Eastwood attacks Japan war myths

The Observer (U.K.) ^ | 05/28/06 | Justin McCurry

[Pokey78]

Two new movies based on a bloody 1945 battle are stirring up memories and forcing both sides to re-examine their history

---

More than 60 years after it became one of the bloodiest battlefields of the Second World War, Iwo Jima's tragic history retains the power to overwhelm. As his plane prepared to land on the isolated Japanese island last month, the actor Ken Watanabe found he could not hold back the tears. Accompanying Watanabe, who shot to stardom playing a feudal warlord opposite Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai, was another hard man of Hollywood whose time on Iwo Jima would lead to something of a professional epiphany.

When Clint Eastwood's two films about Iwo Jima, one of the darkest periods of the Pacific War, reach cinemas this year, audiences could be excused for forgetting the man behind them was once the trigger-happy Dirty Harry.

The 75-year-old director has promised Flags Of Our Fathers and Red Sun, Black Sand will attempt to show for the first time the suffering of both sides during 36 days of fighting in early 1945 that turned the island into a flattened wasteland.

[dsc]

"I have."

You haven't. Your situation was quite different from that of the infantrymen who were preparing to invade the Japanese homeland in 1945, or who might have had to invade other islands if bombing of Japan had not helped destroy their will to continue.

That said, the rest of your post is so thoroughly riven with sophistry and rewritten history that I despair of a productive discussion.

[Barney59]

You are so right on this.

Another sad case of Hollywood-Amnesia.

[Barney59]

I guess he didn't get to read James Bradley's sobering and excellent book "Flyboys: A True Story of Courage".

Maybe Clint would have a different take on the reason's we needed to be the victors in the Pacific. This liberal "everybody wins" crap is making me sick and threatens to pollute my children's reality. God help us through this difficult time.

[Little Ray]

Actually, I'm getting tired of "it".

Maybe if we picked a particularly uncooperative village or town, killed everybody, leveled everything and paved it over, the enemy would start getting "it."

I vote Haditha.

[investigateworld]

I'm having a bit of difficulty following your thinking. Are you supporting the thought, "because we used a nuke and didn't invade Japan the old fashioned way', our skirts are now dirty?

[tanknetter]

the defense of Japan was ultimately a naval problem and with the Japanese fleet on the bottom, Japan was a sitting duck; all that was required was time to allow nature take it's course.

Just out of curiosity, are you familiar with what was happening in mainland China near the end of the war (with, say, the Kwantung Army) at the hands of what you call a "sitting duck"?

And given what was happening, what the long-term effects of "allowing nature (to) take it's course" would have been?

[tanknetter]

the defense of Japan was ultimately a naval problem and with the Japanese fleet on the bottom, Japan was a sitting duck; all that was required was time to allow nature take it's course

Also, while you're at it, care to enlighten us as to your knowledge of what the "sitting duck" was preparing to do near the end of the war with its Aichi M6A1 Seiran aircraft and i400-class submarines?

[american spirit]

Truer words were never spoken.........now how do we make them take those those words & plans and shove them where the sun don't shine?

[RetiredArmy]

Yup. Just another to add to the long list of movies I have not trotted out to see in the past 15 years. It has been so long since I was in a movie theater, I forget where the danged thing is. I just buy DVD's of the old movies, made my real Hollywood stars, not these cheap-assed, whore mongers, drug using, communist and Islamic homicide bombing loving, American hating, homosexuals of Hollyweird.

[hedgetrimmer]

now how do we make them take those those words & plans and shove them where the sun don't shine?

We'd better elect different people to represent us, and clean out our government bureaucracies of globalist appointees and we'd better get on it right away!

[Liberty Valance]

God Bless John Wayne

[ColdSteelTalon]

Sorry Japan, during WWII you deserved no sympathy. From the death marches of Bataan to the Mitsubishi mining corporation that used our soldiers as slave labor. The Atom bomb was too good for you. And the bomb saved millions of American soldiers lives.

Nuff Said.

[Jackknife]

Clint + Koolaid = Another Hollywierdo

[Wormwood]

Am I the only one seeing a parellel between Eastwood's Red Sun and Aeschylus's The Persians?

Yeah, probably. I blame the beer.

[A.A. Cunningham]

Most of those sitting on promotion boards aren't REMFers or pogues. They've been in the s***.

Grow some thicker skin, sweetheart.

BTW, a rifle isn't a gun.

[Protagoras]

"Controversial"? What's Controoversial about it?

A knowledge of history would be helpful in answering that question.

[AnAmericanMother]

Oh, forget it. You're deaf. I agreed with you on that four posts ago.

[Protagoras]

Without having seen either movie, the vast majority here have a strong opinion of them and know the motives of the director.

Everyone could have saved the expense of making the movies if they knew that the potential audience had a mystical "vision" of them in advance.

Sometimes this site is pathetic. (alternately, maybe I just expect too much from FReepers)

[Graybeard58]

A knowledge of history would be helpful in answering that question.

Knowledge of the threads replies would help you.

The "controversy" has been pointed out to me several times already but congratulations, yours was the rudest by far.

[ShadowDancer]

maybe because it was staged

No, it was not staged.