…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.
You’d have thought that someone who seems so interested in history, particularly of the space program and the war, would be better informed about it. But there just seems to be something in the water in Hollywood. America — racist and evil, America’s enemies — justifiable behavior as a reaction to our evil racism and imperialism.
This is, in fact, still the popular media narrative for the current war, in which if we’d just leave those poor Muslims alone, and apologize for fighting back in the Crusades, they’d stop trying to kill us infidels and establish a new caliphate.
I suspect that Hanks understands the causes for the war, but was trying to point out the racial animosities felt on both sides during the war.
The actual fact of the matter is that the troops of both sides had racist attitudes towards their enemy. Japanese troops thought Americans were cowards (because they surrendered) and American troops thought the Japs were “slant-eyed SOBs” because Pearl Harbor and their tendency to massacre Americans trying to surrender.
Generally causes come before effects for sane people.
I suspect that Hanks understands the causes for the war
Then he should show it with his words.
The actual fact of the matter is that the troops of both sides had racist attitudes towards their enemy.
No one denies that. Another straw man.
But in this case, the Japanese were racist before the war, whereas we became so as a result, and not in general, but only toward the Japanese. As VDH points out, we fought alongside other Asians of other races, and liberated millions of Chinese. Hanks is either an ignorant fool, or playing to his ignorant leftist Hollywood cronies.
Japan performed an act of war upon a nation it was then at peace with… slaughtered millions of civilians of all nations… conducted vivisection and biological warfare experiments on civilians and prisoners of war, including Americans… enslaved women, including women form Allied nations, as ‘comfort women’… attacked while waving flags of surrender, so frequently it became expected… massacred tens of thousands of Allied POW’s (and God only knows how many Chinese POW’s)…
…but ‘racial animosities were felt on both sides’ because ‘…American troops thought the Japs were “slant-eyed SOBs”’.
Nice equivalent you’ve got there, Chiris. I can really see how the two sides were JUST the same.
Rand – the history of US racism towards Japanese, mostly expressed against immigrants in the US, is long and well documented, going back to the 1880s.
DaveP – you are adding 2 plus 2 and getting 17. I did not say “both the same” nor did I in any way excuse or defend Japan’s war conduct or the starting of same.
Rand – the history of US racism towards Japanese, mostly expressed against immigrants in the US, is long and well documented, going back to the 1880s.
It didn’t cause the war. We had the same attitudes toward the Chinese, but we didn’t go to war with them, and in fact allied with them even before Pearl Harbor. We didn’t want to “annihilate” them. Tom Hanks is full of shit, and if you agree with him, so are you.
I love the turn of the phrase: “US racism.” There are lots of American people who still dislike Japanese people for whatever reason. However, to use a phrase like “US racism” it really has to be officially sanctioned and… except for internment camps that happened after Pearl Harbor, it never was in the US. This is the common political “we” trick used to socialize individual traits. “We” need to invest in space technology (meaning “I” want to spend your money on aerospace cronies). “We” need to educate “our” children better (“I” want to spend your money on union cronies). “We” need to provide health care for everyone (but not through charity or a system where hospitals redistribute costs of those who can not pay as they see fit). “We” are racist (so that “I” can garner minority vote by giving them scholarships and job preference while at the same time creating an us-vs-them feeling between arbitrary groups).
I did not say “both the same” nor did I in any way excuse or defend Japan’s war conduct or the starting of same.
Naw, your just pointing out how “both sides had racist attitudes towards their enemy”. Thanks for that. Puts it all in perspective.
American exceptionalism really drives you nuts doesn’t it?
Backpedal faster, Chris.
Other annoying misinformation I’ve heard recently in defending Hanks:
1) “That we nuked Japan but not Germany implies racism.”
Except the first test of the nuclear bomb occurred after V.E. Day.
2) “We only interred Japanese, and not Italians or Germans.”
Obviously we interred americans of all 3 ancestries.
“That we nuked Japan but not Germany implies racism.”
Dolts who would say this are apparently unaware that we killed more people in Dresden than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
“That we nuked Japan but not Germany implies racism.”
Dolts who would say this are apparently unaware that we killed more people in Dresden than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
Rand
We probably killed more people in the fire-bombings of Tokyo than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
I used to like and respect Tom Hanks. I am now beginning to view him with the same contempt that I view Sean Penn and Tim Robbins. It is getting so I can’t watch any movie or TV show because the actors in them are such buttheads and I am so angry at all of them that I can’t separate their performances from their politics. I never used to be this way. God damn them all!
There is a difference between a cultural attitude deeply held and supported by the social infrastructure (The belief in Japanese racial superiority in the prewar era) and the situational animosity that war tends to produce.
I can kind of understand how a Marine who just survived the first wave at Iwo Jima might utter the phrase “slant eyed yellow bastard” under his breath as he works up the courage to keep going. He is tapping into a very old and primitive reservoir of emotional energy to get through his day.
That situation is completely different from the institutionalized racism of Imperial Japan. I am talking about the kind of racism that allows ordinarily decent human beings to round up Korean village girls to serve as “comfort women” as an official policy because obviously the solders in question are the master race.
For me, the jumping the shark part of the interview was his reference to current events. Obviously Hanks is playing the moral equivalence game because it fits with what he thinks of current American policy.
The ‘we nuked the Japanese but not the Germans’ argument looks even sillier when you realize that virtually everyone involved in the Manhattan project through late 1944 was absolutely convinced that the first use of the bomb would be against the Germans. It was only after the defeat of the Nazis at the Battle of the Bulge that the notion the bomb would probably be used upon the Japanese instead of the Germans really began to sink in.
Hanks has as much of my money as he is ever going to get….
This dovetails nicely with “The Green Zone.” Another Americans are evil and the Sunni homicidal maniacs are the nice guys movie. At least the makers will lose a bundle on it.
When will the Hollywood left stop demonizing the US? If it was as bad as they make it out to be, they would all be in camps or dead. Kind of like Hugo’s critics, eh Sean Penn? You ignorant slut.
“Hanks has as much of my money as he is ever going to get….”
It’s a shame Rita and the Davids turned him to the dark side.
Despite being a rabid leftie, I am not critical of either the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombings and I do believe the firebombing of Dresden is a much more difficult case.
The invasion of Japan by ground troops would have a truly horrific event, a replay of Iwo Jima and Okinawa on mega-steroids.
That said, I am highly critical of drawing analogies between our ongoing struggle with radical Islam and World War Two. Such analogies are deeply flawed, on many levels.
Heh!
Union efforts at southern reconstruction after the War of Northern Aggression would be a better metaphor for our anti-Islamic activities in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan than can be provided by World War Two and the beaches of Normandy.
Nonetheless, Hanks is indeed a twit concerning Hiroshima and Nagasaki – horrific events that were made necessary by a horrific war.
We probably killed more people in the fire-bombings of Tokyo than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
Yes, but my point was that it wasn’t about race. In that war, it was our enemies (the Nazis and Japanese) for whom it was about race, not us.
Union efforts at southern reconstruction after the War of Northern Aggression would be a better metaphor for our anti-Islamic activities in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan than can be provided by World War Two and the beaches of Normandy.
The former confederates were aiming at world domination and imposing Presbyterianism on us? Really? Who knew?
You’d have thought that someone who seems so interested in history, particularly of the space program and the war, would be better informed about it.
Of course, Hank’s interest in space seems to be mostly of the gushing fanboy type. I found it irksome every time he did an interview talking about how he hoped NASA would find a way to get him into space, while completely ignoring the companies that might actually get him into space.
(I wonder how he’ll react now that NASA actually *is* doing things to help ordinary people get into space?)
A Short Chronology of Japanese American History: Highlights include: Nov. 13, 1922 The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the Ozawa case, definitively prohibiting Japanese from becoming naturalized citizens on the basis of race. This ban lasted until 1952. A similar case involving the denial of naturalization was also ruled upon.
Around 11,000 German-Americans were interned in WWII, while over 150,000 Japanese-Americans (62% citizens) were interned in the same period. So were the Japanese 11 times more “disloyal?”
I believe very strongly in American exceptionalism. One of the things that makes America exceptional is that when we screw up, we admit it and fix it.
One of the things that makes America exceptional is that when we screw up, we admit it and fix it.
We did. And you and Tom Hanks remain full of shit.
Dolts who would say this are apparently unaware that we killed more people in Dresden than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
This popular misconception was started by David Irving (before he became a noted holocaust denier) accepting Goebbel’s propaganda uncritically. Current estimates of the death toll at Dresden are between 20 and 25 thousand, much lower than either Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But that doesn’t invalidate your larger point about people being ignorant about the carnage due to conventional bombing.
It is getting so I can’t watch any movie or TV show because the actors in them are such buttheads and I am so angry at all of them that I can’t separate their performances from their politics.
Join the club. But it’s worse than you think. Not only do the actors subscribe to a poisonous view of the country and it’s principles, but the producers, moneymen and writers do as well. Subsequently a large section of the media, movies and video is emersed in a cultural smog that’s doing it’s best to emulate Orwell’s ministry of information.
“…screw up, we admit it and fix it.”
And listen to leftists beat it to death over and over and over and…
Because they’re so PROUD of their country.
My problem with Dresden was the lack of necessity or military purpose. IMHO it did nothing to shorten the war or diminish the ability or willingness of the German military to resist.
I believe (yes, it is merely an opinion) that Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped to persuade the Japanese emperor to order a surrender rather than order a fight to the death by the entire nation of Japan.
Victor Davis Hanson has a good piece about this at
http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/is-tom-hanks-unhinged/
The per capita number of people who died from war this last hundred years was something like a tenth the historical average. War has obviously changed dramatically in the West at least, it is no longer accepted as a normal part of day to day life.
I do wonder if slightly increased genocidal tendencies come with this transition. If the people of your enemy just will not accept peace, after every opportunity is given, then how else to end war once and for all?
For many people/cultures ongoing war is a natural and expected part of day to day life, and how one gets ahead. For prosperous peoples it is quite the opposite and very unnatural. For perhaps the first time in history, we have far better things to do with our lives than indulge in day to day war. So when prosperous countries do eventually (after an extreme level of tolerance is used up) get dragged down to that level, they tend to get very, very annoyed. And they become very unaccepting of the old we kill/enslave a few of your peasants, you kill/enslave a few of our peasants type of normal behavior that such people expect. Prosperous countries are then seen as culturally insensitive for not playing the old war games and for completely over reacting when a few of their citizens get terrorized/killed in the “natural” course of things.
Chris L.
You said : “I can kind of understand how a Marine who just survived the first wave at Iwo Jima might utter the phrase “slant eyed yellow bastard” under his breath as he works up the courage to keep going. He is tapping into a very old and primitive reservoir of emotional energy to get through his day.”
Very, very few Marines who survived Iwo Jima (or for that matter any soldier who survived the fighting int he Pacific) would utter those words afterwards. If one could say anything positive about the fighting, at the very least it taught both sides a modicum of respect for each other.
Regarding Dresden, the decision to bomb was a British one, and the US (to its eternal shame) went along with it. I won’t carry water for Irving and his crowd of Holocaust deniers (they did indeed massively inflate the casualty figures to support their own perverted ends….hey! inflating numbers to make a point…Phil Jones, your office is calling…), but Dresden was truly inexcusable, whoever was involved in it…
I want to see the miniseries. Hanks did an excellent job with Band of Brothers. It is bound to be better than Pearl Harbor. His extemporaneous remarks to some obscure print journalist will go largely unnoticed by most people, but the carefully-written words and visual elements of the miniseries will be seen by far more people.
Hanks is yet another rich-guy actor, sitting in his Hollyweird ivory tower, thinking the view makes him smarter than the guys living in the flat lands. But he forgets it’s the flat landers who paid for tickets for his ACTING jobs that bought the tower. I don’t remember his stint as a history professor anywhere drawing rave reviews, nor making him rich.
“Sleepless at Harvard”,
.
“Saving Private Ryan’s Private School”,
.
“How I solved the Da Vinci Code and the NYT Sunday Crossword while Producing ‘Band of Brothers’ “.
He’s proof that reading history and understanding it are two very, very different things.
And Japanese racism toward … pretty much everyone goes back even farther.
if we’d just leave those poor Muslims alone, and apologize for fighting back in the Crusades, they’d stop trying to kill us infidels and establish a new caliphate
To me the Muslims can go take a long walk off a short pier regarding this matter. The Crusades were a backlash against Muslim invasions on the Eastern Roman Empire. Why should we be sorry for fighting back against an invasion?
Nukes were not used against Germany during WII because the war in the European theater ended before they were ready for use. The Germans surrendered like in May, and the Trinity test was in July as said here before.
The Japanese did the sneak attack before declaration of war thing before, during the Russo-Japanese war.
Off the Hanks/Japan/WW2 topic, but, as I’m not the first, some notes about the bombing of Dresden:
1. The Russians were the main instigators. They had no real strategic bombing capacity and were always wanting both the Brits and Americans to do more to support their drive westward by softening up the German territory on their route of march they had yet to overrun. Dresden is near the eastern border of what would become East Germany.
2. Dresden occurred about three weeks after the Germans had been thrown back to roughly their pre-Battle of the Bulge positions. The influence of the Battle of the Bulge on Allied attitudes toward Germany gets too little attention. Most allied troops in the Fall of 1944 were fairly sure the war would be over by Christmas. Then Germany launched the Ardennes offensive, the stopping of which was about as brutal as combat gets, plus it was freakin’ cold.. Sort of Monte Cassino plus frostbite. By the time the Germans were thrown back, the Allies had taken tens of thousands of fresh casualties. The German use of infiltrators in American uniforms and the Malmedy massacre of POWs were widely known about by then as well. Both the Brits and the Americans were quite willing, at this point, to find the biggest, gnarliest dry corncob they could lay hands on and shove it up Germany’s ass. Dresden was, at least in part, a temper tantrum by people who’d just taken a sucker punch from an opponent who hadn’t reached the – to the Allies – obvious conclusion that he was beaten.
“We probably killed more people in the fire-bombings of Tokyo than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”
And, it is claimed by many that more Chinese civilians were killed in the Rape of Nanking alone than Japanese in all three combined. Brutal, perverse, and degrading deaths, too. Frankly, I’d rather be vaporized in a mushroom cloud than take a bayonet to the gut. I don’t even want to talk about what the Japanese soldiers did to the women.
The Imperial Japanese Army committed widespread and appallingly brutal atrocities all across the region, including to American soldiers (Bataan Death March). My father, who grew up reading of them in the newspapers as they happened, still refuses even to consider ever buying a Japanese car.
Moreover, if anyone thinks that is all history, and that the Japanese today are gentle creatures who never would harm a soul, let me disabuse you of that notion. Let me preface by saying that, in my experience, most Japanese actually DO fit the foregoing description. However, they still have a bunch of crazy nationalists who cruise the streets of Tokyo in vans shouting out political slogans all day, or did 15 years ago when I was last there. It was almost comical – these big old lumbering delivery style vans with a Rising Sun painted on the side and a great big bullhorn on top like on the Blues Brothers police car. We asked our guide about them and she said, “oh, they crazy, nobody pay attention.” One of our group tried to snap a picture, and the van raced over and the occupants started screaming at him. We beat a quick retreat.
The Japanese are (or were – again, it’s been a while since I made first hand observations) intense people. So are (were) the Germans. It is not for naught that the two of them nearly took over the world. I certainly regret all the lives that were lost in Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as Dresden. But, those two nations, though surely not everyone living in them and caught up in the destruction, sure had it coming.
It happened. It’s done. Hopefully, nothing like it will ever happen again. But, I wouldn’t be shocked if another great conflagration came again sometime, ’cause humankind hasn’t really changed, IMHO.