Running "The War" Thread

[HejiraHenry]

I had an interruption so I'll miss the rest of tonight's episode.

Burns' style doesn't quite work with this one for some reason that escapes my small brain.

I'm not sure why, but I'll think about it.

It's too pro american for your taste.

Boom, seriously, let's keep this thread snark-free. Just as a novelty.

 

[JR]

I had an interruption so I'll miss the rest of tonight's episode.

Burns' style doesn't quite work with this one for some reason that escapes my small brain.

I'm not sure why, but I'll think about it.

It's too pro american for your taste.

Did I say that it was pro American? Uh, nope.

Once again you need to polish your reading comprehension skills.

This is an absolutely brilliant program but it's told from the American perspective.

Nothing wrong with that as far as I'm concerned.

Just let's not pretend it's the only perspective.

Go play with 21. You're much better at that than any sort of serious conversation about this...or anything, for that matter.

 

[Inky_Wretch]

Good stuff, as always from Burns.

The Hispanic story was clumsily tacked on at the end. It took a lot out of the first night's episode (the clumsy edit, not the story itself).

 

[Boom_70]

I had an interruption so I'll miss the rest of tonight's episode.

Burns' style doesn't quite work with this one for some reason that escapes my small brain.

I'm not sure why, but I'll think about it.

It's too pro american for your taste.

Did I say that it was pro American? Uh, nope.

Once again you need to polish your reading comprehension skills.

This is an absolutely brilliant program but it's told from the American perspective.

Nothing wrong with that as far as I'm concerned.

Just let's not pretend it's the only perspective.

Go play with 21. You're much better at that than any sort of serious conversation about this...or anything, for that matter.

You just told us that Burns program does not work for you and now you call it "absolutely brilliant"

 

[Fenian_Bastard]

I don't know.
I thought the Hispanic guy who fought on Guadalcanal and told the story about killing the POWs was very compelling.
I loved the guy from Minneapolis who talked about being 19 and suddenly being avle to be whatever you want.
I'm sold.

 

[dreunc1542]

I just finished typing up my grandfather's life story, he became a POW when the Japanese took over Corregidor. The stories I had to re-type from his time as a POW had me in tears, it's amazing what they went through.

 

[JackyJackBN]

It was an extremely nasty war, as Burns asserts in interviews and reports.

I used to work with an older (heh) Japanese fellow who spent the last couple of years of the war in Borneo. During his training in Kyushu, food was already running low, so they were fed only a bit of rice and lots of pumpkin. (Kabocha is squash to me, but he called 'em pumpkins.) He said he would never eat pumpkin again.

And that's the only war story he would ever tell me.

 

[Inky_Wretch]

I don't know.
I thought the Hispanic guy who fought on Guadalcanal and told the story about killing the POWs was very compelling.
I loved the guy from Minneapolis who talked about being 19 and suddenly being avle to be whatever you want.
I'm sold.

Right, I loved his story. Very compelling. But the insertion into it after that montage with the music was clumsy.

I wish Burns would have put it elsewhere and left the original ending intact.

 

[DanOregon]

I don't understand A. Stanley's need to bring Iraq into it, except for those few NYT readers who didn't realize there is a war in Iraq going on. Geez. How does this compare to Ollie North's show on Fox News? North does a good job of relating small parts and incidents that might otherwise be glossed over by the larger engagements.
God bless the vets.

 

[Fenian_Bastard]

I think Stanley was pointing out that Burns has been talking about Iraq on his press tour promoting the series, specifically in the context of shared sacrifice. She could have made that clearer.
I think, if I were at Auburn in the 1940's, I would have had a crush on that woman from Mobile. What a hoot.
Burns was really tough on MacArthur -- for whom my Navy Dad had no use either. I thought Midway got really short shrift, although the Guadalcanal setpiece was worth the time it got. Tonight's your night if you had relatives flying bombers over Europe, by the way.

 

[Dyno]

I don't know.
I thought the Hispanic guy who fought on Guadalcanal and told the story about killing the POWs was very compelling.
I loved the guy from Minneapolis who talked about being 19 and suddenly being avle to be whatever you want.
I'm sold.

Right, I loved his story. Very compelling. But the insertion into it after that montage with the music was clumsy.

I wish Burns would have put it elsewhere and left the original ending intact.

I completely agree, Inky. Very clumsily edited. The story fit right into the episode, but the placement was really off and took away from what would have been a more powerful ending.

 

[heyabbott]

I thought the juxtaposition of the Bataan Death March to the Japanese American forced relocations was interesting. Although no one really knew in the States about Bataan at the time of the imprisonment of the Japanese Americans.

The use of the term concentration camps for the Japanese Americans is hyperbole and is inflammatory considering the true concentration camps in Germany and Japan. The American reaction to Japanese Americans was racist, but no one was marched from Seattle to Kansas, no one was executed on the way and they weren't starved, beaten and experimented on.

Can't we just acknowledge the difference in degrees of horrible actions. What America did to the Japanese, while absolutely wrong, but does not bare any comparison to the Japanese treatment of Americans and the Nazi's treatment of anyone they disliked.

 

[Fenian_Bastard]

Manzanar was a concentration camp in the classic sense, which is the method by which the Brits invented them for the Boers in South Africa. (I'd argue Australia was the first concention camp if I were being snarky. Also Georgia.)
The Nazis turned the concentration camp into a center for industrialized murder.

 

[Boom_70]

I think Stanley was pointing out that Burns has been talking about Iraq on his press tour promoting the series, specifically in the context of shared sacrifice. She could have made that clearer.
I think, if I were at Auburn in the 1940's, I would have had a crush on that woman from Mobile. What a hoot.
Burns was really tough on MacArthur -- for whom my Navy Dad had no use either. I thought Midway got really short shrift, although the Guadalcanal setpiece was worth the time it got. Tonight's your night if you had relatives flying bombers over Europe, by the way.

I don't think they did a good job giving a sense of overall timeline and how much was going one between DEC '41 and DEC '42- . Too much time spent on Pacific war and not enough spent on debate leading to Operation Torch.

Maybe there is no way to really convey it but when you think about the type of decisions that FDR had to make in the year it is mind boggling.

 

[heyabbott]

Manzanar was a concentration camp in the classic sense, which is the method by which the Brits invented them for the Boers in South Africa. (I'd argue Australia was the first concention camp if I were being snarky. Also Georgia.)
The Nazis turned the concentration camp into a center for industrialized murder.

The Nazis turned concentration camps into more than industrialized murder. That's almost being benign. They used it for systemic slaughter, genocide, slave labor, extermination of women, children and the infirm, ritualized torture and medical experimentation.
The term, concentration camp, as used today is generally defined in that manner.

Referring to Manzanar as a concentration camp is like calling the American public school system, Vietnamese/Chinese-style Re-Education Camps.

 

[Fenian_Bastard]

Oh, balls, it's not.
Read some history, please. Then read what I posted. The concentration camp was invented by the Brits in South Africa as a place to "concentrate" the Boer population to keep it from waging guerrilla war, which, unlike the Japanese on the west coast of the US, the Boers actually were doing. That is precisely what we did with Japanese citizens at Manzanar and places like it. We ran concentration camps here. Get over it. We didn't run death camps.
How "industrialized murder" gets called "benign" in the fever swamp that is your brain is beyond me.
And Boom, I think Burns was right to narrow his focus in order to control the material and tell his story. Can't say I blame him. I think North Africa -- or, at least, Kasserine and the arrival of Patton -- comes up tonight.

 

[heyabbott]

Oh, balls, it's not.
Read some history, please. Then read what I posted. The concentration camp was invented by the Brits in South Africa as a place to "concentrate" the Boer population to keep it from waging guerrilla war, which, unlike the Japanese on the west coast of the US, the Boers actually were doing. That is precisely what we did with Japanese citizens at Manzanar and places like it. We ran concentration camps here. Get over it. We didn't run death camps.
How "industrialized murder" gets called "benign" in the fever swamp that is your brain is beyond me.
And Boom, I think Burns was right to narrow his focus in order to control the material and tell his story. Can't say I blame him. I think North Africa -- or, at least, Kasserine and the arrival of Patton -- comes up tonight.

Using the term concentration camp, TODAY, connotes death camp. Using it today to refer to the forced relocations of Japanese Americans sounds as if you are making the immoral/moral equivalence of America to Nazi/Japan of WWII.

That's typical of an immature and child-like intellect. Relativism and forced equivalence seems to be the mantra of weak minded left.

 

[Fenian_Bastard]

And mindless repetition of the same inaccurate information seems to be the mantra of the extremely silly nativist right.
You're talking very much like a fool now.
What we ran at Manzanar was a concentration camp in the original sense of the word. You can bellow in outrage to your heart's content, but it doesn't change that simple fact. To say so is not to equate the treatment of the inmates there with the treatment of the inmates in Dachau any more than pointing out that Danbury and abu Ghraib are both prisons establishes an "equivalence" in how inmates in both places are treated.
"Child-like" intellect, from the leader of this board's "The Negroes Stole Our Country" society.
It is to laugh.
Back to the series now, I think.

 

[jgmacg]

Sorry, 'Yab, but every major dictionary says you're wrong. And if you're uncomfortable with the term as it relates to American conduct in the world, then please don't research our suppression of the Philippine Insurrection.

 

[Fenian_Bastard]