I have one of those hard-drive TV recorders and during my convalescence I have been catching up on some of the programs that I missed. I have now finished watching HBO's The Pacific.
A Tom Hanks/Steven Spielberg collaboration, it attemts to do for the war against the Japanese what Band of Brothers did for the war against the Germans.
The Pacific war was very different from the European war, and we in Europe don't know much about it. It was a dirtier and more brutal war against an enemy that would not surrender. In a way it was a religious war. Emperor worship was a religion of honor/shame. Christian America believed in sin/forgiveness. Honor/shame takes no prisoners.
In the end America won, not because its soldiers were braver or more virtuous, but because it had better technology.
At one point civilians were ushered forward by the retreating Japanese forces. One woman offered her baby to the American soldiers only to be revealed to be wearing a suicide bomb belt. This could only have been meant to be for us to draw a resemblance to Islamic terrorists who have a similar honor/shame life view. Perhaps the answer in Afghanistan is better technology.
Doc, I take it you regard soldiers with an honor/shame ethic as equally virtuous as those with the Christian/forgiveness ethic.
ReplyDeleteNo, I actually think that not all cultures are equal.
ReplyDeleteLeftists claim that America is the ultimate terrorist nation because of such things as the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the fire bombings of Dresden.
ReplyDeleteI wonder what you think about this.
The Pacific gives absolute justification for the A bombing of Japan. The British were just as much to blame for Dresden and I think it was just retribution for London, Coventry, Plymouth, Bristol, Southampton and many other victims of German bombing.
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