United Liberty

Tom Hanks has caught a great deal of controversy for comments he made regarding World War II:

“Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods,” he said. “They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different.”

In both interviews, he made the same conclusion:

“Does that sound familiar to what’s going on today?” he said on MSNBC, comparing the 60-year-old conflict to the modern war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This, of course, raised the ire of some very high-profile conservatives, including the immensely distinguished Victor Davis Hanson:

“Hanks’ comments were sadly infantile pop philosophizing offered by, well, an ignoramus,” wrote Victor Davis Hanson of Pajamas Media.

Despite the scholastic regard that should be held for Hanson, his comments are ridiculous. Tom Hanks is not Sean Penn. He is not an “igoramous.” He is a smart man who has immersed himself in American history, making some of the most intriguing and historically accurate films on the subject. Charlie Wilson’s War was a slice of American politics that was rare in its realism and its non-ideological illumination about current events, and it was not without merit that Saving Private Ryan has earned the praise of conservatives.

Hanks’ illusion that racism is as present in our policy toward the Middle East, in any way near how it was in World War II, is equally ridiculous. Racism is very much still alive, but it is a subtle and complex mutation of the prejudices of the Great War era. When the American president is a black man named Barack Hussein Obama, and generals of Lebanese/Palestinian descent, black secretaries of state and Asian law professors have been responsible for the crafting of American anti-terror policy, Hanks’ portrayal simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

When it comes to Americans deriding the Japanese as ’yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ during WWII, however, only a quick Google search will tell you that this was indeed the case. By brushing off Hanks’ comments, Hanson is denying a very relevant part of American psycho-history which illustrates the ability of a people at war to dehumanize one’s enemies.

Here’s a few examples of anti-Japanese propaganda during WWII:

It’s ugly stuff, and likely played no small role in Americans standing by as the Roosevelt administration interned 120,000 Japanese in camps. To deny its role is to deny history.