For example, what about the charges that Mao cynically used the Japanese to weaken his ultimate rival, the Nationalists, only confronting them when it suited him?

And whether it is a greater crime to kill enemy non-combatants in a state of war or allow the people of your own country to starve or kill each other to further your own politicl aims seems unclear to me.

Also, does “weird” really need to be put in scare quotes in the context of North Korea? In what sense is it not weird, as in abnormal, illogical, and perhaps threatening?

Although I live in Japan and actually do think it is, in many respects, relatively friendly and sane in comparison to some of its neighbors, I by no means intend to defend its war time atrocities or belittle the suffering of its past victims. But isn’t Will’s point of the still-simmering blackened pot calling the scoured kettle black valid?

I’m saying, you can’t compare them this way. Though Mao’s crimes are considerable and I think we should remember the horrors of collectivization and other horrors of Communist governments, they cannot be compared, casualty to casualty with those killed by the bombs, bullets, swords, etc. of war.

For comparison I brought up comparison of the concentration camps of the Third Reich with those of Stalinist Russia. Hundreds of thousands died in the latter, millions in the former. However, more than just lining these casualties up, which in any case still amounts to a “win” (in terms of sheer atrocity) for the holocaust etc. – there is also a qualitative difference between the horrors of the Stalinist camps, one which I think Overy makes very clear in his fantastic comparative work on the two horrible regimes.

The qualitative difference is more useful than just measuring which is a “greater evil” but in understanding that there are different forms of violence, of atrocity, and of horror in our history and we shouldn’t lump it all into one convenient and amorphous category of badness.

In your case however, you seem to think my argument was that Japanese extermination was some how less objectionable because there were less casualties (which is Will’s argument)….it is the opposite….that the violence and atrocity of war, even if the total casualties are lower, cannot be compared to the qualitatively different deaths and starvation of the Chinese regime.

Over 10 million people died in these camps. I’m not sure what you mean by a “different category of vicimization” but it sounds like you think that because some academic wrote that the Soviet camps were never intended to be centers of extermination we should consider them in a less horrible category than the Japanese extermination of a much smaller number of people. I hope that isn’t what you meant to say.