8 人中、 10 人の方が、｢このレビューが参考になった｣と投票しています。
金日成原理主義による政教融合
By according to the conservative
北朝鮮の教科書を紹介した一書です。ひと事でいう、国家の英雄
である金日成、金正日親子を神格化する一方で、日本・アメリカを憎
み打倒すべき敵とする教育が徹底的に刷り込まれています。現実と
してこのような教育が為されている国家と国交正常化は､中国の反日
デモに遭遇する以上のリスクがあると思われます。ちなみに、金日成
の神格化は､日本の天皇が神の子孫であるとする古事記の導入のよ
うです。憎むべき敵のシステムを採用する貪欲さには脱帽しました。
こういう映画が世界で作られ、観られているという事実。案外、日本で生まれ育った日本人より、外国人の方が日本の近代史や社会をよく知っているのでは、と考えるととても面白い。グローバルな時代だからこそ、正しい歴史が求められる。それによってはじめて、日本の進むべき正しい方向に舵が取れると考える。
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Japan's Dirty Secret - Japan 英語 字幕なし http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7yDOXGmtro
May 2003
Memories of Japanese war crimes continue to poison Japan's relations with its neighbours. Many Chinese are still suffering the effects of a vicious campaign of germ warfare.
"Our unit did things no human being should ever do," confesses Unit 731 member Yoshio Shinozuka. His unit developed the deadly pathogens which were used to infect 250,000 Chinese. Japan's refusal to apologise for its actions, or to acknowledge Unit 731's existence, has further upset its victims.
Produced by ABC Australia
Distributed by Journeyman Pictures
Buried Treasure: World War II Spitfires to Be Unearthed in Burma
Paging Indiana Jones: a British farmer's 15-year quest to find a squadron of legendary fighter planes buried in a far-off land has finally paid off
By Sonia van Gilder Cooke| April 17, 2012
Lincolnshire farmer David Cundall, 62, has spent about $207,000, traveled to Burma a dozen times and negotiated with the cagey Burmese government, all in the hopes of finding a stash of iconic British Spitfires buried somewhere in the Southeast Asian country.
(PHOTOS: Burma’s Landmark Elections and Aung San Suu Kyi’s Path to Victory)
Buried planes? It sounds odd, but in fact this was fairly common toward the end of the war; as the conflict wound down and jet aircraft promised to make propeller-driven fighters obsolete, many aircraft were scrapped, buried or sunk by Allied Forces in order to prevent them from falling into enemy hands.
(PHOTOS: Europe Then and Now)
Cundall started his search after his friend heard from a group of U.S. veterans that they had stashed Spitfires in the region. “We’ve done some pretty silly things in our time, but the silliest was burying Spitfires,” the veterans said.
His interest piqued, Cundall began placing ads in magazines to try to find soldiers who might have been involved.
After a decade and a half of searching, he finally managed to locate the missing airplanes, which had never been flown and were indeed buried while still in their transport crates. “We sent a borehole down and used a camera to look at the crates. They seemed to be in good condition,” Cundall told the Telegraph.
The aircraft arrived at a Royal Air Force base in Burma in August 1945. But by that point in the war, just before the bombing of Hiroshima, the fighters weren’t needed. “In 1945, Spitfires were ten a penny,” said Cundall. “It was a typical British solution: ‘Let’s bury them lads.’”
Getting the planes out of the ground is one thing; getting them out of Burma — a secretive nation that until recently was ruled by a brutal military junta and remains under a variety of international sanctions — is another. But as the Telegraph reports, following the intervention of British Prime Minister David Cameron, who recently visited the country, the Spitfires could soon be on their way back to the U.K.
Cundall hopes that with the help of investors, the planes can finally take to the skies. “Spitfires are beautiful airplanes and should not be rotting away in a foreign land. They saved our neck in the Battle of Britain and they should be preserved.”
Poland hopes to identify remains of Auschwitz hero
Aug 30, 10:04 AM EDT
WARSAW, Poland (AP) - It could hardly have been a riskier mission: infiltrate Auschwitz to chronicle Nazi atrocities. Witold Pilecki survived nearly three years as an inmate in the death camp, managing to smuggle out word of executions before making a daring escape. But the Polish resistance hero was crushed by the post-war communist regime - tried on trumped-up charges and executed. Six decades on, Poland hopes Pilecki's remains will be identified among the entangled skeletons and shattered skulls of resistance fighters being excavated from a mass grave on the edge of Warsaw's Powazki Military Cemetery. The exhumations are part of a movement in the resurgent, democratic nation to officially recognize its war-time heroes and 20th century tragedies.
戦前、戦時中のナチスドイツが支配したドイツ社会と戦後を経ても変らない日本社会の類似点がとても気になる。
******
書評
Not Me
By Joachim Fest (German author); Translated by Martin Chalmers
Atlantic, 304 pages, £20
In Hitler's Germany, He Kept His Head
As a historian, Joachim Fest saw through the 'romance' of Nazism. But he began resisting popular opinion much earlier.
August 23, 2012, 3:04 p.m. ET
By TOBIAS GREY, WSJ
The title of Joachim Fest's autobiography came from a valuable piece of advice given to him by his father: "Etiam si omnes, ego non!" ("Even if all others do, not me!") For a child such as Fest, who grew up in a rare German family opposed to the Nazi regime, the only way to be forearmed was to be forewarned. In "Not Me: Memoirs of a German Childhood," Fest, who went on to become one of the world's leading historians of the Third Reich, writes: "The lesson of the Nazi years for me was to resist current opinion."
First published in German in September 2006, mere days after Fest's death at the age of 79, "Not Me" has the elegiac quality of a writer who has finally put enough distance between himself and his tumultuous past. It is a remarkable work of childhood reminiscence, not least for the fact that most of it is written from memory: Fest could not rely on any keepsakes, notes or letters, as they were all lost when the Nazis expelled his family from their Berlin home.
"I have not written a history of the Hitler years," writes Fest, "but only how they were reflected in a family and its surroundings." This is not, of course, the only angle on the Third Reich that Fest took during his life as a scholar. With his 1973 biography of Hitler, Fest became the first German historian to lay bare the mechanisms behind his countrymen's fascination with the late Führer. His 2002 book "Inside Hitler's Bunker" was the basis for the commercially successful German film "Downfall."
In these and other works, he argued that Hitler's popularity was just as much about Germany's romantic yearning for the trappings of a chivalric past as it was about the dire state of the Weimar economy. Conservative in outlook and mistrustful of any form of extremism, Fest depicted Hitler's rise in recognizably human terms.
"Not Me" suggests more than a few reasons for which Fest might have kept such a cold eye toward the "romance" of Nazism. The son of an elementary school headmaster and a devoted mother, Fest was the second and most outspoken of five children. His father, Hans, had been politically committed from an early age and became a staunch defender of the Weimar Republic following the German revolution of 1918. Their Catholic family attended church on Sundays and as part of the Bildungsbürger class, they valued cultural education above material possessions.
One of Hans Fest's favorite pedagogical tricks was to offer his children a one mark reward for every ten poems recited without error. Fest and his beloved elder brother Wolfgang were invited to dine with his parents from an early age, and it was at the supper table that the family became bound together by conspiratorial feeling.
"It was an utterly politicized world in which we were growing up," writes Fest. "Many conversations and almost all personal decisions were made with an eye to the prevailing conditions."
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These conditions worsened as Hitler rose to power. Hans Fest was fired from his job and was forbidden to give private tutorials. "At table, friends were mentioned who had suddenly disappeared; others disappeared from conversation, because they were no longer friends," writes Fest, displaying his mastery of the telling phrase.
Fest underlines the stealthiness of the Nazi regime and the cunning abstraction of their persecution. "My father was 'cut back,' that was the euphemism, others were 'provisionally retired'; arrests were called 'preventive custody.'" By the spring of 1940 the Nazis had begun closing in on Fest's family. Only an anonymous phone call saved them from being unprepared when a search of their apartment was performed.
"In the years that followed, such calls warned the family something like another 15 times," writes Fest. The only real point of contention between Fest's father and his mother had been whether it was better for the family to become members of the various branches of the National Socialist Party or to continue their covert defiance. Fest's mother vainly tried to persuade her husband to live a lie to protect his family and regain his job. "We are not little people," replied Hans. "Not when it comes to such questions!"
Of his father's steadfastness Fest writes: "When it came to the Nazis, as he had often observed, even the passing thought of giving up had been enough and a person was already lost."
In the face of almost daily harassment, Fest's family maintained a policy of ironic detachment, dubbing themselves "the-other-side-of-the-street-walkers." More than his brothers and sisters, Fest followed his father's example by registering his indifference to authority figures. He was asked to leave his school after being caught carving a caricature of Hitler on his desk. This led to him and his two brothers having to leave Berlin and attend a different school in Freiburg, 400 miles away. In 1944, at the age of 18, Fest then decided to join the Luftwaffe as an antiaircraft batteryman to avoid the risk of being conscripted by the Waffen SS.
This decision provoked a furious row with his father, who argued that there was no excuse to volunteer for "Hitler's criminal war." The war's terrible toll on Fest's family is the subject of the autobiography's moving final chapters. Avoiding pathos, Fest describes the grief he felt when he received news of his brother Wolfgang's death and his father's gloomy return from a Russian prison camp, where he had been forced to volunteer. The author's own narrow escape from death, his imprisonment by American soldiers, and a subsequent failed escape attempt are all wryly detailed.
Most shocking is an account of a long sequence of atrocities suffered by female relatives on his father's side. American troops pulled his polio-crippled aunt, Franziska, out of her wheelchair, repeatedly raped her and then threw her down the cellar stairs of her house, where she subsequently died.
For Fest's family, "the Second World War exploded everything." Even after it ended, they still felt like "the odd ones out." "Unlike the overwhelming majority of Germans, we were not part of some mass conversion," Fest writes. "Whenever talk came around to the 1930s and 1940s, many of our contemporaries felt remorse, but we were excluded from the psychodrama."
—Mr. Grey is a writer and critic living in Paris.
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Navajo code talker from World War II diesBy the CNN Wire Staff
updated 11:31 PM EDT, Thu November 1, 2012
A group of Navajo Code Talkers attends the 2011 Citi Military Appreciation Day event to honor U.S. veterans and current service members at Citi Pond in Bryant Park on November 11, 2011 in New York City. Few of the code talkers are still alive, 67 years after WWII ended.
(CNN) -- George Smith, one of the Navajo code talkers who helped the U.S. military outfox the Japanese during World War II by sending messages in their obscure language, has died, the president of the Navajo Nation said.
"This news has saddened me," Ben Shelly, the Navajo president, said in a post Wednesday on his Facebook page. "Our Navajo code talkers have been real life heroes to generations of Navajo people."
Smith died Tuesday, Shelly said, and the Navajo Nation's flag is flying at half-staff until Sunday night to commemorate his life.
Several hundred Navajo tribe members served as code talkers for the United States during World War II, using a military communications code based on the Navajo language. They sent messages back and forth from the front lines of fighting, relaying crucial information during pivotal battles like Iwo Jima.
Military authorities chose Navajo as a code language because it was almost impossible for a non-Navajo to learn and had no written form. It was the only code the Japanese never managed to crack.
The Navajo code talkers participated in every assault the U.S. Marines carried out in the Pacific between 1942 and 1945.
The code talkers themselves were forbidden from telling anyone about the code -- not their fellow Marines, not their families -- until it was declassified in 1968.
Now in their 80s and 90s, only a handful of code talkers remain.
"They have brought pride to our Navajo people in so many ways," Shelly said. "The nation's prayers and thoughts are with the family at this time as they mourn the passing of a great family man who served his country and protected his people."
Shelly's Facebook post didn't mention Smith's age or the cause and location of his death. A statement about the death on the official Navajo Nation website was not accessible late Thursday.
San Pedro has a memorial that is overlooked in many of the tourist guides. It is a Memorial to the Japanese Fishing Village on Terminal Island.
In 1941, 3,000 first and second-generation Japanese made their homes in an area of Terminal Island known as East San Pedro. The Japanese Fishing Village was next to Fish Harbor. Most of the local residents worked in the fishing industry. Approximately 250 fishing boats were owned and/or operated by the residents. Most of the local people, not working on the boats, worked in the many fish canneries that were clustered together on Terminal Island. Because Terminal Island was somewhat isolated, the Terminal Islanders developed their own culture and even their own dialect. The people called their close community village "Furusato" which translated literally means "old village". An English equivalent would be "hometown", "native place" or "home sweet home".
The village had a Fisherman's Hall where the Japanese martial arts judo and kendo were taught, a Shinto Shrine, ethnic grocery stores, candy stores and billiard parlors. The Island children attended Walizer Elementary School and took the ferry to high school at San Pedro High School in San Pedro.
Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI rounded up all of the adult males and jailed them. On February 19, 1942, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. This Executive Order sent 120,000 Japanese Americans to internment camps . Of the ethic Japanese people forced into internment camps, about 62% were Nisei and Sansei ( 2nd and 3rd generation Japanese) and were American citizens by virtue of being born in the USA. The other 38% were Issei (Japanese immigrants) who were either naturalized American citizens or resident aliens.
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In February of 1942, Terminal Island residents were the first Japanese Americans, on the West Coast, to be forcibly removed from their homes. They were forced to evacuate their homes within 48 hours and had to leave almost of all of their possessions behind including all of their fishing boats and fishing gear. Some were able to sell their furniture, fishing gear, boats and other items. Since the residents only had 48 hours to complete the transactions, they were often forced to sell at ridiculously low prices by greedy individuals taking advantage of the desperate situation.
All of the other residents of Terminal Island were also ordered to leave. The Daily Breeze newspaper dated February 27, 1942 had an article headlined "Whites and Japs Leave Terminal Island" which reported that the United States military had taken over Terminal Island and was patrolling the deserted streets.
The Japanese Village was stripped of anything of any value and flattened by bulldozers and completely destroyed . The fishing boats were either taken by the military, repossessed, stolen, or destroyed.
On January 2, 1945, the exclusion order was rescinded. The internees were released with $25.00 and a ticket home. They returned home to find nothing. Furusato was gone without a trace. The canneries were still operating and a few people went back to work there . The rest of the former residents were scattered. The former Japanese villagers were worried the memory, culture and history of Furusato would be lost forever. They stayed in touch with each other and tried to keep the memories alive.
In 1971, they formed the Terminal Islanders Club. Since its formation, the members have been coordinating reunions, golf games, picnics and other activities. Now in their 80s, the Nisei worry about the future of the various events for the members. In 2002, the surviving second-generation citizens set up a memorial on Terminal Island to honor their Issei parents and to preserve the memory of their Furusato, their "Home Sweet Home".
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