The Oscars Celebrate Mass Murder, Rape, Cannibalism and Ethnic Cleansing

The Clint Eastwood directed companion piece to his flop Flags of Our Fathers; Letters From Iwo Jima has been nominated for a best picture Oscar. This is a movie that treats the mass murderers of the Japanese military that were responsible for atrocities that stagger the mind and ethnic cleansing, as noble men and heroes.

Here's how the LA Times described it:

"Eastwood had planned to focus solely on the American story and its aftermath, but as he was developing his film version of the bestselling book by James Bradley and Ron Powers, he became intrigued with the plight of the 20,000 Japanese soldiers who had burrowed into the island's volcanic rock to await their fate at the hands of the invading Marines. That group, left on the island in hopes that they could forestall an invasion of Japan, was subject to some of the most savage fighting of the war. When the 39-day battle was finally over, fewer than 1,500 are thought to have survived."

The LA Times and Eastwood practically drip tears for their "plight" as they "await their fate" and are "subject to savage fighting" (as if they were passive actors) and tragically those evil "invading marines" won leaving only 1,500 of them alive.

While these 20,000 Japanese soldiers awaited their plight they massacred and tortured captured Marines. Some were eaten alive so their fellow Marines could hear them screaming. The meat from the butchered soldiers was put into tins as rations for the Japanese troops.

Love Letters from Iwo Jima is basically a love letter to General Tadamichi Kuribayashi. As the movie's scriptwriter Iris Yamashita tells it,

"The first document I looked at was a compilation of letters from Gen. Kuribayashi to his family during the time he had been a military envoy in the United States. Most of them were addressed to his son when he was a toddler. As I read them, I was hit with the same impression that Clint must have had when those letters had inspired him to make the movie. It was hard to believe that this soft-hearted, loving father was the commanding general of the Japanese forces on Iwo Jima. The letters were filled with doodles and caricatures and humorous sentiment. You could tell that he adored and missed his son."

Funny thing yesterday I was reading the paper and it described how a cop killer's sister took the stand to offer testimony on what a loving and caring human being he was... this was before he shot two cops who were begging for their lives.

Now we have some lovely letters from General Kuribayashi to his son and wife, which shows he loved his family. I'm sure you can find plenty of letters like that among the Nazi high command as well. There are no shortage of lovely letters written by murderers, rapists and child molesters in America's jails to their loved ones. Evil people are perfectly capable of being sentimental and loving. They're not some sort of creatures apart from human feelings and emotion. If they were we couldn't hold them accountable for what they do.

Hitler really loved his dog. He went into mourning when it got sick, even as he was murdering millions. General Kuribayashi wrote lovely letters to his son, even as his men tortured and brutally murdered captured American prisoners. Before Iwo Jima, General Kuribayashi commanded a regiment in Manchuria and a brigade in northern China. He served as chief of staff of the Twenty-third Army during the capture of Hong Kong.

To put that into perspective, some of the worst Japanese atrocities took place in Manchuria and the capture of Chinese cities occasioned some of the worst of the Japanese wartime savagery. Soldiers held competitions for how many Chinese they could shoot. Mass rapes of women, from little girls to old women, took place everywhere. When the soldiers were done the victims were mutilated and finished off in a way I don't even want to describe. The lucky ones were forced into prostitution for the Japanese Army. There are photographs of the unlucky ones lying in ditches.

One Japanese soldier described smashing a baby's head against a wall and feeling proud that he did it for the Emperor. That was the reality of the Japanese military, true allies of the Nazi Third Reich. These were not the random acts of individuals. These were orders passed down from the Japanese military to soldiers. The murders and rapes did not happen at random, they were mandatory. That is not a reality you will see in this repulsive movie that poses the monsters responsible for these acts as tragic heroic figures.

Here is a brief excerpt from the testimony of a British soldier of what happened during the capture of Hong Kong. General Kuribayashi was the Chief of Staff for the Twenty Third Army during the capture of Hong Kong.

"Early in the morning of Christmas day the Japanese captured St Stephen's Coll-ege outside the walls of Fort Stanley. On their arrival at the Ed Cross hospital, and without one word of peace-parlay, they immediately shot and bayoneted the two Medical Officers, Dr George Black and Captain Whitney of the Royal Army Medical Corps. Captain Whitney had been walking towards the Japanese Officer in charge and was carrying a white flag plus a Red Cross flag, they were still wearing their white hospital clothing and Red Cross armbands. The Japanese entered the hospital, and amid the screaming, they ripped off bandages and field dressings from the wounded. They then proceeded to bayonet 60 of the 90 severely wounded laying helpless in their beds, one young Chinese nurse was bayoneted along with her patient when she tried to protect him.

Later, four Chinese and seven British nurses were put in one room, about one hundred orderlies, doctors and stretcher bearers were herded into another room. During the afternoon the male captives were taken out, two or three at a time, and were dismembered limb from limb. They chopped off fingers, sliced off ears, cut out tongues, and stabbed out eyes before they killed them, some were allowed to escape in order to tell the Fort Stanley defenders what was happening. In the other room the nurses were screaming, they were tied down on beds of corpses on which they were raped.

At some time in the evening the four Chinese nurses and then the three youngest of the English nurses were put to death by bayoneting. About then negotiations with the defenders at Fort Stanley began to progress, the last four of the elder British nurses were locked in a room and left alone. During the night Fort Stanley surrendered, and in the morning British prisoners were brought into the hospital to clean up. It was then that they released the four surviving, gibbering nurses. The people cleaning up waded in blood as they gathered the corpses from the execution room to prepare them for burial. They carried away an hysterical British Lieutenant who was the husband of one of the three British nurses who had been abused and then killed. For the first of the Allied war captives, the years of imprisonment had begun, and for some of the surviving nurses, years of brothel duty for Japanese soldiers began.

Sadly this is not the end of the horror Christmas Story, there were other hospitals, and a Convent, involved in similar atrocities by the Japanese invaders. i.e. Silerian Mission: The Ridge at Wong Nei Chong Gap: Eucliffe Castle: Repulse Bay and the Jockey Club at Happy Valley."

This was the brutal horrific reality of fighting the Japanese in WW2. While Japan has spent the decades since WW2 wrapped up in revisionist history treating the war as an atrocity against them committed by the Americans and endlessly commemorating Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the average Chinese and Korean thinks two atom bombs weren't enough. But liberal filmmakers like Clint Eastwood are happy to portray any enemies of America as noble heroes all the while portraying the American commanders in Flags of Our Fathers as cynical and exploitative.

To achieve this goal of smearing America they will whitewash any atrocities no matter how unimaginably horrific. That's what Eastwood has done here. That's what Hollywood political film making is all about. Whether it's the Communists who are routinely treated as heroes in Hollywood particularly if they ever had to *gasp* testify before Congress on whether they were actually Communists or not. Whether it's Arab terrorists who turn out to just be protesting injustice. Whether it's the Japanese in WW2 or the Indians in the 19th century; any enemy of America is welcome.

The movie I'd like to make would be Science Fiction. It would show Clint Eastwood slipping through a hole in time back to Iwo Jima where he's captured by the Japanese and they can find out if there's any good eating on liberal Hollywood directors after all.