I am a big fan of Tom Hanks’ work as an a comic, a dramatic actor, a producer, and in drag, but he has been reliably attached to what may end up being the most infuriating quote of the year. If not the most infuriating, then at least the most ignorant and irresponsible. In an interview with historian Douglas Brinkley in a Time magazine feature about his upcoming HBO series on World War II in the Pacific, Hanks said this:
“Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”
If you are not now running in circles, wide-eyed and screaming, you should be. Or you are Rosie O’Donnell.
American’s knowledge and comprehension of their nation’s history is dangerously lacking as it is. We don’t need celebrities who have, rightly or wrongly, acquired credibility in the field (in Hanks’ case, due to his performance in “Saving Private Ryan” and his producing of the HBO series “Band of Brothers”) engaging in disinformation. Hanks’ simple-minded four-way moral equivalency of the United States and the Japanese in World War II, the Japanese of that era and Radical Islam today, the U.S. and Radical Islam, and World War II and our current conflicts with Iran, the Taliban, and Al Qaeda may pass muster in an infantile Hollywood dominated by purveyors of make-believe who barely graduated from high school. In a universe where facts matter, however, Hanks’ reduction of epically complex conflicts into mere schoolyard racism manages to simultaneously slander America, misrepresent it, diminish its accomplishments and sacrifices, and make it dumber. This cannot be defended, and neither can the fact that Doug Brinkley, a genuine historian who knows better, didn’t stop Hanks mid-interview and say, “I’m sorry…I’m supposed to interview Tom Hanks, not Forrest Gump. Here are some history books to read and a complete DVD collection of “The World at War.” We’ll finish the interview when you know what you’re talking about.”
As I was fuming about Hanks’s idiocy, I found a superb piece by historian Victor Davis Hansen, who not only is even more upset about what Hanks said than I am, who also has the scholarship and skill to deliver the slam dunk rejoinder that his colleague Douglas Brinkley left in his locker. Read his whole excellent essay, and then send him a note of thanks, on behalf of the W.W. II veteran in your family. Here are some high points:
“…Hanks thinks he is trying to explain the multifaceted Pacific theater in terms of a war brought on by and fought through racial animosity. That is ludicrous. Consider:
1) In earlier times, we had good relations with Japan (an ally during World War I, that played an important naval role in defeating imperial Germany at sea) and had stayed neutral in its disputes with Russia (Teddy Roosevelt won a 1906 Nobel Peace Prize for his intermediary role). The crisis that led to Pearl Harbor was not innately with the Japanese people per se…but with Japanese militarism and its creed of Bushido that had hijacked, violently so in many cases, the government and put an entire society on a fascistic footing. We no more wished to annihilate Japanese because of racial hatred than we wished to ally with their Chinese enemies because of racial affinity…
2) How would Hanks explain the brutal Pacific wars between Japanese and Chinese, Japanese and Koreans, Japanese and Filipinos, and Japanese and Pacific Islanders, in which not hundreds of thousands perished, but many millions? In each of these theaters, the United States was allied with Asians against an Asian Japan…
3) Much of the devastating weaponry used on the Japanese (e.g., the B-29 fire raids, or the two nuclear bombs) were envisioned and designed to be used against Germany (cf. the 1941 worry over German nuclear physics) or were refined first in the European theater (cf. the allied fire raids on Hamburg and Dresden)..
Despite Hanks’ efforts at moral equivalence in making the U.S. and Japan kindred in their hatreds, America was attacked first, and its democratic system was both antithetical to the Japan of 1941, and capable of continual moral evolution in a way impossible under Gen. Tojo and his cadre. It is quite shameful to reduce that fundamental difference into a “they…us” 50/50 polarity. Indeed, the most disturbing phrase of all was Hanks’ suggestion that the Japanese wished to “kill” us, while we in turn wanted to “annihilate” them. Had they developed the bomb or other such weapons of mass destruction (and they had all sorts of plans of creating WMDs), and won the war, I can guarantee Hanks that he would probably not be here today, and that his Los Angeles would look nothing like a prosperous and modern Tokyo.
4) What is remarkable about the aftermath of WWII is the almost sudden postwar alliance between Japan and the U.S., primarily aimed at stopping the Soviets, and then later the communist Chinese. In other words, the United States, despite horrific battles in places like Iwo Jima and Okinawa, harbored little official postwar racial animosity in its foreign policy, helped to foster Japanese democracy, provided aid, and predicated its postwar alliances — in the manner of its prewar alliances — on the basis of ideology, not race….
5)… “Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”… is another unnecessary if asinine statement — if it refers to our struggle against radical Islam in the post 9/11 world. The U.S. has risked much to help Muslims in the Balkans and Somalia, freed Kuwait and Iraq in two wars against Saddam Hussein, liberated or helped to liberate Afghanistan both from the Russians and the Taliban, and has the most generous immigration policy toward Muslims of any country in the world, ensuring a degree of tolerance unimaginable to Muslims in, say, China or Russia…
It would be easy to say that Hanks knows about as much about history as historians do about acting, but that would be too charitable… In Hanks’ case, he is either ignorant and has done little real research, or in politically-correct fashion has taken a truth about combat in the Pacific (perceptions of cultural and racial difference often did intensify the savagery of combat) and turned it into The Truth about the origins and conduct of an entire war…
All in all, such moral equivalence (the Japanese and the U.S. were supposedly about the same in their hatreds) is quite sad, and yet another commentary on our postmodern society that is as ignorant about its own past as it is confused in its troubled present.”
Exactly.
Ethics Alarms 
I’m glad I didn’t see the Hank’s interview or I too would have lost it. Glad to see Hansen took up the cause to set the record straight. It should be required reading for high school students.
The Japanese looked the same before Pearl Harbor and we didn’t try to kill them then. This quote reminds me of the Time Machine scene from the movie “Idiocracy”.
Recently read an article in the frumforum that The Pacific, Tom Hank’s latest venture, can be a delight to novice historians. Though, history based docu-dramas have their place, I believe they may also be misleading, even if unintentionally. For example, after watching the Ten Commandments, Moses, in my mind, now looks like Heston and even has some of his mannerisms. Is not that something of a distortion of history? We should take into account that the purpose of those motion pictures is entertainment and not education.
Two points on that: 1) If it’s entertainment, then the producers shouldn’t talk like it’s history, and 2) if one is going to seriously misrepresent history, one should be clear about it—like “Inglorious Basterds.”