Clint Eastwood is out promoting his twin WWII movies, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. The subtext of these films does not exactly bolster Eastwood’s reputation for intellectual seriousness. Now his campaigning has reached a new low, with these remarks:
Of course, World War II wasn’t exactly “futile”–it achieved a number of important aims. But it certainly did illuminate the “human condition” of Japanese soldiers at the time. Here’s an excerpt from the diary of a Japanese officer stationed at Guadalcanal (from Dan van der Vat’s The Pacific Campaign), describing the treatment of two Allied POWs:
This isn’t a random atrocity carried out in the heat of battle by a couple of peasant grunts–this is organized vivisection performed for the intellectual edification of the officer class. Of course, that’s just one data point. When you pull back, the picture of Japanese atrocities is much worse. In the aftermath of the Doolittle raid, for instance, Japanese soldiers massacred 250,000 Chinese civilians–read that again: 250,000 men, women, and children–because they believed that the Chinese helped the American raiding party. (Not that it matters, but in reality, the Chinese aid was minimal.) And then there’s the Rape of Nanking, during the weeks between December 1937 and February 1938. The number of civilians who died there at the hands of the Japanese is somewhere between 150,000 and 300,000. But again, the details are telling. Here’s an excerpt from the diary of John Rabe, a German stationed in Nanking at the time (from The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe):
Contrary to Eastwood, there were not “bad guys” like this “everywhere.”
