How do you get yourself made into a national icon on the cover of Time …

… where you are celebrated for the ultimate liberal achievement—“redefining America’s past”?

You do it by saying things like this:

“The Pacific” now is coming out where it really represents a war that was of racism and terror, and it seemed as though the only way to complete one of these battles on these small specks of rock in the middle of nowhere was to—I’m sorry—kill them all. And does that sound familiar to what we might be going through today? So it’s—is there anything new under the sun? It seems as if history keeps repeating itself.

And by saying things like this:

Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as “yellow, slant-eyed dogs” that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?

There are so many things one would have to say to respond adequately to these sub-moronic statements by Tom Hanks. Here is just one. Is this fool not aware that the reason those islands could be conquered only by killing all the Japanese soldiers on them was that the Japanese would not surrender—and that, in the early battles, the Japanese kept killing Marines after they had pretended to surrender to them? Having produced an entire television series about the war in the Pacific, does Hanks not know that the battles for the Pacific islands became savage battles of extermination not because of our feelings about the Japanese, but because of the Japanese’ actions which made that outcome unavoidable?

See John Nolte’s very intelligent responses to Hanks. Here Nolte shows a video of the first statement above and comments on it. Here he responds to Hanks’s even more vicious anti-American statement that was lovingly memorialized in Time by liberal historian Douglas Brinkley. Nolte is too approving of our policies in Iraq and Afghanistan. But that’s not the point here. The point is that Hanks, in sheer liberal ignorance and bigotry against white America, portrays our actions in the Pacific in World War II and in Iraq and Afghanistan today as the opposite of what they are; he portrays America’s ultra-liberal campaign to give other people democracy as a Nazi-like genocide of other people because they look different. It’s hard to imagine a worse smear on America than what Hanks has said, and it should never be forgotten.

Most unusually, the conservative news site CNS (hmm, is that what CNS stands for?) got an exclusive interview with Hanks about his “racism and terror” comment. He stood by it, but also shows that he is an incoherent thinker. In a society dominated by liberalism, even a “nice” guy like Hanks is a vicious liberal.

I never read John Nolte before, but I wish there were a hundred more like him. Unlike many conservative writers on the Web, he doesn’t just throw brickbats at a liberal, but brings out the real meaning of his remarks and forcefully and eloquently condemns him for it.

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David B. writes:

Here is a blog entry from the LA Times by one Patrick Goldstein telling how Tom Hanks is “the right wing’s new bogeyman.”

LA replies:

Yes, conservatives never have reasons to be outraged at a person. They’re just looking for someone to hate, just as they did with the Japanese, and the Iraqis, and everyone in the world who is not like themselves.

Charles T. writes:

Hanks is despicable. Liberals conveniently forget about the Japanese occupation and subsequent murders of civilians in Nanking, China. Iris Chang wrote a book about this called “The Rape of Nanking.” Civilians were murdered. Women were systematically raped and then murdered. The book is available at Amazon.

The Japanese were the villains in Nanking and they were the racists in this war.

I would also recommend the movie “The Great Raid” as a reminder of Japanese cruelty in WWII. Although the film writers took some liberties with the facts, the film depicts a raid by U.S. and Phillipino soldiers to rescue American POWs in a Japanese prison camp. The opening scenes of the film show the Japanese herding American POWs into a bunker and then setting it on fire. The motivation for the raid was to keep the Japanese from executing additional numbers of defenseless American prisoners.

Daniel S. writes:

If it was white racism that led to war between the US and Japan, what led to the war between white Germans and Italians and white Brits, Americans, Frenchmen, and Russians? And as I recall it was Japan that first attacked the US, not the other way around. The crimes committed by the Japanese against the Chinese rivals many of the crimes of Hitler against the Poles and other Eastern European peoples. Hanks is an idiot and should offer an apology to all surviving World War II veterans.

LA replies:

Hanks’s reply to criticism (see his CNS interview) is that that he’s heard U.S. soldiers make racist statements about Muslims. In his mind, because racism is the transcendent evil, and because individual soldiers have made racist statements about Muslims, that’s enough to prove that what we are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan is annihilating all Iraqis and Afghans because they are different from us. Such is the mental process of a liberal. Now if someone pointed out to Hanks, as John Nolte points out, that far from annihilating the Japanese we helped rebuild the country and treated the Japanese as our allies, with similar points being made about Iraq and Afghanistan, that might bring Hanks up short for a moment and he might admit that it’s true that we did not literally annihilate those people. But as soon as that conversation was over, he would return to his fantasy world in which Americans go around annihilating peoples because they are different from us.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 14, 2010 06:14 PM | Send