Gundam question: War crimes of the One Year War?

[blut_und_glas]

I hope this does not go against the no politics rule and is in the right forum section. If the thread goes against the spirit of the board, please do delete.

There is a thing that always bothers me when talking about the OYW as a metaphor or parallel to WWII, and after thinking it through yet again, I would like to ask for other peoples thoughts on it:

Where are the war crimes?

If we discount the early space campaign including the One Week Battle, Operation British and Loum, and focus on the war starting with the Antarctic Treaty and the subsequent Earth landings, I have a hard time identifying the kind of systematic war crimes for which Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan are infamous. I can think of instances of at least borderline actions by both Zeon and the Federation (including various protagonists), but I fail to see anything resembling, as I said, systematic, large scale crimes ordered and/or endorsed by either sides' military high command or political leadership. Fictional equivalents to Unit 731 or the Einsatzgruppen, the Bataan death march or Uman ditch, extermination by labour, the rape of Nanjing, Babi Yar, or the commissar order, to name but a few real world examples, seem to be missing from the defining conflict of the early Universal Century.

Am I missing anything or is the OYW actually decidely different from its inspiration in this regard?

Regards,
jdw

PS: I find this especially odd in light of the "Germanisation" of Zeon, as I would have guessed that this (the shift from Zeon as a stand-in for Imperial Japan to evermore obvious Nazi (and Imperial) Germany parallels) should be a gateway to deal more openly with such topics.

PPS: I specifically excluded the mass destruction at the start of the OYW because I find this part of the war to be particularly hard to equate to WWII for other reasons.

[Wingnut]

Where are the war crimes?

Am I missing anything or is the OYW actually decidely different from its inspiration in this regard?

Well probably most notably those that are directly responsible for war crimes tend to wind up dead before or at A Bou A Qu, so there's no one left alive to judge.
Cima gassing a colony being the most notable exception, and she would be able to get off with a much lighter sentence if they also captured her superior(s) who put the G3 in her gas cans in the first place.

[ShadowCell]

PS: I find this especially odd in light of the "Germanisation" of Zeon, as I would have guessed that this (the shift from Zeon as a stand-in for Imperial Japan to evermore obvious Nazi (and Imperial) Germany parallels) should be a gateway to deal more openly with such topics.

well, that's the thing: they don't want to use it as a gateway to more openly deal with the various atrocities of the Axis Powers in World War II. they dress the Zeons up like Inglourious Basterds extras because it makes 'em look cool.

besides which, when Mobile Suit Gundam picks up, Zeon has already exterminated a whole bunch of non-Zeon Spacenoids. space colonies also make it a lot easier to kill enormous numbers of people at once in a very short amount of time, which reduces the need for the enormous genocidal machinery Nazi Germany had to set up. and by the time Mobile Suit Gundam begins, Zeon's army is already devastated by early losses, which means they have more pressing things to worry about than Exterminating All Humans(tm). even so, Zeon's genocidal campaigns are Gihren's idea and the other Zabis either don't know about them, don't care about them, or would rather have their own hands on the lever. Gihren pretty much says as much in his "me? like Hitler? oh dad, you're too kind" scene.

i suppose if you really wanted to, you could look at postwar groups like the Titans and Neo Zeon and the way they treat their various tragically mindwiped weaponized teenage girls, and infer that the Flanagan Institute was doing all that stuff too. and perhaps the Zeons are stuffing people into gas chambers in their occupied territories on Earth when nobody is looking?

but i'm not sure why the One Year War really needs to copy all of WWII's atrocities. i mean, it's not like Gundam doesn't provide plenty of fodder for war crimes tribunals on its own.