This is weird. I just read a George Will column that was thoughtful, humane, and not snotty. I’m confused.
Maybe it’s Opposite Day! (Hmmm . . . no, I got 80% on the Asshole Test. It’s not Opposite Day.)
Well, whatever caused it, he deserves credit for it and I hope they keep putting the same stuff in his porridge at the Cranky Old Weenies Conservative Pundit Rest Home.
Will takes note of the Clint Eastwood film, Letters from Iwo Jima, based on actual letters written by Japanese troops facing an invasion they knew they would almost certainly not survive. He praises the film for seeing a common humanity between the American and Japanese forces, and acknowledges that that attitude was not prevalent during the war itself:
Even during the war there was empathy for civilian victims, at least European victims. . . .
But attitudes about the Japanese were especially harsh during the war and have been less softened by time. During the war, it was acceptable for a billboard - signed by Adm. William F. “Bull” Halsey - at a U.S. Navy base in the South Pacific to exhort “Kill Japs, Kill Japs, Kill More Japs.”
Killing America’s enemies was Halsey’s trade. His rhetoric, however, was symptomatic of the special ferocity, rooted in race, of the war against Japan: “We are drowning and burning them all over the Pacific, and it is just as much pleasure to burn them as to drown them.” . . .
In 1943, the Navy’s representative on the committee considering what should be done with a defeated Japan recommended genocide - “the almost total elimination of the Japanese as a race.”
But he also notes that it is possible to rise above those views, and it is a test of a civilization whether they are able to do so:
Perhaps empathy for the plight of the common enemy conscript is a postwar luxury; it certainly is a civilized achievement, an achievement of moral imagination that often needs the assistance of art. That is why it is notable that “Letters From Iwo Jima” was one of five films nominated for Best Picture. . . .
Japanese forces frequently committed barbarities worse even than those of the German regular army, and it is difficult to gauge the culpability of conscripts commanded by barbarians. Be that as it may, the pathos of the letters humanizes the Japanese soldiers, whose fatalism was a reasonable response to the irrational.
He goes on to say that Eastwood’s film is a sign that America as a whole is finally catching up to its most enlighted heroes of the past. I suspect he’s right, or I hope so at least.
Will quotes Stephen Hunter, film critic for the Washington Post, as saying that there are only 4 among over 600 English-language films set in WWII that show the Japanese in a human light.* Hunter himself makes a more complex point:
Any look at the movies made during the war itself confirms this portrait. Our filmmakers, enraged over Pearl Harbor, seemingly always included a signature scene where Japanese perfidy expressed itself, only to be wiped out most satisfyingly by the righteousness of our soldiers. . . .
When you look at this kind of hate-fueled agitprop today, it’s easy to be embarrassed. And though it may not be a politically correct thing to suggest, try to imagine how Americans felt immediately after Pearl Harbor, and the images of “hordes,” “monkeys” and Japanese officers as decadent aristocrats, though ugly, may be viewed as cathartic, perhaps even necessary for military victory. Demonization of the enemy is one part of war.
He’s certainly right that it’s a common part of war. I don’t agree that it’s a necessary part, or at least it seems to me that, to the extent that it’s psychologically necessary as a motivation, the war is either being fought without justification or the troops and recruits are incapable of the necessary moral imagination to understand either why the war is justified or who it is they’re fighting.
What’s interesting, though, is to compare this pattern with the one emerging from the Iraq fiasco. Hunter notes that it was only 15 years after WWII that movies were portraying Germans sympathetically, and there have been scads of such films since, but there still have been almost no sympathetic treatments of the Japanese. Today, I think we have a more nuanced view of the Iraqis. This is complicated in part by the fact that they are nominally our “allies”, though many of them are clearly enemies, and by the fact that the “terrorists” we are supposedly there to fight were not from Iraq. (Certainly the depiction of Al Qaeda and the nebulous “Islamofascists” is as uni-dimensional as that of the Japanese in WWII.) But there are films like Three Kings which clearly are sympathetic to non-white, non-Christians from a hostile nation. More importantly, in public discussion there is a visible strain, now weaker, now stronger, of recognition that the interests and concerns of common people are equally real and equally human on both sides of the conflict. In fact, there are already projects intended to bring the faces and voices of ordinary Iraqis before the American public; we have not had to wait 62 years to reach that degree of empathy this time. I think that’s a hopeful sign.
* Trivia Question: Guess which four. (Will names one in the article - probably the one you can guess. For the remaining three, I could only come up with two names. One of them was right, the other was not on his list.** The other two films that were on the list I had never heard of.)
** Trivia Challenge: There must be more than four. Name WWII films other than those on Hunter’s list that show the Japanese as ordinary human beings (not ones that glorify Japan - just ones that acknowledge the war was fought by ordinary, mostly decent, people on both sides).
February 26th, 2007
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General, Culture, Iraq, Terrorism, Media, Fiasco |
2 comments
I missed a few, but I made it into the top category!
19
0 to 5 “True”: You don’t sound like a certified asshole, unless you are fooling yourself.
5 to 15 “True”: You sound like a borderline certified asshole, perhaps the time has come to start changing your behavior before it gets worse.
15 or more: You sound like a full-blown certified asshole to me, get help immediately. But, please, don’t come to me for help, as I would rather not meet you.
Hat Tip: Chris Clarke at Pandagon, who claims he got a 2. I’ve met him and he probably did. Wanker.
February 26th, 2007
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General, Bloggin |
6 comments
Dick Cheney and the neo-cons still think it is 1974:
To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.
One contradictory aspect of the new strategy is that, in Iraq, most of the insurgent violence directed at the American military has come from Sunni forces, and not from Shiites. But, from the Administration’s perspective, the most profound—and unintended—strategic consequence of the Iraq war is the empowerment of Iran. Its President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has made defiant pronouncements about the destruction of Israel and his country’s right to pursue its nuclear program, and last week its supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on state television that “realities in the region show that the arrogant front, headed by the U.S. and its allies, will be the principal loser in the region.”
That attitude is one of the reasons our response to 9/11 has been so pathetically off target. Aside from their out0sized belligerence, their fatal flaw is that are apparently constitutionally incapable of understanding the modern world. They really and truly appear to believe that state sponsored terrorism is the primary driving force behind terrorism. Worse, they don’t seem to understand that the modern world has created a situation where small numbers of people can do large amounts of damage with just a little bit of money, some planning, and some luck.
This failure is apparently in the neo-con blood stream. As far as I can tell, the Project for a New American Century treated terrorism as a tertiary concern and thought that most of it would come in the form of state-sponsored groups. Laurie Mylroie wrote and article and a book making the ludicrously unsupported claim that Saddam was behind the first World trade Center bombing. That book was published by the American Enterprise Institute, which is what passes for the intellectual arm of the neo-conservative movement. Paul Wolfowitz was credited in the book for providing “… crucial support for a project that is inherently difficult.”
When th Administration took power, terrorism was a low priority. It wasn’t included in the top twelve priorities of the new Justice Department’s first budget, and the focus of the Bush Administration before 9/11 was on missile defense and China. They acted as if their primary problems were those created by rival nations, not those created by terrorist groups. Even after 9/11, Wolfowitz could not bring himself to believe that Al Qaeda was carrying carrying out their operations without the active help of a state:
Wolfowitz fidgeted and scowled … “Well, I just don’t understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man bin Laden.”
“We are talking about a network of terrorist organizations called al Qaeda, that happens to be led by bin Laden, and we are talking about that network because it and it alone poses an immediate and serious threat to the United States,” I answered. …
Wolfowitz turned to me. “You give bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1999 attack on New York, without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don’t exist.” I could hardly believe it, but Wolfowitz was actually spouting the totally discredited Laurie Mylroie theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Center, a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue.
Even Bush thought that way:
“Go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he’s linked in any way…”
I was once again taken aback, incredulous, and it showed. “But Mr. President, al Qaeda did this.”
“I know, I know, but … see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred …”
“Absolutely, we will look … again.” I was trying to be more respectful, more responsive. “But, you know, we have looked several times for state sponsorship of Al Qaeda and not found any real linkages to Iraq. Iran plays a little, as does Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, Yemen.”
They just don’t understand. They formed their opinions of the way the world worked in the Cold War, when the conflict between the two super-powers dominated the world stage. During that time period, much terrorism was state sponsored and the largest threats to the United States did come from state actors. But the world has changed. Technology has made states unnecessary for terrorists. Technology allows small groups of people to communicate effectively, to raise money easily, and to devise means of killing a lot of people easily. They don’t realize that; worse, they seem incapable of realizing that.
Now they are apparently feeding money to Sunni terrorists and insurgents, many with connection to Al Qaeda, in the hopes of checking who they see to be the real threat in the region: the state of Iran. I would bet almost anything that these people think that once they have made the Saudis happy by weakening or demolishing Iranian power in the Middle East, the Saudis can call off these Sunni terrorist groups. But they cannot. These groups are not the puppets of the Saudis, at least not all of them and certianly not those working with Al Qaeda, are not controlled by anyone other than themselves. Assuming that the Saudis would even want to reign these groups in, there is little reason to think they could in any comprehensive fashion. Perhaps it’s their natural authoritarian nature, perhaps it’s their contempt for the little people, perhaps its their cold war experiences, perhaps it’s the bubbles they have built for themselves, but the neo-cons seem to be simply incapable of realizing that small groups can and are lethal. It is a failure of stunning proportions, made all the worse because it is still driving American policy.
New Yorker link Via Digby.
February 26th, 2007
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Iraq, Terrorism, Technology, Iran |
2 comments
