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Americans, and indeed the whole world, need to get over the idea that movie stars and other celebrities have any wisdom or insight into the way the world works or into history. Most of them are profoundly ignorant, having been miseducated in the recent past by marxists.

Movie stars in particular are nothing at all but actors, they have no particular training at all in thinking, in philosophy, in history, in ethics, in economics, or any of the other fields where the expound so freely. A good looking robot could fully replace them entirely. It is rank foolishness to listen to them for anything.

Given the massive amount of troops we had in both major theaters of operations, during WWII, it would not be particularly surprising to find out there were perhaps a handful of individuals who gave into the darker side of human nature in committing some sort of atrocity(s) against the enemy.

This being said, what happened on the Axis side of things, particularly regarding the Japanese, would prove to be the rule and not the exception.  Hanks (or anyone else) can blame their bestial actions on their culture, the mindset of their military, or even on “the side effects of constantly consuming rice, raw fish, and saki”, for all I care. The bottom line is, we did what we had to do to get rid of this threat, including changing their political, social, and (to some extent) their cultural make up.

Why?  Because in the end, it was decided, leaving these things alone (despite having beaten them soundly), allowing for them to continue on in a beguine state, would not prevent them from rising up again at some future point in time.

This is exactly the same situation we find ourselves in today, regarding Islam.  We may (eventually, Good Lord willing) beat them soundly.  But unless we tear them down and rebuild from the ground up we will surely face them again at some future point in time.

That Hanks purportedly wishes to show that “Americans and Japanese solders ‘hated’ each other” ... sheesh!! Tell us (old timers) something new!!  My Uncle Les was a Marine in the South Pacific during that time.  He took a Jap bayonet in the back, while coming ashore on Guadalcanal.  To this day, he refuses to have anything to do with items “made in Japan”.

Yeah, we were “different” from the Japanese, back in 1941-45.  Much as they are today.  And thank God for that.

Vampires, people that fly, re-animated sewn together body parts, jump-spinning-reverse roundhouse kicks and talking dogs; that’s right, only in a movie.

Movies are not about reality, and were never meant to be. Same goes for reality TV.

Tom Hanks’ job is to express other people’s thoughts and words. Why give a man with so little value such great currency as contradiction?

Only a fool would pay HBO to see a movie, any movie.

One of the up(?) sides of being a geezer is having living memory of historic events and personalities. The down side of course is suffering the bullshit revisionist garbage that passes for “history” written by the ideological creeps with an agenda who have seized control of academia since the early 60’s.

I have a close friend of Dutch heritage who was “interned” by the glorious “liberating” armies of imperial Japan on Sumatra in late 1941. He, his mother and surviving sibling were finally liberated in late 1945 just two weeks short of starving to death. His experiences were not conducive to admiration for Japanese imperial “culture”.

The experiences of 3 other of my uncles and cousins in their own combat contacts with the sons of Nippon likewise do not reflect warm and fuzzy attitudes.

The oil fields of Sumatra and Java are not located in the “south Pacific”.

and another is the captain’s releasing his eventual killer

I am pretty sure that those are two different actors, Bunny. 

That kind of betrayal of a buddy isn’t.

I found it plausible.

The character wasn’t a Ranger, hadn’t trained with the unit.  Take a guy who sits in the rear with the gear, who probably had not had any combat training after basic, send him haring off with a bunch of commandos he met that morning ... man it’s a wonder he did as well as he did.

High ranking American officers were generally painted as cowardly, callous fools.

I do not think this is the case.  The only character in that series who could plausibly be colored such is Norman Dike, who apparently really was not much of a combat leader.

I’m not sure what high ranking is to you, but both the regimental CO (Colonel Sink) and division CG McAuliffe are portrayed favorably.

I’d like to see clips or writing of what Mr. Hanks said.  Do you have any links, Rachel?

I ran across this blog this evening saying a lot of the same things I tried to say. Thought you might be interested in “Cowgirl’s” take on the Hanks statements. Rach

Add millionaire Tom Hanks to the HATE AMERICA too crowd.....

* Posted by conservative cowgirl on March 10, 2010 at 1:45pm
* View conservative cowgirl’s blog

Tom Hanks on WWII: We wanted to annihilate the Japanese because they were “different”
posted at 9:58 pm on March 9, 2010 by Allahpundit
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Well, true enough. They were different, all right. In fact, some lucky GIs got to experience the difference firsthand.

If you were expecting an island-hopping reprise of “Band of Brothers” in this new miniseries, expect otherwise.

But the context for Hanks’ history lessons has changed. Band of Brothers, HBO’s best-selling DVD to date, began airing two days before 9/11; The Pacific plays out against a very different backdrop, when the country is weary of war and American exceptionalism is a much tougher sell. World War II in the European theater was a case of massive armies arrayed against an unambiguous evil. The Pacific war was overlaid by a sense that our foes were fundamentally different from us. In that sense, the war in the Pacific bears a closer relation to the complex war on terrorism the U.S. is waging now, making the new series a trickier prospect but one with potential for more depth and resonance. “Certainly, we wanted to honor U.S. bravery in The Pacific,” Hanks says. “But we also wanted to have people say, ‘We didn’t know our troops did that to Japanese people.’”…
Back in World War II, said Hanks, 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?”

Quoth Big Hollywood editor John Nolte: “No matter how many times you read this passage the context is clear. By ‘different’ Hanks is clearly referring to race, culture and religion, not ideology.” Indeed. Is that what was driving FDR all those years — fear and loathing of the “brown people” or whatever? I thought it was the fact that they bombed us and then fought us relentlessly across the Pacific rather than surrender, but maybe I should tune in for The Truth. So screwy is his read, in fact, that I’m not sure it’s even fair to the Japanese: As I understand it, they hit Pearl Harbor not because “our way of living was different” but because they wanted the oil in the south Pacific and needed to neutralize the American fleet before they made their move. I’m also surprised to learn that whereas the Nazis were unambiguous evil, their strategic ally in the far east — whose imperial army utterly terrorized the civilian population of mainland Asia — was merely “different,” much as jihadists are now. That sure does help me get a handle on that Iraq election held a few days ago.

I assume prominent attention will be given in this thing to the bombings of Hiroshima and Tokyo, irrespective of whether they saved lives in the aggregate by shortening the war. Neo-Nazis like to play the same moral equivalence game by crying crocodile tears over the bombing of Dresden; there’s some extra historical context for you in case you choose to watch. Wish I had a clip of Hanks to offer, but this was a print interview, it seems. Is this bit from Bill Maher’s show of Spicoli apologizing for Hugo Chavez a decent substitute? I’ll bet he and Bill will find plenty to like in Hanks’s series.

Update: Here’s a nice related story: Evidently Matt Damon’s new Iraq flick is “one of the most egregiously anti-American movies ever released by a major studio.”

You forgot Unit 731:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

I one way I hope Tom Hanks is right; we are different than people who can do these things.

Excellent points, Ms. Peepers. I don’t know what Mr. Hanks has been saying lately but if it’s suggesting an equivalency between Japanese troops and U.S. troops he would be way off base, as you clearly demonstrate, to say the least.

Saving Private Ryan had some implausible parts.  Sending a captain on such a wild goose chase and not using command channels to locate Ryan are two and another is the captain’s releasing his eventual killer with the dumb injunction that he turn himself in to the nearest MPs—after a pointless and costly assault to take out a German position presumably long since bypassed and/or having no tactical significance.  Come ON!

The only objection I had to Spielberg’s film was the inclusion of the scene showing the cowardice of the GI who was but steps away from being able to prevent the death of his fellow troop.  I cannot think of a GI’s being so craven as to do that.  It was a greasy little episode to include, esp. side by side with the excellent battle scenes earlier. Horrendous carnage is an aspect of combat.  Fine.  That’s sugar coated in most war movies.  That kind of betrayal of a buddy isn’t. It was gratuitous and an insult to those troops. It has to have happened somewhere in that war, but so did selling PX supplies on the black market.  Why not include that so we can have the “complete” picture of the realities of war?

Of course, the coward is showing killing the killer of his buddy later on while the guy’s a prisoner, presumably “redeeming” himself, but long past the point of “the heat of combat.”

I have a book about the war in the Pacific and alas I can’t recall the title just now.  It made clear that the Allies found out soon enough about the Japanese views on “no surrender” and mistreatment of enemies.  Once apprised, our guys adjusted their conduct appropriately.

WAKE UP - Right on, man.  So true.  Anyone that can’t understand that is either delusional or a revisionist.  People cannot understand what I mean when I say that dropping the bomb was a kindness compared to what would have befallen had we invaded.  I don’t believe that mankind has ever seen a thing like what would have happened had we been forced to invade - we wouldn’t have words to describe the horror.

Ms. Peepers;

I didn’t mean to give you the third degree on this.  I just don’t see that either one of Mr. Hank’s movies can be spun to be anti-american.  They are both, as best as can be possibly done, simply the unbiased telling of a story, and they both used men that actually served in order to be more realistic. 

I can’t find a bias - I simply can’t. 

I also can’t find myself lumping Tom Hanks in with the rest of the Hollywood set.  His work has too much honesty and in general, far too good a morality inherent in it for him to fall under the category that some on this comment section seem wont to place him. 

Forrest Gump?  I mean, come on, that movie had “right-winger wet dream” written all over it!  The leftist hippy ends up dying of AIDS, while the dumb, yet hard working and good-intentioned guy, ends up striking it rich because he is willing to apply himself and work hard. 

The Green Mile?  I haven’t seen a movie come out of hollywood in a long time with a stronger and more appropriate religious undertone than this one.  If you missed the “John Coffey as Jesus Christ” parallel in the movie, then… well, I’m not sure what, but I sure saw it.  This reminds me of the story that Francis posted (IIRC) last Easter about Longinus and the struggle that he had as a result of his part in the crucifixion of Jesus.  The main character, played by Tom Hanks, not only is being punished for his part in the execution of “one of God’s great miracles” but is also horribly afraid of his punishment when he finally is allowed to meet his maker. 

Castaway?  What a great movie about human endurance and the power of love, above all, to keep us going when we would otherwise give up. 

I know that this one sort of came in under the radar, but watch “The Road to Perdition” if you ever get a chance.  A story of a man who had chosen to live a bad life, giving it all up to his own peril in order to save his son from the evil that had consumed him. 

I could go on, but I will not.  I think that I might disagree with what Tom Hanks said in his interviews, but I cannot, based upon his track record, say that it is based upon anythign other than good intentions.  You have to know a man by his acts, after all, and the Tom Hanks that I know wouldn’t have it in him to denigrate our troops in the slightest.

Wollf,

You Dad. I thank him. I salute him. And appreciate your taking the time to write. As you know, Hanks has been in the news lately saying very strange things about the U.S. war effort in the Pacific. I can’t wait to see, “Pacific.” Frankly, my patience is paper thin when it comes to dissing the Marines who fought there. My patience with Tom Hanks over the years has worn thin. When it comes to making money, he’s number one. When it comes to patriotism, Hanks is missing in action.
Wollf, all my best. Semper Fi. Rach

WAKE UP, I feel like hugging you for saying what you said. Rach

Hey Tom! History 101 (in short sentences):  The Japanese had no intention of surendering, EVER. It wasn’t in their culture. Thus, we weren’t fighting a war, we were fighting a mindset. Until Hiroshima - a wake up call, at last.  Sounds like you need one too.

"He was a romantically overwrought petty bourgeois who, under the conditions of a dictatorship, was granted the power to bloodily live out his inclinations.  Such a man would only have had his chance in a society which was itself utterly deranged.”
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I’ll tell you who said that, and of whom, in a minute, but here’s the point I’ve been hammering over and over: 

This is how it starts, and it just gets worse and worse as all the petty second-raters start flexing their muscles in an atmosphere of madness emanating from the top, which can only happen when society itself has lost the plot.

Right now, a deranged America has an alien President who does not love “his” country, and whose second-stringers (Eric Holder, Rahm Emmanuel, Nancy Pelosi et al) are beginning to run riot. The only thing that “trickles down” is Attitude. Eventually it filters down to absurdities such as that described here.
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And the description above?  The great German journalist Joachim Fest, on Himmler (you can be forgiven for thinking it might well have been Obama).

Goober, thanks for the clarifying comment. but at the same thing I’m rankled about having the same message shoved in my face in, “The Longest Day.” I’d love to sit down with you and watch all the BOB episodes so you could retell me I’m talking through my bonnet or I could have the fun of telling you, “I told you so.” Just so you know where I’m coming from, I get an earful every three weeks on the telephone from an old friend in the 80th ID. Who’s seething about Malmedy. And has me reading Mr. Ambrose. So if Rachel really blew some facts, pretty please cut me a little slack. I would appreciate it.

You know what, now that I think about it, there is a big final moral in the Saving Private Ryan movie that you also may have missed.  Tom Hank’s character, Captain Miller, allows a German POW to live when his men want to kill him.  Hanks tells the German to walk towards the US lines and surrender when he gets there.  The German is actually found first by other German forces, and ends up killing Hank’s character at the end of the movie.  So, I guess, one could say that it portrays the Germans as mindless myrmidons, unable to think as individuals and spare a man who spared you only days before, while the Americans are portrayed as merciful, even at the expense of their own lives.  Again, I’m not really sure where you are seeing the trend to denigrate US troops in either of Hank’s films. 
The act of painting a sympathetic picture of certain German troopers (not Germans, as a whole) does not, in my opinion, add up to what you are saying it does.  There were good men who were German soldiers.  I knew and loved one such man in my youth – almost as if he were a blood grandfather.  He’d killed American men with his own two hands, and hated himself for it – all the while knowing that he did what he had to do in order to survive.  Some of them, in much the same way as our boys, were thrust into a war that THEY didn’t want to fight, either, and they were simply farmers and factory workers who were forced by fiat of the government purportedly there to serve them, to go and kill other farm boys and factory workers from across an ocean.

As the “infrequent” commenter here, and for good reason, I’m not nearly as erudite as most of you Folkes are, I do have a couple of thoughts on this one.......

First, my Dad fought on Peleliu, a place that he described as truly Hell on Earth. 3 Purle Hearts, 2 Bronze and 1 Silver Star.

I truly am looking forward to this movie, possibly more than the Eastwood films on the subject.

I hadn’t heard any of the negatives as you have enumerated, including at sites such as Staight White Guy and Aaaaargh, to name a few.

I’ll keep my mind open while watching....but I’ll watch it.

Just wondering, have you seen the movie?
Regards, and Semper Fi.

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
Negative.  There was only one scene in the episode “Day of Days” where it was IMPLIED that an American officer killed a group of German POWs.  The officer in question, a real man named Donald Spears (then Lieutenant, but ended up retiring a Colonel, if memory serves), actually helped the film crew in the creation of that episode.  It was done because of a rumor that said officer, had, in real life, actually done this thing that followed him throughout the European campaign.  The officer actually helped to propagate the rumor in order to gain a reputation as a mean SOB among his men. 
It is left undetermined whether he’d really killed the POWs or not, in both the movie (and also in real life – as far as I know, Colonel Spears has never clarified what actually happened on that day).
So, no, there were no scenes of surrendering Germans being killed in every episode.  In Saving Private Ryan, there is the “Look, I washed for supper” scene where surrendering Germans are gunned down by American troopers, but it was also in the heat of the battle for Omaha Beach, and it isn’t portrayed in a way to denigrate the men involved, in my opinion, but more to portray the abject horrors of war. 
Also in Saving Private Ryan is a scene where a German kills a surrendering American troop with a knife to the heart.  Not sure that Tom Hanks’ movies, to date, anyway, are as bad as you are thinking.

But you were on the qui vive, Roy.

Mr. WAKE UP, I don’t think the flow is necessarily from English to another tongue.  We use “typhoon” which is from the Chinese “da feng” or “great wind.” I think the British appropriated a great many other terms from local languages around the Empire. My American parents in Africa used “muti” (Bantu?) all the time for “medicine.”

Western technology in China didn’t roll over the Chinese language in the case of, say, “steam engine,” which the Chinese rendered as “fire vehicle” maybe “fire cart” or “fire wagon” more precisely.  Ditto “pistol,” which came out as “hand spear.” Both are imaginative, adaptive uses of language.

I think a language like English morphs and blooms as people living in a basically rational culture allow their minds to roam freely, unhindered by, say, anything like the periodic French campaigns to root out “le box lunch” or “le weekend” from the excellent purity of French.  It’s not that English facilitates the imagining of a sub-marine craft, it’s that English readily supplies the building blocks for new conceptual terms. I doubt it’s unique in this regard, however.

Chinese is certainly flexible and adaptive.  It is, alas, a v. hard language to learn to read and write, though not to speak.  Looking up an unfamiliar word in Chinese is quite an involved process with occasional guess work for less accomplished students. To me, it seems like it imposes a considerable processing tax or burden on Chinese children and limits the gross numbers of Chinese who can contribute intellectually.  Those who master their language are formidable intellectual actors by all appearances.

Mr Hanks is simply another in the long list of under educated and over paid illusionists who inhabit “tinsel town”. If you mentioned “Nanking Massacre” to most of them they would reply: “Is that a rock group?”

Sorry Esky, links fixed.

Just one more data point describing what Sam Francis called, “‘anarcho-tyranny’—we refuse to control real criminals (that’s the anarchy) so we control the innocent (that’s the tyranny).”

“Come and take them” (or, “Bring it on” or “From my cold dead hands") indeed. Perhaps the spirit of Leonidas isn’t quite dead yet. Perhaps.

Russell, I love that essay. Thank you for sharing.

You guys are right. Thank goodness you pointed it out. Not knowing is not bliss. It should be “flaw.” Mistakes of that nature are so palpably annoying. Are they not? Yet, perhaps the source is not a flaw in the writing, but something I ate. Yes, undoubtedly that is the likely culprit; an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. Charles, what do you think?

PS, before anyone bothers: excuse my typos above, they are merely typos-in-haste; I do know how to spell

This is very disturbing, but not surprising. It is so easy now to believe the worst about any governmental action; we’ve all been burned too often by the continuous lies at all levels of gov’t.

Oh, BTW- the links don’t work, here or at Fighting--

Thanks for your great contributions to this great blog!