperialism. Here in the late 20th-century conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States, the charge of "Neocolonialism" was often aimed at Western involvement in the affairs of the Third World and other developing nations. NATO became regarded as a symbol of "Pax Americana" in West Europe:


title: Pax Americana

text: Currently, the "Pax Americana" is based on the military preponderance beyond challenge by any combination of powers and projection of power throughout the world's "commons"—neutral sea, air and space. This projection is coordinated by the Unified Command Plan which divides the world on regional branches controlled by a single command. Integrated with it are global network of military alliances (the Rio Pact, NATO, ANZUS and bilateral alliances with Japan and several other states) coordinated by Washington in a hub-and-spokes system and worldwide network of several hundreds of military bases and installations. Neither the Rio Treaty, nor NATO, for Robert J. Art, "was a regional collective security organization; rather both were regional imperia run and operated by the United States". Former Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski drew an expressive summary of the military foundation of "Pax Americana" shortly after the "unipolar moment":


title: Pax Americana

text: Besides the military foundation, there are significant non-military international institutions backed by American financing and diplomacy (like the United Nations and WTO). The United States invested heavily in programs such as the Marshall Plan and in the reconstruction of Japan, economically cementing defense ties that owed increasingly to the establishment of the Iron Curtain/Eastern Bloc and the widening of the Cold War.


title: Pax Americana

text: Being in the best position to take advantage of free trade, culturally indisposed to traditional empires, and alarmed by the rise of communism in China and the detonation of the first Soviet atom bomb, the historically non-interventionist US also took a keen interest in developing multilateral institutions which would maintain a favorable world order among them. The International Monetary Fund and International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank), part of the Bretton Woods system of international financial management was developed and, until the early 1970s, the existence of a fixed exchange rate to the US dollar. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was developed and consists of a protocol for normalization and reduction of trade tariffs.


title: Pax Americana

text: With the fall of the Iron Curtain, the demise of the notion of a "Pax Sovietica", and the end of the Cold War, the US maintained significant contingents of armed forces in Europe and East Asia. The institutions behind the Pax Americana and the rise of the United States unipolar power have persisted into the early 21st century. The ability of the United States to act as "the world's policeman" has been constrained by its own citizens' historic aversion to foreign wars. Though there has been calls for the continuation of military leadership, as stated in "Rebuilding America's Defenses":


title: Pax Americana

text: The American peace has proven itself peaceful, stable, and durable. It has, over the past decade, provided the geopolitical framework for widespread economic growth and the spread of American principles of liberty and democracy. Yet no moment in international politics can be frozen in time; even a global "Pax Americana" will not preserve itself. [... What is required is] a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States' global responsibilities.


title: Pax Americana

text: This is reflected in the research of American exceptionalism, which shows that "there is some indication for [being a leader of an 'American peace'] among the [US] public, but very little evidence of unilateral attitudes". Resentments have arisen at a country's dependence on American military protection, due to disagreements with United States foreign policy or the presence of American military forces.


title: Pax Americana

text: In the "post-communism" world of the 21st-century, the French Socialist politician and former Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine describes the US as a hegemonic hyperpower, while the US political scientists John Mearsheimer and Joseph Nye counter that the US is not a "true" hegemony, because it does not have the resources to impose a proper, formal, global rule; despite its political and military strength, the US is economically equal to Europe, thus, cannot rule the international stage. Several other countries are either emerging or re-emerging as powers, such as China, Russia, India, and the European Union.


title: Pax Americana

text: Joseph Nye discredited the United States as not a "true" hegemony in his 2002 article titled "The New Rome Meets the New Barbarians". His book of the same year he opens: "Not since Rome has one nation loomed so large above the others." And his 1991 book he titled "Bound to Lead". "Leadership", translated into Greek, renders "hegemony"; an alternative translation is "archia" – Greek common word for "empire". Having defined the US hegemony as "not true", Nye looks for an analogy to the true empire: Decline, he writes, is not necessarily imminent. "Rome remained dominant for more than three centuries after the peak of its power ...


title: Pax Americana

text: In fact, there are striking parallels with the early "Pax Romana" (especially between 189 BC when the supremacy over the Mediterranean was won and the first annexation in 168 BC). Under that "Pax Romana" other states remained formally independent and very seldom were called "clients". The latter term became widely used only in the late medieval period. Usually, other states were called "friends and allies"—a popular expression under the "Pax Americana".


title: Pax Americana

text: One of the first to use the term "Pax Americana" was the Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy. In 1942, the Committee envisaged that the United States may have to supplant the British Empire. Therefore, the United States "must cultivate a mental view toward world settlement after this war which will enable us to impose our own terms, amounting perhaps to a Pax Americana". According to Swen Holdar, the founder of geopolitics Rudolf Kjellen (1864–1922) predicted the era of US global supremacy using the term "Pax Americana" shortly after World War I. Writing in 1945, Ludwig Dehio remembered that the Germans used the term "Pax Anglosaxonica" in a sense of Pax Americana since 1918:


title: Pax Americana

text: The United States, Dehio associates on the same page, withdrew to isolation on that occasion. "Rome, too, had taken a long time to understand the significance of her world role." Two years earlier, with the war still at its peak, the founder of the Paneuropean Union, Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, invoked the example of the two-centuries long "Pax Romana" which, he suggested, could be repeated if based on the preponderant US air power:


title: Pax Americana

text: However, Peffer was not certain that this would not happen: "It is conceivable that ... America might drift into empire, imperceptibly, stage by stage, in a kind of power-politics gravitation." He also noted that America was heading precisely in that direction: "That there are certain stirrings in this direction is apparent, though how deep they go is unclear."


title: Pax Americana

text: The depth soon became clarified. Two later critics of "Pax Americana", Michio Kaku and David Axelrod, interpreted the outcome of Pax Americana: "Gunboat diplomacy would be replaced by Atomic diplomacy. "Pax Britannica" would give way to "Pax Americana"." After the war, with the German and British militaries in tatters, only one force stood on the way to Pax Americana: the Soviet Army. Four years after this criticism was written, the Red Army withdrew, paving the way for the unipolar moment. Joshua Muravchik commemorated the event by titling his 1991 article, "At Last, Pax Americana". He detailed:


title: Pax Americana

text: The following year, in 1992, a US strategic draft for the post-Cold War period was leaked to the press. The person responsible for the confusion, former Assistant Secretary of State, Paul Wolfowitz, confessed seven years later: "In 1992 a draft memo prepared by my office at the Pentagon ... leaked to the press and sparked a major controversy." The draft's strategy aimed "to prevent any hostile power from dominating" a Eurasian region "whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power". He added: "Senator Joseph Biden ridiculed the proposed strategy as 'literally a "Pax Americana" ... It won't work ...' Just seven years later, many of these same critics seem quite comfortable with the idea of a "Pax Americana"."


title: Pax Americana

text: The post-Cold War period, concluded William Wohlforth, much less ambiguously deserves to be called "Pax Americana". "Calling the current period the true Pax Americana may offend some, but it reflects reality".


title: Pax Americana

text: The ‘’"Pax Americana"’’ motif reached its peak in the context of the 2003 Iraq War. The phrase "American Empire" appeared in one thousand news stories over a single six-month period in 2003. Jonathan Freedland observed:


title: Pax Americana

text: "The New York Review of Books" illustrated a 2002 piece on US might with a drawing of George Bush togged up as a Roman centurion, complete with shield and spears. Bush's visits to Germany in 2002 and 2006 resulted in further Bush-as-Roman-emperor invective appearing in the German press. In 2006, freelance writer, political satirist, and correspondent for the left-leaning "Die Tageszeitung", Arno Frank, compared the spectacle of the visit by "Imperator" Bush to "elaborate inspection tours of Roman emperors in important but not completely pacified provinces—such as Germania". In September 2002, Boston's WBUR-FM radio station titled a special on US imperial power with the tag ""Pax Americana"". "The Roman parallel", wrote Niall Ferguson in 2005, "is in danger of becoming something of a cliché." Policy analyst Vaclav Smil titled his 2010 book by what he intended to explain: "Why America Is Not a New Rome". The very phenomenon of the Roman-American association became the subject of research for Classicist Paul J. Burton.


title: Pax Americana

text: Peter Bender, in his 2003 article "America: The New Roman Empire", summarized: "When politicians or professors are in need of a historical comparison in order to illustrate the United States' incredible might, they almost always think of the Roman Empire." The article abounds with analogies:


title: Pax Americana

text: In 1998, American political author, Charles A. Kupchan, described the world order "After Pax Americana" and the next year "The Life after Pax Americana". In 2003, he announced "The End of the American Era". In 2012, however, he projected: "America's military strength will remain as central to global stability in the years ahead as it has been in the past."


title: Pax Americana

text: The Russian analyst Leonid Grinin argues that at present and in the nearest future "Pax Americana" will remain an effective tool of supporting the world order since the US concentrates too many leadership functions which no other country is able to take to the full extent. Thus, he warns that the destruction of "Pax Americana" will bring critical transformations of the World-system with unclear consequences.


title: Pax Americana

text: American political analyst Ian Bremmer argued that with the election of Donald Trump and the subsequent rise in populism in the west, as well as US withdrawal from international agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, NAFTA, and the Paris Climate Accords, that the "Pax Americana" is over.


title: Pax Americana

text: "American imperialism" is a term referring to the cultural & political outcomes or ideological elements of United States foreign policy. Since the start of the Cold War, the United States has economically and/or diplomatically supported friendly foreign governments, including many that overtly violated the civil and human rights of their own citizens and residents. American imperialism concepts were initially a product of capitalism critiques and, later, of theorists opposed to what they take to be aggressive United States policies and doctrines.


title: Pax Americana

text: Although there are various views of the imperialist nature of the United States, which describe many of the same policies and institutions as evidence of imperialism, explanations for imperialism vary widely. In spite of such literature, the historians Archibald Paton Thorton and Stuart Creighton Miller argue against the very coherence of the concept. Miller argues that the overuse and abuse of the term "imperialism" makes it nearly meaningless as an analytical concept.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: Allied war crimes include both alleged and legally proven violations of the laws of war by the Allies of World War II against either civilians or military personnel of the Axis powers. At the end of World War II, many trials of Axis war criminals took place, most famously the Nuremberg Trials and Tokyo Trials. In Europe, these tribunals were set up under the authority of the London Charter, which only considered allegations of war crimes committed by people who acted in the interests of the Axis powers. Some war crimes involving Allied personnel were investigated by the Allied powers and led in some instances to courts-martial. Some incidents alleged by historians to have been crimes under the law of war in operation at the time were, for a variety of reasons, not investigated by the Allied powers during the war, or were investigated and a decision was taken not to prosecute.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: According to an article in "Der Spiegel" by Klaus Wiegrefe, many personal memoirs of Allied soldiers have been willfully ignored by historians until now because they were at odds with the "greatest generation" mythology surrounding World War II. This has started to change, with books such as "The Day of Battle" by Rick Atkinson, in which he describes Allied war crimes in Italy, and "D-Day: The Battle for Normandy", by Antony Beevor. Beevor's latest work suggests that Allied war crimes in Normandy were much more extensive "than was previously realized".


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: The Allies claim that their militaries were directed to observe the Hague Conventions and Geneva Conventions and believed to be conducting a just war fought for defensive reasons. Violations of the conventions did occur, however, including the forcible return of Soviet citizens who had been collaborating with Axis forces to the USSR at the end of the war. The military of the Soviet Union also frequently committed war crimes, which are today known to have been at the direction of its government. These crimes included waging wars of aggression and mass killings of prisoners of war, and repressing the population of conquered countries.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: Antony Beevor describes the Soviet rape of German women during the occupation of Germany as the "greatest phenomenon of mass rape in history", and has estimated that at least 1.4 million women were raped in East Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia alone. He asserts that Soviet women and girls liberated from slave labor in Germany were also violated.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: Individual commentators such as the German historian and left-wing antiwar activist Jörg Friedrich have argued that Allied aerial bombardment of civilian areas and cultural targets in enemy territory, including the German cities of Cologne, Hamburg, and Dresden, the Abbey in Monte Cassino in Italy during the Battle of Monte Cassino, the Japanese cities of Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, and especially the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which resulted in the total destruction of cities and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, should be considered war crimes; however, other observers point out that no positive or specific international law with respect to aerial warfare existed prior to and during World War II and that no Japanese and German officers were prosecuted at the post-World War II Allied war crime trials for the aerial raids on Shanghai, Chongqing, Warsaw, Rotterdam, and British cities during the Blitz.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: Charles P. Stacey, the Canadian official campaign historian, reports that on 14 April 1945 rumours spread that the popular commanding officer of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders of Canada, Lieutenant Colonel Frederick E. Wigle, had been killed by a civilian sniper. This rumour resulted in the Highlanders setting fire to civilian property in the town of Friesoythe in an act of reprisal. Stacey later wrote that the Canadian troops first removed German civilians from their property before setting the houses on fire; he commented that he was "glad to say that [he] never heard of another such case". It was later found that German soldiers had killed the Argylls' commander.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: According to Mitcham and von Stauffenberg, the Canadian army unit "The Loyal Edmonton Regiment" murdered German prisoners of war during the Invasion of Sicily.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: Following the Operation Dragoon landings in southern France and the collapse of the German military occupation in August 1944, large numbers of German troops could not escape from France and surrendered to the French Forces of the Interior. The Resistance executed a few of the Wehrmacht and most of the Gestapo and SS prisoners.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: The Maquis also executed 17 German prisoners of war at Saint-Julien-de-Crempse (in the Dordogne region), on 10 September 1944, 14 of whom have since been positively identified. The murders were revenge killings for German murders of 17 local inhabitants of the village of St. Julien on 3 August 1944, which were themselves reprisal killings in response to Resistance activity in the St. Julien region, which was home to an active Maquis cell.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: French Moroccan troops of the French Expeditionary Corps, known as Goumiers, committed mass crimes in Italy during and after the Battle of Monte Cassino and in Germany. According to Italian sources, more than 12,000 civilians, above all young and old women, children, were kidnapped, raped, or killed by Goumiers. This is featured in the Italian film "La Ciociara" ("Two Women") with Sophia Loren.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: French troops took part in the invasion of Germany, and France was assigned an occupation zone in Germany. Perry Biddiscombe quotes the original survey estimates that the French Goumiers for instance committed "385 rapes in the Constance area; 600 in Bruchsal; and 500 in Freudenstadt." The soldiers are also alleged to have committed widespread rape in the Höfingen District near Leonberg. Katz and Kaiser, though they mention rape, found no specific occurrences in either Höfingen or Leonberg compared to other towns.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: Anthony Clayton, in his book "France, Soldiers, and Africa", devotes several pages to the criminal activities of the Goumiers, which he partially ascribes to typical practices in their homeland.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: According to Norman Naimark, French Moroccan troops matched the behaviour of Soviet troops when it came to rape, in particular in the early occupation of Baden and Württemberg, provided the numbers are correct.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: The British, with other allied nations (mainly the U.S.) carried out air raids against enemy cities during World War II, including the bombing of the German city of Dresden, which killed around 25,000 people. While "no agreement, treaty, convention or any other instrument governing the protection of the civilian population or civilian property" from aerial attack was adopted before the war, the Hague Conventions did prohibit the bombardment of undefended towns. The city, largely untouched by the war had functioning rail communications to the Eastern front and was an industrial centre. Allied forces inquiry concluded that an air attack on Dresden was militarily justified on the grounds the city was defended.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: After the end of the war in Europe, German prisoners in Norway were reportedly forced to clear minefields under British supervision. The Germans complained to British Commander, general Andrew Thorn, but he dismissed the accusations arguing that the Germans prisoners were not POWs but "disarmed forces who had surrendered unconditionally." By 1946, when the cleanup ended, 392 were injured and 275 had died; this was contrary to the terms of the Geneva Conventions.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: On 4 May 1940, in response to Germany's intensive unrestricted submarine warfare, during the Battle of the Atlantic and its invasion of Denmark and Norway, the Royal Navy conducted its own unrestricted submarine campaign. The Admiralty announced that all vessels in the Skagerrak were to be sunk on sight without warning. This was contrary to the terms of the Second London Naval Treaty.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: In July 1941, the submarine HMS "Torbay" (under the command of Anthony Miers) was based in the Mediterranean where it sank several German ships. On two occasions, once off the coast of Alexandria, Egypt, and the other off the coast of Crete, the crew attacked and killed dozens of shipwrecked German sailors and troops. None of the shipwrecked survivors posed a major threat to "Torbay's" crew. Miers made no attempt to hide his actions, and reported them in his official logs. He received a strongly worded reprimand from his superiors following the first incident. Miers' actions violated the Hague Convention of 1907, which banned the killing of shipwreck survivors under any circumstances.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: On 10 September 1942, the Italian hospital ship "Arno "was torpedoed and sunk by RAF torpedo bombers north-east of Ras el Tin, near Tobruk. The British claimed that a decoded German radio message intimated that the vessel was carrying supplies to the Axis troops. "Arno" was the third Italian hospital ship sunk by British aircraft after the loss of the "Po" in the Adriatic Sea to aerial torpedoes on 14 March 1941 and the bombing of the "California" off Syracuse on 11 August 1942.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: On 18 November 1944, the German hospital ship "Tübingen "was sunk by two Beaufighter bombers off Pola, in the Adriatic Sea. The vessel had paid a brief visit to the allied-controlled port of Bari to pick up German wounded under the auspices of the Red Cross; despite the calm sea and the good weather that allowed a clear identification of the ship's Red Cross markings, it was attacked with rockets nine times. Six crewmembers were killed. American author Alfred M. de Zayas, who evaluated the 266 extant volumes of the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, identifies the sinking of "Tübingen" and other German hospital ships as war crimes.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: During Operation Overlord, British line of communication troops conducted small-scale looting in Bayeux and Caen in France, following their liberation, in violation of the Hague Conventions. Looting, rape, and prisoner executions were committed by British soldiers in a smaller scale than other armies throughout the war. On 23 May 1945, British troops in Schleswig-Holstein were alleged to have plundered Glücksburg castle, stealing jewellery, and desecrating 38 coffins from the castle's mausoleum.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: On 21 April 1945, British soldiers randomly selected and burned two cottages in Seedorf, Germany, in reprisal against local civilians who had hidden German soldiers in their cellars. Historian Sean Longden claims that violence against German prisoners and civilians who refused to cooperate with the British army "could be ignored or made light of".


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: The "London Cage", a MI19 prisoner of war facility in the UK during and immediately after the war, was subject to allegations of torture. The Bad Nenndorf interrogation centre in occupied Germany, managed by the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre, was the subject of an official inquiry in 1947, which found that there was "mental and physical torture during the interrogations" and that "personal property of the prisoners were stolen".


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: The Italian statistics record eight rapes and nineteen attempted rapes by British soldiers in Italy between September 1943 and December 1945. Various sources, including the Special Investigation Branch as well as evidences from Belgian reporters, said that rape and sexual harassment by British troops occurred frequently following the invasion of Sicily in 1943.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: In Germany, rapes of local women were committed by British and Canadian troops. Even elderly women were targeted. Though the Royal Military Police tended to turn a blind eye towards abuse of German prisoners and civilians who obstructed the army, rape was considered differently. Some officers, however, treated the behavior of their men with leniency. Some rapes were impulsively committed under the effects of alcohol or post-traumatic stress, but there were cases of premeditated attacks, such as the rape of three German women in the town of Neustadt am Rübenberge, or the attempted rape of two local girls at gunpoint in the village of Oyle, near Nienburg, where two soldiers attempted to coerce two girls into going into a nearby wood. When they refused, one was grabbed and dragged into the woods. When the girl began to scream, according to Longden, "one of the soldiers pulled a gun to silence her. Whether intentionally or in error, the gun went off, hitting her in the throat and killing her."


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: Rape also took place during the British advance towards Germany. During late 1944, with the army based across Belgium and the Netherlands, soldiers were billeted with local families or befriended them. In December 1944, it came to the attention of the authorities that there was a "rise of indecency with children" where abusers had exploited the "atmosphere of trust" that had been created with local families. While the army "attempted to investigate allegations, and some men were convicted, it was an issue that received little publicity."


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: According to an article in "Der Spiegel" by Klaus Wiegrefe, many personal memoirs of Allied soldiers have been wilfully ignored by historians until now because they were at odds with the "greatest generation" mythology surrounding World War II. However, this has recently started to change, with books such as "The Day of Battle", by Rick Atkinson, in which he describes Allied war crimes in Italy, and "D-Day: The Battle for Normandy", by Antony Beevor. Beevor's latest work suggests that Allied war crimes in Normandy were much more extensive "than was previously realized".


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: Among American WWII veterans who admitted to having committed war crimes was former Mafia hitman Frank Sheeran. In interviews with his biographer Charles Brandt, Sheeran recalled his war service with the Thunderbird Division as the time when he first developed a callousness to the taking of human life. By his own admission, Sheeran participated in numerous massacres and summary executions of German POWs, acts which violated the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 and the 1929 Geneva Convention on POWs. In his interviews with Brandt, Sheeran divided such massacres into four different categories.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: Secret wartime files made public only in 2006 reveal that American GIs committed more than 400 sexual offenses in Europe, including 126 rapes in England, between 1942 and 1945. A study by Robert J. Lilly estimates that a total of 14,000 civilian women in England, France and Germany were raped by American GIs during World War II. It is estimated that there were around 3,500 rapes by American servicemen in France between June 1944 and the end of the war and one historian has claimed that sexual violence against women in liberated France was common.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: In "Taken by Force", J. Robert Lilly estimates the number of rapes committed by U.S. servicemen in Germany to be 11,040. As in the case of the American occupation of France after the D-Day invasion, many of the American rapes in Germany in 1945 were gang rapes committed by armed soldiers at gunpoint.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: Although non-fraternization policies were instituted for the Americans in Germany, the phrase "copulation without conversation is not fraternization" was used as a motto by United States Army troops. The journalist Osmar White, a war correspondent from Australia who served with the American troops during the war, wrote that


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: A typical victimization with sexual assault by drunken American personnel marching through occupied territory involved threatening a German family with weapons, forcing one or more women to engage in sex, and putting the entire family out on the street afterward.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: As in the eastern sector of the occupation, the number of rapes peaked in 1945, but a high rate of violence against the German and Austrian populations by the Americans lasted at least into the first half of 1946, with five cases of dead German women found in American barracks in May and June 1946 alone.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: Carol Huntington writes that the American soldiers who raped German women and then left gifts of food for them may have permitted themselves to view the act as a prostitution rather than rape. Citing the work of a Japanese historian alongside this suggestion, Huntington writes that Japanese women who begged for food "were raped and soldiers sometimes left food for those they raped."


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: The black soldiers of America's segregated occupation force were both more likely to be charged with rape and severely punished. Heide Fehrenbach writes that, while the American black soldiers were in fact by no means free from indiscipline,


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: In 2015, German news magazine "Der Spiegel" reported that German historian Miriam Gebhardt "believes that members of the US military raped as many as 190,000 German women by the time West Germany regained sovereignty in 1955, with most of the assaults taking place in the months immediately following the US invasion of Nazi Germany. The author bases her claims in large part on reports kept by Bavarian priests in the summer of 1945."


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: The Soviet Union had not signed the Geneva Convention of 1929 that protected, and stated how prisoners of war should be treated. This cast doubt on whether the Soviet treatment of Axis prisoners was therefore a war crime, although prisoners "were [not] treated even remotely in accordance with the Geneva Convention", resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands. However, the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected this as a general argument. The tribunal held that the Hague Conventions (which the 1929 Geneva Convention did not replace but only augmented, and unlike the 1929 convention, were ones that the Russian Empire had ratified) and other customary laws of war, regarding the treatment of prisoners of war, were binding on all nations in a conflict whether they were signatories to the specific treaty or not.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: One of the Soviet Union's earliest war crimes was the "Katyn massacre" (Polish: "zbrodnia katyńska", "Katyń crime"; Russian: Катынская резня "Katynskaya reznya", "Katyn massacre", or Russian: Катынский расстрел, "Katyn execution by shooting"), a series of mass executions of Polish military officers and intelligentsia carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD ("People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs", aka the Soviet secret police) in April and May 1940. Though the killings took place at several places, the massacre is named after the Katyn Forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: Acts of mass rape and other war crimes were committed by Soviet troops during the occupation of East Prussia (Danzig), parts of Pomerania and Silesia, during the Battle of Berlin, and during the Battle of Budapest.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: Late in the war, Yugoslavia's communist partisans complained about the rapes and looting committed by the Soviet Army while traversing their country. Milovan Djilas later recalled Joseph Stalin's response,


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: Does Djilas, who is himself a writer, not know what human suffering and the human heart are? Can't he understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: Soviet war correspondent Natalya Gesse observed the Red Army in 1945: "The Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty. It was an army of rapists". Polish women as well as Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian slave laborers were also mass raped by the Red Army. The Soviet war correspondent Vasily Grossman described: "Liberated Soviet girls quite often complain that our soldiers rape them".


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: The Gegenmiao massacre of 1945; rapes and massacres conducted by the Soviet Army over half a group of 1,800 Japanese women and children who had taken refuge in the lamasery Gegenmiao/Koken-miao (葛根廟) during the Soviet invasion of Manchuria.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: Allied soldiers in the Pacific and Asian theatres sometimes killed Japanese soldiers who were attempting to surrender or after they had surrendered. A social historian of the Pacific War, John W. Dower, states that "by the final years of the war against Japan, a truly vicious cycle had developed in which the Japanese reluctance to surrender had meshed horrifically with Allied disinterest in taking prisoners". Dower suggests that most Japanese personnel were told that they would be "killed or tortured" if they fell into Allied hands and, as a consequence, most of those faced with defeat on the battlefield fought to the death or committed suicide. In addition, it was held to be shamefully disgraceful for a Japanese soldier to surrender, leading many to commit suicide or to fight to the death regardless of any beliefs concerning their possible treatment as POWs. In fact, the Japanese Field Service Code said that surrender was not permissible.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: And while it was "not official policy" for Allied personnel to take no prisoners, "over wide reaches of the Asian battleground it was everyday practice".


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: According to historian Mark Johnston, "the killing of unarmed Japanese was common" and Australian command tried to put pressure on troops to actually take prisoners, but the troops proved reluctant. When prisoners were indeed taken "it often proved difficult to prevent them from killing captured Japanese before they could be interrogated". According to Johnston, as a consequence of this type of behavior, "Some Japanese soldiers were almost certainly deterred from surrendering to Australians".


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: Major General Paul Cullen indicated that the killing of Japanese prisoners in the Kokoda Track Campaign was not uncommon. In one instance he recalled during the battle at Gorari that "the leading platoon captured five or seven Japanese and moved on to the next battle. The next platoon came along and bayoneted these Japanese." He also stated that he found the killings understandable but that it had left him feeling guilty.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: There has been relatively little research into the general treatment of Japanese prisoners taken by Chinese Nationalist forces, such as the National Revolutionary Army (NRA), during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), according to R. J. Rummel. However, civilians and conscripts, as well as Japanese civilians in China, were frequently maltreated by the Chinese military. Rummel says that Chinese peasants "often had no less to fear from their own soldiers than ... from the Japanese". The Nationalist military was reinforced by recruits gained through violent campaigns of conscription directed at Chinese civilians. According to Rummel:


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: This was a deadly affair in which men were kidnapped for the army, rounded up indiscriminately by press-gangs or army units among those on the roads or in the towns and villages, or otherwise gathered together. Many men, some the very young and old, were killed resisting or trying to escape. Once collected, they would be roped or chained together and marched, with little food or water, long distances to camp. They often died or were killed along the way, sometimes less than 50 percent reaching camp alive. Then recruit camp was no better, with hospitals resembling Nazi concentration camps... Probably 3,081,000 died during the Sino-Japanese War; likely another 1,131,000 during the Civil War—4,212,000 dead in total. "Just during conscription" [emphasis added].


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: Within some intakes of Nationalist conscripts, there was a death rate of 90% from disease, starvation or violence before they commenced training.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: During the Burma Campaign, there are recorded instances of British troops removing gold teeth from dead Japanese troops and displaying Japanese skulls as trophies.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: During the Allied occupation of Japan, Australian, British, Indian and New Zealand troops in Japan as part of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF) committed 62 recorded rapes. The commander of the BCOF's official reports state that members of the BCOF were convicted of committing 57 rapes in the period May 1946 to December 1947 and a further 23 between January 1948 and September 1951. No official statistics on the incidence of serious crimes during the BCOF's first three months in Japan (February to April 1946) are available. Australian historian Robin Gerster contends that while the official statistics underestimate the level of serious crime among BCOF members, Japanese police often did not pass reports they received on to the BCOF and that the serious crimes which were reported were properly investigated by BCOF military police. The penalties given to members of the BCOF convicted of serious crimes were "not severe", however, and those imposed on Australians were often mitigated or quashed by Australian courts.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: On January 26, 1943, the submarine USS "Wahoo" fired on survivors in lifeboats from the Japanese transport "Buyo Maru". Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood asserted that the survivors were Japanese soldiers who had turned machine-gun and rifle fire on the "Wahoo" after she surfaced, and that such resistance was common in submarine warfare. According to the submarine's executive officer, the fire was intended to force the Japanese soldiers to abandon their boats and none of them were deliberately targeted. Historian Clay Blair stated that the submarine's crew fired first and the shipwrecked survivors returned fire with handguns. The survivors were later determined to have included Allied POWs of the Indian 2nd Battalion, 16th Punjab Regiment, who were guarded by Japanese Army Forces from the 26th Field Ordnance Depot. Of 1,126 men originally aboard "Buyo Maru", 195 Indians and 87 Japanese died, some killed during the torpedoing of the ship and some killed by the shootings afterwards.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: On 4 March 1943, during and after the Battle of the Bismarck Sea (March 3–5, 1943), General George Kenney ordered U.S. patrol boats and Allied aircraft to attack Japanese rescue vessels, as well as the approximately 1,000 survivors from eight sunken Japanese troop transport ships on life rafts and swimming or floating in the sea. This was later State justified on the grounds that the rescued servicemen were next to their destination, and would have been rapidly landed at their military destination and promptly returned to active service in the battle. Many of the Allied aircrew accepted the attacks as necessary, while others were sickened.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: American soldiers in the Pacific often deliberately killed Japanese soldiers who had surrendered. According to Richard Aldrich, a professor of history at the University of Nottingham. who has published a study of the diaries kept by United States and Australian soldiers, they sometimes massacred prisoners of war. Dower states that in "many instances ... Japanese who did become prisoners were killed on the spot or en route to prison compounds". According to Aldrich it was common practice for U.S. troops not to take prisoners. This analysis is supported by British historian Niall Ferguson, who also says that, in 1943, "a secret [U.S.] intelligence report noted that only the promise of ice cream and three days leave would ... induce American troops not to kill surrendering Japanese".


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: Ferguson states such practices played a role in the ratio of Japanese prisoners to dead being 1:100 in late 1944. That same year, efforts were taken by Allied high commanders to suppress "take no prisoners" attitudes, among their own personnel (as these were affecting intelligence gathering) and to encourage Japanese soldiers to surrender. Ferguson adds that measures by Allied commanders to improve the ratio of Japanese prisoners to Japanese dead, resulted in it reaching 1:7, by mid-1945. Nevertheless, taking no prisoners was still standard practice among US troops at the Battle of Okinawa, in April–June 1945. Ferguson also suggests that "it was not only the fear of disciplinary action or of dishonor that deterred German and Japanese soldiers from surrendering. More important for most soldiers was the perception that prisoners would be killed by the enemy anyway, and so one might as well fight on."


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: Ulrich Straus, a US Japanologist, suggests that frontline troops intensely hated Japanese military personnel and were "not easily persuaded" to take or protect prisoners, as they believed that Allied personnel who surrendered, got "no mercy" from the Japanese. Allied soldiers believed that Japanese soldiers were inclined to feign surrender in order to make surprise attacks, a practice which was outlawed by the Hague Convention of 1907. Therefore, according to Straus, "Senior officers opposed the taking of prisoners on the grounds that it needlessly exposed American troops to risks". When prisoners nevertheless were taken at Guadalcanal, interrogator Army Captain Burden noted that many times these were shot during transport because "it was too much bother to take him in".


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: US historian James J. Weingartner attributes the very low number of Japanese in US POW compounds to two important factors, a Japanese reluctance to surrender and a widespread American "conviction that the Japanese were "animals" or "subhuman" and unworthy of the normal treatment accorded to POWs. The latter reason is supported by Ferguson, who says that "Allied troops often saw the Japanese in the same way that Germans regarded Russians—as Untermenschen".


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: In the Pacific theater, Allied servicemen engaged in human trophy collecting from Japanese soldiers. The phenomenon of "trophy-taking" specially by American personnel occurred on "a scale large enough to concern the Allied military authorities throughout the conflict, and was widely reported and commented on in the American and Japanese wartime press", with magazines and journals reporting widespread cases. Franklin Roosevelt himself was reportedly given a gift of a letter-opener made of a Japanese soldier's arm by U.S. Representative Francis E. Walter in 1944, which Roosevelt later ordered to be returned, calling for its proper burial. The news was also widely reported to the Japanese public, where the Americans were portrayed as "deranged, primitive, racist and inhuman". This, compounded by a previous "Life" magazine picture of a young woman with a skull trophy, was reprinted in the Japanese media and presented as a symbol of "American barbarism", causing national shock and outrage.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: The collection of Japanese body parts began quite early in the war, prompting a September 1942 order for disciplinary action against such souvenir taking. Harrison concludes that, since this was the first real opportunity to take such items (the Battle of Guadalcanal), "clearly, the collection of body parts on a scale large enough to concern the military authorities had started as soon as the first living or dead Japanese bodies were encountered".


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: When Japanese remains were repatriated from the Mariana Islands after the war, roughly 60 percent were missing their skulls.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: In a 13 June 1944 memorandum, the US Army Judge Advocate General, (JAG) Major General Myron C. Cramer, asserted that "such atrocious and brutal policies", were both "repugnant to the sensibilities of all civilized people" and also violations of the Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armies in the Field, which stated that: "After each engagement, the occupant of the field of battle shall take measures to search for the wounded and dead, and to protect them against pillage and maltreatment." Cramer recommended the distribution to all commanders of a directive ordering them to prohibit the misuse of enemy body parts.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: These practices were in addition also in violation of the unwritten customary rules of land warfare and could lead to the death penalty. The US Navy JAG mirrored that opinion one week later, and also added that "the atrocious conduct of which some US personnel were guilty could lead to retaliation by the Japanese which would be justified under international law".


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: Okinawan historian Oshiro Masayasu (former director of the Okinawa Prefectural Historical Archives) writes based on several years of research:


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: According to interviews carried out by "The New York Times" and published by them in 2000, several elderly people from an Okinawan village confessed that after the United States had won the Battle of Okinawa, three armed Marines kept coming to the village every week to force the villagers to gather all the local women, who were then carried off into the hills and raped. The article goes deeper into the matter and claims that the villagers' tale—true or not—is part of a "dark, long-kept secret" the unraveling of which "refocused attention on what historians say is one of the most widely ignored crimes of the war": 'the widespread rape of Okinawan women by American servicemen." Although Japanese reports of rape were largely ignored at the time, academic estimates have been that as many as 10,000 Okinawan women may have been raped. It has been claimed that the rape was so prevalent that most Okinawans over age 65 around the year 2000 either knew or had heard of a woman who was raped in the aftermath of the war. Military officials denied the mass rapings, and all surviving veterans refused "The New York Times" request for an interview.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: Professor of East Asian Studies and expert on Okinawa, Steve Rabson, said: "I have read many accounts of such rapes in Okinawan newspapers and books, but few people know about them or are willing to talk about them." He notes that plenty of old local books, diaries, articles and other documents refer to rapes by American soldiers of various races and backgrounds.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: An explanation given for why the US military has no record of any rapes is that few—if any—Okinawan women reported abuse, mostly out of fear and embarrassment. According to Nago, Okinawan police spokesman: "Victimized women feel too ashamed to make it public." Those who did report them are believed by historians to have been ignored by the U.S. military police. A large scale effort to determine the extent of such crimes has also never been called for. Over five decades after the war has ended the women who were believed to have been raped still refused to give a public statement, with friends, local historians and university professors who had spoken with the women instead saying they preferred not to discuss it publicly. Many people wondered why it never came to light after the inevitable American-Japanese babies the many women must have given birth to. In interviews, historians and Okinawan elders said that some of those Okinawan women who were raped and did not commit suicide did give birth to biracial children, but that many of them were immediately killed or left behind out of shame, disgust or fearful trauma. More often, however, rape victims underwent crude abortions with the help of village midwives. A large scale effort to determine the possible extent of these crimes has never been conducted. Over five decades after the war had ended, in the late 1990s, the women who were believed to have been raped still overwhelmingly refused to give public statements, instead speaking through relatives and a number of historians and scholars.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: There is substantial evidence that the U.S. had at least some knowledge of what was going on. Samuel Saxton, a retired captain, explained that the American veterans and witnesses may have intentionally kept the rape a secret, largely out of shame: "It would be unfair for the public to get the impression that we were all a bunch of rapists after we worked so hard to serve our country." Military officials formally denied the mass rapes, and all surviving related veterans refused request for interviews from "The New York Times". Masaie Ishihara, a sociology professor, supports this: "There is a lot of historical amnesia out there, many people don't want to acknowledge what really happened." Author George Feifer in his book "Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb", noted that by 1946 there had been fewer than 10 reported cases of rape in Okinawa. He explained that it was "partly because of shame and disgrace, partly because Americans were victors and occupiers". Feifer claimed: "In all there were probably thousands of incidents, but the victims' silence kept rape another dirty secret of the campaign."


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: However, American professor of Japanese studies Michael S. Molasky and some other authors have argued that they noted that Okinawan civilians "were often surprised at the comparatively humane treatment they received from the American enemy." According to "Islands of Discontent: Okinawan Responses to Japanese and American Power" by the American Mark Selden, the Americans "did not pursue a policy of torture, rape, and murder of civilians as Japanese military officials had warned."


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: According to some authors, there were 1,336 reported rapes during the first 10 days of the occupation of Kanagawa Prefecture after the Japanese surrender, however author Brian Walsh states that this claim originates from a misreading of Japanese Government crime figures that had actually reported 1,326 criminal incidents of all types involving American forces, including an unspecified number of rapes.


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: According to James D. Morrow, "Death rates of POWs held is one measure of adherence to the standards of the treaties because substandard treatment leads to death of prisoners". The "democratic states generally provide good treatment of POWs".


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: The focus on supposed Allied atrocities during the war has been a theme of Holocaust denial literature, particularly in countries where outright denial of the Holocaust is illegal. According to historian Deborah Lipstadt, the concept of "comparable Allied wrongs", such as the post-war expulsions and Allied war crimes, is at the center of, and a continuously repeated theme of, contemporary Holocaust denial; phenomenon she calls "immoral equivalencies".


title: Allied war crimes during World War II

text: Japanese neo-nationalists argue that Allied war crimes and the shortcomings of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal were equivalent to the war crimes committed by Japanese forces during the war. American historian John W. Dower has written that this position is "a kind of historiographic "cancellation" of immorality—as if the transgressions of others exonerate one's own crimes". While right-wing forces in Japan have tried to push for their perspective on war-time history, they have been unsuccessful due to opposition both within and outside Japan.


title: Arthur Seyss-Inquart

text: Arthur Seyss-Inquart (German: Seyß-Inquart, ; 22 July 1892 16 October 1946) was an Austrian Nazi politician who served as Chancellor of Austria in 1938 for two days before the "Anschluss". His positions in Nazi Germany included "deputy governor to Hans Frank in the General Government of Occupied Poland, and "Reich commissioner" for the German-occupied Netherlands" including shared responsibility "for the deportation of Dutch Jews and the shooting of hostages".


title: Arthur Seyss-Inquart

text: During World War I, Seyss-Inquart fought for the Austro-Hungarian Army with distinction. After the war he became a successful lawyer, and went on to join the governments of Chancellors Engelbert Dollfuss and Kurt Schuschnigg. In 1938, Schuschnigg resigned in the face of a German invasion, and Seyss-Inquart was appointed his successor. The newly installed Nazis proceeded to transfer power to Germany, and Austria subsequently became the German province of Ostmark, with Seyss-Inquart as its governor ("Reichsstatthalter").


title: Arthur Seyss-Inquart

text: During World War II, Seyss-Inquart served briefly as the Deputy Governor General in occupied Poland and, following the fall of the Low Countries in 1940, he was appointed "Reichskommissar" of the occupied Netherlands. He was a member of the "Schutzstaffel" (SS) and held the rank of SS-"Obergruppenführer". He instituted a reign of terror, with Dutch civilians subjected to forced labour and the vast majority of Dutch Jews deported and murdered.


title: Arthur Seyss-Inquart

text: At the Nuremberg trials, Seyss-Inquart was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, sentenced to death, and executed.


title: Arthur Seyss-Inquart

text: Seyss-Inquart was born in 1892 in Stannern (), a German-speaking village in the neighbourhood of the predominantly German-speaking town of Iglau (). This area constituted a German linguistic island in the midst of a Czech-speaking region; this may have contributed to the outspoken national consciousness of the family, and the young Arthur in particular. Iglau was an important town in Moravia, one of the Czech provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in which there was increasing competition between Germans and Czechs. His parents were the school principal Emil Zajtich (who changed his surname to Seyss-Inquart) and Augusta Hirenbach. His father was Czech and his mother was German.


title: Arthur Seyss-Inquart

text: The family moved to Vienna in 1907. Seyss-Inquart later studied law at the University of Vienna. At the beginning of World War I in August 1914 Seyss-Inquart enlisted with the Austrian Army and was given a commission with the Tyrolean "Kaiserjäger", subsequently serving in Russia, Romania and Italy. He was decorated for bravery on a number of occasions, and while recovering from wounds in 1917, he completed his final examinations for his degree. Seyss-Inquart had five older siblings: Hedwig (born 1881), Richard (born 3 April 1883, became a Roman Catholic priest, but left the priesthood, married in a civil ceremony and became "Oberregierungsrat" [senior government counsel] and prison superior by 1940 in the Ostmark), Irene (born 1885), Henriette (born 1887) and Robert (born 1891).


title: Arthur Seyss-Inquart

text: In 1911, Seyss-Inquart met Gertrud Maschka. The couple married in December 1916 and had three children: Ingeborg Carolina Augusta Seyss-Inquart (born 18 September 1917), Richard Seyss-Inquart (born 22 August 1921) and Dorothea Seyss-Inquart (born 7 May 1928).


title: Arthur Seyss-Inquart

text: He went into law after the war and in 1921 set up his own practice. During the early years of the Austrian First Republic, he was close to the Fatherland Front. A successful lawyer, he was invited to join the cabinet of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss in 1933. Following Dollfuss' murder in 1934, he became a State Councillor from 1937 under Kurt Schuschnigg. A keen mountaineer, Seyss-Inquart became the head of the German-Austrian Alpine Club. He later became a devotee of Heinrich Himmler's concepts of racial purity and sponsored various expeditions to Tibet and other parts of Asia in hopes of proving Aryan racial concepts and theories. He was not initially a member of the Austrian National Socialist party, though he was sympathetic to many of their views and actions. By 1938, however, Seyss-Inquart knew which way the political wind was blowing and became a respectable frontman for the Austrian National Socialists.


title: Arthur Seyss-Inquart

text: In February 1938, Seyss-Inquart was appointed Austrian Minister of the Interior by Schuschnigg, after Hitler had threatened Schuschnigg with military actions against Austria in the event of non-compliance. On 11 March 1938, faced with a German invasion aimed at preventing a plebiscite on independence, Schuschnigg resigned as Austrian Chancellor. Under growing pressure from Berlin, President Wilhelm Miklas reluctantly appointed Seyss-Inquart his successor. On the next day German troops crossed the border of Austria at the telegraphed invitation of Seyss-Inquart. This telegram had actually been drafted beforehand and was released after the troops had begun to march, so as to justify the action in the eyes of the international community. Before his triumphant entry into Vienna, Hitler had planned to leave Austria as a pro-Nazi puppet state headed by Seyss-Inquart. However, the acclamation for the German army from the majority of the Austrian population led Hitler to change course and opt for a full "Anschluss", in which Austria was incorporated into Nazi Germany as the province of Ostmark. Only then, on 13 March 1938, did Seyss-Inquart join the Nazi Party.


title: Arthur Seyss-Inquart

text: Seyss-Inquart drafted the legislative act reducing Austria to a province of Germany and signed it into law on 13 March. With Hitler's approval, he became Governor ("Reichsstatthalter") of the newly named Ostmark, thus becoming Hitler's personal representative in Austria. Ernst Kaltenbrunner served as chief minister and Josef Burckel as Commissioner for the Reunion of Austria (concerned with the "Jewish Question"). Seyss-Inquart also received an honorary SS rank of Gruppenführer and in May 1939 he was made a "Reichsminister" without Portfolio in Hitler's cabinet. Almost as soon as he took office, he ordered the confiscation of Jewish property and sent Jews to concentration camps. Late in his regime, he collaborated in the deportation of Jews from Austria.


title: Arthur Seyss-Inquart

text: Following the invasion of Poland, Seyss-Inquart was named as the Chief of Civil Administration for Southern Poland, but did not take up that post before the General Government was created, in which he became Deputy to the Governor General Hans Frank, remaining in this position until 18 May 1940. He fully supported the heavy-handed policies put into effect by Frank, including persecution of Jews. He was also aware of the "Abwehr"s murder of Polish intellectuals.


title: Arthur Seyss-Inquart

text: Following the capitulation of the Low Countries Seyss-Inquart was appointed "Reichskommissar" for the Occupied Netherlands in May 1940, charged with directing the civil administration, with creating close economic collaboration with Germany and with defending the interests of the Reich. In April 1941, he was promoted to SS-"Obergruppenführer". Among the Dutch people he was mockingly referred to as "Zes en een kwart" (six and a quarter), a play on his name, and the fact that Seyss-Inquart suffered from a limp. He supported the Dutch NSB and allowed them to create the paramilitary Nederlandse Landwacht, which acted as an auxiliary police force. Other political parties were banned in late 1941 and many former government officials were imprisoned at Sint-Michielsgestel. The administration of the country was controlled by Seyss-Inquart himself and he answered directly to Hitler. He oversaw the politicization of cultural groups from the "right down to 'the chessplayers' club", and set up a number of other politicised associations.


title: Arthur Seyss-Inquart

text: He introduced measures to combat resistance, and when there was a widespread strike in Amsterdam, Arnhem and Hilversum in May 1943, special summary court-martial procedures were brought in, and a collective fine of 18 million guilders was imposed. Up until the liberation, Seyss-Inquart authorized about 800 executions, although some reports put the total at over 1,500, including executions under the so-called "Hostage Law", the death of political prisoners who were close to being liberated, the Putten raid, and the reprisal executions of 117 Dutchmen for the attack on SS and Police Leader Hanns Albin Rauter. Although the majority of Seyss-Inquart's powers were transferred to the military commander in the Netherlands and the Gestapo in July 1944, he remained a force to be reckoned with. It is thought he met with Haj Amin al-Husseini, an exiled leader of Palestinian Arabs, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, somewhere in Germany in 1943.


title: Arthur Seyss-Inquart

text: There were three concentration camps in the Netherlands: the smaller KZ Herzogenbusch near Vught, Kamp Amersfoort near Amersfoort, and Westerbork transit camp (a "Jewish assembly camp"); there were a number of other camps variously controlled by the military, the police, the SS or Seyss-Inquart's administration. These included a "voluntary labour recruitment" camp at Ommen (Camp Erika). In total around 530,000 Dutch civilians were forced to work for the Germans, of whom 250,000 were sent to factories in Germany. There was an unsuccessful attempt by Seyss-Inquart to send only workers aged 21 to 23 to Germany, and he refused demands in 1944 for a further 250,000 Dutch workers and in that year sent only 12,000 people.


title: Arthur Seyss-Inquart

text: Seyss-Inquart was an unwavering anti-Semite; within a few months of his arrival in the Netherlands, he took measures to remove Jews from the government, the press and leading positions in industry. Anti-Jewish measures intensified after 1941: approximately 140,000 Jews were registered, a "ghetto" was created in Amsterdam and a transit camp was set up at Westerbork. Subsequently, in February 1941, 600 Jews were sent to Buchenwald, a concentration camp located within Germany's borders, and to Mauthausen, located in Upper Austria. Later, the Dutch Jews were sent to Auschwitz, the notorious complex operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland. As Allied forces approached in September 1944, the remaining Jews at Westerbork were removed to Theresienstadt, the SS-established concentration camp/ghetto in the Nazi German-occupied region of Czechoslovakia. Of the 140,000 that were registered, only 30,000 Dutch Jews survived the war.


title: Arthur Seyss-Inquart

text: When the Allies advanced into the Netherlands in late 1944, the Nazi regime had attempted to enact a scorched earth policy, and some docks and harbours were destroyed. Seyss-Inquart, however, was in agreement with Armaments Minister Albert Speer over the futility of such actions, and with the open connivance of many military commanders, they greatly limited the implementation of the scorched earth orders. At the very end of the "hunger winter" in April 1945, Seyss-Inquart was with difficulty persuaded by the Allies to allow airplanes to drop food for the hungry people of the occupied north-west of the country. Although he knew the war was lost, Seyss-Inquart did not want to surrender.


title: Arthur Seyss-Inquart

text: Before Hitler committed suicide in April 1945, he named a new government headed by Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz in his last will and testament, in which Seyss-Inquart replaced Joachim von Ribbentrop, who had long since fallen out of favour, as Foreign Minister. It was a token of the high regard Hitler felt for his Austrian comrade, at a time when he was rapidly disowning or being abandoned by so many of his other key lieutenants. Unsurprisingly, at such a late stage in the war, Seyss-Inquart failed to achieve anything in his new office.


title: Arthur Seyss-Inquart

text: He remained in his posts until 7 May 1945, when, after a meeting with Dönitz to confirm his rescission of the scorched earth orders, he was arrested on the Elbe Bridge in Hamburg by two soldiers of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, one of whom was Norman Miller (birth name: Norbert Mueller), a German Jew from Nuremberg who had escaped to Britain at the age of 15 on a "Kindertransport" just before the war and then returned to Germany as part of the British occupation forces. Miller's entire family had been killed at the Jungfernhof Camp in Riga, Latvia in March 1942. The Anglo-Dutch art dealer Edward Speelman was also involved in Seyss-Inquart's arrest.


title: Arthur Seyss-Inquart

text: At the Nuremberg trials, Seyss-Inquart was defended by Gustav Steinbauer and faced four charges: conspiracy to commit crimes against peace; planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression; war crimes; and crimes against humanity. During the trial, Gustave Gilbert, an American army psychologist, was allowed to examine the Nazi leaders who were tried at Nuremberg for war crimes. Among other tests, a German version of the Wechsler-Bellevue IQ test was administered. Arthur Seyss-Inquart scored 141, the second highest among the defendants, behind Hjalmar Schacht.


title: Arthur Seyss-Inquart

text: In his final statement, Seyss-Inquart denied knowledge of various war crimes including the shooting of hostages, and said that while he had moral objections to the deportation of Jews, there must sometimes be justifications for mass evacuations, and pointed to the Allies forcibly resettling millions of Germans after the war. He added that his "conscience was untroubled" as he improved the conditions of the Dutch people while Commissioner. Seyss-Inquart concluded by saying, "My last word is the principle by which I have always acted and to which I will adhere to my last breath: I believe in Germany."


title: Arthur Seyss-Inquart

text: Seyss-Inquart was acquitted of conspiracy, but convicted on all other counts and sentenced to death by hanging. The final judgment against him cited his involvement in harsh suppression of Nazi opponents and atrocities against the Jews during all his billets, but particularly stressed his reign of terror in the Netherlands. It was these atrocities that sent him to the gallows.


title: Arthur Seyss-Inquart

text: Upon hearing of his death sentence, Seyss-Inquart was fatalistic: "Death by hanging... well, in view of the whole situation, I never expected anything different. It's all right."


title: Arthur Seyss-Inquart

text: Before his execution, Seyss-Inquart returned to the Catholic church, receiving absolution in the sacrament of confession from prison chaplain Father Bruno Spitzl.


title: Arthur Seyss-Inquart

text: He was hanged in Nuremberg Prison on 16 October 1946, at the age of 54, together with nine other Nuremberg defendants. He was the last to mount the scaffold, and his last words were the following: "I hope that this execution is the last act of the tragedy of the Second World War and that the lesson taken from this world war will be that peace and understanding should exist between peoples. I believe in Germany."


title: Arthur Seyss-Inquart

text: His body, with those of the other nine executed men and that of Hermann Göring (who committed suicide the previous day), was cremated at the Ostfriedhof in Munich, and their ashes were scattered into the river Isar.


title: Arthur Seyss-Inquart

text: In Doris Orgel's children's novel, "The Devil in Vienna", he is the father of Lise, the only Gentile friend of its Jewish character Inge Dournenvald, and his only daughter, second born after his son, Heinz. In the Disney Channel movie, "A Friendship in Vienna", based on this novel, he is "Herr Mueller", played by John Hartley, the SA officer of that film.


title: Transracial (identity)

text: Transracial people identify as a different race than the one associated with their biological ancestry. They may adjust their appearance to make themselves look more like that race, and they may participate in activities associated with that race.


title: Transracial (identity)

text: The use of the term to describe changing racial identity has been criticized by members of the transracial adoption community. Kevin H. Vollmers, executive director of an adoption non-profit, said the term is being "appropriated and co-opted" and that this is a "slap in the face" to transracial adoptees. In June 2015, about two dozen transracial adoptees, transracial parents and academics published an open letter in which they condemned the new usage as "erroneous, ahistorical, and dangerous."


title: Transracial (identity)

text: In April 2017, the feminist philosophy journal "Hypatia" published an academic paper in support of recognizing transracialism and drawing parallels between transracial and transgender identity. Publication of this paper resulted in considerable controversy. The subject was also explored in "", a 2016 book by UCLA sociology professor Rogers Brubaker, who argues that the phenomenon, though offensive to many, is psychologically real to many people, and has many examples throughout history.


title: Makgeolli

text: Makgeolli (, raw rice wine ), sometimes anglicized to makkoli (, ), is a Korean alcoholic beverage. The milky, off-white, and lightly sparkling rice wine has a slight viscosity that tastes slightly sweet, tangy, bitter, and astringent. Chalky sediment gives it a cloudy appearance. As a low proof drink of six to nine percent alcohol by volume, it is often considered a "communal beverage" rather than hard liquor. In Korea, "makgeolli" is often unpasteurized, and the wine continues to mature in the bottle. Because of the short shelf life of unpasteurized "draft" "makgeolli", many exported "makgeolli" undergo pasteurization, which deprives the beverage of complex enzymes and flavor compounds. Recently, various fruits such as strawberries and bananas are added to makgeolli to drink in new forms.


title: Makgeolli

text: The name "makgeolli" () is a compound, consisting of "mak" (; "roughly, recklessly, carelessly") and a deverbal noun derived from the verb stem "georeu-" (; "to strain, to sift, to filter") to which is added a noun-forming suffix "-i" ().


title: Makgeolli

text: Because of its cloudy appearance, "makgeolli" is also called takju (; ), meaning "opaque wine", as opposed to the refined, transparent "cheongju" (; ), meaning "clear wine". Another name for "makgeolli" is nongju (; ), meaning "agricultural wine" or "farmer's wine", reflecting the traditional popularity of the beverage among farmers.


title: Makgeolli

text: In 2010, the South Korean Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries announced "drunken rice" as the winning entry in a competition to find an English nickname for "makgeolli". "Makcohol" (makgeolli + alcohol) and "Markelixir" (makgeolli + elixir) were among the runners-up. The five-member panel reasoned that the chosen name would communicate the product's identity as a rice liquor and evoke associations with its ambassadors, the popular Korean hip-hop group Drunken Tiger. This met with a cool reception from the Korean public, with objections relating to translation of the noun "makgeolli", felt to be unnecessary, and to the negative connotations of the word "drunken".


title: Makgeolli

text: Scottish band Colonel Mustard & The Dijon 5, playing at the inaugural DMZ Peace Train Festival in 2018, called "makgeolli" 'Fight Milk', or 'Korean Buckfast'.


title: Makgeolli

text: In 2009, Korean importers in Japan began producing "makgeolli" products, promoting them with the name "makkori", the Japanese pronunciation of "makgeolli". In 2011, several Japanese "sake" companies, including Gekkeikan and Tatenokawa, launched cloudy rice wines under the name "makkori", and announced plans to export the products to Asia, America, and Europe. Concerns were raised in Korea that this could lead to "makgeolli" being mistakenly regarded as traditionally Japanese rather than Korean, as had happened in the 1996 kimchi-kimuchi case.


title: Makgeolli

text: "Makgeolli" is the oldest alcoholic beverage in Korea. Rice wine has been brewed since the Three Kingdoms era, which ran from the 1st century BCE to the 7th century CE. The consumption of rice wine during the reign of King Dongmyeong (37–19 BCE) is mentioned in the founding story of the kingdom of Goguryeo in "Jewang ungi" (Songs of Emperors and Kings), a 13th-century Goryeo Korean book.


title: Makgeolli

text: There are a number of other early records mentioning rice wine in the Korean Peninsula. The Goryeo Korean book "Samguk yusa" (Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms) mentions the brewing of "yorye" (, "cloudy rice wine") in the kingdom of Silla for King Suro of Gaya by his seventeenth-generation descendant in 661, in its section entitled "Garakguk gi" (Record of the State of Garak). In the Jin Chinese book "Sānguózhì" (Records of the Three Kingdoms), the section "Dongyi" (Eastern Foreigners) of the "Wei Shu" (Book of Wei) contains the observation that "the Goguryeo Koreans are skilled in making fermented foods such as wine, soybean paste, and salted and fermented fish". The Asuka Japanese book "Kojiki" (Records of Ancient Matters) makes reference in the section entitled "Ōjin-tennō" (Emperor Ōjin) to a man named "Inbeon" () from the kingdom of Baekje being taught how to brew wine. And the poem "Gōngzishí" (), by the Tang Chinese poet Li Shangyin, refers to Silla wine () made with non-glutinous rice.


title: Makgeolli

text: During the Goryeo dynasty, "makgeolli" was called "ihwa-ju" (; , pear blossom alcohol), as the liquor was made when the pear trees were in blossom. This was associated in many communities in Korea around that time with a tradition of all-night drinking and dancing in special ceremonies. "Makgeolli" was brewed at home for centuries and was considered a "farmer's wine", or rural working-class beverage.


title: Makgeolli

text: While Korea was ruled as a part of the Empire of Japan, the colonial government introduce a licensing system and taxed even for self-consumption. by 1934, home brewing had been banned.


title: Makgeolli

text: The most-consumed alcoholic drink in South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s, "makgeolli" began to lose popularity in the 1970s with the rise of imported alcoholic beverages. Also, due to the national food shortage, the government banned making makgeolli using rice, and makgeolli was made by mixing 80% wheat flour and 20% corn. When flour was used, the quality of makgeolli deteriorated. As "makgeolli" was considered cheap and old-fashioned, sellers then focused on selling quantity rather than quality, with many "makgeolli" companies turning to mass production. In this process, the rice wine is usually brewed with a non-traditionally manufactured fermentation starter instead of the traditional "nuruk." It is also diluted with water.


title: Makgeolli

text: In the 21st century, "makgeolli" enjoyed a resurgence in urban areas and among younger generations. The health benefits and low alcohol proof of "makgeolli", and a growing interest in cultural traditions in recent decades, have contributed to the revival. The product continues to be inexpensive, with a plastic, soft drink-style bottle costing around ₩1,200 ($). Novelty high-end "makgeolli" are also produced, using traditional methods free of artificial additives. There were at least 700 small-scale breweries in production in South Korea in 2017.


title: Makgeolli

text: "Makgeolli" is made from rice using "nuruk", a Korean fermentation starter. "Nuruk" is a dry cereal cake that has been allowed to ferment and mature to promote the growth of molds producing hydrolyzable enzymes that decompose the starches of the cereal grain into sugar. This sugar is then used by yeast to produce alcohol through fermentation. Different kinds of "nuruk", made with different ingredients such as rice, wheat, barley, or mung beans, produce "makgeolli" of a variety of flavors.


title: Makgeolli

text: Steamed rice, "nuruk", and sometimes additional flavoring ingredients such as maize, chestnuts, fruits, herbs, and flowers are mixed and left to ferment in "onggi", the same permeable clay crocks used for making kimchi, soy sauce, and other fermented foods.


title: Makgeolli

text: The brewing process involves two stages: seed and main mash and main fermentation. Seed mash is the process of obtaining actively growing yeasts and enzymes in the mixture of yeast and "nuruk". The tastes and aromas of the main mash develop with the transformation of the rice-derived nutrients and amino acids. Main fermentation lasts for about a week.


title: Makgeolli

text: "Makgeolli" is best consumed fresh, a week or two after brewing. When freshly brewed, it has a milder and creamier taste. It acquires a stronger taste over time and turns into rice vinegar after a couple of months.


title: Makgeolli

text: Traditionally, the wine was only created one way, but to reach out across the different age groups and for exporting purposes there are several different ways the wine is created. Once "makgeolli" has been exported, it can change as well. Many people also brew makgeolli at home these days. Traditionally, "makgeolli" is created unpasteurized.


title: Makgeolli

text: Many mass-produced "makgeolli" are brewed with non-traditional manufactured fermentation starter instead of the traditional "nuruk", and are diluted with water and contain additives such as aspartame. This gives the liquor sweetness without adding a fermentable carbohydrate, and thus increases shelf life. Flavorings such as fruit and ginseng are also sometimes added.


title: Makgeolli

text: "Makgeolli" is usually served chilled, in a bottle or in a pottery bowl with a ladle. Prior to drinking, it is stirred with the ladle, or the bottle is gently flipped upside down several times with the cap on, in order to mix in the settled sediment. It is then ladled or poured into individual small bowls, rather than cups, for drinking. This is because of the tendency of "makgeolli" to split into a cloudy white fraction that settles to the bottom and a clear, pale yellow liquid that rises to the top.


title: Makgeolli

text: "Makgeolli" is often served with fried buchimgae, Korean pancakes, such as "pajeon" (made with scallions), "haemul-panjeon" (made with scallions and seafood), and "bindae-tteok" (made with mung beans and pork). Consuming "makgeolli" with these pancakes is a custom often associated with rainy days. There are a number of theories regarding the origin. The first theory is the effect of association, whereby the sound of the rain is similar to the sizzling sound of a pancake making, so when it rains, pajeon automatically comes to mind. The second theory has to do with traditional agricultural culture. When the farmers were not able to work due to the rain, especially during the rainy season of Summer, they made pajeon to soothe their hunger and accompanied it with makgeolli, a farmer’s favorite drink. Naturally, it became a seasonal food, and the tradition has been passed down to this day.


title: Makgeolli

text: "Makgeolli" may also be mixed with ice and fruits such as mango and pineapple to make fruit cocktails, or with "saida" (lemon-lime drink) to make a simple cocktail named "maksa". "Makgeolli" mixed with "kkul" (honey) is called "kkul-makgeolli".


title: Makgeolli

text: Because of the microorganisms present during fermentation, "makgeolli" is a probiotic product. It contains high levels of lactic acid bacteria such as "Lactobacillus", as well as vitamins, amino acids, and fiber. With a 1.9 percent protein content, over 10 amino acids, vitamin B, inositol and choline, "makgeolli" is reputed to increase metabolism, relieve fatigue and improve the complexion.


title: Makgeolli

text: "Dongdong-ju" ("float-float wine") is a drink very similar to "makgeolli", but slightly creamier and with unfiltered floating rice grains. The word "dongdong" is an ideophone for a small object floating by. "Ihwa-ju" ("pear-blossom wine") is so named because it is brewed from rice with rice malt which ferments during the pear-blossom season. "Ihwaju" is often so thick that it is eaten with a spoon. "Dansul" ("sweet wine") is a sweeter variety with partial fermentation.


title: Makgeolli

text: The Tibetan alcoholic beverage Chhaang is also very similar drink with its cloudy milky appearance along with its unfiltered rice sediments. During the Tibetan lunar new year, Tibetans drink a slight variation of Chaang by adding dried cheese, droma (a type of small tuber similar in taste to sweet potato) and nuts which is then heated and drunk warm. In Nepal, where chaang is enjoyed by the Newars and Sherpas, Korean produced bottled makgeoli is branded and sold as chaang.


title: Hip

text: In vertebrate anatomy, hip (or "coxa" in medical terminology) refers to either an anatomical region or a joint.


title: Hip

text: The hip region is located lateral and anterior to the gluteal region, inferior to the iliac crest, and overlying the greater trochanter of the femur, or "thigh bone". In adults, three of the bones of the pelvis have fused into the hip bone or acetabulum which forms part of the hip region.


title: Hip

text: The hip joint, scientifically referred to as the acetabulofemoral joint ("art. coxae"), is the joint between the head of the femur and acetabulum of the pelvis and its primary function is to support the weight of the body in both static (e.g., standing) and dynamic (e.g., walking or running) postures. The hip joints have very important roles in retaining balance, and for maintaining the pelvic inclination angle.


title: Hip

text: Pain of the hip may be the result of numerous causes, including nervous, osteoarthritic, infectious, traumatic, and genetic.


title: Hip

text: The hip joint, also known as a ball and socket joint, is formed by the acetabulum of the pelvis and the femoral head, which is the top portion of the thigh bone (femur). It allows for a wide range of movement and stability in the lower body.


title: Hip

text: The proximal femur is largely covered by muscles and, as a consequence, the greater trochanter is often the only palpable bony structure in the hip region.


title: Hip

text: The hip joint is a ball and socket synovial joint formed by the articulation of the rounded head of the femur and the cup-like acetabulum of the pelvis. The socket of the acetabulum is pointing downwards and anterolaterally. The socket is also turned such that the outer edge of its roof is more lateral than outer edge of the floor. It forms the primary connection between the bones of the lower limb and the axial skeleton of the trunk and pelvis. Both joint surfaces are covered with a strong but lubricated layer called articular hyaline cartilage.


title: Hip

text: The cuplike acetabulum forms at the union of three pelvic bones — the ilium, pubis, and ischium. The Y-shaped growth plate that separates them, the triradiate cartilage, is fused definitively at ages 14–16. It is a special type of spheroidal or ball and socket joint where the roughly spherical femoral head is largely contained within the acetabulum and has an average radius of curvature of 2.5 cm. The acetabulum grasps almost half the femoral ball, a grip deepened by a ring-shaped fibrocartilaginous lip, the acetabular labrum, which extends the joint beyond the equator. The centre of the acetabulum (fovea) does not articulate to anything. Instead, it is lined with fat pad and attached to ligamentum teres. The acetabular labrum is horse-shoe shaped. Its inferior notch is bridged by transverse acetabular ligament. The joint space between the femoral head and the superior acetabulum is normally between 2 and 7 mm.