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Maxirad
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Have any CAF members besides yours truly seen this movie? I briefly owned a DVD of the film, but I ended up returning it after fast-forwarding through so much of it. Check out this review.
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Pat_Payne
Guest
I haven’t seen this movie, but I’ve seen enough reviews and descriptions of it to ask – why would any sane human being WANT to watch this movie? It could have been so much more than it is – instead of being a “Schindler’s List”-style film about the very real and documented horrors of Shiro Ishii’s Unit 731 biowarfare-experimentation unit (horrors, that to my shame as an American, we actively kept Ishii from being brought to account for after the war in exchange for his using his skills at Fort Detrick), it was pretty much a “Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS”-style exploitation film, just much heavier on the violence and gore than nudity.
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Exiled_Child
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I haven’t seen that particular film, no, but I have a longstanding interest in Unit 731. It’s hard to separate fact from fiction, though.
Lord Russell of Liverpool wrote two books that came out in the fifties, one of which dealt with this material. It’s the earliest source I know of in the English language. I had a first printing and it was called Blades of Bushido, but the newer edition is titled Knights of Bushido. If you actually seek out a copy it’s the same book, just different titles. The other title he published is called The Scourge of the Swastika. That one is interesting because it’s so early. The Holocaust didn’t actually become a big story until Israel began using it as a type of war propaganda to help justify the 6 Day War in 1967. This fact has actually fueled quite a bit of revisionist thinking, owing to the Holocaust narrative just coming out of nowhere in a lot of people’s minds. So Lord Russell’s obscure book from the early fifties can largely shut down that line of thinking. Plus, they’re both just really good books - totally gory and totally interesting. Anyway, would you say that Men Behind the Sun seemed accurate? As you know, it would be impossible to have a non-sensationalistic account of those events, given their extremely nauseating nature.
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Kaninchen
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Have you not thought that you’d be a much more effective anti-Israel propagandist if you bothered to get some of the narrative right? Otherwise it all does rather sound like thought for the day from jewsarejusttoonaughtyforwords.com.
While quite a bit had been written about the Shoah in the post-War and 50’s era, the key event in world consciousness of what had happened was the Eichmann trial in 1961.
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Arizona_Mike
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In popular consciousness, even before the Eichmann trial, “Diary of a Young GIrl” (also known as “The Diary of Anne Frank”) was published in Amsterdam in 1947, was published in English translation in 1952, appeared as an extremely popular play in 1955, and was an award-winning movie in 1959. Elie Wiesel’s memoir “Night” was widely known and discussed when it was published the year before the Eichmann trial, in 1960. Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search For Meaning” was a bestseller in 1959.
This was in addition to the numerous books and articles about WWII which fed an audience of veterans who wanted to know more about the war in which they fought, and in which the Holocaust was commonly discussed. All this was well before 1967. I was a kid in the early 1960s and we were taught about the Holocaust in parochial school in Phoenix, so it wasn’t exactly like this was esoteric knowledge.
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Exiled_Child
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I don’t consider myself an anti-Israeli propagandist, first of all, although I am anti-IDF and anti-Mossad in many instances. Secondly, what I stated in my earlier post is true. Early accounts of the Holocaust were widely questioned and dismissed, in large part because the popular histories of the day made absolutely no mention of it. Winston Churchill’s thoroughly exhaustive and authoritative multi-volume history of the war doesn’t mention it at all, for instance. So if you read my post more carefully you’ll see that I was, in fact, defending and reinforcing the Jewish version of history in the face of the huge, current backlash to it.
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Exiled_Child
Guest
Well, that’s what I get for going out of my way to defend the Holocaust.
I suppose I probably should have known that even mentioning the Holocaust in a very brief aside would garner hysterical and emotional responses virtually identical to the manner in which Muslims reacted to the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. But in case anyone else happens to actually read this thread, it should be understood that I was absolutely 100% correct in everything I said, despite the ill-founded and ill-advised attempt to slander my moral authority. Virtually anyone on Earth who has ever taken a Holocaust Studies course or studied the subject in even the most cursory way will recognize the plain truth of what I said, none of which is even remotely controversial or debatable on any level whatsoever. Anyone who doubts this can very easily refer to this commonplace textbook:
amazon.com/Holocaust-American-Life-Peter-Novick/dp/0618082328
lrb.co.uk/v22/n01/norman-finkelstein/how-the-arab-israeli-war-of-1967-gave-birth-to-a-memorial-industry
A brief quote from the above book review:
Until the late Sixties, however, the Holocaust barely figured in the life of America, or of America’s Jews. As Peter Novick remarks, between the end of World War Two and the late Sixties, only a handful of books and films touched on the subject. Jewish intellectuals paid it little attention. No monuments or tributes marked the event. On the contrary, major Jewish organisations opposed such a memorialisation.
And the only reason the Holocaust subject even came up was because I was trying to ask Maxirad whether Men Behind the Sun contained the Japanese equivalent of skin lampshades and human soap bar stories one can find in films and books that deal with the nitty gritty of WWII.
I suppose I probably should have known that even mentioning the Holocaust in a very brief aside would garner hysterical and emotional responses virtually identical to the manner in which Muslims reacted to the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. But in case anyone else happens to actually read this thread, it should be understood that I was absolutely 100% correct in everything I said, despite the ill-founded and ill-advised attempt to slander my moral authority. Virtually anyone on Earth who has ever taken a Holocaust Studies course or studied the subject in even the most cursory way will recognize the plain truth of what I said, none of which is even remotely controversial or debatable on any level whatsoever. Anyone who doubts this can very easily refer to this commonplace textbook:
amazon.com/Holocaust-American-Life-Peter-Novick/dp/0618082328
lrb.co.uk/v22/n01/norman-finkelstein/how-the-arab-israeli-war-of-1967-gave-birth-to-a-memorial-industry
A brief quote from the above book review:
Until the late Sixties, however, the Holocaust barely figured in the life of America, or of America’s Jews. As Peter Novick remarks, between the end of World War Two and the late Sixties, only a handful of books and films touched on the subject. Jewish intellectuals paid it little attention. No monuments or tributes marked the event. On the contrary, major Jewish organisations opposed such a memorialisation.
And the only reason the Holocaust subject even came up was because I was trying to ask Maxirad whether Men Behind the Sun contained the Japanese equivalent of skin lampshades and human soap bar stories one can find in films and books that deal with the nitty gritty of WWII.
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Kaninchen
Guest
I think the point about the Eichmann trial was that it really brought to the fore what happens when one of the most civilized countries in the world goes mad and embarks on ‘industrialised’ death, the Shoah wasn’t just a huge pogrom and a collection of individual tragedies, it was a death machine.
Personally, I think that’s why the Shoah is so important to remember - done by people ‘just like us’ many of whom might have won management awards.
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Kaninchen
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It’s a pity that you feel so perfidiously traduced in your great love of the Jewish people.Well, that’s what I get for going out of my way to defend the Holocaust.
Consider yourself metaphorically mown down by an AK47.
Err, a couple of people pointed out that the history of the Shoah was out in the open before 1967 and your ‘moral authority’ has been slandered?
Perhaps you might consider a course in ‘getting a sense of proportion’?
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Exiled_Child
Guest
You’re metaphorically a terrible shot, but aside from that you certainly do have a tremendous amount in common with the Hedbo slayers.
Blasphemous though you obviously find it, there are clearly people with a much greater handle on the Holocaust than yourself.
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Exiled_Child
Guest
Also, Kanichen, I really don’t mean to ignite a flame war, or whatever. The offhanded comment I made wasn’t meant to disparage Israel or anyone else. So I apologize if I came across that way.
I wasn’t even speaking directly about the Holocaust, per se, so much as I was speaking about American history itself, and the way the history of book publishing in this country basically ignored the subject until the late sixties. Of course you’re right that there were some written accounts before that, but the only Americans who would have really known that would have been the people browsing Judaica sections in local bookstores. And while practically nobody seems to read nowadays, even back then, before television was such a huge phenomenon, the reading public was markedly tinier than the general public.- Status