Koran Flushing
Even as a frequent critic of the big media, I can't seem to get too exercised over the "Newsweek" Koran-flushing retraction. First, it's not like they played it up as the main angle of the story.
Secondly, I think blame for the deaths belongs with the rioters, and the religious idiots who stirred them up. To blame the American magazine is to accept the bibliolatry of the rioters, which is just plain kooky, though the Bush administration's statements, doing damage control in the wake of the riots, come perilously close to accepting this silliness.
Third, though I don't think "fake but accurate" is a legitimate defense (and neither does the magazine, unlike CBS), don't be surprised if it turns out we did desecrate a book or two along the way. Those sorts of things happen in wars. Terrible, isn't it?
That's Edgar L. Jones, former American war correspondent in the Pacific, writing in 1946. And he pointed out that such behavior was woven into the nature of modern warfare, that it was done on all sides, and that nowhere was it officially condoned, and never was it practiced by any but a minority of soldiers.
During the war, "Life" magazine ran a human interest item: a picture of a pretty girl posing with the skull of a dead Japanese soldier that her fiance had sent her as a souvenier. Newspapers and magazines in the States regularly mentioned the habit of collecting trophies from the bodies of dead Japanese -- ears or gold teeth. The custom even turns up in "Guadalcanal Diary," the best-selling 1942 book.
Again, the work of a minority of soldiers, but Americans then didn't confuse fighting men at war with angels and saints.
"Time" on March 15, 1943, reported on the massacre of Japanese soldiers near New Guinea, "low-flying fighters turned lifeboats towed by motor barges, and packed with Jap survivors, into bloody sieves." It added, "Loosed on the Japs was the same ferocity which they had often displayed."
The atrocity stories were picked up by the Japanese and made much of in their propaganda. Desecrating a human skull, after all, is even worse than dunking a book in a john. The mass suicides of Japanese civilians on Saipan and Okinawa during the war had much to do with the spread of such stories, which were true.
That being said, it's clear that, in the interval between World War II and now, American journalism has taken to itself a vision of its own importance that puts it in an eternally adversarial role to American political and military power. Ernie Pyle wrote things as bluntly as "Newsweek" does, and told stories as heartrending as Michael Moore's. It doesn't get more cynical than his blunt statement, "I couldn't find the four freedoms among the dead men."
But no one ever doubted whose side he was on. He may have hated certain generals and loathed the mismanagement of the war, but you never read a line of his and thought he'd lost sight of the fact that we ought to win this war, or else.
Secondly, I think blame for the deaths belongs with the rioters, and the religious idiots who stirred them up. To blame the American magazine is to accept the bibliolatry of the rioters, which is just plain kooky, though the Bush administration's statements, doing damage control in the wake of the riots, come perilously close to accepting this silliness.
Third, though I don't think "fake but accurate" is a legitimate defense (and neither does the magazine, unlike CBS), don't be surprised if it turns out we did desecrate a book or two along the way. Those sorts of things happen in wars. Terrible, isn't it?
"We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter-openers."
That's Edgar L. Jones, former American war correspondent in the Pacific, writing in 1946. And he pointed out that such behavior was woven into the nature of modern warfare, that it was done on all sides, and that nowhere was it officially condoned, and never was it practiced by any but a minority of soldiers.
During the war, "Life" magazine ran a human interest item: a picture of a pretty girl posing with the skull of a dead Japanese soldier that her fiance had sent her as a souvenier. Newspapers and magazines in the States regularly mentioned the habit of collecting trophies from the bodies of dead Japanese -- ears or gold teeth. The custom even turns up in "Guadalcanal Diary," the best-selling 1942 book.
Again, the work of a minority of soldiers, but Americans then didn't confuse fighting men at war with angels and saints.
"Time" on March 15, 1943, reported on the massacre of Japanese soldiers near New Guinea, "low-flying fighters turned lifeboats towed by motor barges, and packed with Jap survivors, into bloody sieves." It added, "Loosed on the Japs was the same ferocity which they had often displayed."
The atrocity stories were picked up by the Japanese and made much of in their propaganda. Desecrating a human skull, after all, is even worse than dunking a book in a john. The mass suicides of Japanese civilians on Saipan and Okinawa during the war had much to do with the spread of such stories, which were true.
That being said, it's clear that, in the interval between World War II and now, American journalism has taken to itself a vision of its own importance that puts it in an eternally adversarial role to American political and military power. Ernie Pyle wrote things as bluntly as "Newsweek" does, and told stories as heartrending as Michael Moore's. It doesn't get more cynical than his blunt statement, "I couldn't find the four freedoms among the dead men."
But no one ever doubted whose side he was on. He may have hated certain generals and loathed the mismanagement of the war, but you never read a line of his and thought he'd lost sight of the fact that we ought to win this war, or else.
