The latest leftist kerfuffle is that the official West Point alumni association abruptly disinvited Tom Hanks from a ceremony that was to have awarded him the Sylvanus Thayer Award, which is given to “outstanding” non-West Point graduates who exemplify “Duty, Honor, Country.” Democrats, of course, are saying that the Trump administration put pressure on the alumni association because Tom Hanks is a well-known Democrat party supporter who nastily lampoons conservatives.
I say that it’s because, when Obama was president, Hanks freely attacked the U.S. military’s actions during both WWII and the War in Afghanistan. His support for the military is a calculated career move that has nothing to do with his real values.
Image by AI.
My problem with Hanks is what he said about America and the military when he was promoting The Pacific, a miniseries about the American fight in the Pacific during WWII, a show he produced. Keep in mind that Tom Hanks earned a great deal of respect from veterans and active-duty military personnel over the years due to his acting in Saving Private Ryan, as well as his role in producing Band of Brothers and The Pacific.
These actions were smart business decisions, but they did nothing to change his core leftist belief about the American military. Why do I say that? Because of what he said in an interview with Time Magazine in 2010, when American troops were still fighting and dying in Afghanistan:
“Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods,” he told the magazine. “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?”
Nor was that just a one-off mistake. The same article linked above notes that he said much the same thing when appearing on Morning Joe:
“‘The Pacific’ is coming out now, where it represents a war that was of racism and terror. And where it seemed as though the only way to complete one of these battles on one of these small specks of rock in the middle of nowhere was to - I’m sorry - kill them all. And, um, does that sound familiar to what we might be going through today? So it’s-- is there anything new under the sun? It seems as if history keeps repeating itself.”
Did you get that? American troops were and are racist murderers whose sole goal is to kill people because they are “different”?
What a total schmuck.
The Japanese initiated America’s entry into World War II by launching an unprovoked attack against the American military at Pearl Harbor, killing 2,403 Americans. America had two choices: Say, “Oh, that’s fine,” or “We will destroy you.” Fortunately, back in the day, even Democrats refused to take an attack like that lying down.
What anti-American ignoramuses like Hanks—who ought to have known better, given the miniseries he produced—don’t know is how unbelievably brutal the Bushido Japanese were—and I say that as someone who loves visiting modern Japan and has great respect for today’s Japanese people.
When the Japanese invaded Nanking (now Nanjing), China, in 1937, they massacred around 50,000 civilians in the first five days of the attack. By the time they were finished three months later, they had killed 100,000 to 200,000 civilians. (The numbers are disputed, but even the lower figures are heinously high.)
In Indonesia (then the Dutch East Indies), only 70,000 indigenous Javanese people survived from the 260,000 people the Japanese conscripted as slaves to build the Burma-Thailand railway. The Japanese also put the entire Dutch civilian population into concentration camps. I know a lot about that because my mother was one of those civilians. Overall, 4,000,000 people are estimated to have died in Java alone thanks to the Japanese.
R. J. Rummel consolidated more numbers for the slaughter the Japanese military inflicted across the Far East, and they are horrific. They killed 138,000 POWs and internees. (Don’t even get me started on the Bataan Death March, a level of sadism that would have impressed even the Nazis.)
The Japanese conscripted almost 5.5 million Koreans for forced labor (and that’s not including the “comfort women” forced into prostitution), with estimates ranging from 270,000 to 810,000 worked to death or killed over six years. The total number of deaths from working on the Burma-Thailand railroad is probably 600,000 to 1,610,000 Asian laborers (Javanese, Koreans, Thais, Chinese, etc.). And then there were the massacres, with hundreds of thousands killed from China to the Malayan peninsula.
In other words, those “slant-eyed dogs” (to use Hanks’s term) killed millions of other Asian people and ferociously abused millions more. Our American military, which suffered 108,504 deaths and 173,360 wounded, along with its Allies, liberated all those people. But Hanks maligned them as racist killers. What a schmuck.
In Afghanistan, despite these leftist canards, our troops were not racist baby killers. In retrospect, it may have been a poorly thought-out war, but the fact remains that the Taliban had provided a safe haven for Osama bin Laden, the architect of 9/11, and that they were generally a safe haven for the Islamists waging war against the West. And their values are vile. Only a vicious fool would pretend moral relativism when talking about people who, most recently, have left women to die slowly in earthquake rubble...because they’re women.
The leftists defamed our troops, but the fact is that the American military fought Taliban troops in the time-honored way of war: Kill or be killed. Only a schmuck would say otherwise.
So yes, it was absolutely the right decision not to give a West Point honor to Hanks. He’s an anti-American, anti-military schmuck who’s profited mightily over the years from pretending otherwise.