Tom Hanks: Defiling American HIstory To Desecrate American Future?

Victor Davis Hanson remembers the 1st April 1945 U.S. invasion of Okinawa:

"The victory proved the most costly American campaign in the Pacific. Some 50,000 Americans were killed, went missing, or were wounded. The incredible carnage would help persuade the American government to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in hopes of avoiding an even more horrific invasion of the mainland."

Yet the reason why Americans fought the Japanese incurring such terrible costs as these (and others) is apparently beyond the appreciation of fifty-four year old actor Tom Hanks:

"From the outset, we wanted to make people wonder how our troops can re-enter society in the first place," Hanks says. "How could they just pick up their lives and get on with the rest of us? 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?"

As VDH says in his article, the fight against the Japanese wasn't because they were "yellow" it was because Japan had become a fascist society with a belligerent government who had attacked the United States first. What Tom Hanks is doing there is the same thing J.Michael Cole was doing in his editorial last week - choosing to frame an event in terms incidental to the context rather than terms essential to it. This is the anti-conceptual technique of rendering events into such a low level of resolution that the larger context of which they are a part - in this case the value of freedom to which the American military was committed - is lost. Note also all that stuff about "gods", when actually the most important word was freedom. Notice also the first sentence: "

From the outset, we wanted to make people wonder how our troops can re-enter society in the first place," Hanks says. "How could they just pick up their lives and get on with the rest of us?"

Given what follows it, his question can only be rhetorical because the literal answer is: by just doing it. Soldiers do witness terrible things. So what? They cannot be undone and there is nothing to be done except the effort to get on with your own life. But no, the question is rhetorical. What was the intended effect here? Perhaps it was, as Saul Alinsky would have put it, to "rub raw the sores of resentment" among the American underclass - to look upon veterans with their State privileges and think to themselves: "why does he deserve that money" and I don't?" I had never thought of Tom Hanks as a cunt before, but now I'm not at all sure that he isn't a cunt.