chapotraphouse

Beyond even Puyi. I read an account (which I'm trying to source again fucking internet no longer working) from an Japanese soldier who had unashamedly admitted to various war crimes, the communists housed him and his fellow soldiers in clean and comfortable, if spartan and small accommodation, they fed them despite post WW2 shortages and at one point they even gave him limited penicillin for an abscess in his spine.

There was no torture, they just had group discussion or wrote essays about their war crimes. Sometimes survivors of massacres they participated in were brought to them to talk about their experience. The worst punishment he received was early on when they thought he was flippant about his war crimes, they made him spend a night in the cell that prisoners awaiting execution by the Japanese would use, on the walls were signed names and last testaments, often written in blood and there was basically no space.

They did this for months and years, until he and all his fellow soldiers knew to their core what they had done was wrong. They did bring in other political teachers to try and educate them about communism and he was like "buddy I don't care about economics". But eventually after a few years they just sent them all back to Japan. Guys who by all rights should have been hanged at the Hague. And nearly all of them because staunch anti-Japanese imperialism/militarism activists until the day they died.

And I'm not religious anymore but that struck me as one of the most selfless and moral responses to pure evil. While also so pragmatic they made their worse enemy into their weapon. And I think if they could do it with them, an American Treatlerite could be fixed.