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February 14, 2007
Clint, what happened to you?
Clint Eastwood, who released two films about the World War II battle for the Pacific Island of Iwo Jima, said this about his reasons for making Letters From Iwo, showing the fighting from the perspective of the Japanese military.
Clint Eastwood said his acclaimed picture "Letters from Iwo Jima" aimed to show the futility of war, after its European premiere at the 57th Berlin Film Festival.
[Eastwood] said "Letters" and "Flags of our Fathers" were a response to the war movies of his youth.
"I grew up in the war pictures in the 1940s where everything was propagandized. (In) all the movies, we were the good guys and everybody else were bad guys," he said.
"I just wanted to tell two different stories where there were good guys and bad guys everywhere and just tell something about the human condition."
As I said when the trailer was released:
Based on the Japanese preview, it looks like it emphasizes the universal nature of war and the toll it takes on the troops, an unfortunate piece of post-modern moral equivalence.
The Japanese were not merely fighting for God and country, motivated by a sense of honor and patriotism in the Western sense. Rather, they exceeded the racial animus of the Nazis, viewing not just different races -- but all peoples who were not Japanese as subhuman.
The fascist regime inculcated a value system that held that nothing was more virtuous than dying in defense of the Emperor; that an enemy who died bravely was to be honored, but one who surrendered was to be held in the greatest contempt.
Well, Eastwood's muddle-headed moral equivalence is disappointing -- and confirms what I thought were the reasons for his cinematic two-fer.
The obvious response to the glib, "War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing!" refrain is the also-glib-but-true response, "War never solved anything, other than ending slavery, the Holocaust and the brutal Japanese occupation of China and the Philippines."
The Weekly Standard's Jonathan Last agrees, pointing to the way Eastwood's noble Asian fighting men treated their Chinese subjects, and the kindness shown to Allied POWs.
He excerpts a passage from the diary of a Japanese officer.
9 September: Discovered the captain and two prisoners who escaped last night in the jungle and let the guard company guard them. To prevent them escaping a second time, pistols were fired at their feet, but it was difficult to hit them. . . .
The two prisoners were dissected while still alive by medical officer Yamaji and their livers were taken out, and for the first time I saw the internal organs of a human being. It was very informative.
And Last provides an eyewitness account of the Rape of Nanking, where the Japanese Army showed what it thought of their fellow Asians, killing between 150,000 to 300,000 civilians.
I also went down to the morgue in the basement and had them uncover the bodies that were delivered last night. Among them, a civilian with his eyes burned out and his head totally burned, who had likewise had gasoline poured over him by Japanese soldiers. The body of a little boy, maybe seven years old, had four bayonet wounds in it, one in the belly about as long as your finger.
Last also cites the mind-boggling statistic that after Jimmy Doolittle's raid on Tokyo -- the first American attack on the Japanese mainland in the months after Pearl Harbor -- the Japanese slaughtered 250,000 Chinese men, women and children, because they believed the Chinese had provided assistance to the Americans.
In fact, while failing to gear up for a genocidal campaign with the Teutonic efficiency of their German allies, the Japanese managed to exceed the sadism and cruelty of the Nazis in other ways.
As I've said before:
American and British POWs stood a good chance of surviving captivity if held by the otherwise monstrous Nazi regime, while the POWs in the "care" of the Japanese suffered an unbelievably high mortality rate. According to one source, the mortality rate for POWs held by the Germans was 1.2 percent; for those held in the Pacific Theater of Operations, an astonishing 37 percent.
The behavior of the Japanese Army during the war was entirely consistent with the values and ethics of Japanese society during the 1930s and 1940s, and the Geneva Conventions-defying executions of Allied airmen and soldiers -- photographed and featured in enemy publications -- helps explain the undying hatred many U.S. and U.K. vets held for their former enemies.
Notwithstanding Clint Eastwood's "deep thoughts," there was an objectively good side in the war. And an incontestably evil side, too. And, although I've said it before, if you have to ask which was which, then we're doomed.
Posted by Mike Lief at February 14, 2007 07:48 AM
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