You can watch these very troubling 25 seconds below and understand why Tom Hanks would never have the backbone to leave the comfortable echo chamber of MSNBC and enter an environment where he might be challenged. After the actor is done defaming the war against Imperial Japan as a war of “racism and terror,” he doubles with his anti-American slander and says the same of today’s War on Terror. And no one at Morning Joe challenges him. Not Tom — Greatest Generation — Brokaw, not Scarborough, and Mika Brezezinski can’t wait to agree with him.
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Hanks made similarly outrageous statements in another interview, which I touched on earlier this week — comments that caught me completely off guard. As you might have read in Michael Broderick’s article from yesterday morning, “The Pacific” was a project Big Hollywood was eager to champion and cover. Obviously, we’ll have to see what Mr. Racism and Terror has in store for us on HBO over the coming weeks. But at this point you have to wonder if the Oscar-winner’s obvious issues regarding the War on Terror might not have colored what we’re about to see in his miniseries. Given the opportunity, Hanks has certainly been eager to tie together both wars into a damning but thoroughly indefensible political statement that portrays our country and military in the worst possible light.
We all assumed “The Pacific” would be another “Band of Brothers,” and maybe it will be. But much has changed since “Brothers,” a miniseries produced prior to 9/11 (the HBO premiere was Sept. 9th, 2001). The very real Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) that has taken over so much of Hollywood and turned otherwise impressive filmmakers into ham-handed propagandists hadn’t quite taken hold yet. However, today Hanks is showing all the symptoms. Will this affect “The Pacific?”
Over at Hot Air, Allahpundit thinks so and writes, “If you were expecting an island-hopping reprise of ‘Band of Brothers’ in this new miniseries, expect otherwise.”
And you can see why.
Something has changed:
But the context for Hanks’ history lessons has changed. Band of Brothers, HBO’s best-selling DVD to date, began airing two days before 9/11; The Pacific, his new 10-hour epic about the Pacific theater in World War II, plays out against a very different backdrop, when the country is weary of war and American exceptionalism is a much tougher sell. World War II in the European theater was a case of massive armies arrayed against an unambiguous evil. The Pacific war was mainly fought by isolated groups of men and was overlaid by a sense that our foes were fundamentally different from us. In that sense, the war in the Pacific bears a closer relation to the complex war on terrorism the U.S. is waging now, making the new series a trickier prospect but one with potential for more depth and resonance. “Certainly, we wanted to honor U.S. bravery in The Pacific,” Hanks says. “But we also wanted to have people say, ‘We didn’t know our troops did that to Japanese people.'”…
John Hinderacker at Power Line asks the rhetorical question: “Does Hollywood Make You Stupid?,” and then goes on to destroy Hanks’ argument:
What is happening today actually bears a considerable resemblance to the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. Contrary to Hanks’s thoughtless slander, before 1941 probably not a single American was interested in “annihilating [the Japanese] because they were different.” As evidenced by our laxity when it came to national defense. After Pearl Harbor, however, we had no choice but to swing into action–not to annihilate those who are different, but to defeat Japan and restore the peace. The Filipinos were “different” too, of course, so did we take time out to annihilate them? Um, no.
Likewise with the current conflicts. Prior to September 11, far from setting out to annihilate those who are “different,” we protected Muslims in Bosnia, tried to save Somalians from the warlords, and rescued Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. Notwithstanding endless provocations, Americans were happy to leave it at that until Islamic terrorists murdered 3,000 Americans. Once again, we had to swing into action. So, did we “annihilate” those “different” Afghans and Iraqis? No, we established democracies and tried to bring both of those countries into the modern world by, among other things, liberating their women. How can a person of normal intelligence, as Hanks no doubt is, be so blind to reality? Presumably it has to do with swimming in the perverse, liberal water of Hollywood.
Maybe “The Pacific” can rise above the ignorance of one of its creators. Having a millionaire actor label your selfless and noble sacrifice as “racism” and “terror” is one thing. But to have such a message forever imprinted on film is quite another.
For the sake of our Veterans let’s hope the BDS and the slander it manifests in “Our Jimmy Stewart” is confined to the thoughtless actor’s fevered mind.
A friend who works in the film industry and doesn’t share my politics emailed this morning: “Hanks has been a friend to Veterans for over a decade. You’re being unfair over one comment.”
It’s not as though Hanks said this just the one time. This is twice now in two different settings. And I’ve been in love with my wife for a quarter century, but that doesn’t get me off the hook if I say something untrue and hurtful. I still have to explain, apologize or both.
And if I say it twice…
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