watched "The pacific"

[Marlin]

Sorry,, 1959.....

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053137/

[jake]

I'm going to continue watching it, but I did notice the American brutality part. Why is it Hollyweird never shows the atrocities that the Germans or the Japanese committed? How about the Bataan Death March? How about how they tortured and excecuted American Marines and soldiers? How about the Nanking massacre? The biological and chemical weapons testing they did on Chinese slaves? Fuck hollyweird.

Band of Brothers had a whole episode based on the 506th liberating a concentration camp. In reality, the 506th didn't do this, but Hollyweird wrote it in anyway to show the horrors of Nazism.

And a few years ago I'm pretty sure I remember watching a movie about the Holocaust (one of many, of course, but this one stuck with me because it won a lot of awards). Something about a list, or something. It was in black and white. Maybe I just dreamed it.

[Irving]

Schindler's List.

[Birddog1911]

You're right, they did cover that. Nazis are bad. It's funny though that you rarely see anything about the Japanese atrocities.

Band of Brothers had a whole episode based on the 506th liberating a concentration camp. In reality, the 506th didn't do this, but Hollyweird wrote it in anyway to show the horrors of Nazism.

And a few years ago I'm pretty sure I remember watching a movie about the Holocaust (one of many, of course, but this one stuck with me because it won a lot of awards). Something about a list, or something. It was in black and white. Maybe I just dreamed it.

[Irving]

It's funny though that you rarely see anything about the Japanese atrocities.

You mean how they dumped their televisions into our market and single-handedly collapsed the American TV manufacturing industry? Crichton wrote about that in Rising Sun.


Just kidding, I know what you mean. Well, actually I don't, because I've never had the opportunity to watch a movie that laid it out for me.

[Birddog1911]

My Granddad was a China Marine, and had pictures of one village that the Japs went into and slaughtered. I want to say it was Nanking, but I can't be 100% certain. The list is pretty long on crap that they did.

[Troublco]

It's interesting how the fact that we nuked two of their cities is the central point that always seems to come up when referring to Japan. Never mind that they murdered the civilian contractors they captured on Guam, the way they treated their captives, that they had their very own nuke program that was getting close to some success, they committed uncounted atrocities in Malaysia with all the Brits they captured (Bridge over the River Kwai is based on fact), and the Rape of Nanking where they tossed babies in the air and caught them on bayonets for an example. The list goes on and on.

They were planning on fighting until there wasn't a single live Japanese citizen left if we had invaded. And they wouldn't have batted an eye if they'd nuked us first. So I find it ironic at best that they are so put out about being nuked. As horrible a pair of events as they were, in the end the suffering that was averted massively outweighs what would have happened otherwise.

In my opinion nuking them doesn't even begin to outweigh the things perpetrated by the Japanese during the war and before it. They were treated so much better after the war than they treated anyone they conquered, it's almost impossible to assign a value to it.

[jake]

You're right, they did cover that. Nazis are bad. It's funny though that you rarely see anything about the Japanese atrocities.

I think that's more to do with the Pacific being the 'forgotten theater.' I certainly know a lot more about WWII in Europe and to a lesser extent Africa than I do about the Pacific.

Off the top of my head, though, a couple of years ago there was a movie about a raid to free US POWs in the Far East which showed some pretty brutal scenes of Japanese atrocities.

And as we're only into episode one of ten with The Pacific, I don't know what they are going to show. I watched the first episode on Sunday and I didn't notice any racism or torture.

If they do show scenes like that in the context of the wider war, it would still be a lot less disturbing to me than the fact that right now in Japan school textbooks essentially whitewash the things that they did.

[Marlin]

That would be the Burma theater of operations..