Tom Hanks on the Racism of WWII

I though maybe Tom Hanks was one of a few celebrities that had his head on pretty straight.  I'm really not one to follow the talk shows, though.  Some recent comments on World War II have changed my mind.

In an interview with TIME magazine about the WWII miniseries that he produced, entitled "The Pacific," Hanks made some rather unusual comments about racism and the war.  And no, he wasn't even talking about the Nazis.

Certainly, we wanted to honor U.S. bravery in 'The Pacific', but we also wanted to have people say, ‘We didn’t know our troops did that to Japanese people.’

Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. 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?

The war in the Pacific was a war of terror and racism, of suicide attacks. Both sides viewed the other side as being subhuman dogs from a civilization that didn’t recognize the advancement of human kind. Sound familiar? Sound like something that might be going on?

Hanks made similar comments in an interview with MSNBC's 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.

Um, yeah Tom.  We started the war in the Pacific because we didn't like Asians and religion.  It had nothing at all to do with the bombing of Pearl Harbor or Japanese ties to the Nazis.  The "kill them all" comment seems to have come entirely out of his ass.

Hanks plans for the future?  A project dealing with the JFK assassination.

If we do it right, it'll be perhaps one of the most controversial things that has ever been on TV.

At this point I'm thinking it involves a conservative conspiracy, involving GWB as one of the triggermen, but that's just spitballing.

Sheesh!

Sources:
Quotes from TIME magazine, and some basic information lifted from this Fox News article.
Quote from Morning Joe from this CBS News article.
Quote from TIME magazine article, on the JFK project, lifted from this flimsy USA Today article.

I had heard of Hanks' comments from a radio talkshow a few days ago.  Which one, I could not tell you.  Something just jogged my memory earlier today, and dug into it a bit further.