The U.S. always forgets half the war and half the world Laura Flanders Singapore is in the middle of a large, biennial arts festival and audiences here are frankly more interested in the international performers that are visiting than in the U.S. blockbuster that doesn't open here until next week. But reviews are trickling in from the Straits Times U.S. bureau; they complain, among other things, that there are no Pacific Islanders in Hollywood's Hawaii, and no mention of a rather significant regional war in which the attack on Pearl Habor was only a part. Go to the elegant National History Museum in Singapore's colonial center and you're gently reminded that on the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan simultaneously invaded the Philippines, Wake Island, Guam, Thailand, Malaysia, Shanghai and the island of Midway. By February 1942, the Sino-Japanese war had spread to most of Southeast Asia. "Pearl Harbor" however, chooses to leave that whole war out. Historians at the National Museum say that Washington would have been less surprised by the Japanese in December 1941, if Americans hadn't been so handicapped by their own prejudices and ignorance. Common stereotypes of squinty-eyed Asians fed foolish skepticism about the ability of Japanese pilots: "The Americans paid for believing their own propaganda," say the Singaporeans. Japan's so-called Zero aircraft — shown in the movie as if they were in shocking use for the first time — had actually been in use against China for a year. The truth about Pearl Harbor is that Roosevelt et al were nowhere near as surprised as the movie suggests. Far from it. But Hollywood kept the U.S. public in the dark then, and Hollywood does the same today. It's a dark that costs lives, but it's invaluable to big power policymakers. Right now, for example, as George W Bush travels to Europe and speaks about building a constructive new relationship with Russia, he makes no such overture to Beijing and forges ahead with Missile Defense. From here, that's seen as disrespect, verging on the bellicose, yet the U.S. public is kept in almost total ignorance — about the importance of China in this half of the world, for example. There's not one superpower, but rather two, as far as the Pacific's concerned, and China's closer. Just as there's not only one World War II but several, and Hollywood's version is a joke. Laura Flanders WORKINGFORCHANGE http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemId=11383 Miroslav Antic, http://www.antic.org/ Serbian News Network - SNN [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.antic.org/
