""You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it..."
William Tecumseh Sherman
Posted on 08/06/2007 2:34:34 PM PDT by The Noodle
Atomic bomb survivors share stories in HBO film
NEW YORK (AP) -- HBO's disturbing documentary on survivors of the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan didn't make the 50th anniversary of the event.
There's apparently enough emotional scar tissue built up to allow the television premiere of "White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" on Monday (7:30 p.m. Eastern), exactly 62 years after the United States detonated the first-ever nuclear bomb over Hiroshima. The second, and so far last, atomic bomb was dropped three days later. It ended World War II.
The uncomfortable footage of cities reduced to rubble and grotesquely deformed survivors has received relatively little circulation because -- unlike the well-recorded Holocaust -- this was something done by Americans, Sheila Nevins, head of HBO's documentary unit, said. ...
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Can anyone imagine Truman saying to the American public(after approximately one hundred thousand American Marine, sailors, and army men had died taking the main islands with an additional one million dead Japanese civilians and military) that “well we did have an atomic bomb that would have ended things rather quickly, but we chose to be “humane”? Truman would probabaly have been lynched...and would have deserved it.
Unit 741.
That pablum that Clinton Eastwood was selling in that piece of fiction about Iwo Jima pulling and tugging at the facts like a plastic surgeon on Nancy Pelosi’s jawline.
Lemme guess...
Bush’s fault?
Jihad is bad. We should not have to put up with Jihad.
Japan was a fanatical military despotism that was invading all over the globe, torturing prisoners, enslaving whole countries, raping and murdering women, performing medical experiments on humans. they had no respect for their victims, who they viewed as sub-human and undeserving of compassion <<
Japanese scientists performed tests on prisoners centering around the plague, cholera, smallpox, botulism and other diseases.[13]
This research led to the development of the defoliation bacilli bomb and the flea bomb used to spread the bubonic plague.[14] Some of these bombs were designed with ceramic (porcelain) shells, an idea proposed by Shiro Ishii in 1938.
These bombs enabled Japanese soldiers to launch biological attacks, infecting agriculture, reservoirs, wells and other areas with anthrax, plague-carrying fleas, typhoid, dysentery, cholera and other deadly pathogens.
In addition to this, infected food supplies and clothing were dropped by planes into areas of China not occupied by Japanese forces.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
They were already using WMDs in China. That won’t be in the “documentary” as background, will it. I hope so but not holding my breath.
DK
I don’t think it’s a bad idea to show a detailed documentary of the human results of the dropping of 2 atomic bombs. Of course, for any such documentary to be meaningful, it also has to - at least briefly - put it in the proper context of Manchuria & Borneo & Philippines, Pearl Harbor, Bataan, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, the Kamikaze defense, the planned suicidal defense of the Japanese home islands & Tokyo, the Soviet entry into the war, and the even more gastly loss of life and treasure that would have occurred had we NOT dropped those 2 bombs.
Remember this?
http://www.afa.org/media/enolagay/chrono.asp
A few years ago some “historical revisionists” tried to monkey with the Enola Gay exhibit, which ultimately led to the dismissal of the director of the Air and Space Flight Museum...
Didn’t care much for Grave Of The Fireflies. Too many unsympathetic characters. War’s tough, get a helmet.
Do any of these liberal guilt-riders ever, I mean EVER bother to ask the obvious question of why that SECOND atomic bomb had to be dropped, in the first place?
Fact was, the obliteration of Hiroshima FAILED to move Tojo and the other Jap warlords one iota. They were just as ready to meet a land invasion, just like before. Between August 6th and August 9th, no communication, no “Uhh...can we talk?”, nothing.
Hence, it took the obliteration of Nagasaki to finally move the Emperor to order (his first divine oral command ever) his warlords to agree that Japan was being attacked with a “new kind of bomb” and that it was time to talk to the Allies.
Guilt trip my @ss. Now, the Japanese national character was thoroughly pacified within a matter of weeks after the events, and remains so to this day. But prior to 6 August, they were murderously ready to fight to the death.
The greatest mismatch since Jimi Hendrex opened for the Monkees on his first US tour...
Many soldier in the European theater of war was spared because the bombs ended the war. They were in the process of being transfered from Europe to the Pacific.
Among them was my father.
"LeMay said, "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"
- link
A relative flew over Hiroshima the next day and was amazed that one bomb could do that. It used to take several planeloads of bombs before that.
If I could remember all their names, HBO’s in house produced shows could be sited for some of the most disgusting tripe in the name of entertainment.
This is just one more step down the road to hell for everyone associated with the network. Yep, in my opinion it’s that bad.
HBO would rather it have been hundreds of thousands of our troops AND JAPANESE troops and CIVILIANS who would have died instead.
Screw HBO.
Me too.
>>The greatest mismatch since Jimi Hendrex opened for the Monkees on his first US tour...<<
Amen.
And they were released together because Miyazaki couldn’t get the money for Totoro and Takahata couldn’t get the backing for Fireflies. When they got a grant from the Japanese gov’t for Fireflies, they did them and released them together.
Imagine being a Japanese kid going on an educational field trip to see Fireflies, what a relief to have Totoro play right after!
Ever notice how Fireflies is done in shades of beige?
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