The lies of Hiroshima live on, props in the war crimes of the 20th century
By John Pilger (THE GUARDIAN, 06/08/08):
When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then walked down to the river and met a man called Yukio, whose chest was still etched with the…
Long March to an Apology
By Mindy Kotler, the director of Asia Policy Point, a research center that studies Asian regional security (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 26/05/08):
Lester Tenney, an 87-year-old veteran of World War II, plans to travel to Japan today to seek a meeting with the prime minister and an apology for the hardship and misery he and other American prisoners of war endured in that country. For a variety of reasons, beginning with the State Department’s stance on the issue, it is an apology that he is unlikely to receive.
In the fall of 1940, Mr. Tenney enlisted in the 192nd Tank Battalion, Company…
The last excuse for the Iraq war is founded on a myth
By Peter Wilby, a former editor of the New Statesman (THE GUARDIAN, 25/04/08):
Now it is clear that Saddam Hussein had no WMD, that al-Qaida has become stronger in Iraq, and that liberal democracy has failed to spread through the Middle East, one fallback justification for the Iraq invasion remains: it overthrew a murderous, fascist dictator.
Even if it went catastrophically wrong, runs the argument, the invasion had a good, liberal, humanitarian cause embedded in it. In that sense, as Tony Blair often suggested, it was like the second world war. Much of what the allies did between 1939 and 1945 -…
Yes, It Was a Good War
By Richard Cohen (THE WASHINGTON POST, 01/04/08):
Nicholson Baker, a supremely talented novelist, has written a surprising book of nonfiction titled “Human Smoke.” It is composed primarily of snippets taken from contemporary newspapers in the run-up to World War II and makes the daring argument that the war — our supposedly “good” war — was not good at all. We shouldn’t have fought it.
To my mind, the book is dead wrong and very odd. This, though, has not stopped it from getting a respectable front-page review in the Los Angeles Times Book Review — “It may be one of the most important books…
Andrée de Jongh, una mujer extraordinaria
Por Henrike Knörr (EL CORREO DIGITAL, 07/12/07):
En agosto de 1941, una joven belga de 24 años, pequeña y atractiva, se presentó en el consulado británico de Bilbao. Aquella mujer era Andrée de Jongh, pero todos la llamaban ‘Dédée’. Hasta entonces había trabajado como agente de arte y como enfermera, pero una idea muy distinta le bullía en la cabeza. En la conversación trató de persuadir al vicecónsul de su idea de organizar una red para rescatar a pilotos aliados y llevarlos a través de Francia y España, de modo que volvieran a Londres vía Lisboa o Gibraltar. Ante el escepticismo…
Life After Wartime
By Bob Greene, the author of Duty, a book about his father and Paul Tibbets, and the forthcoming When We Get to Surf City (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 12/11/07):
My mother, who is 88, told me last month that it had been a long time since she’d seen Paul Tibbets in the Bob Evans restaurant on the east side of Columbus, Ohio. She thought this was odd; she ate lunch there so often, and he ate lunch there so often, that his absence worried her.
When he died this month at age 92, the obituaries centered, of course, on the controversy over the…
The Story We Needed Ken Burns to Tell
By Cecilia Alvear, an independent television producer, and a former president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (THE WASHINGTON POST, 22/09/07):
There’s an application on my computer called the “Ken Burns effect.” It can dress up my picture slideshows by inserting pans and zooms, adding a feeling of motion to the still images. It mimics the technique filmmaker Ken Burns uses to hold the attention of viewers in his epic documentaries, which rely heavily on historic paintings and photos.
As a Latina, I’ve unfortunately run across another kind of Ken Burns effect, one that leaves Hispanics largely invisible in those documentaries.
For ”…
When War Was The Answer
By George F. Will (THE WASHINGTON POST, 02/09/07):
On a bluff above the sand and a half-mile from the ocean’s edge at low tide, which was the condition when the first Allied soldiers left their landing craft, a round circle of concrete five feet in diameter provides a collar for a hole in the ground. On the morning of June 6, 1944, the hole was Wid erstandsnest (nest of resistance) 62, a German machine gun emplacement.
Hein Severloh had been in it since shortly after midnight, by which time U.S. aircraft were droning overhead, having dropped young American paratroopers Severloh’s age behind the beaches to…
Yes, George Bush does recall a British wartime prime minister: Chamberlain
By Lynne Olson, a former White House correspondent for the Baltimore Sun (THE GUARDIAN, 23/08/07):
George Bush’s favourite role model is, famously, Jesus, but Winston Churchill is close behind. The US president - who was yesterday again comparing the struggle in Iraq with the allies’ efforts in the second world war - admires the wartime prime minister so much that he keeps what he calls “a stern-looking bust” of Churchill in the Oval Office. “He watches my every move,” Bush jokes. These days, Churchill would probably not care for much of what he sees.
I thought a great deal about Churchill while…
An American Hajj
By Charles a Krohn, deputy director of public affairs for the American Battle Monuments Commission (THE WASHINGTON POST, 12/08/07):
Muslims are obliged to make at least one trip to the holy city of Mecca during their lifetime. This pilgrimage is known as the hajj. It is mandatory for men, voluntary but encouraged for women. A basic dress code ensures that there’s no visible difference between rich and poor, weak and powerful. This simple requirement unites the faithful.
I started thinking about the hajj in the spring, when my wife and I visited nine American military cemeteries in Europe. With the exception of the Normandy…
Terrible, but not a crime
By Oliver Kamm, the author of Anti-Totalitarianism: the Left-Wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy (THE GUARDIAN, 06/08/07):
Today is Hiroshima day, the anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb. As the wartime generation passes on, our sense of gratitude is increasingly mixed with unease regarding one theatre of the second world war. There is a widespread conviction that, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, America committed acts that were not only terrible but also wrong.Disarmament campaigners are not slow to advance further charges. Greenpeace maintains that a different American approach might have prevented the cold war, and argues that new…
Nationalists are exploiting history as discontent grows
By Gyula Hegyi, a Hungarian socialist member of the European parliament (THE GUARDIAN, 11/04/07):
Across central and eastern Europe, nationalists are exploiting the painful history of the second world war to whip up anti-Russian feeling and rehabilitate the far right as social and economic discontent grows - and the process is mirrored in Russia. The latest in a string of such moves is the decision by the Polish authorities to block the reopening of the permanent Russian exhibition at the site of the Auschwitz death camp because of its description of some of its victims (from annexed pre-war Polish territory) as…
We won’t forget we were victims of both Nazi and Soviet occupation
By Margus Laidre, the ambassador of Estonia in London. Response to An insult to our war dead (THE GUARDIAN, 16/03/07):
Konstantin Kosachev claims that Estonia now permits SS rallies - but plans to pull down memorials to those who died fighting fascism (An insult to our war dead, March 6). This is not true. Different colours can be used to paint history. For Russia the years 1941-45 mean the great patriotic war, in which the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union and were defeated. For Estonia, alongside Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, the second world war began two years earlier in August 1939, when…
An insult to our war dead
By Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the international affairs committee of the Russian Duma (THE GUARDIAN, 06/03/07):
The marks of the second world war can be seen all over Europe, in restored buildings, destroyed neighbourhoods, war cemeteries, painful memories and memorials to the millions who died in the war against nazism. In almost all countries the memorials are treated with respect. In Normandy fallen British and German soldiers lie in adjacent cemeteries. Their graves are well kept, so that families may visit their last resting place, and new generations be reminded of the horrors of war.
But in Estonia a new law threatens…
Justice for the Forgotten Internees
By Xavier Becerra and Dan Lungren, a Democrat and a Republican U.S. representative of California (THE WASHINGTON POST, 19/02/07):
Art Shibayama is an American who served in the Army during the Korean War. Like many veterans, Cpl. Shibayama was not born in the United States. He was born in Lima, Peru, to Japanese Peruvian parents. Until 1942, Shibayama, his two brothers and three sisters lived comfortably with their parents and grandparents, all of whom had thriving businesses. However, after America entered World War II, his family was forcibly removed from Peru, transported to the United States and held in a government-run internment…
Fanning the flames
By Stuart Jeffries (THE GUARDIAN, 23/12/06):
Beneath Dresden lay the catacombs. Towards the end of the second world war, the authorities decided that these cellars under the beautiful baroque Old Town could provide cover from British air raids. On February 13 1945, the bombers arrived and many civilians fled below to avoid being killed by shrapnel or crumbling buildings, or being burned alive.But, writes Jorg Friedrich in his book The Fire: the Bombing of Germany 1940-45, “this tightly meshed underground construction was a landscape of insanity”. Such was the incendiary impact of the bombing that heat, gases, flames and smoke whipped through…
Stalingrado en estéreo
Por Félix de Azúa, escritor (EL PAÍS, 10/12/06):
Son cosas que sólo suceden una vez en la vida, casualidades irrepetibles. En este caso, asistir a la batalla de Stalingrado desde dos perspectivas opuestas, la primera situada en el frente ruso, la segunda en las líneas alemanas. En ambas ocasiones conduce la visita un guía infalible: el primero es Vassili Grossman cuya novela Vida y destino está compuesta por un mosaico de situaciones y personajes cuya vida y cuyo destino, según reza el título, se van a jugar en la ciudad del Volga. El segundo Jonathan Littell, ganador del último premio Goncourt con…
A Day of Infamy, Two Years of Hard Work
By Robert Trumbull, (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 07/12/06):
Here, 64 years late, are edited excerpts from a dispatch sent to The New York Times by Robert Trumbull, the paper’s correspondent at Pearl Harbor. It details a triumphant but mostly forgotten story of World War II: the salvage effort that rebuilt the Pacific Fleet after the Japanese attack.
A city of seamen, engineers, divers, carpenters, welders, pipe fitters and other industrial workers arose overnight at the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard. Its slogan was “We keep them fit to fight,” and within two years the yard raised or salvaged all the damaged ships except…
La trastienda del 60.º aniversario
La trastienda del 60.º aniversario. Uffe Ellemann Jensen, ministro de Asuntos Exteriores de Dinamarca de 1982 a 1993 (LA VANGUARDIA, 11/05/05).
Putin, Stalin y la derrota del nazismo
Putin, Stalin y la derrota del nazismo. K. S. Karol es periodista y ensayista francés de origen polaco, especializado en cuestiones del Este. Entre los 15 y los 22 años vivió en la URSS, donde combatió en el Ejército Rojo (EL PAIS, 10/05/05).
