Is Tom Hanks Unhinged?
We should also point out that for many Americans, initially in 1941-2, the real war was with the Japanese, not the Germans (despite an official policy of privileging the European theater in terms of supply and manpower), but not because of race hatred, but due to the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
Until then (Hitler would in reaction unwisely declare war on the U.S. on December 11, 1941) Germany had been careful to maintain the pretense of non-belligerency, while Japan chose to start a war through a rather treacherous surprise assault at a time of nominal peace — thus inciting furor among the American public.
Despite Hanks’ efforts at moral equivalence in making the U.S. and Japan kindred in their hatreds, America was attacked first, and its democratic system was both antithetical to the Japan of 1941, and capable of continual moral evolution in a way impossible under Gen. Tojo and his cadre. It is quite shameful to reduce that fundamental difference into a “they…us” 50/50 polarity. Indeed, the most disturbing phrase of all was Hanks’ suggestion that the Japanese wished to “kill” us, while we in turn wanted to “annihilate” them. Had they developed the bomb or other such weapons of mass destruction (and they had all sorts of plans of creating WMDs), and won the war, I can guarantee Hanks that he would probably not be here today, and that his Los Angeles would look nothing like a prosperous and modern Tokyo.
4) What is remarkable about the aftermath of WWII is the almost sudden postwar alliance between Japan and the U.S., primarily aimed at stopping the Soviets, and then later the communist Chinese. In other words, the United States, despite horrific battles in places like Iwo Jima and Okinawa, harbored little official postwar racial animosity in its foreign policy, helped to foster Japanese democracy, provided aid, and predicated its postwar alliances — in the manner of its prewar alliances — on the basis of ideology, not race. Hanks apparently has confused the furor of combat — in which racial hatred often becomes a multiplier of emotion for the soldier in extremis — with some sort of grand collective national racial policy that led to and guided our conduct.
An innately racist society could not have gone through the nightmare of Okinawa (nearly 50,000 Americans killed, wounded, or missing), and yet a mere few months later have in Tokyo, capital of the vanquished, a rather enlightened proconsul MacArthur, whose deference to Japanese religion, sensibilities, and tradition ensured a peaceful transition to a rather radical new independent and autonomous democratic culture.
5) Hanks quips, “Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?” That is another unnecessary if asinine statement — if it refers to our struggle against radical Islam in the post 9/11 world. The U.S. has risked much to help Muslims in the Balkans and Somalia, freed Kuwait and Iraq in two wars against Saddam Hussein, liberated or helped to liberate Afghanistan both from the Russians and the Taliban, and has the most generous immigration policy toward Muslims of any country in the world, ensuring a degree of tolerance unimaginable to Muslims in, say, China or Russia. Hanks should compare the U.S. effort to foster democracy in Iraq with the Russian conduct in Chechnya to understand “what’s going on today.”
In short Hanks’s comments are as ahistorical as they are unhinged. One wonders — were they supposed to entice us into watching the upcoming HBO series on the Pacific theater? But if anyone is interested in the role of race on the battlefield, one could probably do far better in skipping Hanks, and reading instead E.B. Sledge’s brilliant memoir, With the Old Breed, which has a far more sophisticated analysis of race and combat on Peleliu and Okinawa, and was apparently (and I hope fairly ) drawn upon in the HBO series. (Sledge speaks of atrocities on both sides in the horrific close-quarter fighting on the islands, but he makes critical distinctions about accepted and non-accepted behaviors, the differences between Japanese and American attitudes, and in brilliant fashion appreciates the role of these campaigns in the larger war. One should memorize the last lines of his book.)
It would be easy to say that Hanks knows about as much about history as historians do about acting, but that would be too charitable. Anyone with a high school education, or an innate curiosity to read (and Hanks in the interview references works on the Pacific theater), can easily learn the truth on these broad subjects. In Hanks’ case, he is either ignorant and has done little real research, or in politically-correct fashion has taken a truth about combat in the Pacific (perceptions of cultural and racial difference often did intensify the savagery of combat) and turned it into The Truth about the origins and conduct of an entire war — apparently in smug expectation that such doctrinaire revisionism wins applause these days in the right places (though I doubt among the general public that he expects to watch the series.)
All in all, such moral equivalence (the Japanese and the U.S. were supposedly about the same in their hatreds) is quite sad, and yet another commentary on our postmodern society that is as ignorant about its own past as it is confused in its troubled present.
A quick bit of googling for the context of this quotation showed me exactly what I expected about Hanks’s remarks. To be sure, they are blunt and imprecise, and that is regrettable. Nonetheless, here are the words that precede the above-quoted language:
“From the outset, we wanted to make people wonder how our troops can re-enter society in the first place. How could they just pick up their lives and get on with the rest of us?”
My initial suspicion upon reading Hanks’s words was that, as an actor who has played many solider roles, he was referring to the “Other” of our enemies in wartime. Sure enough, this quotation proves to be not some geopolitical comment about the Clash of Civilizations based on race, the history of the first World War, or anything like it, but instead a commentary on the dehumanizing of the enemy that occurs when one fights in a war. If anyone needs evidence of that I would be more than happy to provide it, but I think this concept is largely self-evident and may stand on its own.
This blog post is certainly historically accurate and well thought-out — and revealing of its author’s biases. It reads a narrow comment in far too broad a manner (or rather, it neglects the comment’s context). As a once-upon-a-time English major, I certainly know the feeling.
Interesting notes VDH.
However you give Tom Hanks too much attention. He’s a Hollywood hack and makes some good movies, but like Sean Penn is not worth beans (and thats an insult to a good pot o’ beans…) when engaging in political or historical conversation.
Keep up the good work.
Hanks is just another Hollywood airhead who got rich dressing up and playing pretend. In their minds they have the combined knowledge of all the characters they have been on celluloid. Hanks, for example, probably thinks he could be an executive in FedEx because he, you know, played one in a movie. The whole world recoiled in horror at the barbaric outrages perpetrated by the Japanese in China. Even Nazis who were there were revolted. It is well documented for Hanks to read if he ever lifts his eyes from the pages of Variety. The Rape of Nanking would be a good place to start. The beheading contest between Japanese officers was covered like a sporting event in the Tokyo newspapers. Each lopped off about a hundred before their arms got tired. The Chinese say 300,000 people were killed in a six-week period. Unborn babies were dug from their mothers by bayonets, people were nailed to walls, buried to their necks and run over by horses and tracked vehicle. Just about every other atrocity the human mind can conceive occurred. The Japanese regarded their victims as subhuman and, as such, morality didn’t arise as a question. The stunning historical ignorance of Hanks of course is widely shared in Hollywood. Beyond that, a trendy left wing anti-Americanism is a condition of work. It helps ease the guilt of unearned wealth. What a disgusting crowd.
Hey Tom Hanks, like you, I voted for Obama. Now, your taxes are going to pay for my healthcare and subsidize my rent. I look forward to sponging off your income at every opportunity.
No, I’m not thanking you. I’m just here to laugh in your funny face.
I enjoyed Band of Brothers. But now that I know where Hanks (whom I previously respected as an actor) is coming from, I’ll be boycotting his work as a matter of principle.
What is it with these celebreties!? So self-righteous in their pitiful ignorance (Stone, Penn etc.) So hostile to the society that has privileged them so much. Thank goodness there are some whom remain sane an courageous. Seen this yet?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWi182CMJY8
And Ms. Jackson is not alone. From what I hear there are many others who oppose Hollywood’s anti-American prejudice, but dare not speak out too openly against its quasi-totalitarian leftist culture. I even read somewhere that the inscrutable Angelina Jolie thought that Obama was all ‘smoke and mirrors.’ Go Angie! Celebrities command a lot of attention and are therefore positioned to make a difference. I hope more step up to the plate and take a stand against such revisionist nonsense. On the other hand, I think that with comments like Hanks’, they do their despicable cause more harm than good.
PS – great job VDH! I wonder how Mr. Hanks would reply if he ever bothered to actually consider such a well argued rejoinder?
Professor, you said it well above! Hanks is mouthing Hollywood’s Socialist pap without an idea of the history of WWII. Maybe he watch his own show.
Now, perhaps, Professor, you could address that same concern towards those who feel we of European ancestry should apologize to Native Americans. There was little quarter given by each other side during that long period of warfare between our two peoples, yet modern PC attitudes say only we “White Eyes” were to blame. We White Eyes do have much blame for those wars but then also do the native tribes; their way of warfare was very brutal and cruel.
Same as what Hanks is saying now about the war in the Pacific. Little quarter was given then by either side, except we did accept surrender some times and did treat those prisoners somewhat well.
I think that so many Americans, especially but not exclusively those on the left, take this attitude of moral equivalance because what they want most from others is to be liked, and to allow moral distinctions to be drawn between the behavior or motives of our respective countries or peoples is to invite dislike. Most people who travel learn quickly that in the world at large you have to fight for your place in line and you do well to count your change. Being liked is far less useful than being respected, and in any case the former follows the latter.
Too bad if Hanks was quoted correctly. I remember his interviews about WWII years ago – there was none of this claptrap. I guess the PC crowd gets to everyone, and ‘acceptance’ from the Hollywood out of touch with reality crowd gets everyone eventually. Sad – I liked Hanks.
Heh. Obama can’t do all of the apologizing himself. Hollywood has to help!
Another possibility is that he’s garnering attention on the cheap by speaking out of a non-standard orifice.
This is one of those things that’s rather irritating. In the first place, hopefully if someone talks to Mr. Hanks we’ll get a “clarification” where he or his publicist walks back most of these quotes. Second, in Hollywood this sort of foolishness is par for the course. There’s a nugget of truth in the quotations above: many Americans *were* racist during the Second World War, and there was a savagery to the fighting that was unprecedented in history at the time, and hasn’t really been matched since. Neither of those things, however, gets to the threshold that the quotes from Hanks above. As Dr. Hanson points out, the Japanese were uniquely racist themselves, in a way that the United States and the Western Allies never approached. The Japanese, for instance, conducted biological weapon research on captured Chinese civilians and soldiers, and on some Allied POWs. They murdered hundreds of thousands of Chinese prisoners during the war, many of them one at a time in a way that made their sadism obvious, and mistreated Western POWs in a way that no other nation (not even the Nazis, except perhaps with the Russians) did during the war. And none of that includes the Pearl Harbor attack, which of course was completely illegal and pretty much unprecedented.
Anyway, be interesting to see what happens, whether Hanks takes any flak over this from the mainstream media people. I doubt it, but you never know…
Tom Hanks is a great actor and seems a very likable chap but a historian he is not. Hollywood actors of his caliber are paid tens of millions to pretend, to exaggerate, to stretch truths and live out popular concoctions and fantasies before the camera. When they often repeat such gross inaccuracies and mix it with moral equivalence too you have to wander if these actors can remove themselves from the fantasy worlds they’re immersed in.
It’s quite clear Tom doesn’t know Gump from the forest.
Thus do we see the danger of actors discoursing on politics. Contrast Hanks with Tom Selleck, who, appearing on the Tonight Show during Johnny Carson’s last years was asked his opinion of a political issue of the day. He replied, and I’m paraphrasing, that he had no idea why anyone should care what an actor had to say about such issues. His job was to act as well as he could and entertain people. He stuck with that, and over the years, has continued to display real class of a kind virtually eradicated in Hollywood. Recognized standing in line to view Ronald Reagan’s body lying in state, he was offered the chance to go to the front of the line, but politely declined and waited his turn like everyone else. I purchase every DVD in which he plays a role.
Perhaps Hanks was just trying to make what he considered a useful comment about the nature of war, but lacking sufficient historical knowledge, insulted not only the soldiers who fought the Japanese, but our current soldiers. Hanks also directly implied that our racial hatred of the Japanese caused us to try to kill them all. One need not study a great deal about WWII Japan to know that the Japanese people were thoroughly indoctrinated in the ethic of Bushido and would commonly fight and die to the last man, doing everything they could to take Americans with them. Film from that era exists–I’ve seen it–of Japanese women jumping from cliffs to their deaths, holding their children in their arms, while American soldiers frantically, even tearfully begged them to stop. The atrocities visited on fellow Asians and Allied prisoners of war by the Japanese Army might have turned the stomach of Saddam Hussein. Japanese soldiers were even told that Americans would kill and eat them, encouraging them to fight to the death and to violate the rules of war.
One of the primary factors weighing in favor of the use of the atomic bomb against Japan was the frenzied, fanatical, and ever increasingly suicidal fighting of the Japanese as our troops came closer and closer to the home islands. If our troops were forced to fight their way through Japan, the death toll would have been in the millions, most of whom would have been Japanese civilians and soldiers.
While I appreciate Hank’s skill as an actor, being surprised that yet another actor has shot himself in the foot by ignorantly shooting off his mouth on such matters might qualify one for the Louis Renault Award.
A strange disconnect/distortion took place when Hanks went on David Letterman’s show to promote this series: They waxed nostalgic about the shared sacrifice of the nation during WW2, even sounding downright patriotic at times about the struggle and battles that took place, while completely ignoring the 2 ton elephant in the room – a downtown Manhattan skyline devoid of twin towers, and American soldiers/marines/sailors/airmen still hunting down jihadists in Iraq and Afghanistan… As if, to say, “that was then, and this is now”. (And never the twain shall meet!)
F*** Hanks, his admin assistants and the chopper they rode in on.
I do not subscribe to HBO and I suggest that those who do cancel their subscription.
As an aside, I would be very interested in Prof. Hanson’s views of the show “Spartacus”.
My mother is approaching her eighties. We were talking about our nation and it’s fine history of “SAVING THE WORLD”.
And we are comfortable in that belief.
For the second time in my 55 years years on this planet my mother reminded me that her brother died on the first wave on Iwo Jima.
I said I know mom, that’s why I joined the Marines back in 1971.
She said, I don’t understand our country…no she said, I don’t understand these people.
I said I don’t either mommy.
One of the things I always liked about Tom Hanks was his eschewing the usual Hollywood demagoguery. You assumed he leaned to the left, he’s an actor, after all. I could live with that, everyone is entitled to his or her opinions. The last couple of years though, he has let his beliefs become vocal, and those opinions are, sadly, on the same wavelength as Sean Penn and company.
He is America’s Jackass.
I had really wanted to see this, especially because I liked “With The Old Breed” so much. Now I don’t. Good job with the publicity Tom!
Tom Hanks is this week’s poster child of the truth in the old adage “It is better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool then to open it and remove all doubt.”.
When I read Dr. Hanson, I often feel like the janitor assigned to wash the hallway floor outside Hanson’s classroom who works slowly and quietly in order to hear every word of the lecture. That is, I am not enrolled in the school. And I can’t afford the tuition or the time to audit Hanson’s class. Even if I had the money and the time, I’d be completely unprepared to join the class discussion because I hadn’t done the reading for Dr. Hanson’s course.
Therefore, with a concern for the revisionism in the air, it would be great if Professor Hanson would present his reading list for all of his “students” in this “class”. Such a list would not only cover American history but world history too.
Would Professor Hanson please give us, his students, his referral to the great books of history with which we can educate ourselves?
Thank you so much for what you do Dr. Hanson.
The Hollywood mantra, “why ruin a good storey with the facts”.
The answers are provided brilliantly by Dr. Hanson.
Hanks’ superficial comments are disgraceful. To those that sacrificed and the pain and loss of those left behind at the time – widows and fatherless kids – it is wrong be so disrespectful. It’s as wrong to them, as it is to all who have recently suffered in attacks from radical Islamic violence and those confronting it now.
I hope Tom Hanks reads Dr. Hanson’s article. He did occur to me as an actor who had a little more substance than revealed in his recent comments.
Further evidence refuting racial hostility towards the Japanese is written in ‘House of Morgan’, by Ron Cherenow. Morgan bankers sought business relations in China and Japan in the early 1900′s. And contrary to Hanks’ assertions, partners at the Morgan bank, are an example of Americans that were enlightened, well educated and worldly individuals.
The U.S. ” … has the most generous immigration policy toward Muslims of any country in the world, ensuring a degree of tolerance unimaginable to Muslims in, say, China or Russia.”
A policy allowing a similar rate of immigration from Japan 1941-1945 would have been unthinkable. The current policy is the worst immigration policy we could have for the U.S. and for Moslems. Who is tolerating whom? Islam seeks nothing less than to rule mankind in every corner of the earth. We cannot (and should not) destroy Islam and it will not reform itself, which is not our concern anyway. Short of the Islamization of North America the remaining option is to send them back home.
Repatriation by incentive and grants could be first steps in the most humane solution to this intractable problem. I feel certain we will suffer their belligerence and violence as Europe does now, or worse, before any unfiltered views of Islam surface on the political scene. Trying to parse “good” and “bad” aspects or factions of this supremacist politico-religious system is futile. A “generous policy” as the author suggests here is equally futile and reflects the ignorance of the Bush administration and others. “Tolerance” in this case is something that has been forced upon us.
Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different.
How about the Germans. They were white Aryans who believed in the same Christian God as Americans. They were noted for their civilized culture based on the Reformation, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.
Famed for their contribution to western art, music and literature.
How did we view them Tom?
Actually Churchill covered that point:
“What is our aim?… to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime.”
How did the Chinese and the Koreans view the Japanese? They share the same genetic characteristics in skin color. Why they hated their bleepin’ guts for what the Japs did to THEM.
Ever heard of the Rape of Nanking, China, Tom?
Beginning December 9, 1937 hundreds of thousands of civilians were murdered and 20,000–80,000 women were raped. That’s exactly four years before Pearl Harbor.
You know something Tom…. merciless, cruel and inhuman Japanese warfare didn’t BEGIN on Dec 8, 1941 for MILLIONS of other non-Japanese yellow, slant-eyed people who believed in different gods.
Millions of people loathed the Japanese (and still do) for what they did in trying to annihilate them first. Dumb-ass.
M. Morgan, you’re very understanding of our misunderstandings. You’re very understanding and also very dishonest. I have read the quote in context (at least as much context as is available from “a quick Google search), and found that VDH was exactly right.
True, Hanks began by talking about returning soldiers, but he wasn’t discussing them thinking of the enemy as “‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods” he said WE saw the Japanese as “‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods” (had to take a swipe at the religious folk there).
He went on to state not that the returning soldiers believed that the Japanese “were out to kill us because our way of living was different” but that it was simply a true fact and then he states the same thing about us, the United States, not about U.S. soldiers. In this he draws the moral equivalence between us and the Japanese that VDH does such a wonderful job of eviscerating here.
While it’s true that he puts the whole thing into the context of returning soldiers, he is not talking about the attitudes of the soldiers that are returning, but rather the attitudes of the country the soldiers are returning to.
I agree with Dr. Hansen’s comments, but he oversimplified the situation that led to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. (An attack that was not a surprise to some of our military officers and top executive branch appointees.) Throughout the 1930s, under FDR, we imposed increasingly harsh trade restrictions on the Japanese while liberally trading with Japan’s enemies. We, with a wink and a nod, allowed Army Air Force personnel to take leaves of absence and go to China to form air defense groups. We kept pushing Japan’s touchy military government until it punched us in the nose. I agree with the historians who believe that we deliberately failed to strengthen Pearl Harbor’s defenses to make it an inviting target. The idea was that the Japanese would attack, we’d declare war on Japan, Germany would declare war on us, and we’d get into a war that Congress would not otherwise have approved. The only drawback was that the punch in the nose was more damaging than FDR’s geniuses predicted. We continued to underestimate Japan throughout the war, and our Europe-first policy gave the Japanese military a tremendous advantage.
We did exhibit racism during WWII (Japanese-Americans were forced out of their homes and businesses and locked into camps, German-Americans were left untouched), but not in the way Tom Hanks believes. Our soldiers dehumanize the enemy to assuage guilt, not because society taught them to be violent nationalists, racists, or religionists. It is easier to kill yellow Japs and stinking Krauts than it is to kill Riku Tanakas or Johann Schmidts. But, our soldiers did not exhibit the complete dehumanization and savagery exhibited by the Japanese (or the North Koreans, or the Vietnamese, or the Islamic fighters or terrorists).
In a (Marine..?) history of the War in the Pacific, and intelligence officer is interrogating a captured Japanese soldier. The man is the caricature of the Japanese, thick glasses, buck teeth. Asked why he surrendered… “We were told to fight to the last man…”. “Well?”, says the officer. Says the Japanese soldier, “I’m the last man”. (I am not making this up; I just don’t have the exact title.)
A modest suggestion: read the recently published “Faithful Warriors: A Combat Marine Remembers the Pacific War (Naval Institute Press, 2009), by Lt. Col Dean Ladd, USMCR (ret.) and Steven Weingartner. It has been favorably compared to Sledge’s book–with, I think, good reason, particularly with regard to descriptions of combat and to the views expressed therein about Japan and the Japanese.
Disclosure: I am the co-author.
#1 above wrote, “My initial suspicion upon reading Hanks’s words was that, as an actor who has played many solider roles, he was referring to the “Other” of our enemies in wartime”.
Why would you believe that an actor who has played a soldier, especially an actor in contemporary, divorced from reality, pansy-left Hollywood, has any particular great insight into the experiences, beliefs and perceptions of a combat soldier?
Early in 1966, I found myself in Japan, walking the streets, mingling with the citizens, visiting some historical sites, etc. I was amazed by this fine culture and friendly people, knowing that just over 21 years earlier we were at war. I was wearing an American military uniform during this entire visit, which would not be my last either.
Racial problems? Beauty comes in many forms. Hanks lacks a curiosity that is without excuse for someone who has his stature.
Maybe he took too many acting classes while in school. Bozo!
VDH<, WILSONNN!!!
Speaking of acts against interest (if Hank’s opinion is to be believed) consider how long the U.S. kept the true story of the IJA atrocities classified, especially the treatment of our aviators. For those that flew and fought in the European theater these stories were first met with disbelief, and then with cold fury, similar to many of our citizens’ reaction to the terrorists’ “taking of heads” on video today. In the IJA they considered a decapitation a rite of passage and kept a tally by officer and unit, and ridiculed those who lacked a passion for the same.
Granted, they did not honor (or sign) the Geneva Convention. In order for these agreements to achieve their purpose (protecting the innocent and reciprocal treatment of captured soldiers), those outside the convention wrote their own death warrant – which would not have caused a true believer in the Emperor one minute’s pause – “of course we will die rather than surrender, and if captured will kill our captors or kill ourselves at the first opportunity – irrespective of parole, isn’t the same true for you?”
Sound familiar?
Sigh. Like lambs to the slaughter.
For those traveling in Australia, there are still wonderfully awful and soul-shaking war memorials and museums. It’s worth spending a day in Canberra with the dioramas, equipment and stories. And for all our respect for Mr. Churchill, there are those that still despise him in Australia for stripping the country of their defenses when they knew first-hand what they faced as Japan militarized and showed no humanity in China.
Art imitates life. Stupid is as stupid does.
Like an upcoming Showtime feature by Oliver Stone (RE: Ron Radosh PJM), it is both Showtime and HBO that are culprits in spreading the lie. They are fully in the camp of NYT, Newsweek, and MSNBC.
Like those who defend the Gitmo detainees, these are enemies within.
The world continues on the path where up is down, forward is backward, and right is wrong.
But the left is not right.
His comments reminded me of this quote from the Adam Sandler movie, “Billy Madison”:
Mr. Madison, what you’ve just said… is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it…
Thank you Mr. Hanson for rescuing the truth from yet another historical dimwit.
Stupid is a stupid does.
Actors talk about emptying themselves out to become a character they are portraying in a movie, play etc…
Obviously some of them lose themselves, never to be found in the real world again. Too bad the price to be paid for untold riches in Hollywood is total stupidity and a soulless existence. So why do they frequently end up on the dark side? Why do they frequently end up siding with evil dictators or seeking to take away the freedoms of the rest of us while running to the bank depositing the riches they have garnered? Have they sold their souls to devil are now are being used as pawns to promote an evil agenda?
It’s time to relook at some of the previous work of this actor producer and find out whose work he is taking credit for.
Damn damn damn…I like Hanks the actor, I even have several of his movies in my collection…Turner and Hooch, Splash, Saving Private Ryan…Now, just as with Sigourney Weaver, and others who just don’t know how to act and then keep their yaps shut about things they have no knowledge of, I’ll have to take my Hanks movies out of my collection and put them in a box in the closet, hopefully until the day they realize how stupid they’ve been and apologize to America for being morons.
I won’t boycott his upcoming “Pacific” when it comes out on DVD..but I won’t be paying for it, if you know what I mean…. ;)
there was a savagery to the fighting that was unprecedented in history?
History has a lot of precedents. Trench warfare in WWI, the Ottoman invasion of southeastern Europe, the ravages of the Mongols and Huns, the third Punic War – what made any of those less savage than the Pacific Theater of WWII?
Back in the 60s, there used to be a tv show called “Hank”. I think Hank was a young guy who couldn’t afford to go to college but always found a way to take someone’s place who couldn’t make his/her class. Funny, no one talks or remembers that show.
We are all “Hanks” (not Tom) when it comes to Dr. Hanson’s class.
Gee, Tom, if we’d wanted to annilhate them, we wouldn’t have stopped at two cities, would we?
Dear Mr. Hanks,
Ineptitude and historical illiteracy of your comment aside, it wasn’t that America wanted to annihilate the Japanese, but our willingness to do so is why we won. Read Hirohito’s speech accepting the Potsdam Declaration (unconditional surrender), it’s right there in paragraph 3.
Everyone can make an unfortunate, poorly worded or thought out statement. I’m willing to give Hanks the benefit of doubt because of his work on Band of Brothers, which is some of the very finest television I have ever seen (damning it with faint praise, I know).
By the way, I agree about “With the Old Breed.” I’ve long thought it should be required reading in every High School in America.
The “annihilate/kill” contrast doesn’t even call for philosophical analysis — we know what each state and culture did with absolute power over a subject. Every conquest of Imperial Japan was subsumed and had its population trafficked into forced labor or worse. After Tokyo surrendered, the United States-led Allies spent seven years and billions of dollars rebuilding and liberalizing the country before restoring its sovereignty.
I didn’t think Tom Hanks was this stupid or deluded. I really didn’t.
As a child in the early 1960′s I lived at Itazuke AB near Fukuoka in southern Japan. Fukuoka was the site of an infamous WWII POW camp sited at a nearby coal mine. It was also the home of a medical school at which a captured B-29 crew was murdered through live vivesection. Fukuoka is also not far from Nagasaki and was a secondary nuclear target. Admittedly, I was a child but I do not recall anything akin to racial animosity or hatred between Americans or Japanese even though the war its many atrocities were less than twenty years in the past. If it were all about race we would not have been able to live there as we did.
There were, undoubtedly, strong feelings of race in the war but to try to pin racial animosity as the primary cause is probably silly. Asia is a very racist place but economics, security, and desire for empire were bigger factors than race.
To borrow a line Mr. Hanks ought to be familiar with; Stupid is as stupid does.
Japanese aggression during WWII was premised on institutionalized racism. The members of the Ku Klux Klan were moderates in comparison. And no, I am not even slightly exaggerating. American Southern racism was bad enough—-but it does not even begin to compete with the racist Imperial Japanese military mindset. Allow me to employ a baseball analogy: The Klaners would be comparable to a minor league A team. Those members of the Japanese military, on the other hand, would be best described as Hall of Fame racists. These evil individuals were superstars. They took evil to another level that would be considered incomprehensible to a white Southern racist. The Japanese performed ghastly medical experiments on those deemed inferior to themselves. Raping and murdering helpless women and children were considered rather boring activities.
From the outset, we wanted to make people wonder how our troops can re-enter society in the first place. How could they just pick up their lives and get on with the rest of us?”
Well Mr. Hanks, you might have asked that question of E. B. Sledge. He reentered society and had a long career as, I believe, a professor at a college in Alabama. You might have asked that question of any of hundreds of thousands of men who saw combat in the Pacific–and came home–and resumed their lives. They went on to become teachers (my high school English teacher was one–Pelelieu) insurance executives (another friend–Guadalcanal, Saipan, Okinawa)lawyers (two friends/mentors of mine were at Surigao Strait)or heaven forfend, Presidents of the United States–Kennedy, Ford, and Bush all saw combat action in the Pacific.
There is a long tradition in the United States of citizens going to war, experiencing both its horror and its stupefying boredom, and then returning to civilian life and getting on with it. Hanks, our suffering and insufferable artiste just can’t get his mind around that fact.
A while back I read the book Destroyer Captain, written by a Japanese naval officer about his service in WW II. Great book, now when he was describing his pre-war life he mentioned how the US sent so much relief aid to Japan after it suffered from a major earthquake. That really impressed him.
So to quote Hanks, “Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”
No one in Hollywood has had the guts to make a record of the Japanese and the Sack of Manila -
http://battlingbastardsbataan.com/som.htm
This was an American territory scheduled before 1941 for their own independence in 1946. Will you find a record in the history books of America’s schools or will you find Hiroshima?
Tom Hanks thinks because he has SO much money that God touched him and gave him such great superhuman powers as he rewrites American history…why just a day’s work for him.
Money sure doesn’t buy class, now does it?
What a walking windbag. And I don’t think he’s a nice person at all. [big fat raspberry here] I can live my life NEVER seeing anything he involves himself in as it generally is some sort of mass propaganda campaign.
I really cannot stand the guy.
I think most of you are missing the point and certainly with all due respect to VDH . . . he, in my humble opinion, has taken the “Trench” perspective and applied to our Nation . . . confused the REMF with the front lines. I will assure you that every man jack that comes face to face with the deadly force of enemy . . . he will hate that SOB with every breath taken. If that man is fortunate enough to survive the confrontation he will come home an . . . unknown . . . a mear sodden image of what once was.
So keep up the REMF chatter . . . and now you know why the Vet never talks.
I know something about the Pacific War, as you will see if you examine my web site. Mr. Hanks is indeed wrong to assert any moral equivalence between the Japanese and the Americans during the Pacific War. The United States had no imperial ambitions in the Far East in 1941; on the contrary, we were preparing to grant independence to the Philippines, our only territory in the area, in 1948. Japan had seized Korea in 1911 and Manchuria in 1931, annexing the former and turning the latter into a puppet state, and was in the process of trying to reduce China to another puppet state.
We had likewise proposed ending the “unequal treaties’ with China, but Japan was not interested. Japan’s effort to establish a closed sphere of influence in the Far East clashed with the American policy of free trade, which most economists recognize as benefiting everyone concerned.
The Rape of Nanking has already been mentioned. It was hardly unique. It is also now widely accepted by historians that the Japanese used poison gas against the Chinese, who had no defenses and no means of retaliation, on numerous occasions. The Allies declined to use poison gas even at Iwo Jima, an island whose civilians had long been evacuated, where its use might have spared countless Allied lives while killing about as many of the Japanese defenders as actually perished (e.g. practically all of them.) While some U.S. commanders set up brothels for their soldiers — an act of which I am not proud as an American — there is no serious question of the girls being tricked or forced into participating, which cannot be said of the widespread system of “comfort women” tricked or forcibly recruited by the Japanese for use in military brothels.
The U.S. has been condemned for its mass bombing of Japan. I can certainly wish there had been another road to victory, but the Japanese were unwilling to surrender on anything approaching acceptable terms, and the alternatives were an invasion or a blockade. Both were estimated to be likely to produce Japanese casualties of ten million or more, plus a million Allied casualties in the event of an invasion. And it should not be forgotten that Japan had mass bombed the Chinese wartime capital of Chungking, which was swollen with civilian refugees at the time, an act that not only predated U.S. strategic bombing, but predated even the German terror bombings of Warsaw and Rotterdam. Mass terror bombing of civilians was invented by the Japanese.
I should make it clear that I do not hate today’s Japanese. I do hate the Japanese militarists of that past era and the horrors they brought to the world, but they are gone and good riddance; and, while I am concerned about the Japanese ultranationalist movements and Japanese reluctance to come to grips with their past as the Germans have done, the Japan of today is not the same nation as the Japan of 1945.
Hanks began to lose me with his Big Love series, which is wrong on so many levels. It’s peculiar how the only prejudice Hollywood does not see anything wrong with is prejudice against religious conservatives such as Mormons. They are, of course, not the only such target, but they have proven a highly lucrative one, because they are vulnerable to a divide-and-conquer strategy due to their theological differences with other Christian faiths. Other religious conservatives should take note, and to their credit, some have.
It’s a shame, because Hanks is the rare Hollywood actor who has only been married a couple of times and stayed with both more than a couple of years; I like (most of) his acting; and he has indeed played an important role of reminding this generation of the heroic sacrifices of the generation that had to fight the Second World War. But that capital only goes so far, and he’s rapidly running out with comments like the one Dr. Hanson quoted.
Any early efforts at humanity with wounded Japanese soldiers on Guadalcanal were squelched when the gesture was returned with grenades or hidden pistols. The taking of prisoners declined quickly after that. Many racist comments after those early encounters were the reaction to stories of atrocities that spread rapidly throughout the American forces. Many elderly veterans of the war still cannot stand Japanese 65 years later.
Alright, M. Morgan, let’s reassemble the two quotes, so we can see what context was missed.
“From the outset, we wanted to make people wonder how our troops can re-enter society in the first place. How could they just pick up their lives and get on with the rest of us?”
SNIP
“Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”
VDH addresses this question of whether this quotation… proves to be not some geopolitical comment about the Clash of Civilizations based on race, the history of the first World War, or anything like it, but instead a commentary on the dehumanizing of the enemy that occurs when one fights in a war, as you claim.
“Despite Hanks’ efforts at moral equivalence in making the US and Japan kindred in their hatreds, America was attacked first, and its democratic system was both antithetical to the Japan of 1941, and capable of continual moral evolution in a way impossible under Gen. Tojo and his cadre. It is quite shameful to reduce that fundamental difference into a ‘they…us’ 50/50 polarity. Indeed, the most disturbing phrase of all was Hanks’ suggestion that the Japanese wished to ‘kill,’ us, while we in turn wanted to ‘annihilate’ them. Had they developed the bomb or other such weapons of mass destruction (and they had all sorts of plans of creating WMDs), and won the war, I can guarantee Hanks that he would probably would not be here today, and that his Los Angeles would look nothing like a prosperous and modern Tokyo.”
SNIP
“Hanks apparently has confused the furor of combat—in which racial hatred often becomes a multiplier of emotion for the soldier in extremis—with some sort of grand collective national racial policy that led to and guided our conduct.”
So, yes, your evidence would be welcome here. Otherwise, your once-upon- a-time English major conjecture is out its league when you attempt to match wits with a man who has written over 17 books, as well as hundreds of articles, book reviews, scholarly papers and newspaper editorials on matters ranging from ancient Greek, agrarian and military history to foreign affairs, domestic politics and contemporary culture.
I think that Hanks is correct in some respects. The American propaganda machine sought to demonize Japan and the rest of the Axis powers. We did round up Japanese and put them in camps.
Certainly, the Japanese propaganda machine did the same.
With regard to soldiers going to war, coming home, and reintegrating in society, he also doesn’t understand. No one really can, unless they went through the training, fought, and came home. War certainly is hell. You see things that you would rather not see. Today’s soldier is no different than the Spartan warrior who returns from horrific battles only to go work in his field and sow or harvest his crops.
I think that sometimes we as a society try to figure out, or place things into situations that aren’t there. Do soldiers have dreams about what happened? Sure. Flashbacks. Sure. But that doesn’t preclude them from becoming normal productive members of society.
Loved the article. So I went to Amazon to check out the book mentioned, With the Old Breed, and the VERY FIRST review is:
“Eugene Sledge became more than a legend with his memoir, With The Old Breed. He became a chronicler, a historian, a storyteller who turns the extremes of the war in the Pacific —the terror, the camaraderie, the banal and the extraordinary—into terms we mortals can grasp.”—Tom Hanks
So Tom Hanks must have read the book….
Hanks, if that was his stance lost a large chunk of potential Japanese-American viewers.
There were some concerns in some quarters about race otherwise I don’t know if Roosevelt would have issued an EO for relocating the Japanese population off the West coast. Ancestry trumping Nationality. Proved pretty unfounded after the fact, just looking at the exploits of the 442nd Division in Europe.
For those who also, in revisionist fashion, like to bemoan the use of and decry the necessity of atomic weapons in securing the timely surrender of Japan I recommend Japan’s Longest Day.
This book, by the Japanese Pacific War Research Society, was based upon exhaustive interviews with all surviving parties (except Emperor Hirohito) about the 24 hours leading up to the Emperor’s historic surrender broadcast, detailing the difficulty in even reaching the agreement of the government to surrender and the efforts by military factions to interfere and prevent it from happening, including the attempted coup and occupation of the Imperial Palace.
Tom Hanks – the new Howard Zinn!
I had an uncle who openly said that as far as he was concerned, “We could have just kept dropping more atom bombs on them until there weren’t any more Japanese.”
Sounds like “annilation” to me.
He had a reason.
Uncle Ray had, as a nineteen-year-old in an intelligence unit seen up close what the Japanese had done to the people of the Phillipines.
Hanks was taught his version of “History” by the same folks who ignore the atrocities of our enemies (like Bataan and Nanking) and seem to think we could have talked our way past the Pearl Harbor attack.
Like Matt Damon, he’s a victim of his association with Leftywood…
Dear Mr Hanks
Needs to be reminded of the Rape of Nanking
Unit 731 and the attempt to build an A-bomb by the Japanese Navy
and of course with the closing of UNIT 731 It had enough diease’s and virus’s to kill half the world’s Population. Oh and spreading diease’s/plague in China in WW2. Like sean penn a hella Actor but not as smart as he thinks himself in history.
I will watch Hanks’ new flick, I already pay for TV service and I have a great interest in the subject.
That said,I no longer have a shred of respect for Tommy Hanks,he joins a ever growing list of actors,directors and other hollywood lefties whose movies I will not go to a theater to see.
All of the war movies that have been made of the current conflict aren’t worth spending a second of my time on.
Thank you VDH, for setting Hanks straight on his ignorance.
i missed the part in saving private ryan where the motives of the soldiers even came close to hanks interpretation.
i wonder if he regrets being a tool of propaganda…
missed band of brothers-maybe it sets the record straight and develops on the idea that americans love killing foreigners.
Hansen is being a prat.
First, he is taking a quote in isolation and attempting to extrapolate from it all sorts of agenda and application which is not evident from Hanks’ comment in isolation. This opinion piece reflects poorly on Hansen’s axe to grind, not on Hanks.
Second, I have collected many short films, cartoons, and military training films produced in the United States during World War II, such as Frank Capra’s “Why We Fight” series and Bugs Bunny cartoons, and they all portray Japanese people and culture in a very perjorative way – the cartoons show every “Jap” or “Nip” with buck teeth, short, myopic with cokebottle glasses, the military training films talk about the Japanese people as “mindlessly worshipping their God Emperor”, and children trained to be soldiers while American children are peacefully playing and fishing. There are images of American children raising money for Japanese earthquake relief juxtaposed with Japanese children chanting in unison, marching, and practicing bayonnetting dummies. The Japanese culture is repeatedly and overtly depicted as not placing the same value on human life that westerners do. I don’t exaggerate at all, all this is in Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series, which can be bought in retail. This is what our soldiers were being indoctrinated on, and it bears out what Hanks was talking about.
Hansen makes several attempts to provide examples that supposedly prove that 1940s Americans had no innate racist feelings against Japanese or Asian people, even going back as far as 1906 to do so. A little more recently to the World War II generation, however, was 1924, the year the Immigration Act of 1924 was passed, which barred immigration of Asians into the United States, and has provisions in it specifically aimed at Japanese. Indeed, these restrictions on Japanese and Korean immigration were not lifted until the McCarren-Walter Act of 1952.
For all the fun he pokes at Hanks, Hansen is pretty lousy at being a historian to overlook all this.
Rifle308, The book to which you refer is entitled “Japanese Destroyer Captain,” (it is – or was – quite rare prior to the advent of the internet), by Tameichi Hara. Captain Hara was indeed impressed with the humanity of the Americans who came ashore in Japan, and immediately set about rebuilding that nation, who only days before had been their mortal enemy.
Tom Hanks? What it is about these fabulously successful and wealthy celebrities that they don’t have the good sense to just keep their mouths closed concerning matters outside their expertise? As if anyone cares what he thinks! Few of today’s celebrities have the decency to give humble thanks to the nation which made their wealth and success possible. No class whatsoever. Ingratitude is among the most ugly of failings.
i realize my mistake…
hanks is just saying that the americans in the pacific were bloodthirsty xenophobes.
the ones in the european theatre were ok, though.
let’s see…
tom hanks, born in 1956.
I gather he learned more from watching All in the Family, than from any personal experience.
I know a little something about the Rape of Nanking since my friend wrote quite a prominent book about it. There was some interest in turning it into a movie, provided of course that there was a storyline and a hero (Hanks, anyone, cast as world-weary journalist flying in and seeing the carnage under him on the ground, perhaps?) No Hollywood studio would touch it. Reality isn’t their schtick.
Thanks to #24 above for reminding us of the horrors the Japanese inflicted on the Chinese in the Sino-Japanese War. {Actually this had begun much earlier with the annexation of Korea and Manchuria.] I would be glad to send Mr. Hanks a copy of Iris Chang’s book, “The Rape of Nanking” at any time.
“The Japanese culture is repeatedly and overtly depicted as not placing the same value on human life that westerners do.”
American propaganda during WWII was admittedly often racist. Still, it is very accurate to describe the Japanese culture during that era as less respecting of human life compared to Western values. As matter of fact, the evidence is abundantly clear on this point! So much so, that your central point is utterly absurd. Americans sometimes acted in a hypocritical manner. The Japanese racists, on the other hand, behaved in a very consistent matter. They adamantly believed in their racist principles.
It would be interesting to grill Hanks on his assumption by taking it to its logical conclusion, that the leaders of the United States during the period running up to and, at the time of, World War II foisted and encouraged this racial hated by Americans against the Japanese he’s decrying right now.
The reason why it would be fun is that Hanks is implicitly tarring the left’s all-time favorite Democrat, Franklin Roosevelt (at least he’s still the all-time favorite, as long as Barack Obama can’t get his pet projects passed) and FDR’s chief advisers as being the bigots, since they were the leaders who had been running the U.S. government since March 4, 1933. And if Hanks wants to take the racism charge down to a slightly lower level by citing things like the internment camps for U.S. residents of Japanese descent, then he’s got to go after the man who was at the forefront of that movement, the Democrats’ all-time favorite Republican, California Gov. Earl Warren.
I’d assume Hanks knows conservative Republicans weren’t running the country during World War II, and that Ronald Reagan wasn’t California governor when the internments occurred, but with Hollywood celebs and and overall knowledge of history, you never know — Tom may actually think Herbert Hoover was still in office in the late 1930s and got us into the war and FDR pulled or chestnuts out of the fire, in the same way Churchill didn’t take over in London until Chamberlain had botched things up for the previous five years.
It is a sorry state of affairs when someone like Tom Hanks, who appears to be far more intelligent and well-read than many of his Hollywood colleagues, and even a bit of a “patriot,” can lapse into the usual Moral Equivance/Racism explanation for the war against the Japanese. As Prof. Hanson has pointed out, the Japanese did not want to “kill us because we were different” – the Japanese were bent on conquering the Pacific Rim, enslaving the populace and stripping it of its raw materials to fuel their economy. The American navy and military presence on Wake Island and the Philippines stood in the way, and therefore had to be crushed. Yes, our “anti-Jap” propaganda was racist, but Germans and Italians were the subject of caricature as well…and they were the Enemy – the ones who killed your brother/son/father.
Today, the primary image of the Japanese is as either polite businessmen or giggly camera-loving tourists, not the brutes who tortured POWs during the Bataan Death March or who worked British POWs to death building the Bridge over the River Qwai. Others have noted the Rape of Nanking as evidence of Japanese brutality, but there is one other factoid that hasn’t been mentioned: the German Ambassador to Nanking was so appalled by the Japanese bloodbath that he declared his area of the city a “safe zone,” and urged the Chinese to flee there to be under protection of the Third Reich.
As Professor Hanson has pointed out, it was only after the complete destruction of the Japanese idealogy that allowed for the West to rebuild it in our own image, not unlike what was done in Germany. Gen. MacArthur remains a hero in Japan, the Philippines and South Korea for all he did on behalf of the people of those nations.
If anything, this again just points out the failures of our educational system to teach history. The sad thing is that Mr. Hanks seems to long for a culture which respects the sacrifice that took place during the war and that could produce war movies that were popular as well as rousing. What he doesn’t realize is that Baby Boomers like him (and me) were mislead by leftist anti-Vietnam revisionism in the 60s that has made that all but impossible. All he need to is look at the dozen movies that his Hollywood buddies have churned out about Iraq (“Rendition,” “Stop-Gap” etc.) and the leftist, elitist self-hatred that they expouse.
I suggest that Tom Hanks round up a few of his movie-making buddies and attend a few of Professor Hanson’s lectures; it would be good for them.
My wife tells me that an actor’s politics should not matter, but to me they do. If I hear an actor like Hanks spout off this ignorant Leftist PC nonsense, if I hear Vanessa Redgrave praise the PLO, or Sean Penn defend his good buddy Cesar Chavez, for me this contaminates all of their acting thereafter, it is a piece of information that makes the necessary suspension of disbelief very hard for me, indeed.
Thus, an increasingly large number of the denizens of our very own drugged-out Sodom and Gomorrah, our West coast cesspool near the ocean—as opposed to Washington, D.C., our East coast cesspool near the water, are on my own personal “do not watch” list, not the least because they also obviously despise the capitalist society that has allowed them immense opportunity and wealth, and they also so obviously despise most of the people making up the audiences whose patronage provided that celebrity and wealth.
Yes, Hanks is unhinged.
He was better before he got so full of himself but these days, he stimulates the gag response.
Of course he is deranged…he is a Hollywood Leftist.
He has about as much connection to the real, adult world as does a 3 day old infant.
Inevitable ( and a classic !):
Who is this Tom Hanks ?
You wrote a rational rebuttal to Tom Hanks historically ignorant comments. For the record during WWII the Japanese brutalized the Chinese and Filipinos, denigrated the Buddhist religion (Shinto was their nationalist doctrine), murdered the white Europeans wherever they found them (just look at the Japanese administered POW camps in Manchuria), and converted Indonesia and Malaysia into a Muslim country. For all his money Hank is ignorant about history.
Tom Hanks thinks that dying in a film is the equivalent sacrifice as dying in the Pacific theater in WWII.
He thinks that reading a script is the same thing as historical research.
#65 Mark – Kudos to a more correct perspective than VDH!!!
Keep in mind that those identical serials, cartoons, propoganda films . . . those were in continuous use by the US Military for training purposes all through the 1960′s and 1970′s. Why because we were fighting another group of “slanty eyed, slope heads” . . . Viet Nam.
Does that sound familiar?
What about the solider that returns home today . . . from Afghanistan . . . from Iraq . . . Oh yeah . . . there we are fighting the “Rag Hat, Camel Jockey, Sand N****s”
Does that Sound familiar?
OPPS I forgot . . . Even VDH needs to be politically correct sometimes. LOL
“Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.” – G.K. Chesterton
As true today as it was when it was written. Moral equivalence stems from a lack of knowledge, and an unwillingness to remedy that lack.
I hope that Tom Hanks misspoke. I hope that with his excellent work portraying the European theater of operations in WWII that he might also research the Pacific conflict. That he might research enough to find out that we embargoed Japan over their continuing rape of the rest of Asia. That he would find out that the brutality the Japanese military displayed dwarfed even that of Nazis Germany.
I hope so anyway.
Hanks accuses the US of fighting the war in an manner based on racial animosity. His comparison of Japanese and US actions/motivations (“kill us” vs. “annihilate them”) makes that obvious.
My father was a corpsman attached to the 1st marine division 7th marines during the war. He never talked much about his experiences on Peleliu and Okinawa when we were kids. Only later in his life did he open up a bit and tell us of the horrors he saw on those islands. The brutality of the Japanese toward the Okinawan natives where Japan’s military often forced Okinawan natives into so-called “collective suicide, has been well documented. My Dad told us that there were no prisoners taken by his unit, and until his dying day felt only regret for those thousands of marines killed and maimed on those two bloody islands. He had absolutely no remorse for his or his units actions, and his feelings were only hardened when his unit was sent for a short time to China to liberate the Chinese, and the brutality and crimes of the Japanese toward the Chinese were left open for all to see. This brutality affected my father’s
Hanks and Spielberg do my father and all the other brave soldiers who served in the Pacifica a great injustice. For the same reason I refused to watch Spielberg’s Munich, I will not watch this series as well.
Well, after all, although Hanks was never, ever, actually a real live soldier, he did play act at being a soldier in ‘Saving Private Ryan’ so I guess that qualifies him as an authentic military historian. Hollywood is all pretend. Celebs like Hank don’t even think for themselves. They mereley read other peoples lines. In this they sharfe a certain kinship with our current president. We seem to be experiencing an epidemic of earthquakes. Perhaps the San Andreas fault would accomodate us and rid us of the fatuous, self-absorbed, intellectually challenged Hollywood Left.
Loathe as I am to disagree with VDH I have to on this one. We put Japanese on the West Coast in camps and took their stuff. We did not do that to Germans and Italians. Also, from the people I talk to hatred of the “Japs” was more racial than that of the Germans. I know older people of that time who were raised to me non-racially prejudiced except for the Japanese. Now, I don’t think that makes our policy worse or morally equivalent to the Japanese, but I certainly think Hanks has a point, perhaps badly made. A large aspect of the Pacific War was a “race” war and I don’t think there is any reasonto deny that. I do think there is a reason to oppose moral equivalence. And that VDH wrote a whole piece on this without noting the longstanding restrictions on “yellow” emigration here, particularly strong in California and the Japanese internment signals to me that he knows it too.
Dr. Hanson,
I wish someone would do a movie about our post-war occupation of Japan. My father was part of that occupation (having served in New Guinea during the war). He lived with a Japanese family during the occupation and struck up a friendship with one man, in particular. Long after my dad came, he and his Japanese friend corresponded. My dad always considered that time in Japan as one of the most memorable of his life. It was hardly the stuff of racism or hatred for someone different.
Hanks was born in 1956. My guess is that like so many who have been miseducated since the late ’60s Hanks is so thoroughly pickled in the-white-west-is-evil-and-racist view of things that it’s next to impossible for him to see anything pertaining to our history other than through that lens.
Thank you for taking the Hanks controversy head-on. I could not have said it better.
Quite frankly, had I decided to not watch or read something by a persons who politics I disagreed with, no doubt, I would not have read probably 50% of the canons I have in my personal library. I would probably miss out on Steinbeck, no doubt would not have bothered with screenplays by Horton Foote, nor taken in the wonderful poetry of Robinson Jeffers. And yet, I have learned greatly from them.
I would not have gotten the perspective of another world. I would have fallen into an uneasy political correctness assuming what the outcome or product was going to be.
So I’m willing to see Hanks as woefully unprepared for a press conference, tinged by an expedient brand of politics, and like Professor Davis, accept everything that he does and will continue to do for not only veterans, but active duty soldiers and their families like mine. It doesn’t mean I agree with everything he says, but this is America. I don’t expect that I would have to that in order to partake.
Dear Mr. Hanks, Japanese are still different, and still believe in different gods, if you believe our objective was to turn their skin white, and make them Christian, then we must’ve lost WW2.
Like then, we are at war with a militarist clique. We can’t choose what race, or religion they follow, but we can choose whether we let them kill us or not, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t call us racists for choosing the latter.
Thank you
East vs west; Bushido vs Gung-Ho :)
The Tripartite Pact gave Asia to Japan,
and Europe to Germany; Not sure if they
had decided where to draw the dividing
line down the middle of the Americas.
I am certain that if either of the Axis
Powers had started the war with an Industrial base comparable to that of
the US, and the US view of war as a
dirty business, rather than a glorious adventure, this commentary would not exist.
The only thing that the WWII Axis had
in common with the current Axis of Evil
is that both were controlled by leaders
whose craziness got in the way of their
competence; Let us hope that stays true.
Tom Hanks comments are just rambling impromptu musings. Otherwise, he is just from the Obamanation school of thought, that one should never let the truth stand in the way of a story. As Obama does, “if you want to know the truth, just make it up.”
it was the worst fighting because the japanese were so brutal and vicious, crazed savages. american soldiers in the pacific were our greatest heroes and so many gave their lives to end the war.
in mr. hank’s view the japanese were much maligned i suppose, just as last week the muslims in nigeria chopped off the hands and feet of christian infants and cut off their heads. and, no it was not in retaliation for anything that had been done to them, despite the lies of the putrid nytimes. in fact, the last seige were christians defending themselves against these islamic mutants.
actors speak words that other people write for them. nothing they say represents their own thinking, although by coincidence it may. i don’t want to hear from them because they are perverse empty shadows who only transmorgify into humans on cue.
#72 Wolla Dolla,
I’m with you in that I have my own “Do not watch” list. There are people and programs that I will not watch because they say or promote things that offend me. Boycotting sponsors is another thing I do. The malefactors still prosper, though, because there are millions of people who are sympathetic or oblivious to their deeds.
Here’s another celebrity revising history of this great country to satisfy there hateful agenda. Every time an actor or actress opens their mouth that’s one more person who’s movies I won’t watch or rent. I used to admire him now I don’t I think these celebrities should either give most of their money back to the Government or work at the going rate that actors receive in communist countries.
U.S. Marines killed in WW2, 24,486. Sixty-four years later, Tom Hanks stabs them in the back.
Somebody may ask. How can a guy like Tom Hanks, who has Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers on his resume, suddenly and inexplicably decide the fight against the Japanese was based in racism and fueled by on propaganda. Surprisingly to most people, Hanks has been going on TV lately making a moral equivalency case, saying that Americans and Japanese soldiers hated each other because each was different from the other (then he tries to link it to our distaste for Muslim extremists not only who launched a sneak attack on us, but who continue to want to attack innocent civilians; who want to kill us). Well, I think it’s time somebody put Hanks in his rightful place. The truth is, Hanks I’m convinced, is a fraud. I think that, when it comes to despising the U.S. military, he’s in bed with Barack Obama. Finally, Hanks, I believe, is admitting his Hollywood hatred for America and everything it stands for because he just can’t hold it in any longer. And I guess he feels that he’s rich enough that he no longer has to.
The background.
Seems to lil’ ol’ blond haired, blue eyed Rachel that, when it comes to American-hating guys like Hanks, love of money has always come way before hatred of country. But eventually the true colors show through.
Fact is, I believe Tom, somewhat ironically, despises most everything our country and military stand for. If somebody was going to make a killing off of WW2, he’d want it to be him. I believe that Hanks believed in his pre-Saving Private Ryan days that he could make a pile of money making war movies, while embedding within them the almost subliminal notion that the GI’s were no better than the Japanese or Germans. How many of us have actually bought into that lie? Did U.S. Marines in WWII commit equivalent acts of barbarism that the Japanese soldiers specialized in? You decide.
Here’s a sample of what the Japanese busied themselves with during the war years. Or, Tommy, is it just some Rachel concocted propaganda?
How about The Rape of Nanking for starters? The Bataan Death March. The Japanese practice of lopping off heads of prisoners of war. The barbaric, inhumane medical experimentation on American soldiers in 1945 Japan. Perhaps a little more atrocity history is necessary to put this moral equivalency lie to rest. My thanks to George Dunkan for the language and information that I have a feeling Hanks won’t be making any movies about. For Hanks to say that our greatest generation was no better than the enemies they fought, enemies who wanted to enslave the world cerca 1940, is unforgivable. I believe that Eddie Slovic had a thousand times the courage and love of country as a Tom Hanks. Who’s good at pretending. He’s an actor. In real life, I believe he’s nothing but a liar. Now let’s take a look at the kind of soldiers Tom Hanks compares the United States citizen soldier to.
This is a sample of what the Japanese were responsible for leading up to and during the second world war. “Known historically as the ‘Rape of Nanking, in 1937, (the real start of World War II) the Chinese capital had a population of just over one million, including over 100,000 refugees. On December 13, the city fell to the invading Japanese troops. For the next six weeks the soldiers indulged in an orgy of indiscriminate killing, rape and looting. They shot at everyone on sight, whether out on the streets or peeking out of windows. The streets were soon littered with corpses, on one street a survivor counted 500 bodies. Girls as young as twelve, and women of all ages were raped by gangs of 15 or 20 soldiers, crazed by alcohol, who roamed the town in search of women. At the Jingling Women’s University, students were carted away in trucks to work in Japanese army brothels. Over a thousand men were rounded up and marched to the banks of the Yangtze river where they were lined up and gunned to death to give practice in machine-gun traversing fire. Thousands of captured Chinese soldiers, many wounded, were also murdered. In the following six weeks, the Nanking Red Cross units alone, buried around 43,000 bodies. About 20,000 women and girls had been raped, most were then murdered. Department stores, shops, churches and houses were set on fire while drunken soldiers indulged in wholesale looting and bayoneting of Chinese civilians for sport. It is estimated that over 150,000 Chinese civilians and soldiers were killed in this, the most infamous atrocity committed by the Japanese army.
PHILIPPINES MASSACRE
“A full account of all massacres of Filipinos by Japanese troops would fill several books. In Manila, 800 men, women and children were machine-gunned in the grounds of St. Paul’s College. In the town of Calamba, 2,500 were shot or bayoneted. Around 100 were bayoneted and shot inside a church at Ponson and 169 villagers of Matina Pangi were rounded up and shot in cold blood. At the War Crimes Trial in Tokyo, document No 2726 consisted of 14,618 pages of sworn affidavits, each describing separate atrocities committed by the invading Japanese troops. The Tribunal listed 72 large scale massacres and 131,028 murders as a bare minimum.
THE CHEKIANG MASSACRES
“The Doolittle bombing raid on Tokyo brought a retaliation against the Chinese people that staggers the imagination. On April 18, 1942, sixteen twin-engined Mitchell B-25 bombers, each carrying one ton of bombs, and led by Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle, were launched from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet. Their mission was to bomb the Japanese capital, Tokyo, and then, unable to land back on their carrier, proceed to friendly airfields in China, 1,200 miles across the East China Sea. Some of the planes reached their destination safely but the others ran out of fuel and crashed after their crews had baled out. Sixty four airmen parachuted into the area around Chekiang. Most were given shelter by the Chinese civilians but eight of the Americans were picked up by Japanese patrols and three were shot after a mock trial for ‘crimes against humanity’. The Japanese army then conducted a massive search for the others and in the process whole towns and villages that were suspected of harboring the Americans were burned to the ground and every man, woman and child brutality murdered. When the Japanese troops moved out of the Chekiang and Kiangsu areas in mid-August, they left behind a scene of devastation and death that is beyond comprehension. Chinese estimates put the death toll at a staggering 250,000. Lt. Col. James Doolittle was later awarded the US Medal Of Honor. (The Chinese Department of Defense claims that 1,319,659 Chinese soldiers were killed between 1937 and 1945. It estimates the number of Chinese civilians killed during this period at over 30,000,000)
ATROCITY ON LUZON
“While many atrocities were committed on Luzon, this one stands out for its sheer bloody mindedness. Fourteen Filipino resistance fighters surrendered to the Nippon savages after their ammunition was expended. Tied together neck to neck and with hands tied behind their backs, they were marched three miles to their place of execution. Ordered to sit down, another group of prisoners were brought in and forced to dig fourteen holes two feet wide and four and a half feet deep. When the digging finished the fourteen Filipinos, with their neck ropes removed, were forced to jump into the holes while the other group shoveled the earth back into the hole and stamped it down hard until only the head and neck of the victims were visible above ground. Their repugnant duty finished, the grave diggers were then lined up and shot in cold blood. The attention of the Japanese was now focused on the fourteen heads awaiting decapitation. A few soldiers had gone behind some bushes to defecate and after scraping together their excreta on to banana leaves they returned to the buried victims and kneeling down offered each head a last meal. Unable to move, the helpless men could only shake their head from side to side whereupon the Japanese soldiers stuffed the revolting faeces into their mouths amidst peals of laughter from their comrades. After they had their fun, the serious business of execution commenced as an officer drew his sword and with deft strokes separated the fourteen heads from the bodies. No one was ever punished for this foul deed.
MURDER ON WAKE ISLAND (January 12, 1943)
The stubborn defense of the island by the tiny garrison of 388 US Marines and 1,200 civilians workers lasted for fourteen heroic days. On December 23, 1941, Major James P.S. Devereux of the 1st. Defense Battalion, US Marine Corps, and Commander Winfield Cunningham of the Naval Air Station, realizing that the odds were hopelessly stacked against them, called for a cease fire, raised the white flag and surrendered the island. In January, 1942, the US Marines, numbering 1,187, were herded into the cargo holds of the 17,163 ton Japanese luxury liner Nitta Maru, for transportation to Yokohama and then to Shanghai. Those left behind included the civilians and the wounded Marines. A year passed and on the night of January 12, 1943, the Japanese accused the civilians of being in secret radio communication with US naval forces. The 97 American civilians still on Wake (actually 98 but one was caught stealing food and was beheaded) were marched to the beach and there lined up with their backs to the ocean and brutally murdered by machine guns. After the war, the Japanese commander on Wake, Rear Admiral Shigematsu Sakaibara, and eleven of his officers, were sentenced to death by a US Naval Court at Kwajalein. Sakaibara was transported to Guam to await his fate. There, on 19 June 1947, he was executed by hanging. The murdered civilian POWs were later buried in Honolulu Memorial, Hawaii.
THE ‘AKIKAZE’ EXECUTIONS (March 18, 1943)
“The Mitsubishi built destroyer Akikaze (Lt. Cdr. Sabe Tsurukichi) was ordered to sail to Wewak in New Guinea to remove some German residents who were suspected of using radio transmitters to report ship movements to the Americans. Forty civilians were rounded up, most of them German clergymen, plus a few nuns with two children. About thirty more civilians were picked up when the ship stopped at Manus Island before proceeding to Rabaul. En-route, Captain Tsurukichi received a radio message from the 8th Fleet Headquarters to dispose of all neutrals on board. On the aft deck a wooden scaffold was erected and a sheet hung across the deck to shield the executions from the rest of the prisoners. One by one the victims were led from their cabins, interrogated and blindfolded and taken to the rear of the ship. There, they were hung on the scaffold by the wrists from a rope and pulley and as their feet cleared the deck they were shot by a four man rifle party. Their bodies were then thrown overboard. The two children were taken from the arms of the nuns and thrown into the water. The men were killed first then the women, the whole procedure lasting three hours.”
(George Duncan, Massacres and Atrocities of WWII)
BACK TO RACHEL
I know it’s a chore to read through all this, but just imagine what it was like trying to live through it.
Incidentally, Hank’s “Band of Brothers”, as I see it, was filled with ludicrous suggestions that there was also a moral equivalency between the German and American soldiers while anybody at Malmedy would disagree. As I remember, in virtually every Band of Brothers episode there was a gratuitous shot of an American soldier killing a white-flag-waving German soldier in cold blood. High ranking American officers were generally painted as cowardly, callous fools. Why didn’t at least the TV reviewers in the mainstream media pick up on this? Isn’t the answer so obvious? Because they agreed with it.
Hanks, last week, went on foaming at the mouth spewing, in Rachel’s opinion, contempt for American soldiers by implying the Marines in the Pacific were out to “kill them all”. Give me a break. The Japanese believed surrender would bring dishonor to themselves and their families. The Japanese respected no one who surrendered. For the most part, the Japanese hated taking prisoners and wouldn’t be taken prisoner. The United States soldier was 7 times more likely to die as a prisoner of the Japanese than of the Germans. When the Japanese weren’t engaging in bayonet practice with POW’s, you might find them playing games with Chinese babies, throwing them up in the air, and trying to impale them with their bayonets. What a way to pass the time. What a pitiful excuse for an American, in my humble opinion, Tom Hanks really is. When it comes to love of country and respect for the United States Marine Corps, Hanks is missing in action.
“Loathe as I am to disagree with VDH I have to on this one. We put Japanese on the West Coast in camps and took their stuff. We did not do that to Germans and Italians.”
The United States did incarcerate both German-Americans and Italian-Americans. The numbers, it must be conceded, were not as high as those of Japanese-American descent. But you are missing the point. American racism was not comparable to Imperial Japanese militarist contempt for those deemed to be racially inferior. We would have also had to fight Japan during WW II even if all its citizens possessed blue eyes and blond hair. The racial characteristics of that nation had nothing to do with it.
1- Hanks is an actor who lives a privileged life. A nice guy who as increasingly gone left over the years. He would not have gotten away with such a comment back at his home where he grew up.
2. That said, the comment may be attributed to Hanks seeing some of the propaganda we made during the war where the “Japs” were seen as monkey-like and rat-like. The reason for this was to harden the normally decent citizen soldiers so they would kill the Japs without hesitation. Everybody knew they were the ones who thought they were the superior race. This belief led to many of the atrocities they committed against people they believed were no superior than dogs.
My dad still had friends who served in both theaters. Without a doubt those who served in the Pacific hated Japs far more than those soldiers who served in Europe hated Nazis.
Dad had a friend who would not buy anything Japanese made- period. He spat on the ground every time they were brought up. He had seen what the Japanese could do.
For those wishing to spend the time on a little informed observation of the matter of “race” as pertains to the War in the Pacific, I would strongly recommend John Dower’s work on the subject:
War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1986; Pantheon; ISBN 0-394-75172-8)
Hope that helps.
The short answer here is “Yes!” However I think it has more to do with the Hollywood elites hatred (no other word applies) of George W. Bush and the war in Iraq. Hanks probably couldn’t resist the opportunity to engage in a little moral equivalence and set up a cheap crack (sure to please his peers) about how we fought the Japanese and how we are fighting terrorists. On the other hand, it is entirely possible that Mr. Hanks really isn’t very bright.
Even though I was born long after the end of World War II, every time I read about the Rape of Nanking and the extreme brutality of the Japanese in all of their spheres of operation, then read about the arrogant refusal of very many Japanese today to even consider the possibility that Japanese soldiers committed unthinkable atrocities during World War II, I subsequently find rising in myself a cold urge to vigorously advocate that Japan be first evacuated of innocents, then nuked until every man, woman and child there is dead or shrieking in hopeless, dying agony with horrific burns.
I can very much understand the brutality that American soldiers exhibited later in the war towards brainwashed, fanatical mass murderers once it sank in that the Japanese soldiers were intensely racist and without any respect at all for even the most minimal standards of decency. That this killed a great many Japanese who might have in a different world been quite acceptable or even admirable human beings was simply not relevant in the hell on Earth that was the Pacific Theater. The atomic bombings of two Japanese cities full of undoubted innocents mixed up with guilty parties was simply deeply regrettable military necessity for the reasons already given.
To state what should be obvious: if the US had sincerely desired to annihilate Japan, it had the means (the bomb), the motive (Pearl Harbor) and the opportunity (bases within bomber range of the home islands). The first atomic bomb would have hit not Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but Tokyo, and there would not have been warning leaflets dropped first.
That the US did not behave this way should be instructive.
I cancelled HBO years ago. It’s pure drivel. My life is much happier now.
In re Mark @ 65 and Tallgrass @ 80
As I recall from those same films and cartoons, Hitler, Goering, Mussolini et al did not come off looking very good either. Cartoonists were particularly tough on Mussolini and engaged in, what we would call today, “cultural insensitivity” toward Italians. [Also, take a look at some of the German newsreels, films and cartoons from the same period. Roosevelt was regularly portrayed as Jewish and we all know how the Jews fared in Nazi culture, both popular and otherwise.] World War II was a life-and-death struggle where every available resource was mobilized to win. As for the Japanese they set new standards for barbarism and cruelty during the Sino-Japanese War, a war fought against fellow Asians where racist atrocities, such as those that took place in Nanking, were commonplace. The Japanese earned the opprobrium heaped on them well before Pearl Harbor. A great deal of the anti-Japanese propoganda during the war originated with the Chinese.
As is the case of most moral relativists you probably don’t believe half of what you say but simply enjoy the shallow satisfaction of striking an outrageous pose. However you do remind me of what the French socialist Jean Francois Revel once said – “Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.” The question, in effect posed by Mr. Hanks, is are we at that point yet?
I wonder if this discussion would have begun if Homer Lea’s “The Valor of Ignorance” was required reading in U.S. schools. It was,in the Japanese Naval Academy, prior to 1920.
I’ve been looking forward to the upcoming HBO series The Pacific (starts Sun eve) for some time now. Produced by Spielberg and Hanks, the same team that brought us Saving Pvt Ryan and Band of Brothers. I watch both just about every time they pop up again on the tube, and can’t think of any dramatic reproduction of warfare that is any better than either of those two productions at any level.
Hanks has been out quite a bit this week touting the series. He’s a fairly low key guy who generally stays out of the limelight. Since 911, he’s made a comment here and there that meshes with the general Hollywood loony left take on politics in general and Iraq/Afghanistan in specific. It’s not that I’ve given him (and Spielberg) a pass, but his comments ‘til now have not diminished either of those two great war chronicles.
His take on the REAL war in the Pacific – as opposed to his yet to be seen docudrama version – recorded below and on the two videos I’ve seen this week of him “pitching” The Pacific is scurrilous and defamatory. Defamatory of every American fighting man who served and died avenging Nanking, Pearl Harbor, and Bataan.
The pre-August 1945 Japanese were infinitely more savage than the jihadi bastards of today. Every Nip man, woman, and child was capable of ripping downed US aviators limb from limb. In fact, many hundreds actually did just that. And that’s the civilians. The island commander who missed having Geo HW Bush as a doomed captive by a degree or two of periscope angle actually dined on the livers of downed Navy pilots. Nazi savagery was situation dependent if I may cut them a huge undeserved huss. Japanese savagery was a deeply ingrained element of their culture – and no doubt still lies there just below the surface. To hear and see Hanks eschew even moral equivalence (the despicable path taken by Clint Eastwood in his scurrilous Iwo bookends) in favor of plainly faulting American motives then AND today is unbearably insulting.
Every year for as far back as I can remember, us sons of WWII have had to defend the honor of our fathers – particularly regarding such hot button issues as Dresden, Nuremberg, Tokyo and the A-bomb. Given enough time, the left will re-cast those events forever in the minds of those who come long after us. Not for me. I pause on every December 7th, and VE-Day and VJ-Day as well. I purposely scheduled my retirement ceremony for VJ-Day to make my last comments in the uniform of a Marine about a 24yr-old Navy Lt and carrier sailor who wept with joy on the first VJ-Day. Calendars once highlighted all three events. Remember that? Our kids and grand-kids don’t give it a thought…
I’m gonna pass on Hanks this time. I’ll read the reviews first from those military bloggers who are counting on a better product than Hanks is touting. Then I’ll still have to think hard about contributing to his overabundant riches – much of which has come from fictionalizing men and actions he would have never contemplated being or doing. His wholly frivolous life as a Hollywood creature and loony left commentator were purchased by men like John Basilone… and WF Cole… among millions of others.
What do you expect from a man who in an interview said that he thinks Obama “is doing an excellent job” ??? I loved the Band of Brothers series. This man has left the gravitational pull of the earth and joined his lefty lunatic friends in Hollywood who by opening their mouths prove their ignorance.
It is always unfortunate when actors speak. Regrettable they get a lot of attention, and they embarrass themselves. They need a writer. All actors should walk around with a writer. The writer then will write them a script and they will deliver it brilliantly. With an unselfconscious, natural and engaging delivery. Oh if only this were so. For some reason actors are drawn to speaking publicly about geopolitics, a complex subject even for people who are not actors i.e. thoughtful, learned, experienced, worldly people. Alas, we hear from actors.
Hanks strikes me as a good guy, and my guess is that what he said was taken out of context, or that he was unintentionally being imprecise in his words. But the fact remains, what he said is true, although there’s nothing particularly remarkable about it. You go back and look at US government sponsored propaganda, and indeed Japanese people were portrayed as subhuman, and I’d speculate that large swathes of marines likely had a large hate in their heart for the Japanese, although probably not as much a result of propaganda, rather a natural view of one’s enemy in intense combat. The difference is that the US military did not engage in nearly the amount of wholesale massacres that the Axis powers and the USSR did, although they did in fact occur. (I’ll leave out bombing of civilian populations, since it was more a product of the time and technology, rather than how inhumane one side or another was).
But also, the US cause was just, or at the very least a lot more just than the other side. I think if you gave Noam Chomsky the truth serum, even he would admit that if Japan and Germany had won the war, they would not have done the same for the vanquished as did Allies (not including the USSR). This makes a huge difference, and it’s what moral relativists always leave out. (Watch Team America for a better picture of what I’m saying).
Wonder what Clint Eastwood has to say about Hanks’ portrayal of these battles? I think I’ll skip the Hanks special and rent “Dreams of My Father” instead.
VDH can’t pass up the chance to gore Hollywood lefty Hanks, but there is not much there, there. Sorry. Hanks makes a few relatively innocuous remarks, probably to try to get more lefties to watch his series and a fair number of the righties here go nuts, swear never to watch anything he ever makes, blah blah.
I remember when Ken Burns documentary on WWII aired a few years ago, some righties back on the old Powerline were going nuts because there was anything in it implying that we were EVER less than saintly. Now if this HBO series turns out to avoid the truth, then I will be the first to condemn it, but some of you should get treatment for your severe allergies…or else go live in the bubble.
There was enough racism in WWII to give some credence to Hanks remarks; why not let it go at that? Does he need to say, “We were righteous and they were evil; praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.”?
If Howard Zinn skews the deck unfairly AGAINST us, some of you are so jingoistic that any bad portrayal of us is seen as treason. Your passions have made you a bit simple-minded.
Is history, simple or complicated?
So many of you people really don’t get the point, and so drag nontopical issues in like Japanese atrocities, etc. Neither Hanks nor I are saying that the US war effort and the Japanese war effort were morally equivalent. We were in the right, they were in the wrong. We conducted ourselves far more honorably, treated the Japanese far more humanely than they treated us. No one is arguing anything to the contrary. The issue is, were racial stereotypes used, was racial hatred drummed up in order to really motivate the troops? There is no question that it was. It was overt, it was conscious, it was purposeful. There was nothing subtle or equivocal about it. The problem is, many of you can’t seem to bring yourselves to admit that, because you have a dysfunctional “all of nothing” attitude about this. You can’t think “yeah, we were largely in the right, even though we did send loyal Japanese-Americans to internment camps*, even though our military and society was segregated, even though we did use racial hatred in our propaganda.” No, you seem to need to believe that we were the white knight with not a spot on us, so you have to deny historical fact. No one is arguing about whether or not we were justified in hating the Japanese. We were. Just as we were justified in hating the Germans at that time. The point was, that we fueled that justifiable hatred of the Japanese with already underlying racial hatred of Asian people, refined and narrowed to the Japanese. Our propaganda machine did it overtly. The 1940s was a different time, we were fighting a unified nation in Total War (I’m making the assumption that everyone understands the concept of Total War), and so really riling people up any way we could, even with racial motivations, was probably necessary. That didn’t make it virtuous, but you gotta do what you gotta do in a situation like that. Just like I don’t think we should be nuking our enemies now, but I do think that we might the necessary choice to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Again, not virtuous, but necessary. The way so many of you seem to be denying that which is historical fact and lashing out and anyone who might bring it up is simply not rational.
*110,000 Japanese-Americans were interned, 65% of which were American citizens, versus only 10,000 German-Americans, the majority of whom were not citizens, even though German-Americans made up a far larger portion of the US population than Japanese-Americans did in 1942
Well, Mr.Hanks just shown himself to be another liberal loon from the enormously wealthy showbiz elite. While I have no problem with them making money, I don’t have to fund their rantings. So, I have decided not to go to the movies anymore.
Tom Hanks’ is simply another elitist loser not worth…But his words diminish the lives and actions of heroes. To these heroes here and everywhere. THANK YOU!!!
A few uncomfortable facts:
1. The Japanese attack was preceded by US naval embargoes on their ports, considered an act of war in international law. This is why many Old Right historians have argued extensively that FDR, while claiming he was working to keep us out of war, was actively attempting to get us into WWII, as he had previously promised Churchill.
2. Although of course horrific, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor killed almost no civilians. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, conducted by Truman without the support of Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy (the Chief of Staff to the President), Brigadier General Carter Clarke (the military intelligence officer who prepared intercepted Japanese cables for U.S. officials), and Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, on the other hand killed almost nothing BUT civilians, over 100,000.
3. This was something easily done by Truman, who was aware that such action wouldn’t be condemned by the American public, 13% of whom in a 1944 Times magazine poll favored wiping out the entire Japanese people as a race. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Japanese_sentiment#CITEREFBagby1999 )
VDH,
The Imperial Japanese Army was every bit as evil as the Nazi SS, and they were far more lethal.
This is a truth that Hollywood Leftists just cannot handle, but Americans of the 1940′s had to fight.
Point in fact, the Imperial Japanese General Headquarters had planned to sequester the Emperor Hirohito effective upon the British amphibious assault on southwestern Malaya, which the British planned for late September 1945.
That would also have been when the orders would have gone out to massacre all Allied POW’s, interned civilians, and any other Allied civilians Japanese forces could catch in China and all of Southeast Asia (Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, any Phillipine islands still held by the Japanese, etc.).
Check out the reference to Field Marshal Terauchi (CinC of the Japanese army group – Southern Group of Armies) in the index (page 573) of George Feifer’s Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb.
Allied signals intelligence (MAGIC) intercepted and decoded the mid-to-late July 1945 order from Imperial GHQ to Terauchi to prepare for this.
If the coup against Hirohito had succeeded, the Imperial Japanese Army would have killed at least an additional 50 million people, more than had died in all of World War Two to that point, before Allied armies could eliminate Japanese forces overseas.
The horror would not have stopped there. An estimated ONE THIRD of the Japanese people (25-30 million) would have died of starvation, disease, poison gas and conventional weapons during a prolonged ground conquest of Japan.
See:
The Most Deadly Plan, Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen, Proceeding of the US Naval Institute, January 1998 edition, pp 79-81
and
“Gassing Japan”, Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen, MHQ: the Quarterly Journal of Military History, vol 10 no 1 (Autumn 1997), pp 38-43.
Allen and Polmar ran across references to a plan to gas Japan and put in a FOIA request. Eventually they got a copy of a document labeled “A Study of the Possible Use of Toxic Gas in Operation Olympic.” The word “Retaliatory” was PENCILED in between “possible” and “use.”
Apparently there were only five of these documents circulated during WW2. After the war in 1947, the document was requested by the Chemical Corps for historical study. In an attempt to “Redact” history, another document was issued to change all the copies to emphasis “Retaliatory” rather than the reality of the US planning to use it offensively in support of the invasion of Japan.
The “Retaliatory” plan called for US heavy bombers to drop 56,583 tons of gas in the 15 days before the invasion of Kyushu than another 23,935 tons every 30 days after that, and that was just the STRATEGIC bombing campaign.
Tactical air support was in addition to that.
The ground weapons would have contributed an additional 1,400 tons of gas shells and there was 8,000 tons of shells on invasion ships. Another 9,356 tons of ground weapons would arrive every 30 days after the invasion kicked off.
At the time of the scheduled 1 Nov 1945 invasion, there were 144,762 tons of munitions were available to the USA for the invasion.
By way of reference, in shelling Okinawa, 126 4.2 inch mortars on US Navy landing craft fired 28,000 4.2 inch mortar shells in one hour.
See http://www.4point2.org/gunboats.htm
Since the 4.2 inch mortar shell was the primary organic gas weapon of the CWS, that represents 400 tons of shells delivering 98 tons of lethal gas in one hour on an area 5-miles long and 1,000 yards deep, if gas were used on Okinawa’s invasion beaches.
There were going to be twice as many 4.2 inch mortar armed landing craft for Operation Olympic.
Over all, the Chemical Warfare Service casualty estimates for this attack plan were 5 million dead with another 5 million casualties.
Ultimately, the plan was not approved, but it was prepared for by General Marshall, since the gas to implement the plan was sent to the Pacific in very scarce shipping space and eight new CWS 4.2 inch mortar battalions were ordered formed in July 1945 in the midst of a _massive_demobilization_ of US Army European theater troops.
The US Army Chemical Warfare Service was also planning using captured stocks of German chemical weapons and it had transported many of those stocks to the USA. It was in the process of placing many of those chemical agents in US weapons as the war ended.
See:
http://www.bordeninstitute.army.mil/published_volumes/chemwarfare/CHAP2_Pg_09-76.pdf
According to Allen and Polmar, the June 18, 1945 meeting where Harry Truman was briefed on the projected casualties for Operation Downfall, the over all plan to invade Japan, by Adm King, Gen Marshall and the rest of the Joint Chiefs was when the topic was broached.
We know now that the decision to drop the atomic bomb was made then, although the notes for the meeting only referred to “undisclosed topics.”
This was our backup to nuking Japan into surrender. If the A-bombs didn’t work, the US military wase going to gas the Japanese people from the air like bugs, and keep doing so until Japanese resistance ended or all the Japanese were dead.
Thank God for the atom bomb – killing 150,000 – 200,000 Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved 75-80 million lives.
They waxed nostalgic about the shared sacrifice of the nation during WW2, even sounding downright patriotic at times about the struggle and battles that took place
The “good” war – because our entry aided the Soviets, and the Comintern instructed leftist sympathizers to support the war.
In response to Mark #65 re Frank Capras “Why we Fight”.
One has to be pretty deep in the kool-aid to reference the marxist propaganda movie “Why we Fight” in this discussion. This pathetic movie was intended to be a motivational propaganda movie for our soldiers before going of to die in foreign hellholes and was funded by the Defense Department. IT WAS NEVER SHOWN because Capra turned it into a pro-Communist/pro-Russia propaganda film. I have watched it and the pro-communist propaganda is unmistakable. That you cite it here as evidence of U.S. racism/agression is bizarre. The fact that it won an Acadamy Award speaks volumes about Hollywood, even in the 1940′s they were infiltrated by leftists !!!
The strong racism and nationalism of the Japanese immigrants was well documented and spying by elements of them was a large part of the success of the attack on Pearl Harbor. In the interest of national security we had to inter Japanese nationals on the west coast. The continual hysteria over this is despicable. They were not used as slave labor as Japan did to everybody they occupied. They were not starved as Japan did to everybody they occupied. They were not physically abused as Japan did to everybody they occupied. They were not prostituted as Japan did to everybody they occupied. They were asked to sit out the war in an out of the way place while the rest of America was drafted and sent to cold, wet, muddy hellholes around the world to die in painful and grotesque ways at the hand of the Japanese and the Germans. But they lost their businesses and homes you say ? I will bet that the men who died on the Bataan death march or on the beaches of Iwo Jima would gladly have traded their house or their job for the privilege of LIVING !!!. I refuse to feel any guilt over the internment of the Japanese nationals on the West Coast of the United States and anyone who thinks I should is a Pluristic Relativist fascist.
I am not a Tom Hanks fan. His remarks about the nature of the American Pacific campaign against Japanese imperialism (and racism) cannot be written off as his “Forrest Gump” moment. His patriotism has always been founded on unformed ideas of what America was intended to be and what it was all about for about a century and a half. His “John Adams” series was a mess, because it never delved into the ideas that were the foundation of this country (individual rights, the government being the servant not the master), it was only about what happened to Adams here and there and everywhere, not what animated Adams. When a man has nothing but lumps of glop as his moral premises, he is bound to default to liberalism and America-bashing. Our culture is altruist/collectivist. That’s all Hanks sees around him. So he submits to it. Look at Obama. He’s worse in that respect, except that he’s actively trying to destroy it. Hanks is just absorbing the cultural bile, and that naturally includes knocking America.
In fact, you can mate “Forrest Gump” and “John Adams” because everything just happened to Gump, as well. The role of ideas — good and bad — is beyond Hanks’ comprehension (well, one could say that as well of Hollywood). What moves men to heroism or villiany is beyond his ken. I don’t think Hanks is stupid; I think if he read Mein Kampf, or the Koran (Mein Kampf in Arabic, if you will), or Japanese imperialist “white papers” of the 1930′s and 1940′s, he’d change his tune. But, he’s got to do that himself, and if he chooses not to, then my estimate of him remains negative with a touch of sadness for him.
Outside of veterans here, Tom hanks has done more to honor our military than all of you combined.
Forgive me for being blunt. Hanks, Glover, Sarandon, Baldwin, Sheen, Streisand, Penn, the entire panopoly of Hollywood ‘intelligensia’ are ludicrous. Look, they spend their lives pretending. They reap millions, allowing them to exist in a bubble world. They despairetly want to be loved, They all struggle with an incredibly deep narcissistic hole in their being. Honor their professional performances. Give them the benifit of the doubt. In private, snicker at their pronouncements. These are profoundly sad individuals. Despite their fame and wealth, they, deep, deep down, realize that they are performing seals. Throw them a fish or two..
Is Tom Hanks Unhinged?
No, he’s merely an actor.
I may not be a smart man, but I know what a Japanese atrocity is
Here we see the psychological dysfunction of actors. Spending their lives emulating larger-than-life, unrealistic characters, where the lines of good and evil are clearly defined, the comparative blandness of their own privileged and sequestered lives are revealed. They then feel compelled to take up causes in the name of compassion, and of course hitch their wagons to the modern liberal, who has feigned compassion down pat.
These are the people C.S. Lewis warned us about, those who become far worse tyrants than the “robber baron” could ever hope for, as they are motivated by moral compassion instead of simple greed. Knowing a few aspiring actors myself, this dysfunction begins early on in their career, as their entire focus is to garner attention and to be liked. In other words, become whoever someone else wants you to be (which is coincidentally how our current President got elected).
Too bad…Tom Hanks did do wonderful work honoring veterans, but now I won’t be able to stomach watching him work as an actor, knowing what a fool he has become.
Gary Sinese, on the other hand, his co-star in Forest Gump, is an unalloyed clear thinker and good friend of our Vets.
I mostly agree with Dr. Hanson, as usual, but I do think it would have been more honest for him to at least have mentioned two items:
1) the Japanese internment camps where Americans imprisoned other Americans (and confiscated their property and possessions) just for being Japanese. I’m sure Dr H would agree that this was one of the more shameful episodes in our history.
2) some of the “pro-war” movies, and posters and other propaganda/advertising, of the ’40s, that depicted Japanese people as cartoonish, slanty-eyed devils.
you can’t deny these things. however, having said that…
the thing Hollywood doesn’t seem to understand is that NO country is “the good guys.” you know, they think of Spain and France as great places, and they don’t think of Portugal at all. yet those three countries were the “colonialist” powers that Hollywood and the Left love to hate. (this was in 1640 or whenever, so Hollywood doesn’t know about it unless somebody rad a screenplay once.)
America isn’t a colonizer, America is a COLONY. hello?
so knowing that, I will compare our faults and tragedies to those of any other country, and I don’t think I’ll find us lacking in courage and goodness.
I mean, we only became a country in 1776; yet less than 100 years later, we were already fighting to outlaw slavery. (and we’ve been trying, in vain, to make up for that original sin of slavery ever since.) name me one other country that banned slavery that quickly. hell, some Muslim countries STILL have slavery, if I may say so!
I don’t understand the compulsion to blame America first, but it’s the way the left wing of the country thinks. anything Western, Christian, Jewish, English, is bad. and anything “foreign” and non-Judeo-Christian is noble.
er, back on topic: Dr H’s overarching point is that racial animosity didn’t have anything to do with WWII, and there I think he’s clearly spot on.
Like many other Obama supporters, is it possible that his obsession with finding racist explanations for everything stems from the same well that can only see opposition to Obama (and his policies) as racism? That seems to be the meme of the day on the left because they are incapable of understanding the idea that the underlying principles of the political ideology they support are anathema to most Americans. Yes, I know the left claims that they (and they alone) are not ideological. I think they actually believe, that, too because they seem not only to be oblivious to much of the world around them, outside their little bubbles, but also to be highly self-unaware.
But when it comes to Hanks and his other lefty Hollywood cronies, I just wish they’d keep their lips buttoned. I find it harder and harder to forget who they really are when I watch their performances, the more they venture into politics.
Hey, what can you expect, the best movie Tom did was The Burbs. Missing out on the experience, his view of his generation’s war was Forest Gump; I suspect in Tom’s view the Pacific War with the Japanese was just the precursor to Forest Gump, on a bigger scale. Saving Private Ryan, the movie, was the patriotic front where the antagonists came from the same race and same civilization, and where right and wrong was cut and dry. Apparently in Tom’s mind a war is only legitimate, if it is white boys fighting white boys to prevent genocide–apparently the current Sudan genocide is excluded in favor of concerts in London to prevent global warming.
A Liberal is a Liberal by any other name,and ignorance has a lot to do with it.
86. jjv:
Loathe as I am to disagree with VDH I have to on this one. We put Japanese on the West Coast in camps and took their stuff. We did not do that to Germans and Italians..
Japanese, Germans and Italians were interned in the US. I refer to CITIZENS of those countries. Look it up. I worked with a German national whose uncle was interned. American citizens of Japanese origin WERE interned in the US. This did not occur with American citizens of German and Italian origin. During World War I, there was a great deal of anti-German sentiment directed at US citizens of German descent. I have heard first hand experiences of it. Even with such vilification, many Americans of German descent served honorably during World War 1, such as General Pershing. As a result, American citizens of German descent got treated better during WW2 than during WW1.
Since the Japanese killed an estimated 10-20 million civilians during WW2, I find discussions of our alleged racism towards the Japanese as being absurd.
120. skeeziks:Outside of veterans here, Tom hanks has done more to honor our military than all of you combined.”?????
Maybe Hanks feels he has given so much that he can now speak his mind.
Another persone who has been Zinned.
115. RL:
A few uncomfortable facts:
2. Although of course horrific, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor killed almost no civilians. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, conducted by Truman …..killed almost nothing BUT civilians, over 100,000.
3. This was something easily done by Truman, who was aware that such action wouldn’t be condemned by the American public, 13% of whom in a 1944 Times magazine poll favored wiping out the entire Japanese people as a race.
Who killed more civilians in World War 2, Japanese or Americans?
Handsome is as handsome does. IMHO, those who kill more of their civilian opponent would better qualify as savage/racist etc. We stopped the Japanese killing machine- 10-20 million civilians.
I would urge Hanks to read some history that he’s seemingly caught up in, to get a broader sense of what happened, and he’ll probably help himself in future interviews. He might even learn something – that there is a parallel between militaristic fanaticism and religious fanaticism with militaristic overtones. We did not wish to annihilate because of difference; we wished to annihilate because in war, you win by defeating the enemy utterly. That events in the Pacific demonstrated the horrific degree to which soldiers can de-humanize non-combatants and POWs, and then themselves become de-humanized, and in many cases to levels not seen in Europe, should not be overlooked. But Hanks bats away historical data with a casual question, which is essentially just ignoring the truth.
Here’s a sample, Tom, if you’ve got a few days between big movie shoots:
http://www.amazon.com/Retribution-Battle-1944-45-Max-Hastings/dp/0307263517
So we would have used a Nuclear Bomb on “Hitler” and not the German people?
A nuclear bomb dropped on a bastion of hard working industrious and cultured people?
Wow. Looney tunes Hanson in full Neocon Jewoish Old Testament hate mode.
So Stalin was a good guy? Wht didn’t we Nuke Moscow and crush Stalin to win the European War?
Sorry Europe was a half victory at best. Germany had every right to attack the Sviet Union in 1941. We saved Stalins ass. He had no food with Ukraine cut off for 3 harvests. Where did Uncle Joe get his food. Yep the USofA. Nice work guys. Without food no army. Sorry Hanson
Oh and Hitler lays out in his Dec 11 1941 Speech exactly why he made the official declaration. Chicken hark wheelchair guy FDR already placed the US at war with Germany that year. He just didn’t have the balls to declare it.
Hey, Tom Hanks, liked you in Forrest Gump and Saving Private Ryan, but stop reading Howard Zinn, please!
With all do respect Trent Telenko the Waffen SS was a far better fighting force than the Japanese Army. Your mistakening the fact these guys were essentially abandoned and isolated on these islands so they had no choice with lethalness. The Waffen SS was far more lethal in the sense of the number of KIA they inflicted on the Soviets US and British and Canadians
The Japanese were rolled over twice by the Soviets in 1938 and 1939 in Manchuria
#112 Mark – Well said and correct.
Rarely have I been so struck to the core as by this posting by VDH and the subsequent thread . . . I must appologize . . . however I will say this . . . if you have ever been stuck in the middle of rice paddy watching your buddies . . . VDH and Tom Hanks are nothing but actors. The whole “XXXXing World” is nothing but a dream and the reality of the loss of your buddy will never go away! Never! You don’t care who, what, when or where you just want to kill that MF that is trying to kill you!
Jim Garner and I talked for 30 minutes during his stopover in Vietnam.
He was combat wounded in Korea.
Not so many left in Hollywood that I care to watch.
But I do like Hanks,
Hope it was just a stupid journalist mistake.
I agree with almost all of your comments about Tom Hanks. One point I want to make, you said we would have used the atomic bomb against Hitler if it had been necessary. Of course, it was not quite ready to go until the Summer of 1945.
Few people know this, but we only had 2 or 3 of them in August of 1945. So WE BLUFFED JAPAN when we dropped 2 of them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at that point we were out of A-bombs! Or had one left, depending on which source you look at. If Japan had known this they might have fought on for weeks, costing thousands of lives. So this was a closely held secret. We pretended we had a lot of them, and it worked.
Also, what we think of as “racism” now was just normal racial pride back then. Japanese were for Japanese, White people were for White people, this was just taken for granted and was normal back then. Japanese were incredibly nationalistic. In their eyes, then and now, they are a completely different race than the Chinese, who they distrust. The fact that we dropped an A-bomb on them and not on Europe did not cause them to think racism, because they knew if they had had it THEY WOULD HAVE USED IT AGAINST US WITH NO GUILT. They expected us to go all out.
It is harder to use a weapon like that against people who are similar to you racially and culturally. There would have been a lot more resistance among the American leadership to use the A-bomb in countries where their own ancestors came from. This is normal, it can be called racism today, but this is the way people think. Would an Iraqi-American general, I know there is not one, but would he go along with what Bush did to Iraq as easily as a White general or Colin Powell went along with bombing apartment buildings in Baghdad in March of 2003? Of course not. No one wants to see something like that happen where their ancestors are from. If Bush had decided to bomb Africa in that same manner, on trumped up claims, maybe Colin Powell would have had a backbone and resisted it. But it is natural for people to have more empathy with those that are racially like them. This is certainly not solely an American trait.
And the strange truth is, it is likely that the example of those 2 bombs and the devastation they caused PREVENTED an atomic war. Remember, these were TINY atomic bombs, with almost no explosive power COMPARED to what we have today. Every expert in 1945 thought we would have at least one atomic war after World War II — but we never did. Because people saw the horrendous destruction and radiation sickness, and even the Communist Chinese realized it was too risky to invite that kind of insanity upon themselves. And Mao was practically mentally ill, and he let millions of his own people starve rather than change his failed agricultural policies. Yet even he drew the line at invading India, or other actions which could have gotten him in an atomic war. So the threat of the A-bomb actually deterred dictators over the years.
I’m sick and tired of these dim-witted Hollywood elites taking potshots at our country and her relatively short history. I’ll add Hanks to my already lengthy list of actors not to support.
I’ve never subscribed to HBO and never will. Waste of my time. I’d rather read about history than watch some pompous dolt interpret their version for me.
Rachel – indeed hard to get through but necessary.TY
NOTE TO David T. #46
For crying out loud. Leave the South out of this. Anytime another section of this country wants to massage thier own “I’m better than thou racial ego”… they do the Dump it on the South. Racism is Universal. and trust me, not every souther was a KKK!!!!
Fool
Anyone given pause by the subtle mendacities of #65 and #80 should know that Capra’s “Why We Fight” series made heavy use of actual German and Japanese footage celebrating their triumphs and techniques. “Mindlessly worshipping their God Emperor” and children training to be soldiers were demonstrated with Japanese produced footage showing these acts. Only one of Capra’s seven films was dedicated to the Pacific theater and it focused on China.
The racial stereotyping of Disney, WB, and other cartoon makers was to laugh at our then enemies, much as we do at the predictable PC braying of #65, #80, and similar ilk.
BTW, my father, shot down twice in the South Pacific, got to listen to Japanese radio broadcsts announcing the beheadings of downed squadron mates. A typical American Boy Scout. he hated the Axis so much that he sponsored Japanese students and German DPs to educations and life in the U.S. postwar. Other typical acts of American racial hostility included flying in the Berlin Airlift and medevac out of Korea.
Tom Hanks is a sad case.
In all fairness, there is a smattering of truth to Tom Hanks’ remarks. The issue I have is that they imply some sort of equivalence that simply didn’t exist. If my neighbor hits my dog and I murder him and burn his house down with his family inside, we’ve both done something wrong.
I doubt anybody commenting here has more respect for the Japanese than I do. I’m married to a Japanese lady, for over thirty years now. I lived there. My in-laws are survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima.
Prewar Japan wasn’t a democracy, and the people had essentially no voice in what their government did, but the behavior of the Japanese Army was atrocious, and it wasn’t just the soldiers who were responsible. The right side won, and my mother in law said that as horrible as the bomb was, it ended the war. I’ve no patience for the apologists. Truman chose the best of some bad choices.
Radical Islam has its own plans for you.
On the subject of the relocation of the “Japanese-Americans”, you are aware that due to the Gentlemen”s Agreement between Japan and the US and the immigration act of 1921(?) Japanese subjects could not emigrate to or become citizens of the US after that date. In addition, birthright citizenship as we now understand it didn’t exist. So the majority of the “Japanese-Americans” placed in relocation camps, were Japanese, but not American, They were in fact Japanese nationals (i.e., enemy aliens)and their minor children. Many had been educated in Japan. And after they had been removed from the Special Security Zone – basically the West Coast – they were free to leave the camps. Many chose not to do so, and refused to take a loyalty oath, because they were “hedging their bets” in case the Japanese won. Most of the members of the 442RCT were from the Hawaiian Islands and because subjects of the Hawaiian Monarchy became citizens of the US upon annexation, were citizens. Not to mention that they represented a large percentage of the population of the Islands, rendering relocation a non starter.
I am so disappointed in Tom Hanks. Mr. Hanks did not use his brain when he made those inappropriate remarks about the war with Japan…He owes all the veterans and veterans families who served in WW II. It was a disgrace what he said. Well I am not surprised because he is cozying up to the President, invited to watch the movie in the President’s private quarters of the WH, so he is on the bandwagon of psuedo Americans whose comments have become outrageous and almost loony. I will not watch “The Pacific”…Sorry I am not going to line the pockets of a limousine liberal who is using the soldiers of WWII as cannon fodder and phony patriotism…I will not be a part of this lie; this ruse…America made this guy famous and very rich and for him to berate and downgrade our Republic..I am sick and tired of it..and I will not go to another movie or watch his movie on HBO…
I beg to differ, Hanks is not deranged. I can respect the deranged. He is, however, typical of the leftists : usually boring, marginal talent, cowardly, wealthy, and over exposed. Poor fool who doesn’t see his numerous limitations, and mistakenly equates wealth for brains. Run Tom run……….
M. Morgan:
“From the outset, we wanted to make people wonder how our troops can re-enter society in the first place. How could they just pick up their lives and get on with the rest of us?”
The warriors cannot, nor should they, ‘get on with the rest of us’. It is the ‘rest of us’ that can and should join the warrior.
We need to accept full responsibility for the warrior’s actions on our behalf and thank him for enduring the trials and tribulations to which we ordered him to submit.
Warriors are our teachers. Their lessons, while painful and humbling, contain the best and the worst of humanity. Behold the Man.
No day without an inanity, courtesy to Sean Penn, Oliver Stone, James Cameron, Tom Hanks -
It is simply bewildering how there are still people around willing to take them seriously -
Can’t there be a movie star who is not a loon?
Apparently not -
“Control the past and you control the future.”
Seems like Hanks and Spielberg were at the White House today for a private screening of ‘The Pacific’ with Obama et al.
Maybe I’m reading too much into that, but I get the distinct impression (along with Oliver Stone’s latest efforts) that there is a ramping-up in Hollywood to re-write history with renewed urgency. Only this time, they’re going after our most cherished, core beliefs about what is good about America. Saving the world from Japanese Imperialism and Nazi Totalitarianism were (despite the moral ambiguities of almost every human action) perhaps our finest achievement, so it must be turned into a “racist / imperialist” act of aggression. Thus motives are dissected until something nefarious is found and then focused on relentlessly.
This is nothing new for the Left of course. But now with the aid of vivid CG techniques, such narratives can be ‘brought to life’ with ever more emotional impact. My advice: be sure to provide the counter-narrative to any young people you know – that America is unique among the superpowers of history, in that throughout the 20th century, it did not use its power to conquer and submit every nation it could. That cannot be said of the British, the French, the Russians, the Japanese, the Germans (twice), the Italians, the Belgians etc. etc. Who all sought to conquer or retain territories near and far. What did the US do with its ‘conquests’ after WWII? It helped create the conditions for unprecdented wealth and personal freedom in both Japan and Germany – not to mention most of their victims’ lands as well. Case closed.
What’s unhinged? You worry about 1945 when your nation has enough civilian casualties on your hands, over the last three decades, to humble even the devil.
Just so sick of Hollywood make-believe people who always seem to believe their own bull. Hanks is only an actor, nothing more. He has joined ranks with Penn, Garafolo and the rest of the hollywood brain dead bimbos. Was looking forward to watching Pacific as both my Dad and Stepdad were there. After Hanks brain fart I will now pass. I will also boycott any of his other cinematic efforts.
Time for a Patton Quote to get everyone’s head straight:
“Sure, we want to go home. We want this war over with. The quickest way to get it over with is to go get the bastards who started it. The quicker they are whipped, the quicker we can go home. The shortest way home is through Berlin and Tokyo. And when we get to Berlin, I am personally going to shoot that paper hanging son-of-a-bitch Hitler. Just like I’d shoot a snake!”
- General George S. Patton, Jr (addressing to his troops before Operation Overlord, June 5, 1944)
Carry on.
nq
VDH …when you called Hanks an ignoramus you most covered it.
an excellent analysis of the PC world that is being presented by people who should limit their comments to thank yous at the Oscars
There must be something in the water in Hollywood, California! What has happened to everyone out there…they ALL act like they are Kings and Queens and we should listen to their rantings and vulgar ravings about OUR country!! Get over yourselves! You mean NOTHING to the majority of Americans…
My father-in-law served in the Pacific theater. He was on the Bataan Death March, and the Oryoku Maru, aka: a hell ship (google it). He witnessed barbarism on a scale that makes me want to throw up, yet I have only a hint of what he saw and experienced firsthand. Yet he was always careful in his expressions – while some japanese acted as barbarians, some were human. Even soldiers would turn their backs (at risk of death if caught by their superiors) while prisoners stole food.
I’ve been wondering about Hanks mental health for a couple years, this is it. I will not support another one of his movies or projects. Apparently, his over-indulgance in kool-aide has damaged his brain.
Can’t we find something better to do than go to the movies?
Some of the VDH critics here are confused. Did you expect devastated citizens in WW2 era to display some kind of PC tolerance found in modern day American universities? For them to approach the Japanese imperialists raping their people with a sense of bold understanding? “Oh, let’s not judge all of the Japanese people with the army that’s destorying our nation”
Read up on some history – there was racist treatment from all sides. I own a Korean children’s book from the 80′s that characterized the Japanese occupiers as rat faced, buck toothed vermins. Some Koreans still derisively call Japanese as “monkeys” and CONSTANTLY pick fights with their now democratic neighbors. The Kim Yuna vs. Mao Asada feud is yet another testament to unforgotten feelings between those two nations.
The Japanese set up slave war camps in China that made Manzannar look like a summer trip to the hills. They distributed racist literature that proclaimed their people as chosen by heaven, and forced Koreans to take up Japanese name. I’ve heard the Chinese argue that more Chinese starved to death than the Jews, or how some of them objected to the Japanese not renouncing the emperor in the internment camps.
But most American students aren’t likely to learn any of this, since Americans (mostly liberals) tend to privilege certain injustice over others. They’ll grind their teeth at the thought of the Nazis, and establish Hitler as the very definition of evil, becasue it fits more comfortably with the rigid (liberal) binary opposition of white / European superpowers oppressing a given minority group. With this mindset, the American government’s forced internment of Japanese citizens (travesty for sure) is prioritized in American history books, although Japan’s war crimes against their Asian neighbors are arguablly MUCH worse, more racist, and bigger in scale.
Some Asians occasionlly resent how the Jews enjoy a symbolic status of “the persecuted people” in the eyes of the west. They feel their story is no less compelling and deserving of western attentions. While there’s a whiff of anti semitism in OG Asian circles, there’s a grain of truth to this gripe. If Americans can’t see racism beyond Hiter and the KKK hood, the whole story will never be told.
“Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”
Oh, baloney. The Japanese decided to attack us because we, among others things, cut off their oil supply, and they didn’t like having their oil supply cut off.
We, OTOH, wanted to smash them because they attacked us (obviously). Ever heard of Pearl Harbor, Tom.? How about the Japanese attack on the Philippines? That ringing any bells?
Different lifestyles, customs and whatnot had nothing to do with it.
And, we regarded them as the sum of the earth, because they were, in fact, acting like the the scum of the earth.
As I was recently doing research to get information on my father-in-law’s best friend, I came across the battlingbastardsofbataan website, and an interview with Major Richard Gordon. In the late 80′s, he was asked by the Japanese to participate in a documentary on the War. The producers were very gracious, and learned ALOT about WWII they’d never been taught, but he also learned a few things. The Japanese were *ALSO* working on a nuclear bomb, but had given it up as impossible. When Maj. Gordon was confronted on the American’s use of the bomb (since the japanese were in preparations to slaughter all POW’s, my fil lived because of the USA used it) he asked them if Japan would have used it had they succeeded in developing it first. The producers had to admit Japan would have done, and he never heard another word on the subject.
USA-DOA
It would be interesting to see if at any other time in our history that America’s actors so dissed America. Tom Hanks has proven he is a major league ass-clown. Were there others in the past? Was John Wilkes Booth the same kind of ass-clown?
USA-RIP
@11
mistreated Western POWs in a way that no other nation (not even the Nazis, except perhaps with the Russians) did during the war
~~
try how the Nazi’s treated the Jews. That would be getting there. None of this was taught in high school in the 70′s, I’ve learned it from firsthand accounts of those who survived.
Just for the record, the attack on Pearl was supposed to be preceded by a declaration of war by the Japanese delegation in DC being presented to Cordell Hull. Because the idiots left it to the last minute to transmit, Japanese administrative stupidity prevented it being presented until well after the attack had begun. Was still a sneak attack, but the jackholes in Tokyo were at least trying to observe the diplomatic niceties.
And on another point, you fight clean, we fight clean, you fight dirty, we fight dirty, the Japs fought dirty, too bad, so sad. They should count their lucky stars that we held the whip hand in ’45 and not the Russians (or the Chinese).
Tom Hanks made a stupid comment, our war in the Pacific wasn’t about race and neither is the war on terror. Mr. hamks needs a refresher course in WW2 history and to face faCTS AND REALITY ABOUT THE WAR ON TERROR. tHE jIHADISTS COME IN MANY COLORS including white, blonde, blue-eyed females. Pull your head out Tom.
Under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (which remains in place today) “whenever there shall be a declared war between the USA and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion shall be perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the USA, by any foreign nation or government,” all males aged 14 and older who are not naturalized are “liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured and removed, as alien enemies.”
World War I: 6,300 European enemy aliens in America were interned by the War Department.
World War II: 112,000 Japanese interned. In addition, more than 31,000 other enemy aliens from Axis countries (more than half of which were of European ancestry were also interned).
Check out “In Defense of Internment” by Michelle Malkin, not Tom Hanks!
@40
We only had two bombs.
What a pity the left wing moonbat Tom hanks did not talk to the ‘comfort women’ who were take in their hundreds of thousands from all over Asia to provide sexual services to the Japanese Army. Or to the thousands and thousands of British, Australian, New Zealand and American prisoners of war who were tortured and worked to death, in total contravention of the Geneva Convention, in Japanese POW camps or to the MILLION and MILLIONS of Chinese and Koreans who were used in barbaric medical experiments or killed by BIOLOGICAL weapons started by the Japanese years BEFORE Pearl Harbour. Or the Civilians used as SLAVES by the Japanese in every country they occupied. And why not address the fact that Japan has NEVER admitted guilt for any war crimes at all not like the Germans did and they committed far far more barbaric and bloodthirsty crimes than the Germans ever did. Still can’t let the TRUTH get in the way of a good PC, MC, left wing, moonbat narrative can we Tom. Why do moonbats have to CONSTANTLY apologise for America.
Tom Hanks is an idiot. I will not waste my time with his mini-series due to his incompetent and clearly anti-American statements.
Anyway, I didn’t notice a link to the piece in Time Magazine, but if anyone cares to read it, here it is…
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1969606-1,00.html
Hanks ought to lay off a subject that he knows essentially nothing about, and stick to commenting on what he does, and does well, which is playacting in movies.
Tom Hanks is a product of the California State University system.
It looks to me as though Tom Hanks has no clue about the lives of the men his production “The Pacific” will portray.
A Marine such as “Manila” John Basilone, for example, who will be one of the three Marines behind the mini series. After John Basilone was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions on Guadalcanal, he was returned to the states to help the war effort by touring the country to help sell war bonds. He wanted to go back with his men, though, got his wish, and was shipped out in August, 1943. He hit the beaches at Iwo Jima in February, 1944, and again performed above and beyond the call of duty, was killed on that first day, and was awarded the Navy Cross. This was a soldier who was a gentleman, first, then a Marine. He didn’t have a racist bone in his body. He loved his fellow soldiers, wanted to be with them in battle, and ultimately gave his life for them. It wasn’t about annihilating the Japanese.
It makes me wonder how Hanks will be portraying John Basilone. I don’t think it will be anything like this 7-8 minute tribute to John Basilone, but we’ll see:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLCqO3WRoco
Correction to above post- the years should have been 1944 and 1945, respectively.
Even misquoted, the words expressed are pretty accurate. The Japanese were portrayed as buck toothed,short people with bad eyesight. The idea that “we” had gotten along with the Japanese hardly applies. Most Americans had never met a Japanese person. We had also limited immigration from Japan. The idea that the Japanese-Chinese war was brutal somehow means that it was not racial motivated in unfounded. The Japanese considered ANYBODY who was not Japanese as inferior. Besides, Hanks was talking about the American attitude towards the Japanese. Mentioning any other country has no meaning.
The experience of combat destroys a few, but strengthens more of us. I have a friend who was a physics graduate student in Lithuania when the Nazis noticed him…he’s Jewish. He then spent most of WW II in a concentration camp. The guy was liberated by Patton, and become a cook in Patton’s 5th Army. Next he spent years in the Israeli Army, starting in ’46. With that background, he became the nicest fellow, and was completely sane.
Members of the Physics Professoriat at Berkeley have told me that the best students they ever had were those returning from WW II. They were reportedly focused, motivated, and wanted to get on with their lives. Also, you didn’t want to screw around with them. If you wanted to play poker with them, you had better have known what you were doing. So the idea that most soldiers are damaged by the experience is just…plain…wrong.
Look at John Warner, Ted Stevens, Frank Lautenberg, Dan Inouye, and Bob Dole. They seem to be among the best of us.
The comments that this article is about I believe are misunderstood. I don’t think he is saying World War Two was all about racial differences, but rather how the people on the homefront viewed the war and the attitudes surrounding the war. We entered World War Two after we were attacked at Pearl Harbor, and before that we were in a state of “armed neutrality” and were still very much isolationist. Tom Hanks is not denying this. What he’s saying is that the attitudes surrounding the war were racist. And they were. The U.S. government put Japanese-Americans into internment camps, for God’s sake! Also, after VJ-Day, we abolished Shintoism in Japan. I don’t think we entered and fought the war because of racial differences. They attacked us, and we had to kill or be killed. I do think that many of the attitudes surrounding the war were racist though. Especially at home.
That’s why he made the connection to the war in Iraq. We went into Iraq because we thought Saddam Hussein had WMDs, and even then he tried to ethnically clensed his country of Kurds. We tooked him down as we should have. However, many of the attitudes surrounding the war are racist. (“The Qu’ran preaches terrorism”, “Islam is a religion of hate”, etc.) I think that’s what Tom Hanks was trying to say.
Once the Americans understood that the Japanese would stop at nothing to fight to the death, and held a callous disregard for human life, we fought them not only on their own level, we got a lot better at it. And we won.
To compare that in some idiotic racial overtone with the war on terror is well, childish. Islamic extremists exist to kill infidels, and keep killing infidels until they themselves are dead.
The difference is, we fought force with overwhelming force in the Pacific. And we won. Totally. We are fighting terror with lawyers, and a weak ineffective sympathetic congress and administration. You can see how that is turning out, cant you?
Tom Hanks is able to give his opinion because he has the power of the media to foment it. Otherwise, regardless of his HBO specials, his horribly flawed opinion wouldn’t count for a damn thing.
He has succumbed to his own vision of importance, and so some how, what he says is supposed to count. It doesn’t. It’s only his flawed view as he sees it. He wasn’t there. He has absolutely no idea what it was like. He is speculating in the same manner a dog licks himself. Because he can.
What the hell were we doing in Hawaii anyway?
America in 1941 was a white supremacist society, legally and socially. Anyone who thinks otherwise is in serious denial. We had anti-miscegenation laws, and legal segregation. We had Jim Crow south. We and our allies had colonies in the Pacific long before Japan did, and our methods of repression were every bit as brutal. Japan proposed a racial equality clause to the League of Nations in 1919 and U.S., Britain, and Australia voted it down.
And let’s not forget, our own military in WW2 was segregated by race. Interestingly, this was not the case in Japan, where “mixed race” citizens served with all the other soldiers, including one half-Caucasian general.
American soldiers kept the bones of Japanese soldiers as trophies. They sent skulls home to their wives (the subject of a famous cover photo on LIFE magazine).
Every country on earth exploits and manipulates its history books for the purpose of self-aggrandizement. Is everyone so convinced that America is magically exempt from this otherwise universal trend?
Or China, for that matter. Yes, a country with no academic freedom whatsoever, where historians are mouthpieces for state ideology – apparently everyone here believes, without questioning, every number and statistic they provide on what Japan did during WW2 without question.
The Unites States killed over a million Japanese civilians in 60+ firebombing raids during WW2. That was before the nukes.
Race was a factor worldwide during WW2. To pretend otherwise is a total whitewash. The argument that this is somehow falsified because Nazis were white is and we fought them too is so laughably childish, I am astonished to see supposed adults making it.
Hausser #145,
The amount of evil and murder the Imperial Japanese Army committed is only loosely related to it’s fighting power.
You might want to re-read # 96 by Rachel Peepers above for a refresher on that.
The Waffen SS to my knowledge never used chemical weapons outside the Death Camps.
The IJA applied chemical munitions to Nationalist and other Chinese armed resistance about 2,000 times from 1931 – 42, if the current Chinese government is to be believed.
The number is likely much less, but it still does not change the fact that the IJA killed more Chinese than the Germans killed Russians, with fewer troops and many fewer weapons.
I came from SE Asia where Japanese tortured local people (they were not even soldiers) by inserting pipes with running water to their throats. When their bellies got too big with water, the Japanese would stand on them to force out the water and repeated the process. My friend’s granddad was ironed to death. There was much more, what did Tom Hank know?
If Tom Hank kept his month shut, he would have not shown his stupidity.
Tom Hanks is just an actor. He plays parts. He has no other value system other than getting paid to play a part. Being in a particular movie makes him neither learned nor astute. Playing in Saving Private Ryan gives him none of the noble character of the actual soldiers. He is just an actor. May we please put him in perspective?
Tom Hanks’ remark was pertaining to the attitudes surrounding WWII, not why and how we fought in the War. We put Japanese-Americans in internment camps, and we abolished Shintoism after VJ-Day when we occupied Japan. We fought in WWII out of necessity, and Tom Hanks would most likely agree with that statement. While WWII itself was not racist, the attitudes surrounding it were.
His comparison to the current war in Iraq is fairly legitimate. We went into Iraq because we thought Hussein had WMDs, and even if he didn’t he was still mustard gassing the Kurds, which is enough to constitute a war in my book. However, many of the attitudes surounding the war are indeed racist (“Islam is a religion of hate”, “The Qu’ran endorses terrorism, etc.). I think this is what Tom Hanks meant.
I thinks Hanks move to turncoat is far more simple than most of us are making it out to be. Hanks is a wonderfully talented actor, but off the cuff without script comes across as a vapid flunky in an interview.
Hanks invested a lot in his toe sucking of The Chosen One during the campaign of 2008. Off the screen, Hanks is no different than say a Skeeziks PJM version.
This was probably done to agitate the political opposition after the massive failure called Obama. Hanks is lashing at using the tools at his disposal. Whether it his own creation, or more likely parroting the crowd Hanks runs with, don’t mistake that Hanks is some intellectual giant.
Hanks: “I’m not a soldier, but I play on on TV….”
Hanks has made some really crappy movies. He’s also made some good ones. What is sad and pathetic is he isn’t lacking knowledge or a hateful moron like Penn- it’s the fact that the man is having a mental break from reality. I pity him but more I pity his wife. That poor woman must have crawled into the nearest hole, mortified with what her mentally unbalanced husband has said, which is akin to being a holocaust denier. He’s made it painfully clear that he is not a lefty loon of Hollywierd but simply a lunatic that should be in a padded room in a mental insitution
Miss Pity Pat Hamilton says, “Oh, for pity sake!”
Tom Hanks is not Al the pool cleaner, he has a wide audience. If he doesn’t know what he is talking about he needs to keep his mouth shut.
May I also invite you all on a little trip down memory lane? We were thanked for our good offices in ending the Japanese-Russo war in ’01 (?). We restricted Japanese immigration to California at the turn of the 20th century: some context, no one could ever become a citizen of Japan unless so born; Koreans who had lived there for generations were excluded. In 1910 Korea was annexed by Japan and they attempted to destroy every vestige of Korean culture. In ’27 (?) Japan was devastated by a huge earthquake our aid to the victims earned the major cities of the US a beautiful porcelain doll in kimono as thanks.
Population pressures encouraged Japan to look for “over seas” expansion. Manchuko! The Chinese living there were treated like animals. Japan then attempted to move north but their formations were consistently cut to pieces by the Soviets. It was proposed that a quick easy war with China would solve all Japanese’s problems. Try looking up “the rape of Nanking” on Wiki. So now bogged in China, resource problems unsolved they could only look south and that would mean war with the US.
On the tactical level there was racism but institutionally only the Japanese held racist views and clung to them until the very last. The US was shocked and angry about the attack at Pearl so how many race riots took place in Hawaii or California? Try none. And as far as their internship read Kennedy’s “Freedom From Fear” it came within a hair of not happening. My uncle, an illegal German immigrant, was registered for possible internship but the Germans weren’t running wild seemingly unstoppable just off our shores as were the Japanese at this time.
WWII was a war of machine age militaries and even the most fanatical Japanese could see that they were out classed the US but they also believed that we were mongrel dogs that would give way if struck a very hard blow. The Japanese never won a single campaign after Pearl but always clung to the idea racist idea that one big win would give them the war.
The Japanese murdered or attempted to work to death virtually every prisoner of war they captured. They succeeded tens of thousands of times.
The atomic bomb? There were over three million Japanese soldiers overseas who had never known defeat not to mention several million on the home islands. One word from the emperor and what ever defeats were suffered in the home islands these military outposts could have gone on fighting. The war could easily have lasted another decade, doubling our casualties to that date. And how many casualties would we have been willing to suffer to liberate Indonesia, Vietnam, etc in order to hand them back to their colonials? The Soviets would have been the natural allies of these hold out Japanese bastions with all the mischief that would have gone in train with that.
That’s enough!!!
Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different.
This quote from Hanks is very telling. He is summing up his own views towards the Japenese and projecting them, pure and simple. Tom, ever hear of a little thing called pearl harbor? How about the spread of imperialism? Who cares what this idiot thinks anyhow? As if someone who is sane might actual say “hmmm, well Tom Hanks said it, it must be true therefore I beleive the same thing”.
Dave Surls: “Oh, baloney. The Japanese decided to attack us because we, among others things, cut off their oil supply, and they didn’t like having their oil supply cut off.
We, OTOH, wanted to smash them because they attacked us (obviously).”
Good point, Dave. Certainly WE would NEVER attack anyone just because they cut off our supply to oil…
“Hanks’ statement looks like something that you would find scrawled on the inside of a toilet stall, but Hanson’s critique is also very shallow. It is easy to tell that he has little expertise on the Pacific War.”
http://ampontan.wordpress.com/2010/03/13/whats-the-story-with-tom-hanks/#comment-22079
My father heard of the surrender of Japan, while on a troop ship- in transit for the invasion of Japan. Since my father was a member of the signal corps who would have gone in at the front of the first wave, the atomic bombs saved his life- as well as the lives of hundreds of thousands of other US soldiers and Japanese soldiers and civilians. As previous posters have indicated, the Japanese (civilians included) were prepared to fight to the death. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki quickly curtailed the war in the Pacific, preventing the much heavier casualties (military and especially civilian) that would have occurred in a prolonged siege.
Hanks’was one comment. Please pay more attention to the sustained acts of simplistic historical revisionism such as Fallows’ “The Imperial Cruise”, in which an effort is actually made to construct an historical argument, and on a much grander scale,along the lines of Hanks’ brainfart.
Having made a ‘war’ movie or two does not make you an authority of any sort, no matter who your ‘consultant’ may have been. When you are fighting a determined enemy, any enemy, it is always a good idea to prepare your self for victory as well as death. “Dehumanizing” the enemy in your minds eye can take away or reduce the remorse of killing another human being and keep you sane longer. Never having had your life placed at the edge of extinction in mortal battle with a suicidal enemy philosophy you can’t make such statements of an ‘a factual’ (without fact) nature. Hanks is a “pretender”, he pretends to be something he is not, for a living! Words are GIVEN to him. He isn’t known for his rhetoric or his intelligence. But he is known as a “pretender”. Stop looking and listening to these folks like they have some value to add, they don’t. They ‘entertain’ by pretending. Like a dancer… except a dancer is really a dancer.
And as a reward for Hanks’ dissing our country, our esteemed BO invites him to host a ‘movie night’ at the White House. Like his
following anti-American minister for twenty years, this shows the
hatred our President has for our country. It’s not arguable. . . we’ve
elected a steward of our country who hates everything we love about it.
Get rid of the ‘RATs if you love your country and all it stands for. Keep them in if you want the gov’t to determine whether you can salt your tomatoes.
I love HBO i do not want cancel it.
Dr. T,
Riku Tanaka? Come now, Japan’s Joe Smith is surely Taro Suzuki. I’ve been in Japan nearly 20 years, and I can’t recall meeting a single Riku, although Rika is somewhat popular as a woman’s name.
Thanks for noting that FDR did put a squeeze on the Japanese. However, if you encounter a Japanese nationalist (or, perhaps, read “Sapio” magazine) who wishes to tell you “the real story” about the war, that bit will get great inflation.
How many non-Asian GIs returned (and still return) home with Japanese wives? It used to be that on/off Ft. Campbell there were Korean signs up everywhere due to the number of Korean wives. Are all those men racists or exoticists?
My thanks to Hanks for reminding me why I don’t pay to watch professional liars and phonies.
How long must we atone for Matt Damon’s, George Clooney’s, Tom Hanks’ et al’s zinns?
I thought Tom Hanks was an overrated actor. I was wrong. He’s a BAD overrated actor.
I used to have a Taiwanese roommate. Her grandparents had been in China during what she called the “Anti-Japanese War,” and the things they had told her about Japanese atrocities were so bad she didn’t even want to repeat them to me. I asked her once if she thought we had been justified in using the bomb, and her immediate response was a very vehement “Yes!” Good enough for me.
Sad to see the numbers of PC appologists for Hank’s racist accusations of the United States. One would like to think he mispoke or was misquoted. Both the Japs and the Islamofacists attacked America, not the other way around. Misanthropic attitude toward Americans.
Wait , it gets worse. Check this quote on the Cuban Missile Crisis . . . “It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I’m pretty sure. Wasn’t that like the Bay of Pigs thing?”
Why people would put any stock whatsoever in such an ignorant buffoon is beyond me.
what a jerk! The product of the post-60s US school system. All of the last three generations believe as he does.
It ain’t going to get reversed. Ever.
What many of you who bring up our government-inspired racist propaganda don’t seem to realize is that the American people are so inherently non-racist and tolerant (willing to give the other guy the benefit of the doubt) that the government had to do this to instill the fighting spirit necessary to do the job.
Many posters here comment about the Japanese-Americans put in internment camps but no one asks why. Two reasons readily occur. The Japanese military had a policy of sending 5th column spies and saboteurs into the countries they meant to invade. Just one example: nearly every commercial photographer in Manila as war neared was a Japanese who reported military and other intelligence to Tokyo. When a Japanese pilot who took part in the Pearl Harbor attack landed his damaged plane on the Hawaii island of Niihau he was given assistance by Japanese-born islanders. American military authorities were so leery of the Japanese on Oahu they parked fighter plans in neat rows away from the fences so they could be better protected from local attacks. This, of course, made it easier for the Japanese carrier plans to destroy them. Secondly, the shock of the attack so rattled the Army generals that they seriously proposed abandoning the West Coast to the Japanese invaders they believed were on the way and withdrawing to the Rocky Mountains to defend the rest of the country. One of the reasons for the internment, apart from the 5th column fears, was concern that Japanese-Americans would soon become the victim of mob violence. Feelings, as we have forgotten, ran high. Presentism, as that way of looking back into the past and applying modern modes of thinking without regard to context, never takes that into consideration. All this said, I think a very good case can be made that FDR manipulated us into war with Imperial Japan.
What’s really sad is someone like Tom Hanks, who is a good actor, director and producer, is even asked his opinion about the history of the Pacific Theater of WWII. I don’t consider him qualified let alone possessing any expertise to be asked anything about this subject. What a colossal waste of our time to even listen to what he thinks or professes to know about that history. What a shame that the media allows him the access so broadly to spout his opinion and scarily thinks they are doing a good job. Garbage in, garbage out…..
This is part of the crypto-marxist “America is Evil” fraud that is perpetrated by the American liberals (made up primarily of old ’60s hippies who have taken over the universities – in particular the Education departments and teacher unions)
No different than the AGW Climate fraud.
The idiots lap it up.
#175 – Andrew…….Reducing WWII down to simple racism is lazy and dishonest at best. Hitler, Stalin and Tojo did not start the wars because of racism. It was an grand adventure to spread their ideologies on a grand scale, and increase their role and power, and egos on the world stage. Race was only one of the tools in the box used to justify their actions. And the USA was all too happy to stand on the sidelines until it no longer could.
Gee Andrew@175, get over yourself. All the PC maddness you and others here are expressing is nothing more than leftist, cretinous, self-loathing, drivel. White (American)man-bad, others-good. I mean it is really getting tedious.
War is NOT about race but the extention of politics. You and your PC-minded soulmates have to make everything about race (or whatever other grievence fits into the topic) in order to denigate America. War may be fought between races but it isn’t racial. You moron. Talk about simplistic!!
And Hanks as well as you are trying to draw moral equivalences where there are none. And you and he are also taking a swipe at our war against Islamic jihadists and their war against us. Again using your template that they are good, we Americans are bad..
If you and 65 and others really feel this way, then go to Walter Reed, any VFW, DAV or VA hospital and tell those who fought for your right to be an idiot what you think of them.
Minor historical correction:
The sneak attack was never supposed to happen. A formal declaration of war was SUPPOSED to be delivered to the War Department before the first bombs fell on Pearl Harbor but due to the secrecy involved and the ineptitude of the Japanese consular staff, the formal declaration was not delivered until hours after the attack.
Common misconception is that the Japanese planned to sneak attack Hawaii that fateful day when in reality, the plan was to declare war, then attack when there would not be nearly enough time to respond, observing the niceties, while achieving the tactical and strategic objective.
That poor woman must have crawled into the nearest hole, mortified with what her mentally unbalanced husband has said, which is akin to being a holocaust denier. He’s made it painfully clear that he is not a lefty loon of Hollywierd but simply a lunatic that should be in a padded room in a mental insitution
I’m a history teacher and I’m really getting sick and tired of Hollywood people as well as reporters picking and choosing their historical facts to meet their needs. The fact is that Americans were VERY racist against the Japanese and other minorities in the early to mid 20th century. In fact, if you were to go back in time even 20 years ago and spent a day, the first thing you would say when you got back would be, “man, those people are racist.” YES we hated the Japanese as much as they hated us, probably more. We were at war for crying out loud. If you don’t believe me, just ask your grandparents. My mom and dad learned songs in elementary school like “Taps for the Jap.” I believe Hank’s comments comparing World War 2 to the War on Terror are shaky at best, but this idiot who wrote this article needs to consult a historian before he writes another article like this.
I recommend VDH, and everyone else on this list who knows nothing about American attitudes to the Japanese and Japanese-Americans, read John Dower’s “War Without Mercy”. This might give this conversation a more balanced and less doctrinaire tenre.
I’m afraid VDH, for whom I have a lot of respect as an historian of the classical world and of war in general, has done a disservice to his (often deservedly much maligned) profession with the ahistorical article.
The idea here is a comparison with WW2 in the Pacific with our current “war” on terror. Racism was rife according to #175, and that observation was very very true! The Japanese hated whites, and we hated the Japs…simply because the infection of political correctness hadn’t made it’s stain on society yet.
Was it right? At the time, you damn right it was. See, back in the 40′s, people didn’t have the luxury of a group of PC police telling them how wrong they were to see the Japanese as different. If it were now, Pearl Harbor would have been our fault, especially Bush’s fault, and Obama would be apologizing left and right for our imperialistic warmongering by having a base there in the first place. We would be sternly reminded of the Japanese’ right to conquer territory trumps our right to exist.
Fortunately, back in those days, there was something that was easily recognizable as the ENEMY, and we, as a nation pulled together to defeat that ENEMY by every means at our disposal. We didn’t ask for that fight, but once in it, we were in it to win, and win we did. Total capitulation was the only acceptable outcome, and our racist intolerant hatred for the Japanese was carried on after the war when we refused to rebuild their country, their form of government, kept them enslaved, and as a result, they are the poorest backwater being kept under the thumb of the horrible United States.
Wait…hmmmmm…seems it didn’t turn out that way, did it? Of course it didn’t!! Using today’s “a racist under every rock” thought process to try to explain the attitudes of sixty plus years ago is folly. It was what it was, and Hanks trying to compare our attitudes of racism against the Japanese with our alleged racism against a religion again, is sheer folly. He is misguided, and also wrong.
Islam isn’t a race. Islam is a cult religion based on the number of non muslims you can murder, or better yet, how many infidels you can murder by blowing yourself up for Allah’s approval. ISLAM IS NOT A RACE MR.HANKS…your comparison just doesn’t fly because we fought a WAR…like wars should be fought….TO WIN!
Today, we are dabbling in pseudo prevention of terrorists,while those terrorists are doing everything possible to destroy our entire way of life….THEY are fighting a war….we are being accused of racism when we point out the obvious as to who is trying to kill us. Muslims….are not a race. They are a cult. A cult that embraces murder, maiming, torture, and total subversion of cultures and societies to force their theocratic ideology on literally every living being on earth. They are serious…our leaders are not.
So, the lesson is simple. If we ever get actually serious in defeating Islamic terrorism..we will do it. We will ignore the goody two shoe asshats who scream racism, intolerance, bigotry and every last thing they can think of when we give them back what they are giving us. They, the muslims, are laughing out loud, not believing their good fortune in having an enemy who openly assists them in their own demise. They perceive us as weak, timid, and they thank Allah for the useful idiots who do their dirty work for them…keeping our citizens at bay and gagged by pointing fingers and accusing them of being racist. Racist? How ignorant can anyone be and still breathe.
BUT! The good part about all this is simple. Those idiots who are assisting jihad regardless of how stupid they are…THEY are going to be the first to die at the hands of their “freedom fighters”. Jihadists respect force. Overwhelming force. They fear confrontation, so they attack like cowards..and kill only those who cannot fight back. These are the people our PC asswipes are forcing our government to back down to….and that is why we are going to suffer an unbelievably horrible attack in the coming years…
The jihadists wont rest until an entire geographical portion of the United States is rendered uninhabitable by a suitcase nuke….and our PC mental masturbators will wring their hands and say “see? we deserved it”…and I will personally hunt them down first, and then go deal with Islam in the only way they understand. Force.
There is no comparison between the Pacific war and today’s head in the sand conflict with terror. Hanks is an actor…and his opinion is just that. His.
Sanity and historical perspective, is this too much to expect from our celebrity opinion givers? Yes, wretchedly.
Perhaps unintentionally, Hanks has swerved in to an area of truth, and this article cites it. Maybe in our military “in extremis” as you put it, racism against Japanese served as a magnifier of the zeal necessary to win a world war. Does that sound familiar? Well, yeah, a little.
But, did we (as the article points out) in victory try to be respectful of the Japanese and their culture, establish a democracy in Japan, and ally ourselves with that democracy against totalitarians in the region based on ideology rather than ethnicity? We sure did. But doesn’t that sound a little familiar when compared to what we are doing in Iraq?
At least, that’s what the Bush administration wanted to do in Iraq. What our new administration wants to do remains a mystery. One point of departure is that we didn’t use weapons of mass destruction against the Iraqis. Consequently (at least partially so anyway), the transition from enemy to ally has taken longer in Iraq than it did in Japan. Maybe it will never be as successful.
But Hanks is right to see parallels between what we did to/for/in Japan and what we are now doing to/for/in Iraq. He just has failed to see the extent of them.
DEAR DR.HANSON:
THE MORE I READ, THE MORE I HEAR, AND THE MORE I SEE, CONFIRMS FOR ME THAT THERE IS A PANDEMIC OF CONTAGIOUS LUNACY GOING AROUND IN THE WORLD. NOT EVEN ONE DAY CAN GO BY WITHOUT COMING INTO YOUR FACE.
Do a Goggle Search on this phrase, “Is Tom Hanks Unhinged?”….the response (8500 hits)to VDH’s take on Mr. Hank’s idiotcy is immense amd growing. Time for a retraction from this fading actor?
Tom Hanks doubled down on the stupid. Here is a transcript of a CNS News interview with Tom Hanks about his “racism and terror” remarks:
CNS: “You said that the Pacific represents a war of quote ‘racism and terror’ and the only way to complete one of these battles was to quote ‘kill them all’ and you compared it to what’s going on today. This–”
Tom Hanks: “Well, I said it’s familiar with what’s going on today. You can walk into the National World War II museum in New Orleans, in the Pacific wing, and Steven Ambrose himself has made that very point. It’s up in black and white, that after Pearl Harbor, these people that were very, very different from each other, the Americans and the Japanese, who had different heritages, who had different theologies and different ways of government, had a different sense of society went at it tooth and nail.
“It would be naïve to assume that racism was not part of the quotient of World War II and ***it’s historical fact by way of just simply suicide bombers from the air and as well as the terror that was visited upon civilian populations throughout the Pacific that terrorism was not part of the equation as well.***
CNS: To connect that today, do you support President Obama’s decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan, to take down al Qaeda, and the fact that he has not ended the war in Iraq yet?
Hanks: “Well, I’m not so sure, I’m not, even though we do have people that are trying to kill each other and shooting guns at each other, the connection there is not as clear cut and I think it would be foolish to assume that it is. (NICE PASS THERE, FOREST GUMP) What is going on in Iraq is completely singular to Iraq. What is going on in Afghanistan is completely singular to Afghanistan.
“I’ve made other–I made another movie about Afghanistan that is now !!! almost ‘gone with the wind,’ !!! ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ in which the Soviets were there and the Pakistanis and the Afghanis were fighting in a completely different sort of thing. To ask me, now look, I’m an actor, do I support what’s going on? I’m not a politician and I’m not a statistician and I’m not a legislator. I’m a guy who looks at what’s going on and understands that there’s nothing but struggle and inside that struggle are the proclivities of humankind and like Ernie Pyle himself said: ‘Anybody who likes going to war is a damn fool. Anybody who wants to prolong a war is a damn fool. Anybody who wants to walk away from a war unfinished is a damn fool.’”
CNS: “Now, how about the racism and terror comments that you made about the Pacific. How does that connect at all to what is going on–since you did say that it was connected?”
Hanks: “Yes, I did. I did say that. Yeah, I did. And, in fact, I have talked to all sorts of people who have, in the vernacular, used incredibly racist terms about the people on the other side of the fence, and we can see all the time that comes over in the regular news media from their side, from the other side, terms that can only be viewed as racist. But let’s just take the word “racism” out of it and put “ignorance” instead, because it’s, racism, is a mere virulent form of what that ignorance is.
“I’d like to think that as our time has gone by and as Americans have found themselves in 2010, ignorance is being replaced by a certain amount of enlightenment and racism is going to be replaced eventually by an acceptance. It’s just taking an awfully long time.”
These producers aren’t even trying to make money. Nobody with half a brain would call their audience racist and expect people to tune in to that message. Maybe a small percentage of people who feel guilt at some perceived unearned wealth would go for this, but this is revisionism at the service of our enemies while being touted as multilateralism. The disconnect is too strong.
I beg to differ. Some of my best friends, as well as myself, are “unhinged” but not extreme leftists, historically challenged, or narcissistic. Hanks is a weak little man who mistakenly equates his financial and show biz success with IQ, insight, and entitlement. Please don’t confuse him with facts as this would work against the downfall of Obama and cronies. Lets give the “unhinged” a break. The “hinged” also have their fair share of problems. Run Tom Run (from honesty)……
Tough guy / writer Norman Mailer once said of a male actor who criticized him (can’t remember who) that “acting is not a very manly profession”. It captures it perfectly. These are already insecure people. Then they get all this fame and money and should feel better about themselves but deep inside they know they are only acting like a tough guy, acting like a soldier, acting like someone who survived real adversity. We have put these people on a pedestal but what they do is not very inspiring compared to the real thing.
So out comes drivel like this in an attempt to seem more relevant and to be part of a “real” cause along with all the fake ones. If the key to understanding politics is “follow the money” , it is “follow the insecure ego” for Hollywood.
#208 – Jane G.
Who attacked whom? I think that is very important. But that’s just me.
There may have been racist people with specific animosity towards Japanese in the USA. However, that has nothing to do with Japanese Imperialism throughout Asia. Not one darn thing.
These historical reasons for Japanese imperialism have very deep roots. A comment thread is no place for such a lengthy treatise. Nevertheless, a series of events over 500 years does supply a logical exegesis.
1514: The Portuguese force China to open her ports to foreign trade. Portugal is more than a match for imperial China. Other Europeans follow.
1638 The Japanese expel all foreign missionaries and traders. Having witnessed European efforts to exploit China, the Japanese choose isolation.
1842 The British force more concessions on China as a result of the Opium War. China is divided into zones of control by the imperial powers.
1853 An American fleet under Commodore Matthew Perry forces the Japanese to open their ports for trade. Fearing the possibility of becoming another China, the Japanese abandon their feudal system in favor of modernity.
1868 to 1912 The Meiji Restoration. Japan launches a crash program to become a fully modern state. They soon join the race for empire after victories over China and Russia. But where will they find the resources?
1940 German armies overrun France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Britain has her back to the wall. The Australian army is away fighting Rommel in North Africa. The iron, coal, rubber, light metals and other resources of Asia are ripe for the picking. Only the US stands in the way of Japanese imperial ambitions.
The rest you know. The conflict and the results have a long and complex history. If culpability is what Hanks’ wants, there’s plenty of blame to go around. “Racism” is contemporary rant, not an exegesis. I’ll leave acting to Hanks if he promises leave history to historians.
Read WITH THE OLD BREED. It will remind those who don’t already understand it the brutality that is warfare, and why it should be undertaken with a keen eye to what it does to people, peoples and civilizations.
FEDup has it right.
The racism was mutual, with the japanese believing they were the children of the sun god, hence superior to all other races, and we regarding them as dangerous animals, one and all.
They attacked not only us, but the russians, the chinese, the koreans, the malays, etc.
In fact, they were the bad guys and we were the good guys. They got what they had coming. By taking a stand contrary to the facts, Hanks reveals(again) his ignorance and his extreme affinity for loving evil and hating good.
Question: Did he come “stock” that way; or after dating Jane Fonda a few times?
I don’t think the remark warrants so much Tom Hanks bashing. He has glorifiede America’s veterans in Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan, not to mention other historical movies like Apollo 13. Calling Hanks “unamerican” is a little harsh. (As in a little harsh I mean way too harsh.) Tom Hanks said that WWII had elements of racism in it. Sean Penn publicly supports Hugo Chavez. There are actors in Hollywood who belong in the Sean Penn, “unamerican” category, and Tom Hanks is not one of those actors.
“I believe Hank’s comments comparing World War 2 to the War on Terror are shaky at best…”
Not shaky. Wrong.
“They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different.”–Hanks
Sorry, but that’s just complete nonsense.
Tom Hanks has never actually served in the military, in any capacity, in any uniform. He has played soldiers in two movies that I can recall (Forrest Gump and Saving Pvt Ryan) however, so that must be the source of his knowledge on the matter, and those movies appear to have made him better qualified to assess our conduct and our motivation ever so much better than the men an women who actually fought and died in that war.
While he was dressing up like a girl to break into television, I was serving a 13 year tour of duty in nuclear submarines, and a lot of people my age were in uniform, in combat, in Viet Nam.
We, as a group,tend not to opine much on the motivation and conduct of Hollywood actors in their personal lives and politics. We, instead, just don’t go see their movies.
It’s worse than even our good Mr. Hanson makes out. Consider:
You mean like al quaeda? No. It was straight-up, old-fashioned, political/geographic imperialism. They didn’t care about our way of life.
There is a move on today, among the leftist allies of the jihad movement to draw comparisons between the mohammedan jihad and the Japanese involvement in WWII.
It is bogus at every level, and based on a gimcrack victimology. The KamiKaze (神風) special forces (特別攻撃隊) suicide pilots are supposed to be somehow comparable to the mohammedan suicide/assassination bombers — which they are not. And the internment of the American Japanese is supposed to be comparable to some imaginary mistreatment of the American mohamedans — which while imaginary, is constantly trumpeted as something immanent, despite the absence of any evidence.
CAIR is propagandizing in the California schools at this very moment, along those lines.
It is extremely disgusting.
American motives and hostilities are presumed to be racial. This is an article of faith among the left, recently adopted by the jihad movement.
An irony here is that while some Americans are racists (and it used to be even more common than today) America is in fact less racist as a nation/culture than most of the world.
But the important thing for the left is to level the accusation to intimidate the morally insecure — so as to obtain obedience. Today, the words “you are racist” mean “you are inferior, you are a sinner“.
And there’s your money quote. He overtly makes comparison to the struggle against the international jihad movement.
Clearly Hanks is an ignorant imbecile. Another master of make-believe who imagines himself therefore an expert on the real world. (Occupational hazard I suppose). But he really must be pilloried in public for advancing jihaddi propaganda at a time when we are under attack.
Personally I find all these fashionable comparisons between Japan and the mohammedan cultures and countries to be intolerably offensive, to America, to Japan and to civilized standards in general.
There is no common ground between the Japanese concept or conduct of war and those of the mohammedans, particularly not the jihaddis.
There is no common ground between the spiritual life of Japan — Shinto, Buddhist, Confusian and above all syncretistic (and largely life affirming) — and that of the mohammedans.
There is no common ground between the amazingly productive public and commercial life of the Japanese and that of the sleepy, self-indulgent and largely parasitic public and commercial life of the mohammedan cultures.
There is no common ground between Japan’s national pride, self definition and pursuit of self sufficiency and the amorphous allegiance of the mohammedans to the “ummah”, the population of believers.
There is no common ground between the mohammedan compulsion to impose their faith on the minds of all people and anything that has ever happened in Japan. (I suppose it could be argued that such a proselytizing has been present in one or two crack-pot schools of Buddhism over the years. But such things have been small marginal phenomena. Not really comparable to the mohammedan cultural norm.)
All in all it is offensive, disgusting and wrong in every respect.
Hanks richly deserves a public shaming for supporting our enemies in this particularly mindless revolting fashion.
In case you were wondering how far Tom Hanks’ political affiliations have drifted, Hanks contributed $12,000 to AL FRANKEN to help pay for his Senate recount cheating team. I loved Band of Brothers, but no Pacific for me.
It seems my comment has been deleted.
Whatever have I done wrong?
Another POS hollywood actor that I refuse to pay my hardearned money to see, let alone watch for free on TV!
Those who are trying to make this about returning troops are intentionally missing the meaning (as Mr. Hanks clarified recently). Hanks is talking about a supposed racism of the general population of the U.S. toward Muslims. He has since clarified his statements here: http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/62716
I find his statement that: “I have talked to all sorts of people who have, in the vernacular, used incredibly racist terms about the people on the other side of the fence, and we can see all the time that comes over in the regular news media from their side, from the other side, terms that can only be viewed as racist. But let’s just take the word “racism” out of it and put “ignorance” instead, because it’s, racism, is a mere virulent form of what that ignorance is.”
Really Tom? Who are those people that you’ve talked to? Fellow actors? Fellow Hollywood liberals? Every day fans who open up to you and start spouting anti-Muslim profanities? Or do you perhaps have large groups of racist friends that we don’t know about?
He makes the statement with absolutely nothing to back it up but a liberal’s knee-jerk belief in the racism and brutality of the American people.
I have no idea what he means by “regular news media from their side.” What side does he mean? Is he talking about the “Muslim side” or the “conservative side?” Again, he makes a statement with absolutely nothing to back it up.
His comments reflect nothing but ignorance and prejudice and the liberal desire to make themselves appear tolerant by calling others racist.
Oh, and as some commentators have pointed out, posters, movies and cartoons were made during WWII with anti-German and anti-Italian themes and stereotypes and racist terms as well, and they had not even attacked us directly.
@148. Gylippus
I fear your analysis is correct and it enrages me.
My father having survived bloody Omaha, was going to be sent into the Pacific theatre and I assure you that there was never a finer, more gentle, less-racist human on this planet.
And now these buffoons will try to poison young American minds with this revisionist take on the attitudes and motives of that great generation of young men and the country that called them to duty.
You ably answered your question “What did the US do with its ‘conquests’ after WWII?” May I add what may seem trite for all the recirculation it gets on patriotic holidays, but still rings with the power of truth: We asked only for enough ground to bury our dead.
You exhort us to remind the children we know of the good this country has done – of the greatness they are called to . . . but, what of the young who ingest, unfiltered – slander presented as enlightened entertainment?
When I found out that his wife Rita Wilson’s father was Muslim, and that she was best friends with Rosie O’Donnell…I immediately thought to myself “That explains everything”.
Poor Tom Hanks. He got sucked into the black hole of make believe and he’s gone now.
I’ve always liked Tom Hanks as an actor, love his movies. But its way too much pressure on him to consider him a war expert, or a foreign affairs expert or even a history expert. His background has nothing to do with military planning, history or execution. So why bother asking him? Its like asking Tiger Woods or Paris Hilton to relive the experience of the victims of Pearl Harbor. Silly.
Throughout history elites have used narratives, usually based on actual events, to shape and control the picture of the world they impose on the societies they rule. Sometimes those narratives depict the heroism of ancestors in the hopes that a dramatic retelling of past exploits will motivate young listeners to emulate them in behalf of the elites. In societies ruled by more ideologically inclined elites, those tales often take the form of morality plays that shape and mold the outlook, values, and judgments of the ruled.
Here in the U.S., elites use the corporate entertainment industry and its vast television audiences to shape the outlook of their constituent populations. But instead of using truthful narratives, American elites resort to lies and distortions so that actual events can be twisted and bent to conform to the propaganda needs of their left-wing ideology.
Consider the case of NBC’s Law & Order, an extremely popular television show. L&O’s left-wing producer, Dick Wolf, controls a stable of five crime-oriented shows (also Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, L.A. Dragnet and Crime & Punishment), making him one of the most powerful men in television. For years, Law & Order, which is filmed in Manhattan, advertised its episodes as being “ripped from the headlines,” a claim Wolf and star Jerry Ohrbach still make in interviews. But instead of depicting reality, Wolf’s scriptwriters take high-profile crimes committed by blacks, and replace the bad guys with whites, even inventing white racist criminals that bear no relation to anything seen in New York during the past 100 years.
And so, even though more than 89 percent of suspects in violent crimes are black or Hispanic according to NYPD crime reports, L&O presents a looking-glass world in the grip of a white crime wave. In “Teenage Wasteland,” an episode that originally aired on February 7, 2001, the true case of a group of black teenagers who ordered Chinese food, and murdered the delivery man, is turned into a group of middle-class, white kids. “Myth of Fingerprints” (November 14, 2001) tells of a white, female forensics chief whose years of false testimony has sent many innocent men to jail.
One of those innocents was murdered in prison, resulting in the official’s conviction for manslaughter. “Fingerprints” was loosely based on the real case of former Oklahoma City supervising forensic chemist Joyce Gilchrist, nicknamed “black magic,” for her seeming forensic wizardry. Gilchrist’s lab techniques and court testimony had come under scrutiny by federal and state authorities. Critics charged she gave false testimony causing 23 men to be sentenced to death, eleven of whom were executed. Joyce Gilchrist is black, but unlike the fictional white official, was never prosecuted, though she was fired for alleged “flawed casework” and mismanagement.
Seven months after the October, 2002 Washington, D.C. sniper case was closed with the arrest of suspects John Muhammad and Lee Malvo, L&O dramatized the case, but with the shooter as a white man! (“Sheltered”; May 14, 2003.) “Smoke” (May 21, 2003) opens with the death of a child, whose adoptive father, a famous entertainer, had dropped him, while dangling him from a hotel room window. The detectives eventually discover that the entertainer would also arrange for underage boys to accompany him to his mansion, where he would sexually violate them. When I told a not particularly media-savvy neighbor who is the mother of four small children that story line, she immediately said, “Michael Jackson!” But on L&O, the character was depicted as a white comedian. Remember the Danny Almonte case? Almonte was the 14-year-old Dominican fraud who — through the connivance of his father, Felipe de Jesus Almonte, and Bronx-based, Dominican Little League coach Rolando Paulino — passed himself off as a 12-year-old, in order to play in the 2001 Little League championships. But in “Foul Play” (May 1, 2002), the coach magically becomes a blond-haired, white man, who is somehow convicted of a murder committed by the player’s father.
L&O’s creative team must read some interesting publications, since many of their “ripped from the headlines” stories never happened, but suit any left-winger’s paranoid fantasies quite well. Consider their obsession with non-existent, murderous white supremacists, whom they depict as besieging Manhattan. In “Open Season” (November 20, 2002), a William Kunstler-like defense attorney is murdered while celebrating the acquittal of a guilty-as-hell black defendant for shooting a white policeman. The killer, a member of a white supremacist group, then uses his defense attorney to unwittingly pass along information to his co-conspirators, who murder a prosecutor in another state. The defense attorney is charged with aiding and abetting the supremacists, before she is shot by a female supremacist. The real basis of the episode was the indictment of radical attorney, Lynne Stewart, of consciously aiding and abetting Moslem terrorist Sheik Abdul Rahman, the convicted ringleader of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In “Prejudice” (December 12, 2001), a racist, white real estate agent progresses from writing a letter to his co-op board in an effort to keep an interracial couple out of his building, to flashing a gun at a black colleague, to murdering a black man who beat him to a taxi. Such a case would have been fantastic in 1951, let alone in 2001. In “Genius” (April 2, 2003), a white, violence-embracing ex-con-writer stabs a white cabby to death. Viewers are then given mixed messages, as the cab driver turns out to be a fugitive, white supremacist racial murderer.
In another surreal L&O touch, ordinary black New Yorkers are repeatedly shown to be victims powerful white overseers. In “Kid Pro Quo” (April 30, 2003), the dedicated director of admissions at a tony private school is murdered by her corrupt racist boss. The victim sought to get a deserving but poor black girl admitted, but was overridden by the boss, who’d taken a bribe to accept the inferior child of a Jewish pornographer. And then there’s the homophobia angle. In the real world, Manhattan is, like San Francisco, one of the most gay-friendly areas in America. But not in L&O’s alternate universe. In “Girl Most Likely” (March 27, 2002), a private school student murders her lesbian lover, in order to hide the fact that she is gay. Last, but not least, comes xenophobia. In “Patriot” (May 22, 2002), a pale, blonde-haired former special forces officer kills a Moslem immigrant he had surveilled, and whom he suspected of being a terrorist. The prosecutor presents the imaginary patriot as a fire-breathing, chest-thumping, jingoist monster, even as the story suggests that the dead man really was a terrorist.
Now beginning its fourteenth season, Law & Order, a top-rated show and perennial Emmy nominee for Outstanding Drama Series, serves as a willing tool for the elites’ culture war against Middle American whites. No wonder it receives awards and recognition from its corporate masters.
joeblough: This happens ALL the time at PJM even those comments that have been passed by an initial censor later get censored AGAIN by some draconian moonbat. PJM’s even handedness only applies to minorities and left wingers posters such as you and I are expendable.
Essential vdh,
Tom Hanks is like the jackass that you can ride up to the house. There is of course no reason to take him into the house. Each must decide if they want to waste their money on his films.
Like most of the current crop of Hollywood Actors who play “action” rolls such as soldiers—they are not a pimple on a real PFC’s ass.
From the Time article
‘To the young Tom Hanks, history was as dull as an algebra equation. For Hanks — a classic baby boomer, born in 1956 — World War II was just a string of long-ago muzzle flashes in black-and-white. Yet he did have a more direct connection to the global cataclysm. His father had been a U.S. Naval mechanic (second class) in World War II. But Amos Hanks wasn’t the type to tell his son tales of bravery and sacrifice. “Growing up, I always knew Dad was somewhere in the Pacific fixing things,” Hanks says. “He had nothing nice to say about the Navy. He hated the Navy. He hated everybody in the Navy. He had no glorious stories about it.”‘
‘Occasionally, Hanks enjoyed a war thriller like Battle of the Bulge, but he much preferred the Three Stooges, James Bond and any film with Sophia Loren.’
Excuse me, but this guy is not the guy to talk to about the history of the war in the Pacific, or the history of anything else, for that matter.
He’s what we call a lightweight, history-wise.
And don’t forget guys in HOLLYWOODLAND apart from the fact that ALL the bad guys are WHITEY and preferably non American WHITEYS and CHRISTIANS and NEVER EVER EVER MUSLIMS even the TERRORISTS. The good guys however are always Black, The PRESIDENT, a Black BOSS, a Black POLICE CHIEF/Head of Detectives, a Black MAYOR, a Black BRILLIANT SCIENTIST/COMPUTER EXPERT and of course a Black who is the the hero’s longest, bestest , truest, most loyal friend ever. And of course the Black guy is NEVER ever the baddie.
Which is of course is completely the reverse of REALITY where Blacks are HUGELY and DISPROPORTIONATELY criminal and where MOST Terrorists are MUSLIMS.
THANK YOU, MR HANSON….LETS HOPE MR HANKS DECIDES TO BELIEVE IN AMERICA, PAST AND PRESENT,INSTEAD OF SINGING TO THE IGNORANT MSM MINIONS.
Mr. Hanson is attempting to apply logic to a situation for which logic is inapplicable.
Tom Hanks illustrates as perfectly as anything we have seen in recent years the incredible power of the all-points attack on this country by the radical left. Hanks is a brilliant actor which indicates that he is also in all liklihood a brilliant man. Yet he is “unhinged”, not because he is incapable of reason and uninterested in knowledge, but because he is a case study that shows how difficult it is to escape a concerted propaganda campaign, executed over the course of decades.
The arts succombed to the attack decades ago. Those few well known Hollywood personalities who have been able to resist the propaganda are probably a percent or two of the total.
While we worked, and raised our kids, and tended to our houses, and tried to live decent lives, thousands of the parasites who have infected Hollywood, and our college campuses and the newsrooms, and the major networks, dedicated themselves to subverting everything that made our casual acceptance of the blessed American way of life possible.
Now the Obama has crawled out of the woodwork with his sneer and haughty contempt for the millions of use who created never before seen prosperity, we look around and see that the maggots like him are everywhere.
Tom Hanks, American icon, beloved actor, artistic genius, blabbering brainwashed leftist puppet.
Perhaps Tom’s own family and friends referred to the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs,’ but I know my family and friends never did, AND NEVER WILL. As a conservative and a Christian, I believe all humans are actually brothers and sisters, and fellow believers have even a greater bond. I’m thinking Tom’s statements are coming from a drug and/or alcohol problem, or maybe a desire for the almighty dollar. WHAT A SHAME!
#143: “In addition, birthright citizenship as we now understand it didn’t exist.”
You’re wrong on that one. See, among others, US v. Wong Kim Ark, March 28, 1898.
I suspect that more civilians were killed by allied bombs in Germany than in Japan. The bombing of Dresden was no picnic. And if the US was motivated by racial hatred, why would they have gone to war with the Germans? Wouldn’t it have been better to unite with fellow racists.
I’d like to say that I’m surprised by Hanks’s ignorance of history, but then again he did star in the Da Vinci Code.
May Miss Pity Pat get one more crochet needle into this effort?
#185. Miss Pity Pat says, “Oh, for pity sake RL, the oil was ours not “theirs” and their behavior warranted a great deal more than an embargo.” You can believe anything I guess if you decide to remain willfully ignorant of facts, more reprehensible when they are so easily accessible on the www. The Japanese had for some years preyed upon the Koreans and Chinese as if they were some kind of ferocious beasts in human form. And it wasn’t done in gas chambers, it was all done lovingly by hand i.e. sword and bayonet. I recall reading the translation of one Japanese officer’s diary wherein he stated that he just didn’t “feel right” if he didn’t cut off at least one head with his sword every week. What can Miss Pity Pat say; some people are able to satisfy their constitutional with an apple a day.
I believe we provided 80% of their petroleum products and the vast majority of their scrap metal. We cut off the flow; ineffective then, ineffective now (Iran) but it is the liberal’s idea of “doing something.” The Japanese had two years reserve supply of same but they had brought themselves now to having only two courses of action: back out of China (big loss of face and butt) or going to war with the “dogs” across the Pacific. The embargo and moving the US fleet from the West Coast to Hawaii were levers and threats to try to get them to change their behavior but the focus was on Europe, no one, no one, wanted war with the Japanese.
#188 Good point in mentioning the book “Imperial Cruise” as I couldn’t get past the first few pages of the PC clap trap the author had put to page. Could the author be Brady?
#205 Well said Raider Dave; not that the Japanese were above sneak attacks—see Port Arthur.
#207 Racist I hear leveled. Compared to what? Liberal political correctees always astound poor Miss Pity Pat in that they make pronouncements as if they were the last and forever word in wisdom, as if in a hundred years people won’t be laughing at their
parochialism. I would be happy to argue that in the world at that time we were of a lessor racist bent than most.
#208 JaneG, thank you for the lead on that Dower book; isn’t he a great author? Hoping I don’t have my books mixed up he wrote a book—I believe entitled “Defeat”—wherein he spends some fascinating pages about how the modern Japanese constitution was written. It was done in two weeks, the staff, American military and civilian, filled with liberals and conservatives, following a ten point directive written by Macarthur. Those few pages alone are worth the book.
You’re all perfect little darl’ns and when the cup cakes come out of the oven…
It’s back. Curious.
Frankly, Hanks not is seemingly an idiot, in the same category as Penn, but is determined to show the world that he in fact is. Like AGW, we must rethink whether those in charge of media are even mentally able to cope with science, much less history. There appears to be a disease among the wealthy and privileged that makes them intolerably stupid. Able to ignore reality with no effort, yet able to address every problem with perfect precision. As long as the scalpel cuts only the peasants in their way to the rainbow they envision.
Mr. Hansen probably could have shortened his highly intelligent piece by sufficing to say, simply, “Tom Hanks is an idiot.”
Why bore us with the details?
Thank you VDH, well said.
Tom Hanks. What the hell were you thinking?
Stupid is as stupid does!
217. Oh my, another post that creates its own strawmen.
Just what we need to make the right strong again.
Dower’s book is a good work of history, if, I may be permitted to say so as a widely published conservative historian.
I am absolutely sick to death of demagogic, docrtrinaire, knee jerk, uninformed nonsense from our side giving the libs ammunition to kick us in the guts.
Get a bloody education.
Tom Hanks is not unhinged. He is the typical Hollywood liberal – basically the USA is not a good, much less an exceptional country – all the good the USA has done abroad – fighting for other people’s freedome is really imperialism, racism, vile capitalism.
What scares me is that people like him and Spielberg (remember his movie Munich?) and James Cameron (Avatar protrays American soldiers as evil) and Oliver Stone (JFK and admirer of Chavez, Castro, etc.)
These people have a gigantic power – they create the narrative of what most Americans believe – people who don’t read a serious book, people who think that global warming is real, America is racist, imperialistic, evil, etc.
This is indoctrination of the highest order, starting with children – from WALLE- blaming big business for polution and destroying the earth and making people fat – to Pocahontas (plagiarized by James Camaron), to the homosexual agenda, to the anti-Christian slant in movies.
I was so disappointed to hear Tom Hanks words. I really liked Band of Brothers and was going to watch this new special, Pacific. That was until his ignorant words. No more revisionist history. I will not pay money or waste my time and watch Pacific.
Tom Hanks simply expressed an ugly truth. Neither Japanese or Americans would admit they have racial fears of each other. We have learned how to coexist after WWII, but the racism has not disappeared. Be honest, you hypocrites.
I like sushi, though.
This article could be read in any history class in North America. In Canada, the schools barely cover Hong Kong and the atrocities against Commonwealth Soldiers in Japanese POW camps. It is always about the bomb. What most Canadians dont know about the bomb, was that is was a Canadian scientist on the Manhattan Project who figured out the minimum critical mass, and died shortly thereafter doing so. America, stay with the truth, ignore those who have never fought for anything.
I agree with most of what the professor says. However, once the war started against Japan, we (including Hollywood) did try to make it into a war of good and evil by pointing out race quite strongly. We were also at war with Germany and Italy, yet we did not create internment camps for them as we did for the Japanese. So, I do beleive that Hanks did have a point.
However, in trying to relate his point to what is happening today, he is so far off base it’s not even funny for all of the reasons the professor cites. Many other posters are 100% correct in their assesment that actors assume that playing a character on film somehow gives them the knowledge and experience of that person. If that were true, then I’s ask Obama to play the role of Tom Jefferson or George Washington. Maybe it would rub off.
What a nut. Movie stars should not say things. Just make another
movie for those who are willing to pay for them.
Tom Hanks no matter how many Oscars, Emmy’s or Tony’s he is selected to pocket will always be Buffy Wilson in “Bosom Buddies.” I often wonder whom he bartered with to elevate his career because you know he made some sort of a deal with someone. To me he’s an average actor, a B- rated one at that. He and his kind will always be loyal in their left wing thinking to what is cool in Hollywood. If he strays to far to the center, he’ll be relegated as just another actor. He is so transparent.
There is a strange belief that someone that is talented in one area must be talented in others. Tom Hanks can speak the words that other people wrote well so he must be have something valuable to say from his own mind. Would you want Michael Jackson to watch your children? Would want tax advice from Willie Nelson? Hanks seems to be lost when he thinks for himself. So what else is new?
It was a different world and a different time. I personally do not think the United States at the time of Pearl Harbor had any form of national identity. The country was not a world super power . . . we were in the midst of recovery from over a decade of economic difficulties. We were still principally an agrarian society, especially in the heartland. Mostly I think the people of the US just wanted to be left alone, we were isolationists, we did not want to fight a war any where. Awareness of the world situation was much less than today, but I do think that the main stream media at the time, radio and movie news reels, brought a little bit of Washington to the people, on a biased perspectived. Racism was rampant in the country, and segregation was the norm. We had the “Land of Dixie” in the south and out on the west coast we had the seperation of the Asians . . . and yes whether we like it or not . . . it was integral to the life styles and culture of the country. Every ethnic group that has ever become the predominate immigrant group has been segragated and hated primarily because of their economic impact on the established group. All of the ingredients to cause the rise of patriotism based on hate for the Japanese people were here . . . and Washington used those ingredients to rouse the country to arms.
John Toland’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, “The Rising Sun” is a good single source that distills the Japanese perspective of World War II into a somewhat rational understanding. Anyone that has read that book will have much clearer understanding of what was going on in Japan. Yes, it is written by a US citizen, or Irish decent . . . and clearly in this book is the fact that World War II for the Japanese was started over . . . OIL!!
Whether or not I like what Tom Hanks said is immaterial, but I do respect his opinion about what World War II was all about. To refuse to watch his rendition of what happened in World War II in the Pacific simply because you do not agree with his statements is idiotic, or perhaps just down right stupid . . . just as refusing to read “Mein Kampf” because you hate Hitler would be.
Any individuals perspective, including an actor, builds an opinion based on information they are subjected to. Tom has his right to an opinion and I refuse to subject him to petty ridicule because of it. The movies that he has acted in or produced have had profound meaning to some and to others were tripe . . . base your judgement on the product and not the process.
Why would anybody care what an actors opinion is? I enjoyed many of Tom Hanks films but
apparently he is an idiot.But,you know in a way it’s similar to electing politicians as leaders and expecting good results,after all politicians are not leaders but only are interested in their own interest
Surprise attack at Pearl Harbor?
James Bamford spends his days reading newly classified original documents in dusty rooms of Washington DC – in his recent work Body of Secrets – he lays out the ‘plan’ of Roosevelt to initiate an oil embargo on Japan.
the ‘plan’ was to prompt a ‘response’ that would cause average Americans to want war on Japan – and get behind the ‘program’.
Not unlike 9/11.
This site is truly a cheer leading squad for the Likkud Party and Islamophobics – not to mention revisionist history that justifies the false flag operation that jump started WWII.
Shame on all of you.
He’s not unhinged. He’s just another Hollywood ignoramus who was raised in the American school system which “taught” him crap like this. Tom Hanks is of, by and defines modern American cultchuh.
Dear Mr. Hanks:
Since your day’s of “Big,” your intellect and perspective seem to have grown very “small.” I say this because of certain odd statements you have recently made regarding the reasons the United States has gone to war. As someone who grew up in the aftermath of WWII, and whose father served as a SeaBee on Saipan in the Pacific during that war, I can tell you that we entered that war because we were attacked by Japan on December 7, 1941. Not because they looked different than we did. And we fought a total war not because we wanted to destroy them as a race or because they looked different than we did but because we knew that they, and the Germans, were using battle tactics of total annihilation against civilian cities. And that they would use these tactics against our cities. And in fact, Mr. Hanks, it was one of your beloved European countries that was hell bent on wiping out people because of their race and or religion. Perhaps living in your Hollywood bubble most of your life you have never heard of a facility by the name of Auschwitz? Hint: it was not located anywhere in the United States. And speaking of Europe, in connection with your obsession with race in America Mr. Hanks, I have a few more questions for you. Quick, name ONE black European civil rights leader. (crickets chirping…..) Now, just as quickly, name ONE black president (or vice president) or the equivalent thereof of a European country (crickets chirping LOUDER….) Name a black European sports star on the same level (of wealth and fame) as Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Mohamed Ali, Jackie Robinson, Jesse Owens, Shaq, the Williams sisters, etc. etc. Still thinking? Well, if you guessed French tennis stars Yannich Noah and Gaels Monfils, you just about drained the European bench of ANY person of color of any notoriety. America, via the NFL, MLB and NBA and most American universities, creates dozens of black, formerly poor, millionaires every year. How many does Europe generate? I can’t think of ANY. No, pretty sure Becham is a white guy… Or how about all those black European members of show biz on a par with Sammy Davis, Jr., Sidney Poitier, Nat King Cole, Johnny Mathis, Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, Morgan Freeman, Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey, Wesley Snipes, Will Smith, Halle Berry or Michael Jackson? More crickets chirping/more silence…. So why do you and the Europeans look down your racist noses at us from your left-appointed position of faux superiority? The Europeans have no Abraham Lincoln or Martin L. King, Jr. in their history. Instead they have kings and queens who enslaved their people and relegated them to living in squalor as serfs and subjects. And as a matter of fact, it was not Americans who introduced slavery to America, it was Europeans! It is we Americans who stopped this barbaric European practice – which they no doubt learned from their kings and queens. You want reparations? Go talk to England, France, Italy and Spain! And does anyone remember the FRENCH and Indian War? Yeah, that’s right, it was the French who took advantage of the indigenous inhabitants of North America, involved them in a war NOT of their making, the result of which was to cause them to be relegated to a “reservation based” existence of poverty and second class citizenry for generations. Thank you very much, Paris! Look at the leaders of major – well, even minor – European countries and you see none of the diversity seen in American politics, sports, manufacturing, art & entertainment. You see white males. OK, there was Margaret Thatcher and now there is Angela Merkle. But there is no Harriet Tubman no Susan B. Anthony and no Rosa Parks. Nobody in the United States of America should hold Europe up on a pedestal but in fact should hold them up for the ridicule they so richly deserve. As do you, Mr. Hanks. Shame on you. You owe the American people and the veterans who keep us free, regardless of what the enemy looks like, an apology much bigger than you are.
He’s a moron. His movies suck any more. Who can wade through the BS?
Describing Hank’s remarks as an explanation of World War II’s causes is completely wrong. Hanks was comparing the propaganda techniques used to by the government to support wars. Governments need to construct a gigantic monolithic threat to frighten the populace, a construction that dehumanizes the enemy. The connection between fighting “Japs” to fighting “Ragheads” is about as obvious as it can be.
I lived in Japan in the 1980′s for three years. A lovely country, great people, so-so food and a quixotic culture. The Japanese work hard – period. One thing that stands out in my memory is their chronic dislike of Koreans. They don’t like Koreans and do not want them in Japan (for which there is probably some historical basis). I was told by a friend that the Japanese did not allow any ‘Vietnamese boat people’ in the 1960s to land on their shores. Japan strongly believes in maintaining the purity of their culture. That is their right any many could argue that the US and Europe could have done a better job at maintaining their cultures, as well.
I do not believe this makes the Japanese ‘racist’ any more than I believe that any American who dislikes Obama’s policies is a racist. But, it is the term that raises emotions in an undereducated society, so, Hanks can make a silly statement and get a pass from the mainstream media. Then again, the mainstream media is becoming increasingly irrelevant.
Both barrels, precicely aimed.
Well done, Mr. Hanson.
I pray for a reasonable reply, but I’m not holding my breath.
i am surprised that speilberg would be a part of something like this. the least he can do is stand up for the country that has worked tirelessly to support those who are endangered from the civil war, ww2, and the rest. as a student of history as i am sure mr speilberg is, he knows silence in effect condenes stupidity. witnesss the mindless stupdity of penn and now sad to say hanks. sure the usa like another other group, country culture in the world has periods of which we are not proud, but we move forward and make the necessary changes. hey tom, where are kudos for that? huh? you hollywood types think middle america are bunch of ractist fools, to heck with that. we made you, and we can refuse to pay the tab for your efforts.
the pathetic use of race that the idiots in washington echoed by the bigger idiots in hollywood has me boycotting films of those i used to enjoy. they won’t get a dime of my money.
Dear Mr. Hanson,
I just read your article, “Tom Hanks Flunks History”, and I thought it was very well written and you perfectly commented on the asinine responses made by Mr. Tom Hanks. I think people will swallow any ridiculous and inaccurate ideas of history and politics, especially when those ideas are spewing from the mouths of celebrities. I rarely read about anyone disagreeing or commenting on these type of topics, unless of course they fall in line with that which is trendy or popular at the time.
Bravo for stating true facts and putting Mr. Hanks’ opinions to shame.
The quotes from Hanks’s defenders here are completely disingenuous and fail to even address one of Hanks’s most absurd charges, that we wanted to “annihilate them because they were different”. Mark mentions Bugs Bunny cartoons and Frank Capra as proof that Hanson is being a “prat” who is ignoring history. Those features came out after Japan invaded Pearl Harbor and were used as vehicles to dehumanize the enemy. But if such films and features are being pointed in defense of Hanks’s assertion that we wanted to annihilate Japan because of some sort of racial animosity, they wholly fail to bolster such a ridiculous assertion. We wanted to annihilate Japan, get this, because they waged an aggressive war against the United States, not because they were yellow-skinned. Does Pearl Harbor ring a bell? Wake Island? The Phillipines? Our immigration policy of the time is completely and utterly irrelevant. Unless of course you are ignorant enough to believe that it played a role in Japan’s decision to bomb us or our reaction to a war of aggression being waged against the United States.
Frank Brady made the following comment:
“Describing Hank’s remarks as an explanation of World War II’s causes is completely wrong. Hanks was comparing the propaganda techniques used to by the government to support wars. Governments need to construct a gigantic monolithic threat to frighten the populace, a construction that dehumanizes the enemy. The connection between fighting “Japs” to fighting “Ragheads” is about as obvious as it can be.”
If that is the case, why didn’t Hanks say that? He said our whole reason for wanting to destroy them was motivated by some sort of racial animus. Such an assertion is absolutely absurd, as absurd as stating “We are killing al Qaeda terrorists not because they murdered 3000 Americans on 9/11 but because they are swarthy Muslims”. Anyone making such a claim would righty be criticized, as Mr. Hanks is being criticized for contending that the United States wanted to destroy the Japanese not because they waged an aggressive war against us but because of the color of their skin and their Shinto beliefs.
It is amazing that there are individuals here asserting that Mr. Hanks said one thing, when I can clearly read that he didn’t. He didn’t say “We used their race as a way to dehumanize them so that the American populace would have no reservation in wanting to see them destroyed”. He said their race WAS THE REASON we wanted them destroyed. If you can’t see the difference, you shouldn’t be criticizing Mr. Hanson.
Joe Blough, your post is at 224 .. they get reviewed to meet the posting policy it seems (eg. hate speech prohibited – policy details above).
Most Hollywood stars arrive there with little or nothing. They come from humble backgrounds, are uneducated and without a foundation. They have not yet learned how to think critically. Now propel this naive to quick stardom, insolate him in comfort, and feed his unformed mind the drivel spewed by Hollywood heads for the past seventy years. He’s standing in an exciting after-party next to Bab’s who says, “this is what we believe.” It’s fairly easy to see how most fall for this hokum. If he doesn’t ‘believe’ as Bab’s believes, he won’t be at the next party. Soon enough, he too comes to believe that America is an evil empire. The likes of Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro etc. are the real freedom fighters. The answer to all that ails the poor, is more and bigger government to take your money, and distribute it to those whom you have agrieved by working so hard and acquiring wealth. When I see these folks, I’m reminded of the biblical parable of the rich man who makes a production of his paltry offering (Tom Hanks, Sean Penn, Alec Baldwin etc. etc.)and the peasant lady giving her only penny (you and me) and nearly being stampeded to death by those who race to worship the rich man for his great gift. It makes me ill.
“93. judy, nyc:
it was the worst fighting because the japanese were so brutal and vicious, crazed savages. american soldiers in the pacific were our greatest heroes and so many gave their lives to end the war.”
Judy – How would you characterize Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Suggest you pick up a copy of VDH’s “Carnage and Culture”. There certainly were cultural differences between Japanese and Western warfare but we didn’t prevail in WWII by being nice.
What is so wrong with what Hanks said. THe Japanese were very racist and brutal and believed the Yamato were the chosen people for their connection to the gods and martial bravery. Naturally, we responded in kind once we got a sampling of their brutality. Racism breeds counter racism. What is the big deal?
148. Catherine. Thanks for your comments and question. I have no easy answers to that one though. I guess one of the corollaries of Liberty is that you can’t (shouldn’t) control the narrative 100%. People are ultimately free to make up their own minds, say what they want etc. And in the end it’s up to families to see to it that their kids are exposed to a range of views in a guided manner. So you can only hope to reduce the problem, not eliminate it.
What else? For one thing the education system needs a complete revamp. Back to the basics: Math, Science & western History, Philosophy & Literature. Special emphasis on U.S. exceptionalism (warts and all), Judeo-Christian Ethics, Greek Civics, why capitalism = both more wealth AND more freedom and what happens when elites try to engineer society (they wind up re-writing history, among other things). Also, kids need to be sensitized to propaganda techniques. i.e. how film and other media can be used to pull your emotional strings and cause you to stop thinking. Throw all that post-modern PC multi-culti revisionist nonsense we’re feeding our kids daily in our schools on the garbage heap and never look back!
Boycott MTV and all the other outlets of post-modernism (most networks and cable channels sadly.) That is the hard sacrifice for us world-weary adults who crave a little diversion after a long day. No. 232. Pragmatist gives an interesting glimpse into how they operate. Drive them out of business. Pick up a good book instead. Or watch only the shows / movies who’s overall message you are comfortable with. I for one have stopped watching anything by Penn, Clooney, Stone, Damon, Spielberg, Cameron etc. (And now Hanks). And don’t miss em one bit. I admit it narrows your options down on movie night but there’s still plenty of decent fare left (and always more reading to catch up on.) I don’t care if an actor / director / producer is a Lefty. Just keep it out of your films and out of your public pronouncements and you may earn my dollars. Start spouting anti-American, anti-western propaganda and you’ll lose me for good. I’ve broken this rule twice recently and regretted it both times. Once was Avatar which as anticipated boiled down to America / technology = bad, tribal / pre-industrial = good. I’ve resolved to ignore Cameron again. The visuals were great but don’t make up for the attempted indoctrination.
The Second was The Hurt Locker as I was assured by several friends that it was a fair portrayal. I resisted for a long time since best I can tell, Bigelow is a flaming progressive lefty (ever seen Strange Days? Awful. America as nihilistic police state.). Finally I relented.. I thought the first half was great, but it lost me after the ‘body-bomb’ incident and the protagonist’s descent into self-doubting rogue. The Hurt Locker is still anti-American in my opinion, in this sense: The take away message I got was that war is bad because it destroys even our most heroic troops and fans the flames of future violence. (That motif was expressed towards the end when the crowd of Iraqi kids silently chase after the US armored vehicle throwing stones at it – the next generation of Jihadis.) These kinds of messages are deceptive (they are only partial truths, which can be more decptive than outright lies) and aimed at demoralizing the citizenry in the face of a mobilizing and vicious enemy. I’m not saying that the horrific costs of war should not be realistically treated in film. Nor am I denying the film-makers right to convey the message he or she chooses. What I’m saying is that I reject the leftist narrative that the explosion of Islamic Jihadism aimed at the U.S. must be fought with kind words only. First we must make our enemies fear us; then perhaps they will listen to what we say. So don’t be fooled by the progressive’s subtle shift in tactics. The message is no longer ‘Bush lied thousands died’ (that would be counter-productive now that Obama is continuing Bush’s policies in Iraq and Afghanistan), but it is still aimed at subverting our will to defend ourselves.
Ultimately the only way to flush the sewage out of media / academia is to take ‘em head on. Not through McCarthy-esque tactics (too divisive, we need unity these days) but through rational argumentation (as per VDH’s superb piece) and ridicule (the emperor has no clothes!), and most of all voting with both ballots and entertainment dollars.
I’d be interested to hear your own thoughts (or anyone else’s) on how to fight the culture war more effectively?
If Tom Hanks is ignorant, or unhinged, as VDH says, then so is Barry Obama.
But the truth is, they aren’t crazy, and they’re no fools either.
Their heads are on straight, and they know plenty.
,
They know a big war is coming, between us and the bad guys.
And that if we think we’re bad, too, we’re gonna lose.
They’re bad guys, that’s what.
as a collector of jap ww2 militaria and student of the pacific i have been looking forward to a accurate account of the pacific war against japan for quite some time.
my father was in the air force and as a boy I lived on guam (1964) and okinawa (1967-70).
the japs were hated by all of the countries that they invaded as they turned everyone into some form of slave,labor sexual etc.
although i love the japanese they are among the most racist societies.
i returned to okinawa and mainland japan during the mid 90′s and explored all of the caves battlefields etc.
Mcarthur was a true god to the japanese as he introduded womens vote,democracy etc.
the japs if victorious would have enslaved us,as china,phillipines indonesia and on and on and on.
the japs were evil,there is no doubt,read your history.
i have been looking forward to hanks account of ww2 in the pacific as it has never been the coverage it deserves.I hope i am not dissapointed tonight!!!!!!!!
Tom Does not have a clue about History!
Ask Him about the NANKING MASSACRE. 300,000 dead Chinese killed by the Japs. Killed because the were inferior. Maybe WILSON should give him a history lesson!
Here is an interesting take by Barry Rubin. Hanks may not be unhinged, but our education establishment is:
http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/2010/03/americas-war-with-japan-tom-hanks-isnt.html
Correction to above post- the years should have been 1944 and 1945, respectively.
Presumably young white Americans made war on Nazism because the Germans were a different race? Hanks is incoherent. Is it the weed talking?
This is from CNSNews.com
When asked about his statements on MSNBC that the World War II in the Pacific was a war of “racism and terror” which he compared to what is going on today, Hanks said: “Well, I said it’s familiar with what’s going on today. You can walk into the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, in the Pacific wing, and Stephen Ambrose himself has made that very point. It’s up in black and white, that after Pearl Harbor, these people that were very, very different from each other, the Americans and the Japanese, who had different heritages, who had different theologies and different ways of government, had a different sense of society went at it tooth and nail.
“It would be naïve,” said Hanks, “to assume that racism was not part of the quotient of World War II and it’s historical fact by way of just simply suicide bombers from the air and as well as the terror that was visited upon civilian populations throughout the Pacific that terrorism was not part of the equation as well.”
He was talking about the Pacific theater. That’s why the show is called “The Pacific”. And it was a war of racism and terror. The Japanese flew planes into our ships and we put them in internment camps. They attacked us fanatically, and there were certainly elements of racism in their actions. We put all Japanese Americans in internment camps, even though there were many more German Americans living here. If that’s not racism, I don’t know what is.
And besides, just because there was some racism in WWII doesn’t mean it was an unjust war. Tom Hanks never said America was in the wrong. That’s why he glorifies WWII veterans in his movies and TV shows.
And I think many people are calling Tom Hanks an idiot even though they don’t really know a whole lot about WWII
The quote is actually inaccurate. Tom Hanks said:
“The Pacific, now, is coming out where it represents a war of racism and terror, and it would seem as though the only way to complete one of these battles in these small specks of rock in the middle of nowhere was to, I’m sorry, kill them all. Does that sound familiar to what we might be going through today? Is there anything new under the sun? It seems as though history keeps repeating itself.”
Shame on you, Pajamas Media, for tarnishing the reputation of a man who was trying to glorify the achievements of our veterans. And you call Tom Hanks anti-American.
The video can be found below.
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/62716
And Tom Hanks says that “What’s going on in Iraq is singular to Iraq and what’s going on in Afghanistan is singular to Afghanistan.” He also says in the video above that he “is not a politician”, and refused to comment on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Way to go Pajamas Media. Please don’t waste your readers’ time like this again. Don’t distort the truth.
The lesson is: spend enough time in Hollywood, and anyone will go crazy.
I propose a new cinematic version of Heart of Darkness. Only this time, Kurtz is neither in Africa, nor Vietnam/Cambodia. This time, he is hiding out somewhere in Bel Air.
The only problem is, the entire movie industry is already upriver with him. Maybe it is yet another project we can outsource.
Dear Mr. Hanks,
While I am always interested in hearing what talented artists like yourself have to say, I think you
you need to read more deeply in the matter of World War Two. Since you played Capt. John Miller you probably have no small interest in his personality, the government that sent him to die in
Ambleve, and those young men who rest with him.
Please, spare us any rant on our racism……..our wounds still seep blood and our hearts still lay broken from the losses suffered. God Bless Col Paul Tibbits, Capt John Miller and all the others. I
will listen to those who faced japanese and german steel……….PS, I loved Forrest Gump, Dr J
“Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’
Yeah, it’s kind of like that in every war. That’s because if we viewed the Japanese as ultra-polite guys who bowed to you about every ten seconds, who made beautiful rock gardens and grew bonsai trees for kicks, we wouldn’t want to kill them anymore. And, if you feel like that, you can’t really have a war.
Anytime you’re fighting a war, you HAVE to to dehumanize the enemy…if you’re planning on winning. And, this is especially true if you have a conscript army. Professionals can fight without dehumanizing enemy folks quite as much; with a conscript army you really have to lay it on thick, and build up a good strong hate. Nobody’s going to want to hit the beach at Normandy while they’re thinking about what a swell egg J.S. Bach was, so you forget about concentrating on German contributions to art and music and you wrap your brain around the idea of tearing the guts out of a bunch of dirty baby-raping kraut bastards.
Believe me, when we were having our civil war, the Yankees and the Rebels weren’t going around talking about what swell guys the other guys were. The Yanks were calling the Rebels traitors and the Rebels were calling the Yanks tyrants.
And speaking of civil wars, most Americans that have died in wars, died in wars fighting against people that were just like us (Revolutionary War, War of 1812, and the bloodiest war we’ve ever fought…our own civil war).
So, the idea that wars are about the other guy being “different” is a bunch of baloney. Wars are fought over political issues, not because the other guys is “different”.
We’re not fighting Al Qaida because they’re “different”, we’re fighting them because they keep attacking us, killing our citizens, blowing up embassies and whatnot. Christ, Tom get a clue.
This kind of stuff is Military Art 101 stuff, but Hanks doesn’t seem to be aware of the concepts. That’s because he’s rather obviously historically ignorant.
It is well-documented that the evacuation was motivated, not by racism, but by information obtained by the U.S. from pre-war decoded Japanese diplomatic messages “MAGIC” and other intelligence revealed the existence of espionage and the potential for sabotage involving then-unidentified resident Japanese aliens and Japanese-Americans living within the West Coast Japanese community.
The U.S. Congress immediately passed legislation providing enforcement provisions for FDR’s Executive Order, unanimously in both the House and Senate, provided under Article 1, Section 9 of the United States Constitution.
Only persons of Japanese ancestry (alien and citizen) residing in the West Coast military zones were affected by the evacuation order. Those living elsewhere were not affected at all.
It is not true that Japanese-Americans were “interned. Only Japanese nationals (enemy aliens) arrested and given individual hearings were interned. Such persons were held for deportation in Department of Justice camps. Those evacuated were not interned. They were first given an opportunity to voluntarily move to areas outside the military zones. Those unable or unwilling to do so were sent to Relocation Centers operated by the War Relocation Authority.
At the time, the JACL (Japanese American Citizens League) officially supported the government’s evacuation order and urged all enemy alien Japanese and Japanese Americans to cooperate and assist the government in their own self interest.
It is misleading and in error to state that those affected by the evacuation orders were all “Japanese-Americans.” Approximately two-thirds of the ADULTS among those evacuated were Japanese nationals–enemy aliens. The vast majority of evacuated Japanese-Americans (U.S. citizens) were children at the time. Their average age was only 15 years. In addition, over 90% of Japanese-Americans over age 17 were also citizens of Japan (dual citizens)under Japanese law. Thousands had been educated in Japan. Some having returned to the U.S. holding reserve rank in the Japanese armed forces.
During the war, more than 33,000 evacuees voluntarily left the relocation centers to accept outside employment. An additional 4300 left to attend colleges.
In a questionaire, over 26% of Japanese-Americans of military age at the time said they would refuse to swear an unqualified oath of allegiance to the United States.
According to War Relocation Authority records, 13,000 applications renouncing their U.S. citizenship and requesting expatriation to Japan were filed by or on behalf of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Over 5,000 had been processed by the end of the war.
After loyalty screening, eighteen thousand Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans were segregated at a special center for disloyals at Tule Lake California where regular military “Banzai” drills in support of Emperor Hirohito were held.
The Supreme Court of the United States upheld the Consitutionality of the evacuation/relocation in Korematsu v. U.S., 1944 term. In summing up for the 6-3 majority, Justice Black wrote:
“There was evidence of disloyalty on the part of some, the military authorities considered that the need for action was great, and time was short. We cannot –by availing ourselves of the calm perspective of hindsight — now say that at the time these actions were unjustified.” That decision has never been reversed and stands to this day.
It should be noted that the relocation centers had many amenities. Accredited schools, their own newspapers, stores, churches, hospitals, all sorts of sports and recreational facilities. They also had the highest percapita wartime birth rates for any U.S.community.
More history for you to consider regarding the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians:
Consider that of the nine commission members, six were biased in favor of reparations. Ishmail Gromoff and William Marutani, relocatees themselves, sat in judgment of their own cases. Arthur Goldberg and Joan Bernstein made sympathetic, pro-reparation statements publicly before hearings even began. Arthur Fleming had worked closely with the JACL (he was a keynote speaker at its Portland convention in the ’70s). Robert Drinan was a co-sponsor of the bill establishing the commission.
Consider that notices of when and where hearings were to be held were not made known to the general, non-Japanese public.
Consider that witnesses who gave testimony were not sworn to tell the truth.
Consider that witnesses who were pro-reparation were carefully coached in their testimony in “mock hearings” beforehand.
Consider that witnesses against reparation were harassed and drowned out by foot-stomping Japanese claques, that the commission members themselves ridiculed and badgered these same witnesses.
Consider that not one historian was asked to testify before the commission, that intelligence reports and position papers contrary to reparations were deliberately ignored.
Consider that as a result of the above, the United States Department of Justice objected strongly to the findings of the commission.
Lastly while we’ve all been educated on the doctrines associated with the rise of Nazism, I would be curious to know if courses are provided teaching the history of the doctrines of Japanese militarism, a belief system similar and equally as insidious as Nazism?
Any clasess on the kokutai? Hakko Ichiu? Any reading of Kokutai no Hongi? Shimin to Michi? The role of Nichiren Buddhism and Japanese “Language Schools” in teaching these doctines of Japanese racial superiorty to ethnic Japanese colonies throughout the word prior to Pearl Harbor?
Those of you learning this history at your public schools and universities should understand you are being taught an extemely biased and partial version of what really happened and why. I would urge you to go beyond the politically correct version of this history as propagated by the Japanese-American reparations movement.
In war, we dehumanize our enemies to make it psychologically easier to kill them. Thus: Krauts, Nips, Gooks, Wogs, etc. This is not racism.
VDH is spot on as usual. Hanks ,although a fine actor, is clueless when discussing history.
The cardinal sin in the eyes of today’s Left is white racism against non-whites (they do not admit that non-whites can be racist). The US at the time of Pearl Harbor was certainly racist by 2010 standards – Jim Crow laws were in effect, the press had no problems portraying the Japanese in highly non-PC terms and so forth. To argue otherwise is to ignore the facts.
The thing is, portraying the Japanese as yellow monkeys or what have you pales in comparison to the horrific atrocities the Japanese committed during the Rape of Nanking and in Korea and the Philippines. Even the internment of Japanese-Americans, which I do not defend, is not quite akin to Dachau or the infamous Japanese POW camps, where POW’s were subjected to live vivisections.
To a morally sane person, there is no contest. But it’s the left we’re talking about so a white person calling the Japanese “Japs” “shows” just how rotten Americans are, but the Japanese enslavement of millions of South East Asians somehow says nothing about Japanese culture or mores.
To be morally equivalent to the Japanese would have required more than interning Japanese-Americans – we would have had to force their women into servicing US troops, as thousands of Korean, Chinese, and Filipino women were forced to do to the imperial Japanese troops during WWII.
In the Japan of 2010, natives of Korean ancestry are still not considered Japanese and are subject to discrimination, no matter how many generations have lived in Japan. Beliefs about the cultural and genetic superiority of Japanese are very widespread in today’s Japan, although fortunately 1945 caused them to permanently lose interest in overseas military adventures. But their racism is ignored by Western liberals, who love to luxuriate in their own self-hatred. If it isn’t white racism, it doesn’t matter (and isn’t that in and of itself pretty racist, to say that only white racism matters and it trumps every other virtue and vice in the world?)
I saw “With the Old Breed”, Eugene Sledge’s great book about his experiences in the Pacific during WW II, at Costco. I nearly gagged when I saw the foreword was written by this #&@*%@# chickenhawk…surely someone of true moral character could have been found instead of this sorry excuse for a human being…
Tallgrass:
I’m very late to this thread, but I have to address something you wrote:
“What about the solider that returns home today . . . from Afghanistan . . . from Iraq . . . Oh yeah . . . there we are fighting the “Rag Hat, Camel Jockey, Sand N****s”
“Does that Sound familiar?”
No, it doesn’t, and I’m currently deployed in an infantry unit. We don’t think or talk in these terms. We hate the enemy. Our local allies are the same race and religion as the enemy; most of us wish them well, and know they’re our ticket out of here.
“Haj’” is as close as it gets to insulting; it’s used without rancor, and without differentiating between enemy, neutral and friendly locals.
Many of the usual historical myths are trotted out here.
115 RL: “The Japanese attack was preceded by US naval embargoes on their ports, considered an act of war in international law.”
False. An embargo is not an act of war. Neither the U.S. nor any other nation was required to sell oil to Japan. And there is no such thing as an “embargo on a port”. A port may be blockaded by a hostile navy, but neither the U.S. nor any other nation had ships blockading any Japanese port.
Also some outright nonsense.
78. James Just: “during WWII the Japanese… converted Indonesia and Malaysia into a Muslim country.”
The East Indies were converted to Islam centuries earlier: from the 1200s to the 1500s.
Also, while the Japanese militarists based their program on a politicized form of Shinto, there was no great conflict with Buddhism. Several of the most revered Zen masters of that period explicitly supported the militarists’ warmongering.
205 Raider Dave: “The sneak attack was never supposed to happen. A formal declaration of war was SUPPOSED to be delivered to the War Department before the first bombs fell on Pearl Harbor…”
False. The “14-part-statement” which Japan sent to the U.S. that day, to be delivered before the attack, only announced a break in diplomatic relations. It did not include a declaration of war; Japan did not declare war until 10 hours after the attack.
Read the book War Without Mercy It is an explaination of exactly what the author is saying
Dear Mr. Hanks,
I applaud you and Mr. Speilberg for the support of veterans of both theaters.
As a History teacher in N.C. and whose father fought in the Pacific w/ the 2nd. Marine Divison. I do wish that one would look @ every phase of this time as it relates to both civilian and soldier.
By doing so one can maintain a standing w/in the contexts of that which one delves and facts will be more accurate.
As I have learned from papers which I have written on this subject life is like a Rubics Cube and combat like a Rubics Cube in a house of mirrors.
Sincerely,
RHB
I love Tom Hanks. Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers and Pacific are love stories to the American soldier. The opening scene of Saving Private Ryan was probably the most accurate portrayal of combat I have ever seen, although nothing can explain combat to one who has not been there. The insanity, the inhumanity, the cruelty, the chaos of combat is something that no one who has not been there can ever understand. Someone once said that Rambo was a war film. Those are great action adventure films, but they are not war films. Personally, I love the scenes in Saving Private Ryan and Part 1 of Pacific when American soldiers shoot in cold blood enemies attempting to surrender. Why? Because it is accurate. To pretend that it does not happen is naive. When you go through hours or days of shooting, killing and attempting to save yourself while being shot at and then to think in an instant that all is forgiven is insane. When your “blood is up” things like that happen. But Hanks shows us how we get to that level without passing judgment. I hope Hanks shows us in the later parts of Pacific the scenes from Sledge’s book about a Marine carrying around a severed hand or boiling a Japanese skull to remove the skin to save as a souvenir. Why? Because the left in this county tries to demonize the modern American soldier as a sociopath, when the truth is that war has always been dehumanizing and the modern American soldier is actually much better trained to be respectful of their enemies than their grandfathers were.
So what do I think of Hanks’ comments? I think they are stupid. But I also think that Hanks probably goes to a lot of Hollywood parties and gets a lot of grief for being “pro war”, so he had to say something so the next time he goes to a Hollywood party, he can say “See I share your leftist sentiments.” That’s all.
lucslawyer: what, exactly, did you dislike about VDH’s foreword? Be specific.
Except I doubt you can be. You’re just a passing troll, an ugly toad who stops to squirt out a bit of poison before moving on. How sad to be you.
Hanks is another overpaid leftist schlemiel spouting nonsense. Why does anyone listen to these morons?
Execreter #18:
You are cluless.
You say: “In response to Mark #65 re Frank Capras “Why we Fight”.
One has to be pretty deep in the kool-aid to reference the marxist propaganda movie “Why we Fight” in this discussion. This pathetic movie was intended to be a motivational propaganda movie for our soldiers before going of to die in foreign hellholes and was funded by the Defense Department.” Duhhhhh. I held this film series up as an example of the kind of heavy, hamfisted, often racist propaganda being shown to soldiers and the general public at the time to motivate them to support the war effort, I was not praising the series in any way, so your “kool-aid” comment is wildly off, and doesn’t dispute anything I said. Your Glenn-Beck addled nervous system just reflexively spat out “kool-aid” like you’ve been conditioned to do without actually thinking about whether or not the canned response actually applies to the situation (here’s a clue – it didn’t).
Second, you say: “IT WAS NEVER SHOWN because Capra turned it into a pro-Communist/pro-Russia propaganda film. ” You just made that up hoping that no one would know the difference, and you’re completely wrong. At least 54 million Americans had seen the series by the end of the war (Rollins, Peter. “Frank Copra’s Why We Fight Film Series and Our American Dream.” Journal of American Culture. 19. (4): 81) And you admit that it was an Academy Award winning movie – how many academy awards are given in time of war to movies that are never shown?
“That you cite it here as evidence of U.S. racism/agression is bizarre. The fact that it won an Acadamy Award speaks volumes about Hollywood, even in the 1940’s they were infiltrated by leftists !!!”
No, what is bizarre is that you think this argument at all undermines any of my statements. First of all, I only spoke of US racism, never aggression. The Japanese were clearly the aggressors, but that doesn’t mean we weren’t racist. Second, the movie may have had marxist undertones, I am not going to get into that with you because that’s a red herring you are throwing out that has nothing to do with racist undertones in Why We Fight. Why We Fight could very well be marxist AND racist at the same time, genius. I think you will agree that the Soviets were marxist, and they were also racist, mostly against Jews. Ever hear of the Refuseniks? Mostly Jews who were refused emigration visas because the Soviets considered Jewish people to be traitors and security risks during the Cold War.
“The strong racism and nationalism of the Japanese immigrants was well documented and spying by elements of them was a large part of the success of the attack on Pearl Harbor.”
Yes, and? The Japanese were, and still are a racist people, no doubt about it. That disproves American racism against them how? So the people we were fighting were bad guys, and were also racist, so that automatically made 1940s-era Americans nonracist? I am sure all the black Americans who lived through Jim Crow in the 1940s will be happy to hear that you proclaim that Americans weren’t racist.
And this: “In the interest of national security we had to inter Japanese nationals on the west coast. The continual hysteria over this is despicable. They were not used as slave labor as Japan did to everybody they occupied. They were not starved as Japan did to everybody they occupied. They were not physically abused as Japan did to everybody they occupied. They were not prostituted as Japan did to everybody they occupied.” What a bunch of rationalizing, self-serving garbage. You logic could also be used to justify American racism towards blacks during that time: “Hey, we had Jim Crow, we wouldn’t let them drink from our water fountains, or eat at our lunch counters, or go to the same schools, but Jim Crow wasn’t as bad as Apartheid, so therefore, it wasn’t racism.
And this pretty much speaks for itself: “I refuse to feel any guilt over the internment of the Japanese nationals on the West Coast of the United States and anyone who thinks I should is a Pluristic Relativist fascist.” You don’t think America could have ever done anything wrong, and anyone who doesn’t agree with you is a facist. Lovely.
273. Gylippus:
“Back to the basics: Math, Science & western History, Philosophy & Literature… Judeo-Christian Ethics, Greek Civics…Also, kids need to be sensitized to propaganda techniques. i.e. how film and other media can be used to pull your emotional strings and cause you to stop thinking…”
Very well said!
The only real way to shift attitudes and beliefs is in their formation. That there is a sense of truth at the basis of that endeavour, is the only valid path to achieving such a result and to strengthen any population, in terms of insights and perspectives.
To your latter comment above, I would add that in your list of “back to basics” needs to be training on the first principles of behaviour. Be it pyschology and/or courses of study within the discipline: neural linguistic programming; hypnosis; and neural physiology and function are examples of areas of education that apply in sensitizing people to those very techniques used in media and film.
A more critical awareness of behavioural insights can reduce the distortions that are communicated and accepted, and increase one’s distinction between matters of the heart and the mind to lead to a stronger sense of being and a more constructive conclusion.
This addition to the list of fundamentals you detail, IMHO, is essential and belongs as part of the “Back to basics”.
The banal celebrity culture elevating actors, like Hanks, and such to idol status, surrounding themselves with craven, slavish sycophants, makes these vain empty shells deceive themselves into thinking that they really are brilliant intellects, or worse, messianic prophets sent to speak truth to the masses.
Another ignorant hollywood cretin establishing his infantile leftist bona fides.Ignore the idiot;boycott his movies.
Tom Hanks is just reflecting the p.c. version of history, which, in every case, basically boils down to “Americans were the bad guys.” Talaban – good, U.S. – bad; North Vietnamese – good, U.S. – bad; North Koreans – good, U.S. – bad; Japanese – good, U.S. – bad. Of course, p.c. doctrine dare not say the same thing about the Nazis. It just side-steps the issue by declaring the Soviets the sole saviors of Europe, and the American and British added only token contribution, which was of no real consequence. It is the p.c. perogative that every positive contribution the United States has ever made to the world be either turned on its head, or swept under the rug.
292. lucslawyer:
“I nearly gagged when I saw the foreword was written by this #&@*%@# chickenhawk…surely someone of true moral character could have been found instead of this sorry excuse for a human being”
Perhaps a Dick Cheney or a Rush Limbaugh . . . patriots and veterans both.
It’s a little off topic, but…
“In a questionaire, over 26% of Japanese-Americans of military age at the time said they would refuse to swear an unqualified oath of allegiance to the United States.”
Good for them. I wouldn’t either.
You can twist and spin as much as you want to, and when you’re done twisting, the United States government sent tens of thousands of innocent American citizens, including thousands of little children, to concentration camps.
What the government did was:
1. A violation of the United States Constitution.
2. Immoral as hell.
Ironically, the same political party and government bureacracy that packed innocent American citizens off to concentration camps in WWII was scum rotten with communists, communist sympathizers and Soviet agents.
To add to the irony, the Democrats have a long history of disloyaty to the United States, with the most obvious example being the mass treason carried out by the Southern Democrats in 1860.
Needless to say, despite their long history of disloyalty and treason, the liberal Democrats have never rounded themselves up and send themselves off to concentration camps.
@273. Glyippus
So grateful for that thoughtful response.
You said “Also, kids need to be sensitized to propaganda techniques. . . . Throw all that post-modern PC multi-culti revisionist nonsense we’re feeding our kids daily in our schools on the garbage heap and never look back!”
My concern is that the culture is the water the fish are swimming in. The fish does not question that essential context of his existence, nor is he encouraged to by the prevailing value purveyors.
Your distaste for Avatar is a case in point. Our son waved us off from that PC multi-culti circus. The only part of the movie he enjoyed was when the marines are exercising their muscle. His was the only voice cheering in the theater.
But – this is what the kids are breathing. You and I can withhold our entertainment dollars, but the generations behind are swimming in this stuff.
In your last paragraph:
“Ultimately the only way to flush the sewage out of media / academia is to take ‘em head on. Not through McCarthy-esque tactics (too divisive, we need unity these days) but through rational argumentation (as per VDH’s superb piece) and ridicule (the emperor has no clothes!), and most of all voting with both ballots and entertainment dollars.”
Given my pessimism about reversing the sewage flow – I land at last on your hope in the restorative potential of the ballot box.
And it must happen this November. My prayer is that enough of our fellow citizens still possess that essential American character born of our unique beginnings – and turn this ship around.
What an interesting variety of opinion here. I do find one glaring logical error that recurs in many of the comments. VDH doesn’t say anywhere in this post that there was no animus fostered in American culture during the war against the Japanese. What he says is that Hanks’ formulation — “We, in turn, wanted to annihilate [the Japanese] because they were different” — is utterly wrong.
VDH is right. We DIDN’T want to annihilate the Japanese because they were different. The fact that they were demonized during the war itself doesn’t mean that the war started due to some colossal antipathy on our part to their “differences,” nor was that why we KEPT fighting, nor was it why Americans in combat felt the hatred, fury, and kill-or-be-killed desperation that those in combat always feel.
The Japanese attacked us and we could not let them hold us at risk from the Pacific, nor could we allow them to use their occupation of Asia and the South Pacific to consolidate a power base against us. We fought Japan because Japan was a nation displaying open and lethal hostility, threatening not just our interests but our sovereignty and survival.
All the race hatred in the world would not have dragged our butts across the ocean to fight for it island by island and life by life, if we had not been under material threat from an armed and predatory nation. It’s ignorance and ahistoric foolishness to overlay modern theories about racism over this simple reality.
For me the “historical accuracy” of the mini-series was set in the first few minutes by the map behind the Marines commander giving the set speech. Canada seems to be part of the US, Vichy West Africa is under Nazi control and the British Empire is nowhere to be seen. Considering that at the time the British Empire extended over one quarter of the globe I would consider this particular oversight to be fairly typical Hollywood history. That’s a lot of pink on a map of the world by any standards.
Add to that the fact that it was only in September 1944, the last year of the war, that the US actually had more people in uniform than the British that the whole Pacific War being an American only theater, which seems to be Hollywood’s view, is very far from truth. Tell that to all the British, Indian and Dominion troops who fought and died to liberate South East Asia.
Maybe the mini-series is not quite U-571, but it seems to be going in that direction.
301. David, sounds good to me! :)
307. Catherine. We are not fish. Humans are good at complex pattern recongition, once they learn to recognize the signs. The story of your son is inspiring to me (please tell him I said so), and a testament to your parenting. But it is possible to teach many (most?) kids to recognize when they are being manipulated, even though they are surrounded by it (see 301. David Sheedy) Once they learn that there are many adults out there who will feed them a line in order to take away their power, they become more discerning. It’s usually something they want to hear (like Al Gore telling them that they know more about how the world works than you do. They engage in monologue rather than dialogue, then follow it up with some sort of call to action in support of such and such a cause. Truth-sayers on the other hand often bear unpopular views, but encourage dialog and debate. They lead by example – while encouraging you to draw your own conclusions.
The problem of reforming the education system is much thornier in that it will require almost super-human political will. (I nominate VDH as plenipotentiary education czar!) You are right. November will be a decisive cusp in the nation’s history. The progressive Dems have dug a very deep hole for themselves, let’s shove them in it.
My uncle died in horrific circumstances during the Burma railway atrocity. He was a British Colonel trying to get more food and water for his fellow prisoners. He walked 20 miles to see a junior Japanese officer although extremely ill from dysentery and heat exhaustion and was sent back empty handed because the junior was too busy to see him, a Colonel in the British Army. He died back at the camp because the Japanese refused to treat him to show the British that they were superior. This is chronicled in the letters of the men who remember him.
He wasn’t racist. He was just doing what he could for his troops. How dare Tom Hanks call those who fought the Japanese racist? How dare he.
Anyone that thinks the American soldier fighting in the Pacific theatre of WWII did not view the Japanese as something other than inferior, slant-eyed yellow devils is sadly mistaken. Good WWII US propaganda and you will see the cartoons and read the types of vicious and racist images put out there. Tom Hanks was 100% correct. Anyone that thinks otherwise is, well, an ignoramus. Locking US citizens in jail — interment camp, my ass! They were in prisons, Prisons that were hell! — isn’t enough of a clue how the country viewed the Japanese? I have news for all the conservatives who wear the flag and scream about America’s greatness: American does not have a perfect history. Racism, sexism, the slaughtering of native people, we stole Hawai’i. Politics is full of bribery and illegal under-the table -deals. We have more murders than anyone else. We suck in a lot of ways. That does not overshadow our greatness, but let’s not deny our faults.Don’t be mad at Tom Hanks for speaking the truth. Be mad at yourself for A. not knowing historuy and b. not accepting the truths of our past.
There are a lot of morons on this board, headed by idiot in chief VDH, but I especially enjoyed the simpleton #309 who credits British, Indian and Dominion troops with “liberating” South East Asia.
Would that be Indonesia? I don’t think the Indonesians were too happy with being “liberated” only to be promptly oppressed again by Dutch “liberators”.
Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam? Again “liberated” and forced to enjoy the fruits of French liberation/subjugation.
Of course within a decade or so the Indonesians and Indochinese both overthrew the “liberating” Europeans…as did the Indians…who I guess weren’t so happy at being part of the Dominion some eurocentric idiots seem so fond of.
The West did have a condescending/racist attitude towards the East back then, and it’s obvious from the bulk of these posts that a pro-western bias persists among some.
As for VDH ludicrous point that we were allied with Japan during WWI…weren’t we allied with the Soviets during WWII? I guess that means we were bosom pals with them forever right?
“They were in prisons, Prisons that were hell!”
Bzzzz! Wrong! You’re describing a history that never happened. It’s terrible to be interned at all, but those camps were not hell holes at all.
“in jail — interment camp, my ass!”
Many of VDH’s readers are familiar with the nature of those camps. My grandfather worked in one as a school administrator (and worked in various charitable endeavors after the war) and told his children and grandchildren what it was like.
If you want your lies to be believed, you need to make them more subtle.
“Tom Hanks was 100% correct.”
No, actually he wasn’t.
“They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different.”
That part is total nonsense.
re: 97
“re: 86 “Loathe as I am to disagree with VDH I have to on this one. We put Japanese on the West Coast in camps and took their stuff. We did not do that to Germans and Italians.”
The United States did incarcerate both German-Americans and Italian-Americans. The numbers, it must be conceded, were not as high as those of Japanese-American descent. But you are missing the point. American racism was not comparable to Imperial Japanese militarist contempt for those deemed to be racially inferior. We would have also had to fight Japan during WW II even if all its citizens possessed blue eyes and blond hair. The racial characteristics of that nation had nothing to do with it.”
I don’t concede that internment of foreign nationals & their decendents, citizen or otherwise, was racist. First, it is always cast as if only Japanese ‘citizens’ were interred, which it must be to even make the argument that it was racist. But more importantly, America had had experience in WWI with sabotage…
In 1916, an ammumition dump near the Statue of Liberty was blown up:
Fragmentation from the explosion travelled long distances, some lodging in the Statue of Liberty and some in the clocktower of the Jersey Journal building in Journal Square, over a mile away, stopping the clock at 2:12 a.m. The explosion was the equivalent of an earthquake measuring between 5.0 and 5.5 on the Richter Scale[2] and was felt as far away as Philadelphia. Windows broke as far as 40 kilometres (25 mi) away, including thousands in lower Manhattan. Some window panes in Times Square were completely shattered. The outer wall of Jersey City’s City Hall was cracked and the Brooklyn Bridge was shaken. People as far away as Maryland were awakened by what they thought was an earthquake.
Property damage from the attack was estimated at $20 million (US$ 399 million in 2010 dollars). The damage to the Statue of Liberty was valued at $100,000 (US$ 1,993,000 in 2010) and included the skirt and the torch. The arm has been closed to visitors ever since…
This was fairly conclusively tied to German saboteurs, though details are sketchy since only a collaborator was caught. After WWI, damages for $50 million were sought, and Germany finished paying this in only 1979. (from wikipedia)
This was a tremendous amount of ammunition, and one report was that it was destined for Russia, possibly critical in forestalling the Bolshevik revolution. In any case, it was intended for our allies in the fight against Germany.
How do you deal with the possiblility of sabotage during a major war? Certainly not all Germans, Italians, or even Japanese were interred during WWII, but I personally don’t see this as evidence of racism. The only alternative is to expend the additional resources and manpower required to guard every vulerable facility, not interring, but certainly restricting where certain non-citizen nationals might work.
Of course, this is ‘profiling’ and would be rejected by liberals. Thus unlike in 1916 when it was only naivete that permitted German agents hiring on as guards at the ammo-dump, today it will be liberal outrage at ‘racist profiling’ that will result in some new tragedy.
I too used to be a fan of the American film, but such comments from Hollywood morons make me leery of any film, as it is probably a liberal agenda. I want to see a film to ESCAPE politics. And perhaps if Tom “Einstein” Hanks had read “The Rape of Nanking” or “Prisoners of the Japaneese”, or even talked to someone who’s walked the walk “over there”, he and others might just stop putting their foot in their mouths.
Once again, an actor I respected has spent too much time listening to and going to Hollywood parties full of people without a clue. Hang around long enough with idiots, it seems to have rubbed off.
WWII was much deeper than his “racists” war, go back to the 20′s and view history. Then try and talk to WWII vets alive an ask them if they were racist.
I hope your box office appeal suffers.
Why would such an intelligent man with so much success spend any more time on a movie or mini-series that he truly believes was so racial & hellbent? My whole family used to be die-hard fans of Hanks – now we’re just wondering what (or who) exactly has possessed this talented & caring individual to the extent we don’t recognize him anymore.
The series seems pretty good so far. Any complaints about last night’s episode?
They tend to reduce the scenes to a very small area, probably to make it affordable, since paying thousands of extras for a lot of scenes would run into huge(r) money, but last night’s episode had no critique of American racism that I could see, and the men are coming home as heroes. The previews show that some will screw up back in the states, but I assume that they are following the true stories of a number of soldiers.
I appreciated the scene where the two guys are sitting together after they lost their buddy. One needs to ponder, “why, and what if,” the other says, “it happened, and that’s it.”
This was our backup to nuking Japan into surrender. If the A-bombs didn’t work, the US military wase going to gas the Japanese people from the air like bugs, and keep doing so until Japanese resistance ended or all the Japanese were dead.
Hanks, Spielberg and Hollywood generally
continue to mesmerize us with anachronistic
‘state of the art’ PC recycling of
seen-to-death WWII themes –while refusing
to shed any light at all on the looming,
indeed, gargantuan implications of their
—and now OUR —decades of sellout and
enmeshement with the most genocidal regime
in history —over in their ‘fave’ mass market
and franchise slum —ACROSS the Pacific
—even on this, the 60th Anniversary of
the STILL unfolding, and mysteriously ‘overlooked’
—KOREAN WAR…
Donna V.: The fact that he wrote it at all…surely a fellow Marine vet, or a member of the Americal or 25th or 77th Divisions could have been found…someone who was actually there…instead we get another chickenhawk…Why is it that so many of these wingnut talking heads who are so vociferous in their praise or defense of America’s fighting men just could not find the time to be one themselves?
My, my, Mr. Hanks must have hit a nerve big time…all the defensiveness being displayed here, from VD on down…and as to being allies or friends…yes, when we think it is in our best interests…otherwise it is Jap, gook, zip, chink, slant eyed, sand nigger, towelhead, raghead…shall I go on?
Thanks to the internet I can say with hand on heart that I have watched most of their watchable movies, yet not one of these despicable haters of everything decent (Hanks, Penn, Clooney, etc) has earned a single cent from me.
Tom Hanks, like so many other Hollyweirds, is just not very bright. They’re free to be stupid, too.
FACT IS —having made BILLIONS upon BILLIONS these past decades
looking the other way, at best, while unflinchingly catering to
the franchise-slum denial needs of history’s —MOST— awesomely
genocidal regime —ACROSS the Pacific —Hollywood’s moral alibi
of choice remains the ad nauseum, anachronistic, PC WWII retread.
ESP. galling in 2010, the once again ‘mysteriously overlooked’
60th Anniversary of the epic, urgently relevant, indeed, STILL unfolding
—KOREAN WAR…
AMEN
What is not a retread, and what has never been seen in a movie (at least not accurately and in detail), is the torture, rapes and almost complete devastation by the Japanese on the Filipino people during WW II. Even in the POW and civilian prisons, they starved thousands to death, through gasoline on countless homes filled with women and children and burned them to death. That should be made into a movie. It also should be mentioned that they have still never apologized for their horrors. Please, though, do not identify those sub-humans with the Japanese of today. Read my just published book (in the Philippines where I live 6 months of each year with my Filipina wife): “LEST WE FORGET: THE BRAVE AND HONORABLE GUERRILLAS AND PHILIPPINE SCOUTS OF WW II (Including a Reminder of the Tortures on the Death March, in the Prison Camps and on the Civilians).
hiiiiiiiiii
The which shows here is right in some way but also good for every society people in the country.
………………..
cristina
I think the comments was correct and I hope Tom knows what he is talking on and about.
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