7 ms·

One of the last Navajo code-talkers died on October 19th, aged 107

262 points by helsinkiandrew 2y ago

helsinkiandrew 2y ago
https://archive.ph/vBX2o https://archive.ph/vBX2o
onychomys 2y ago
I've always wondered why the Japanese didn't do the same thing in reverse. There's gotta be some tiny languages from small ethnic groups on the islands. At the time, it's not like we could have gone and looked up the words in a dictionary somehow. Even without it being encoded, it would have worked pretty well. And yet they didn't even think about it, as far as I know.
- aidenn0 2y ago
  Perhaps Ainu[1]? Biggest problem there is that after 600+ years of contact with Japanese, a lot of vocabulary is common between the languages. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_languages
  - VTimofeenko 2y ago
    There is a small population of Ainu living in far east of modern Russia. This can be probably extrapolated to them living there during USSR times. Ainu have had... strained relationship with Japan, so they could had been enlisted by the USSR during the war to decrypt messages. That's not to say that Ainu people's relationship with USSR has been ideal either, but them serving as translators during the war seems plausible.
- bell-cot 2y ago
  I don't know the history on that...but the Imperial Japanese Government's decision-making was frequently impaired by overconfidence.
- DylanDmitri 2y ago
  More fascism = less peripheral vision
- WorldMaker 2y ago
  Context is an interesting key here, I think. That point in the US coincided with a increased interest in First Nations, and in some places a renewed attempt to preserve their heritages, especially linguistically. The US generally sees itself as a nation of immigrants and one axis of its "Freedom of Speech" has historically seen the usefulness to speak one's own language, whatever it may be. Diversity of languages has been a goal for the US at various times in its cultural history. In that context, "what's the most diverse language that Americans speak?" is a question you can ask, and an answer you can find without much difficulty. Japan had one and only one national language. Japan didn't have the culture of thinking of itself as a melting pot where many languages might meet. It probably wouldn't have thought to ask that question at all "what's the most diverse language that the Japanese speak?" In practice, we can assume that's also why it confused the Japanese for so long in the war, it wasn't a question to think of themselves, it probably was a hard question to ask of Americans if they saw "English" as the national language they might also not think to ask "what other languages do Americans speak?" or maybe even "why isn't this English or a derivative of/code for English?"
  - wbl 2y ago
    Oh no it's very hard. You go to NYC and spend weeks in barber shops and ethnic restaurants until you hear the fragments of the nearly extinct tongue. Name the language and it is likely spoken in the five boroughs.
    - dullcrisp 2y ago
      Ranking individual things as more or less diverse than other things is a gross abuse of the concept of diversity anyway. But yeah cataloging the set languages spoken in the US is likely impossible in any meaningful way.
    - speakspokespok 2y ago
      A buddy from Latin America who barely spoke English moves to the US. Specifically, he moves to Bushwick, Brooklyn, NYC. He goes, "They all say, 'You gotta learn English. This is America!' but I can't understand any of them - even the Puerto Ricans." First thought in my head was 'dude, you're learning English on hard mode'.
- teractiveodular 2y ago
  Apparently they did: I've heard it claimed there was at least one submarine that used Kagoshima-ben, a famously impenetrable dialect spoken in southern Kyushu, for precisely this purpose. I can't find any reliable source though. More generally though, Japan now and Imperial Japan in particular was very big on there being "one Japan" with one Japanese people and one standard language. Dialects were not encouraged and Okinawan, which is really a different language, was ruthlessly suppressed (kids punished for speaking it in school etc).
  - gerdesj 2y ago
    WN. Those letters mean: "Welsh not". Back in the day, Welsh children would be punished for speaking Welsh (instead of English) and made to wear a wooden board with WN on it around their neck. The board would be passed on through the day to the final transgressor who would receive a thrashing or similar punishment. Generally all of them would get a thrashing anyway - it was good for them! Edit: Not, not no ie WN: "Welsh not". Small but important difference.
- jcranmer 2y ago
  Japan is (and was) a pretty ethnically homogeneous place; the largest indigenous minorities are the Ryukyuans and the Ainu. The Ryukyuan languages aren't all that different from Japanese in the first place, and the Ainu were subjected to forced assimilation that has made many ethnic Ainu unable to speak the language, and while I'm not sure of the speaker count in the 1940s, I doubt it was that high. While their imperial possessions at the time would have included lots of other ethnicities, incorporating Korean or Chinese code talkers wouldn't have been that helpful (not that hard to find people who speak those languages), and the size of their Pacific Island groups would have likely struggled to produce enough adequate code talkers. Although the institutional racism of the country was probably enough to forestall any plans in the first place. It's also worth pointing out why the use of Navajo code talkers was so successful. Part of that is that it's from a language family that was poorly known by linguists at the time. But even within that language family, Navajo is pretty different (compare how different English is from other Germanic languages, or indeed most Indo-European languages). It's also a fiendishly complex language; like, there's no regular verbs--that would make attempts to crack it via standard cryptanalytic techniques rather more difficult. (Also worth pointing out, it was a code within Navajo so that even when the Japanese pressed a Navajo POW into translating the messages, they couldn't crack it).
- numpad0 2y ago
  There were footnotes I've seen on Navajo topics that they tried Satsuma(Kagoshima) dialect for the same purpose, but there were no shortages of speakers at the Allied side and the use ended quickly. Uniqueness of Navajo and other Native American languages was that they were all complete multi millennia isolate from English thanks to how USA came to be. Japan wasn't like that so dialects aren't divergent enough for this use case. Ainu might be a candidate but it's way too high profile.
IncreasePosts 2y ago
Ironically, we don't call his people by their own name (Navajo is what the Tewa people called the Dine')
- gerdesj 2y ago
  "The Navajo are speakers of a Na-Dené Southern Athabaskan language which they call Diné bizaad (lit. 'People's language'). The term Navajo comes from Spanish missionaries and historians who referred to the Pueblo Indians through this term, although they referred to themselves as the Diné, meaning '(the) people'." From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo
- gerdesj 2y ago
  Bizarrely, Germans call themselves Deutsche and the Dutch call themselves all sorts of crazy things. Swiss, Spanish, oh the whole of Europe. As for Japanese, Chinese, Russia ... errm most of the rest of the world 8) In English we don't really get America(n) "right", and they are one of the larger populations that speak the bloody lingo! Oh and lingo: lingua - Latin with a twist, that's how we Anglo-Saxons keep it real!
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  English speakers don't call anyone by their own name. "Japan" is another good example here. Interestingly, the Japanese term for other countries/languages are frequently much closer than the English versions. So while English speakers call the Deutsch "German" and Deutschland "Germany", Japanese speakers call them "doitsu", which is just as close as you can transliterate "Deutsch" to the syllables allowed in Japanese. It's not a rule though: the proper term for the USA is "beikoku", which translates to "country of rice". (The colloquial term for USA however is "amerika", which is exactly what Americans call themselves colloquially.)
  - samatman 2y ago
    Japan is roughly as close to Nippon as doitsu is to Deutsch. The Germans are somewhat extreme on the exonymic spectrum, there are something like six distinct terms used in Europe for them. I've never heard one complain about it.
dang 2y ago
Related. Others? Why Navajo is one of the most difficult languages (2023) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41097075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41097075 - July 2024 (84 comments) Why Navajo is the hardest language to learn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38484528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38484528 - Dec 2023 (1 comment) Samuel Sandoval, among last Navajo Code Talkers, dies at 98 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32297121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32297121 - July 2022 (1 comment) Navajo Code Talker John Pinto Dies, Age 94 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20008374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20008374 - May 2019 (2 comments) Navajo Code Talkers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10059642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10059642 - Aug 2015 (2 comments) Last Of The Navajo 'Code Talkers' Dies At 93 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7848945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7848945 - June 2014 (19 comments)
- dgfitz 2y ago
  That last link title from a decade ago seems at odds with the title of this article.
  - undersuit 2y ago
    There seems to be 29 original code talkers who were primary in the development and then the program expanded. The 2014 article is on one of the original 29. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_talker#Deployment_and_evolution_of_the_code_and_post-war_code_talkers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_talker#Deployment_and_evo...
teractiveodular 2y ago
The Japanese tried to crack the code by torturing a poor guy called Joe Kieyoomia who was Navajo, but not a code-talker or even aware of the existence of the program, but they didn't get far. Amazingly, he survived the concentration camp, the Bataan death march and getting nuked in Nagasaki, returning to the US and living until 77. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Kieyoomia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Kieyoomia
- KennyBlanken 2y ago
  It's worth noting just how extreme the levels of crime against humanity committed by the Japanese were. The Germans (and Swiss...) for the most part imprisoned / shot PoWs. The Japanese used PoWs for chemical and biological weapon testing and vivisection, and they would find the most depraved ways to draw out mass torture of PoWs. For example, they would do things like put US soldiers into baskets so small PoWs could not move at all inside them, load them into unventilated railroad boxcars with no water, then load them into ships, sail out to sea, and drop them overboard into shark-infested waters. Then there's the Nanjing Massacre where in a matter of days Japanese soldiers slaughtered something like 300,000 Chinese civilians at a rate of around 7,000 civilians a day. That was just one of the more than a dozen massacres. It's widely believed that Japan slaughtered more civilians than the Germans. The sheer level of depravity is astounding. And what's especially disturbing are the lengths conservatives in the Japanese government have gone to over the last several decades to rewrite history and erase these atrocities, while pushing harder and harder against the restrictions on their armed forces.
  - krapp 2y ago
    Also worth noting that along with Operation Paperclip, where the US recruited Nazis to bootstrap their space program, the US also recruited Japanese war criminals to continue their experimentation in torture and chemical and biological warfare, which led to (among other things) MKULTRA.
    - scarecrowbob 2y ago
      Seriously. And in Bluebird and Artichoke the US directly continued that work, and not in some kind of "generic spirit" way, but in literal extensions of existing programs using people gathered via Paperclip. And in Korea the US used bioweapons developed by the Japanese during a retreat in late 1952. The Japanese were indeed horrible during the war. The take that the Germans and the US treatment of "expendable" humans during and after these wars was somehow more justified or less horrific is a uniquely horrible and ahistorical take.
julianpye 2y ago
The obituaries are often my favourite part of the Economist. They are edited by Ann Wroe - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Wroe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Wroe - a true legend. They focus mostly on long-forgotten people and create an intense glimpse into the short timeframe when their life made a big impact. My favourite obit of all time of hers is the one of Bill Millin: https://www.economist.com/obituary/2010/08/26/bill-millin https://www.economist.com/obituary/2010/08/26/bill-millin (https://archive.is/iZifs https://archive.is/iZifs)
- julianpye 2y ago
  And this is another great one, also in the vein of 'the last one' about the death of the last of the Beguines: https://www.economist.com/obituary/2013/04/27/marcella-pattyn https://www.economist.com/obituary/2013/04/27/marcella-patty... (https://archive.is/ClVez https://archive.is/ClVez)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- axus 2y ago
  If an AI could research and write as well (and as accurately) as that, I'd say they've finally surpassed us.
shiroiushi 2y ago
It's too bad there were never any good movies made about the code-talkers. There was one movie by John Woo, starring Nicholas Cage, named "Windtalkers", but it was terrible; coincidentally, I was just reading an article this morning about the "worst war movies of the last 25 years" and Windtalkers was on it, alongside "Jarhead 2" and others.
jackschultz 2y ago
So many great parts in this. 1) The sense and importance of community. Both the mention of them coming together when he returned where "the ghosts will be laid". And also the mention of "there was no “I” in his war, only “we”. We're stuck in such an individualist culture where we're told to work hard to stand out, and seem to be shamed if we're weak and in receiving help from others. 2) Words as metaphors. Beautiful examples given in the post, but we should remember the roots of many of our words are also metaphors. My favorite being "persona"[0], coming referring to an actors mask that air goes through. Helps remind me that we're always actors in the world, not some defined Self we're stuck with. Good book[1] on that topic from Jay Garfield. 3) Explanation at the end of his "Navajo Code-Talkers uniform". Mentions that yes, it's more than ok to imagine clothes as images and have meaning beyond "something to wear for efficiency". The Emerald podcast talks about these things, both ornaments in general from human history [2] and more specifically about guardians [3] which is what he considered the Navajo colors were for, to protect him. The similarity of all these cases, to me, comes to they're not all thoughts he had in his head as words, which is what we're told to do from the smallest of ages. We're told to think hard, and use words (like I'm doing here) to be smarter than others. When looked at, words and thoughts are nothing compared to the experienced feelings that come from community, imaginal metaphors like hopping rabbits that leave tracks in the snow, or looking at colors you're wearing and feeling protected. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona [1] https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691220284/losing-ourselves https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691220284/lo... [2] https://www.themythicbody.com/podcast/universe-adorned-ornament-culture-cosmos-consciousness/ https://www.themythicbody.com/podcast/universe-adorned-ornam... [3] https://www.themythicbody.com/podcast/guardians-and-protectors/ https://www.themythicbody.com/podcast/guardians-and-protecto...
ngneer 2y ago
For this to work, x=D(E(x)) must hold, where x is the message in military English, and E and D are the encoding and decoding functions. Ergo, the Navajo language must have as many possible utterances as military English does. This is neither surprising nor interesting. What is interesting is that E and D were not known by the Germans and could not be effectively reverse engineered in time.
new_vienna 2y ago
[flagged]
prmoustache 2y ago
Strange obituary where the writer do not even mention his real name, Hash-keh Nah-adah, as opposed to the english name that he was forced to use at school years later.
w3ll_w3ll_w3ll 2y ago
https://metalgear.fandom.com/wiki/Code_Talker https://metalgear.fandom.com/wiki/Code_Talker
pseudolus 2y ago
If anyone is passing through Kayenta, AZ (very close to Monument Valley) there's a free small exhibit about the Navajo code talkers. Strangely enough, it's inside a Burger King of all places. Atlas Obscura features a brief article about the display: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/burger-king-navajo-code-talkers-display https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/burger-king-navajo-code-...
- neverartful 2y ago
  I just visited Monument Valley and it was spectacular. Inside the Visitor Center they have a whole room devoted to the Navajo code talkers. I only spent a few minutes in it but it was very interesting and very nicely presented.
Neonlicht 2y ago
In WW2 there was a lot of panic about "fifth column" infiltration from German special forces. So they came up with a code word that only native speakers can pronounce: Scheveningen.

https://archive.ph/vBX2o https://archive.ph/vBX2o

I've always wondered why the Japanese didn't do the same thing in reverse. There's gotta be some tiny languages from small ethnic groups on the islands. At the time, it's not like we could have gone and looked up the words in a dictionary somehow. Even without it being encoded, it would have worked pretty well. And yet they didn't even think about it, as far as I know.

aidenn0 2y ago
Perhaps Ainu[1]? Biggest problem there is that after 600+ years of contact with Japanese, a lot of vocabulary is common between the languages. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_languages
- VTimofeenko 2y ago
  There is a small population of Ainu living in far east of modern Russia. This can be probably extrapolated to them living there during USSR times. Ainu have had... strained relationship with Japan, so they could had been enlisted by the USSR during the war to decrypt messages. That's not to say that Ainu people's relationship with USSR has been ideal either, but them serving as translators during the war seems plausible.
bell-cot 2y ago
I don't know the history on that...but the Imperial Japanese Government's decision-making was frequently impaired by overconfidence.
DylanDmitri 2y ago
More fascism = less peripheral vision
WorldMaker 2y ago
Context is an interesting key here, I think. That point in the US coincided with a increased interest in First Nations, and in some places a renewed attempt to preserve their heritages, especially linguistically. The US generally sees itself as a nation of immigrants and one axis of its "Freedom of Speech" has historically seen the usefulness to speak one's own language, whatever it may be. Diversity of languages has been a goal for the US at various times in its cultural history. In that context, "what's the most diverse language that Americans speak?" is a question you can ask, and an answer you can find without much difficulty. Japan had one and only one national language. Japan didn't have the culture of thinking of itself as a melting pot where many languages might meet. It probably wouldn't have thought to ask that question at all "what's the most diverse language that the Japanese speak?" In practice, we can assume that's also why it confused the Japanese for so long in the war, it wasn't a question to think of themselves, it probably was a hard question to ask of Americans if they saw "English" as the national language they might also not think to ask "what other languages do Americans speak?" or maybe even "why isn't this English or a derivative of/code for English?"
- wbl 2y ago
  Oh no it's very hard. You go to NYC and spend weeks in barber shops and ethnic restaurants until you hear the fragments of the nearly extinct tongue. Name the language and it is likely spoken in the five boroughs.
  - dullcrisp 2y ago
    Ranking individual things as more or less diverse than other things is a gross abuse of the concept of diversity anyway. But yeah cataloging the set languages spoken in the US is likely impossible in any meaningful way.
  - speakspokespok 2y ago
    A buddy from Latin America who barely spoke English moves to the US. Specifically, he moves to Bushwick, Brooklyn, NYC. He goes, "They all say, 'You gotta learn English. This is America!' but I can't understand any of them - even the Puerto Ricans." First thought in my head was 'dude, you're learning English on hard mode'.
teractiveodular 2y ago
Apparently they did: I've heard it claimed there was at least one submarine that used Kagoshima-ben, a famously impenetrable dialect spoken in southern Kyushu, for precisely this purpose. I can't find any reliable source though. More generally though, Japan now and Imperial Japan in particular was very big on there being "one Japan" with one Japanese people and one standard language. Dialects were not encouraged and Okinawan, which is really a different language, was ruthlessly suppressed (kids punished for speaking it in school etc).
- gerdesj 2y ago
  WN. Those letters mean: "Welsh not". Back in the day, Welsh children would be punished for speaking Welsh (instead of English) and made to wear a wooden board with WN on it around their neck. The board would be passed on through the day to the final transgressor who would receive a thrashing or similar punishment. Generally all of them would get a thrashing anyway - it was good for them! Edit: Not, not no ie WN: "Welsh not". Small but important difference.
jcranmer 2y ago
Japan is (and was) a pretty ethnically homogeneous place; the largest indigenous minorities are the Ryukyuans and the Ainu. The Ryukyuan languages aren't all that different from Japanese in the first place, and the Ainu were subjected to forced assimilation that has made many ethnic Ainu unable to speak the language, and while I'm not sure of the speaker count in the 1940s, I doubt it was that high. While their imperial possessions at the time would have included lots of other ethnicities, incorporating Korean or Chinese code talkers wouldn't have been that helpful (not that hard to find people who speak those languages), and the size of their Pacific Island groups would have likely struggled to produce enough adequate code talkers. Although the institutional racism of the country was probably enough to forestall any plans in the first place. It's also worth pointing out why the use of Navajo code talkers was so successful. Part of that is that it's from a language family that was poorly known by linguists at the time. But even within that language family, Navajo is pretty different (compare how different English is from other Germanic languages, or indeed most Indo-European languages). It's also a fiendishly complex language; like, there's no regular verbs--that would make attempts to crack it via standard cryptanalytic techniques rather more difficult. (Also worth pointing out, it was a code within Navajo so that even when the Japanese pressed a Navajo POW into translating the messages, they couldn't crack it).
numpad0 2y ago
There were footnotes I've seen on Navajo topics that they tried Satsuma(Kagoshima) dialect for the same purpose, but there were no shortages of speakers at the Allied side and the use ended quickly. Uniqueness of Navajo and other Native American languages was that they were all complete multi millennia isolate from English thanks to how USA came to be. Japan wasn't like that so dialects aren't divergent enough for this use case. Ainu might be a candidate but it's way too high profile.

IncreasePosts 2y ago

Ironically, we don't call his people by their own name (Navajo is what the Tewa people called the Dine')

gerdesj 2y ago
"The Navajo are speakers of a Na-Dené Southern Athabaskan language which they call Diné bizaad (lit. 'People's language'). The term Navajo comes from Spanish missionaries and historians who referred to the Pueblo Indians through this term, although they referred to themselves as the Diné, meaning '(the) people'." From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo
gerdesj 2y ago
Bizarrely, Germans call themselves Deutsche and the Dutch call themselves all sorts of crazy things. Swiss, Spanish, oh the whole of Europe. As for Japanese, Chinese, Russia ... errm most of the rest of the world 8) In English we don't really get America(n) "right", and they are one of the larger populations that speak the bloody lingo! Oh and lingo: lingua - Latin with a twist, that's how we Anglo-Saxons keep it real!
shiroiushi 2y ago
English speakers don't call anyone by their own name. "Japan" is another good example here. Interestingly, the Japanese term for other countries/languages are frequently much closer than the English versions. So while English speakers call the Deutsch "German" and Deutschland "Germany", Japanese speakers call them "doitsu", which is just as close as you can transliterate "Deutsch" to the syllables allowed in Japanese. It's not a rule though: the proper term for the USA is "beikoku", which translates to "country of rice". (The colloquial term for USA however is "amerika", which is exactly what Americans call themselves colloquially.)
- samatman 2y ago
  Japan is roughly as close to Nippon as doitsu is to Deutsch. The Germans are somewhat extreme on the exonymic spectrum, there are something like six distinct terms used in Europe for them. I've never heard one complain about it.

dang 2y ago

Related. Others? Why Navajo is one of the most difficult languages (2023) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41097075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41097075 - July 2024 (84 comments) Why Navajo is the hardest language to learn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38484528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38484528 - Dec 2023 (1 comment) Samuel Sandoval, among last Navajo Code Talkers, dies at 98 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32297121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32297121 - July 2022 (1 comment) Navajo Code Talker John Pinto Dies, Age 94 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20008374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20008374 - May 2019 (2 comments) Navajo Code Talkers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10059642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10059642 - Aug 2015 (2 comments) Last Of The Navajo 'Code Talkers' Dies At 93 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7848945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7848945 - June 2014 (19 comments)

dgfitz 2y ago
That last link title from a decade ago seems at odds with the title of this article.
- undersuit 2y ago
  There seems to be 29 original code talkers who were primary in the development and then the program expanded. The 2014 article is on one of the original 29. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_talker#Deployment_and_evolution_of_the_code_and_post-war_code_talkers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_talker#Deployment_and_evo...

teractiveodular 2y ago

The Japanese tried to crack the code by torturing a poor guy called Joe Kieyoomia who was Navajo, but not a code-talker or even aware of the existence of the program, but they didn't get far. Amazingly, he survived the concentration camp, the Bataan death march and getting nuked in Nagasaki, returning to the US and living until 77. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Kieyoomia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Kieyoomia

KennyBlanken 2y ago
It's worth noting just how extreme the levels of crime against humanity committed by the Japanese were. The Germans (and Swiss...) for the most part imprisoned / shot PoWs. The Japanese used PoWs for chemical and biological weapon testing and vivisection, and they would find the most depraved ways to draw out mass torture of PoWs. For example, they would do things like put US soldiers into baskets so small PoWs could not move at all inside them, load them into unventilated railroad boxcars with no water, then load them into ships, sail out to sea, and drop them overboard into shark-infested waters. Then there's the Nanjing Massacre where in a matter of days Japanese soldiers slaughtered something like 300,000 Chinese civilians at a rate of around 7,000 civilians a day. That was just one of the more than a dozen massacres. It's widely believed that Japan slaughtered more civilians than the Germans. The sheer level of depravity is astounding. And what's especially disturbing are the lengths conservatives in the Japanese government have gone to over the last several decades to rewrite history and erase these atrocities, while pushing harder and harder against the restrictions on their armed forces.
- krapp 2y ago
  Also worth noting that along with Operation Paperclip, where the US recruited Nazis to bootstrap their space program, the US also recruited Japanese war criminals to continue their experimentation in torture and chemical and biological warfare, which led to (among other things) MKULTRA.
  - scarecrowbob 2y ago
    Seriously. And in Bluebird and Artichoke the US directly continued that work, and not in some kind of "generic spirit" way, but in literal extensions of existing programs using people gathered via Paperclip. And in Korea the US used bioweapons developed by the Japanese during a retreat in late 1952. The Japanese were indeed horrible during the war. The take that the Germans and the US treatment of "expendable" humans during and after these wars was somehow more justified or less horrific is a uniquely horrible and ahistorical take.

julianpye 2y ago

The obituaries are often my favourite part of the Economist. They are edited by Ann Wroe - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Wroe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Wroe - a true legend. They focus mostly on long-forgotten people and create an intense glimpse into the short timeframe when their life made a big impact. My favourite obit of all time of hers is the one of Bill Millin: https://www.economist.com/obituary/2010/08/26/bill-millin https://www.economist.com/obituary/2010/08/26/bill-millin (https://archive.is/iZifs https://archive.is/iZifs)

julianpye 2y ago
And this is another great one, also in the vein of 'the last one' about the death of the last of the Beguines: https://www.economist.com/obituary/2013/04/27/marcella-pattyn https://www.economist.com/obituary/2013/04/27/marcella-patty... (https://archive.is/ClVez https://archive.is/ClVez)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
axus 2y ago
If an AI could research and write as well (and as accurately) as that, I'd say they've finally surpassed us.

shiroiushi 2y ago

It's too bad there were never any good movies made about the code-talkers. There was one movie by John Woo, starring Nicholas Cage, named "Windtalkers", but it was terrible; coincidentally, I was just reading an article this morning about the "worst war movies of the last 25 years" and Windtalkers was on it, alongside "Jarhead 2" and others.

jackschultz 2y ago

So many great parts in this. 1) The sense and importance of community. Both the mention of them coming together when he returned where "the ghosts will be laid". And also the mention of "there was no “I” in his war, only “we”. We're stuck in such an individualist culture where we're told to work hard to stand out, and seem to be shamed if we're weak and in receiving help from others. 2) Words as metaphors. Beautiful examples given in the post, but we should remember the roots of many of our words are also metaphors. My favorite being "persona"[0], coming referring to an actors mask that air goes through. Helps remind me that we're always actors in the world, not some defined Self we're stuck with. Good book[1] on that topic from Jay Garfield. 3) Explanation at the end of his "Navajo Code-Talkers uniform". Mentions that yes, it's more than ok to imagine clothes as images and have meaning beyond "something to wear for efficiency". The Emerald podcast talks about these things, both ornaments in general from human history [2] and more specifically about guardians [3] which is what he considered the Navajo colors were for, to protect him. The similarity of all these cases, to me, comes to they're not all thoughts he had in his head as words, which is what we're told to do from the smallest of ages. We're told to think hard, and use words (like I'm doing here) to be smarter than others. When looked at, words and thoughts are nothing compared to the experienced feelings that come from community, imaginal metaphors like hopping rabbits that leave tracks in the snow, or looking at colors you're wearing and feeling protected. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona [1] https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691220284/losing-ourselves https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691220284/lo... [2] https://www.themythicbody.com/podcast/universe-adorned-ornament-culture-cosmos-consciousness/ https://www.themythicbody.com/podcast/universe-adorned-ornam... [3] https://www.themythicbody.com/podcast/guardians-and-protectors/ https://www.themythicbody.com/podcast/guardians-and-protecto...

ngneer 2y ago

For this to work, x=D(E(x)) must hold, where x is the message in military English, and E and D are the encoding and decoding functions. Ergo, the Navajo language must have as many possible utterances as military English does. This is neither surprising nor interesting. What is interesting is that E and D were not known by the Germans and could not be effectively reverse engineered in time.

new_vienna 2y ago

[flagged]

prmoustache 2y ago

Strange obituary where the writer do not even mention his real name, Hash-keh Nah-adah, as opposed to the english name that he was forced to use at school years later.

w3ll_w3ll_w3ll 2y ago

https://metalgear.fandom.com/wiki/Code_Talker https://metalgear.fandom.com/wiki/Code_Talker

pseudolus 2y ago

If anyone is passing through Kayenta, AZ (very close to Monument Valley) there's a free small exhibit about the Navajo code talkers. Strangely enough, it's inside a Burger King of all places. Atlas Obscura features a brief article about the display: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/burger-king-navajo-code-talkers-display https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/burger-king-navajo-code-...

neverartful 2y ago
I just visited Monument Valley and it was spectacular. Inside the Visitor Center they have a whole room devoted to the Navajo code talkers. I only spent a few minutes in it but it was very interesting and very nicely presented.

Neonlicht 2y ago

In WW2 there was a lot of panic about "fifth column" infiltration from German special forces. So they came up with a code word that only native speakers can pronounce: Scheveningen.