Posted on 09/23/2007 8:54:51 AM PDT by submarinerswife
Edited on 09/23/2007 9:01:27 AM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
Premeires tonight at 8pm on PBS. 7 part series
FDR doesn't come off so great when it comes to the interments of Japanese Americans.
We may not always agree w/ why the individuals did something, but I sure as heck respect all the veterans and their families & what they went through to preserve this country. Cried thru mot of the show tonight!
Ken Burns is what Michael Moore pretends to be.
You missed the lady from Alabama talking about how the successful Marine recruiter who avoided her mother for a year, because Momma was so mad that he’d recruited “her little boy”.
thanks for the heads up and thanks for the link to the book ...will surely check it out.
I didnt know many of my fathers stories until his funeral. My uncles told the tales of my fathers experiences, one having been on a ship in the Pacific and getting word that his mother had died. My uncle was at Normandy...never did talk about it. They all were proud of their involvement and passed down love of country and responsibility to it...they came from a family of 13. 3 girls the rest boys ..and everyone of the boys have served in the military. WW2, Korea and Vietnam.
The only other Burn’s documentary I’ve seen is the Civil War, but Burns, in my opinion, really has the talent to make the story personal & to me, that’s what makes his work riveting to watch.
Actually they were Army Air Corps.
Just started on the west coast a few minutes ago.
Based on the opening, I turned it off.
I was a young teenager during the early years of Vietnam, and didn’t pay a lot of attention to it at first. But I was in an all girls chorus in high school, and Christmas when I wasn in 9th grade, we went down to Keesler AF base in Biloxi MS and did a show for the airmen. We sang “I’ll Be Home for Christmas”, and it occurred to me, later, that some of those guys, who were due to ship out soon, probably never made it home. I can’t hear that song anymore, without tearing up.
My point on the Latinos has more to do with the prism that Burns views life through, including WWII. It is all about groups and people as victims. And more often than not, he spends more time and emphasis on these small groups without putting their role into context. It mirrors what is now being taught in our school history books. George Washington may get a line and George Washington Carver a paragraph. It is all part of multiculturalism and revisionist history.
In terms of the numbers, if the US had 130 million people prior to WWII and Latinos were 1.5%, that works out to 1,950,000 Latinos. If approximately half of them are women, that leaves about 1 million males of all ages. Even allowing the fact that some women served, I just don't buy the assertion that 500,000 American-Latinos served in uniform in WWII.
The internment of Japanese-Americans was not one of our best moments, but it involved primarily Japanese living on the West Coast. Some German and Italian Americas were also interned. Some of it had to do with the fear of espionage and some had to do with protecting people from possible reprisal. A sad chapter, but why make it the lead in the opening of the series or at least put it into historical context?
correct...and thank you
Yes. I think rather than a “celebration of diversity,” he was trying to very simply state the truth - that America has been the light and home for many people from many countries. He also was correct that we were isolated from the rest of the old world.
“Based on the opening, I turned it off.”
Oh please don’t! It is truly excellent.
We didn’t end up w/ four different armed forces till after the war. National Security Act of 1947 created the Department of Defense, Joint Chiefs, CIA, and US Air Force
Don't worry, they'll get plenty of the feeling of patriotism from this movie. But it is true, that many young men decided that to become a man, they needed to prove themselves as soldiers. It doesn't mean they weren't patriotic, it just means they were young men looking for more out of their plain lives.
Why? You don't think they wanted to serve their country, too? I'm sure that many of those men were also looking to better themselves, and they thought that being part of the military would help them do that, just like many other young men from less than wealthy circumstances all across the country.
You’re starting to sound like Johnny One-Note here. Let it go. Stop looking for some hidden political agenda in every frame and view it for what it is, the individual views of the participants in the War, from the grunt’s point of view, as it were. It’s a good documentary about a subject matter that needed to be covered before all of the participants were dead and buried. Thank you Ken Burns, you liberal you, for doing it. Where are the conservative documentarians who could pull this off? I don’t know of any. But Burns could and did, for which I am thankful. I do not find it objectionable on a political level and if there is the occasional inference, it is surely minimal and non-invasive to the documentary as a whole. I think you have to go out of your way to try to find something to complain about, and do it because that is how you want to view it, through your own political prism.
Now, what I’ve found interesting so far, the one guy who said he saw a Japanese pilot laughing after an attack, and how after that he actually started to hunt the enemy and wasn’t happy if on a given day he hadn’t polished one off. Plus the guy who said they took no prisoners after they saw what the Jap soldiers had done to some of their men that they had tortured and killed. And the guy that said they had basically executed some Jap soldiers rather than take them as prisoner. War was fought differently in those days, it was fought to win, not some PC war like is being fought today in Iraq and Afghanistan where are troops fight with one hand tied behind their back. Or our own gov’t pursues charges against them (the Haditha soldiers being an example), disgraceful. And various aspects of the war was censored in WWII but the reporters knew which side they were on, again, not like today where the press is totally adversarial, and don’t seem to know whose side they really are on.
I might add, while this film, as well as virtually all other commentary on the subject, portrays the internment of the Japanese as a bad mistake, I question how U.S. citizens will feel if a group of home-grown Muzzies blow up one of our major cities or commit some other major atrocity in the U.S. I wonder how adverse our citizens would be to kicking Muzzies out of this country or interning them, if it meant our very survival. When you don’t know if the Muzzie living next to you is friend or foe. I know how I’d feel and what I would want done.
It brings tears to my eyes when I see what the old bread went through in WWII. Braver men have never walked the face of the Earth.
Semper Fi to all of our dead and brave Marines. You will never be forgotten
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