Tom Hanks is truly a National Treasure, artistically speaking. No one has ever acted better with a face painted ball. Regrettably, Mr. Hanks has moved into an unscripted narrative in which he is clueless. America is not now and never has been a racist nation, sands our war of western expansion subduing native american indians.
Overlooking this one terrible blemish on our mid-nineteenth century history, (slavery was an unspeakable evil never abided by other than one region of the country) for which I do believe that we have sought to make just amends, cultural, financial and in the historic record, Mr. Hanks chose to compare our military response to the "Day that will Live in Infamy" with the manner in which we have defended ourselves against the radical Islamic terrorists - racially charged hate enflamed by our national conception that these enemies were/are somehow less than fully human. Nonsense, I say.
We fought total war in both Europe and in the Pacific to win as quickly as possible, thereby ending the suffering of all civilian populations involved as soon as possible. We attacked both enemy homeland residential/industrial cities relentlessly, killing both the capacity and
willingness of Germans and Jap civilian populations to pursue hostilities. No meaningful differences in strategy or tactics were utilized against either the master arian race or those yellow bastards. Indeed, the architect of the bombing campaign over Germany as well as Japan was the same individual, U.S. General Curtis LeMay, the developer of saturation, carpet bombing of upwards of contiguous, 20 mile square target zones in a single night's aircraft bombings.
What about the use of the Atomic bomb, you ask? Surely, the most straight forward answer is that the A-bomb was not perfected prior to Germany's surrender. Would the Bomb have been dropped on Berlin had it been available? Military planning records and President Truman tell us, yes. Nor did the former residents of Dresden, Germany deem themselves overly pampered when they were firebombed to death by the tens of thousands nitely for three straight days when the US dropped hundreds of tons of incendiary explosives on this city. These weapons of mass annihilation caused a vaporizing firestorm very similar to the blast effects of the A-bomb. The only difference is that the A-bomb caused chronic radiation sickness in the victims - unknown and unintended consequence to the US military. Still, was it more hate driven than the generals awareness of the consequences of being incinerated at 2500 degrees F. ? Hardly.
So, that even handed US war fighting in WWII stands well the test of time, and compares well with our nation's defense against Islamic radicals, who upon being interned at Gitmo have uniformly gained substantial weight, gotten full access to all recognized islamic religious materials prescribed for their daily observances, including clean prayer rugs always correctly oriented to Mecca, as well as individual and group recreational facilities.
Accordingly, I say to spoiled Tom-Boy: go tell it to the marines that they lived and died by the thousands throughout the Pacific, carrying out shameful war crimes in saving our country.
