Gallipoli - documentary

I didn't know much about this disastrous campaign during the First World War from which ANZAC legend was born.
My knowledge of it was very limited to Wikipedia.

Watching this documentary reminds me of the power of visual narratives.

It focused on letters written by not only Allied soldiers but also Turkish ones as well.
That creates a well-balanced portrayal of this brutal savagery of war.

Watching it is excruciatingly painful. What a waste of human lives.
These must have included artists who could have been as great as Picasso. Musicians as talented as Mozart.
Their lives were cruelly cut short by the ruthless geo-politics in their day.

It's a great reminder how lucky we are here in Australia right now, enjoying wonderful summer days.

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Masters of Money

As someone who didn't study economics, therefore have absolutely no idea of how capitalism works or fails, this BBC documentary is a very useful educational lesson.

There are three series starting from John Keynes, Friedrich Hayek and Karl Marx.

Stephanie Flanders is obviously very passionate about the subject, and I really liked her gutsy style of presentation.

She skilfully leads us to three completely different theories, easy enough for us to get basic ideas without dumbing down.

With a plethora of archival footage and interviews, this series is another great documentary offering from BBC.

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9/11 - Phone Calls from the Towers

I do hope, in my remaining lifetime, I won't be able to witness more horrific events than September 11, 2001.

It's a declaration of war on our civilisation by Islamic Jihadists.
The war that can't be lost by anyone who believe in secular, democratic society, and its political, judicial due process.

This documentary is a heart-wrenching account on that beautiful autumn day in America.
It's really unbearable to listen to recordings of phone calls made by victims trapped in Twin Towers.
I don't know what to say here.

So, I thought......
The following is from an interview of Christopher Hitchens by Tony Jones during LateLine.

TONY JONES: So let’s talk briefly about that day September 11, 2001.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes.

TONY JONES: You described it very tellingly soon afterwards, if not on the day, as it being as if Charles Manson had been made God for a day.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Mmm. Yes, I remember thinking that as I watched this huge cloud of filth emerge from the wreckage, as the towers sank, up came this sort of billowing cloud of ordure and wreckage and including the shredded remains of about 3,000 of my fellow creatures.

This is a really evil looking cloud. There was shot from a helicopter above Manhattan showing it sort of spreading on this really beautiful day all across the southern tip of my favourite island. And I thought “it’s as if Charles Manson is giving orders today, yes”.

TONY JONES: The other…

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: That’s how it felt. I think about it every day, still.

TONY JONES: Take yourself back then to watching it. Because one of the most horrific images – and I think you actually described this as one of the most horrific images that still remains in your head that you have ever seen and that is, the burning people falling or jumping, in fact, from the towers before they collapsed.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes.

Yes – hesitating between jumping to their deaths or being burnt alive and getting both – jumping while burning.

And a terrible little shrill cry that was overheard on the streets of Greenwich Village by a school teacher who was trying to escort some children along the sidewalk and one of them pointing and saying, “Look, teacher, the birds are on fire”.

A childish attempt to rationalise what was going on, make sense of it or, if you like – the wrong word but to humanise it.

That stayed in my mind as well. Still does.

TONY JONES: One of the more remarkable things that happened in the aftermath was the reaction of some on the Left – and I am sure this rather helped your – or helped galvanise the transformation that you were already undergoing – particularly from the reaction from people like Noam Chomsky.

Tell us a little bit about that.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, once I had sorted out my various impression of the day, which I had in common with everyone else – and which also included the realisation that a friend of mine had just been flown into the walls of the Pentagon.

I felt, with that additional horror, much as everyone else did, to discover, work through shock, rage, fear – not so much, oddly enough. I didn’t feel I was frightened by it but I was very powerfully shaken by it.

And then – I wasn’t sure whether to trust myself with this but I actually have to admit it – a sort of sense of exhilaration coming from, “Okay, it’s everything I hate versus everything I love”.

It’s a summons of a sort. It’s “Okay, now if you don’t recognise this as a crisis, when would you recognise one?”

And then very soon succeeded by the realisation – I then had been working for The Nation magazine as columnist for the flagship journal of the American Left for upwards of two decades – immediately realising I wasn’t going to like what a lot of my comrades were going to say.

And I remember thinking of Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Howard Zinn, and a few others. They would find a way of explaining this away.

And that I wasn’t in the mood for it. And I don’t just mean mood for that moment. It wasn’t a temporary sort of eruption of my digestive system or anything.

I wasn’t prepared to tolerate that.

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The Fog of War - Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara

What kind of a life awaits for a man whose first vivid recollection at the age of two was a celebration of the end of First World War?

This Oscar winning documentary traces the life of Robert McNamara, former Secretary of Defence during Kennedy and Johnson presidency.

Whatever criticism he may or may not deserve as an architect of Vietnam War, there's no question about his strong sense of mission, dedication and contribution to his country.

Giving up lucrative job as a top man at Ford, he spent next five or so years dealing with the most pressing issues facing our civilisation, that is, the annihilation of nations through thermo nuclear exchange under the Cold War geopolitical fixation.

And what he achieved at the end of a day?
He became the most hated man on earth when he resigned. Deservedly so.
And, not everything he says in the film is historically accurate.

However, unlike Henry Kissinger, who has never shown any sign of regret, remorse, or admission of his errors, McNamara frankly recognises sufferings and pains caused by his policy and tries to learn from his mistakes so that the world will be a better place.
Of course, this later in life contrition doesn't at all exonerate him from the political responsibility he had to bear.
All the lies and deceptions he and Johnson concocted during the Vietnam War.

Well, it's really frightening to think that the worst will come after these men left, as Nixon and Kissinger move into the White House, sabotaging the peace negotiation in 1968, and prolonging the sufferings, deaths and miseries which were totally avoidable, for the sake of their political advantage.
That is really an impeachable crime against humanity.

To me, this film is a great history lesson.
I didn't know that he was deeply involved in a planning of the bombing of Tokyo and other cities in Japan during the Second World War.
And his remarks on this subject are very telling.

"LeMay said, 'If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals.'
And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals.
LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost.
But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"

And he finishes the interview with this quote from T.S. Elliot.

We shall not cease from exploring
And at the end of our exploration
We will return to where we started
And know the place for the first time.

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'The Missionary Position' by Christopher Hitchens

As the most famous polemicist in his time and a life-long contrarian, Hitchens succeeded in living up to his reputation in this book, completing a formidable demolition job of the most celebrated 'Saint'.

Although Vatican abolished the office of Devil's Advocate in 1983, they still occasionally seek opposing views, and in 2002, it was none other than Hitchens who rose to the challenge arguing against beatification of Mother Teresa.

I remember hearing him saying during an interview, "And I suddenly realised that I've become the first person in history who played a devil pro bono."

Mother Teresa's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech is legendary for its dogmatic, stupid and fundamentalist stance against abortion. This is another good example as to why this prize has become a laughing stock.

In this short book, he presents some indisputable evidences against her and Catholic Church, arguing that she was not a friend of the poor, but a friend of the poverty, and the rich.

It's really an eye-opening book by one of my favourite writers, sadly missed.

"The cure for poverty has a name, in fact: it's called the empowerment of women.
If you give women some control over the rate at which they reproduce, if you give them some say, take them off the animal cycle of reproduction to which nature and some doctrine—religious doctrine condemns them, and then if you'll throw in a handful of seeds perhaps and some credit, the floor of everything in that village, not just poverty, but education, health, and optimism will increase.
It doesn't matter; try it in Bangladesh, try it in Bolivia, it works—works all the time.
Mother Teresa spent her entire life fighting against this possible outcome."

Here is a superb TV program he made. It's a precursor to this book.

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Days that shook the world - Hiroshima

Although I live here in Melbourne where there's almost no news of Hiroshima, this day has an enormous weight in me.

Growing up in Yamaguchi, west of Hiroshima, as a school excursion, we used to visit a special hospital where surviving victims are still suffering from the effect of the blast.

To this day, I still remember the burns on their skins, tears in their eyes and despair on their faces.

"Why them?"
"Were they fortunate to survive?"

One of the most moving experiences I had when I visited Memorial Park was not when looking at horrific photos or objects, but, reading letters and notes left behind by the victims.

Written words were far much more powerful than visual imagery. Even now I really don't know why.

They are the first-hand witness accounts told by survivors, most of them were dead in the following years.

Burned people everywhere with their eyeballs hanging from their faces were walking like ghosts towards a river, desperately screaming "Water, Water!"

I remember, I had to leave the library, I couldn't take it any more.

"Why them?"

Here is my confession.

The legality of the bombings is debatable. Whether or not they amount to the crime against humanity is, again, contestable.
They were definitely deliberate attempts at mass murder of civilians and annihilation of entire cities.
At least, they haven't been judicially challenged. That's because they are the winner of the war.

The position of the successive US government has been very consistent.
The bombs were necessary to hasten the end of the war, therefore, saving the lives of Americans.

I used to object to these arguments strongly. They all sounded like a cheap excuse for recouparating two billion dollar investment in Manhattan Project.

However, after reading lots of stuff, my position has changed almost 180 degree.

Now, I do completely agree with their reasoning. It sounds treacherous for me as a Japanese to say, but, I really do see their point.

The Government of Japan was eager to sacrifice entire population, if Allied forces invaded the country. 

The tragedy of mass suicide and horrendous fightings in Okinawa Island would have been repeated in main island on a gigantic scale, resulting in, who knows, the death toll and devastation that is too horrifying to contemplate.  

They were telling its citizens to charge against rumbling US tanks with bamboo sticks , for example. 

These were mad preachings. The defeatist ideology that had been insanely demonstrated as the formation of Kamikaze squadron.

The country that holds such an irrational, idiotic policy based on religious myths must be defeated. 

It wasted innumerable opportunities to surrender unconditionally even though everyone knew that's the only way out, simply because they maintained that a God should never be dethroned.

If there was ever a "just war", the last war was the one. It was a battle of ideologies. 

The bombings did hasten the end of the war, and saved not only the lives of the Americans, but also the Japanese.

I do believe that is what really happened.

Japan was a quasi theocracy, Emperor was a living God, its citizens expressing a fanatical divine worship.
Now, it embraces the most advanced form of governance, democracy. The third biggest economy in the world. One of the most secular countries on the planet.

Who can't say the bombings were the beginning of all?

Morally and ethically unacceptable, yes, but, considering the geopolitics at the time, they were necessary evils that finished Japan's war.

When the government takes a wrong turn, it's their citizens who pay the ultimate price.

Do I dare say that in the presence of the survivors, looking into their eyes?

..........

This is one of the series of BBC documentary 'Days that shook the world'.
It's definitely worth watching.

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The Trials of Henry Kissinger

Based on Christopher Hitches' book 'The Trial of Henry Kissinger', this superb documentary film is a scathing indictment against what he calls "a pathological liar and a war criminal."

The film briefly traces his birth in Germany to his ascent to White House.

In the film, there're three main cases against him, war in Vietnam and Cambodia, invasion of East Timor, and assassination of General Rene Schneider in Chile.

There are more detailed accusations in Hitchens' book, but, with a lot of archival images, sounds and footage, this documentary succeeds in presenting a very convincing case against this recipient of Nobel Peace Prize in 1973.

For what?
"Efforts to broker a peaceful settlement of the Vietnam War."

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Citizen King - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr

This two hour documentary by PBS is a very moving story of a man who spearheaded a civil rights movement in America in the 60s.

With a plethora of archival films, viewers can trace last five years of his life.

From 'I Have a Dream' speech at Lincoln Memorial in 1963 to 'Mountaintop' speech in Memphis in 1968, we can see his struggle, courage and passion.

In particular, 'Mountaintop' address is eerily touching, considering what happened the next morning.

"And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."

I wonder if he anticipated the day would come when a black man becomes President.
Obama's splendid second inaugural address coincided with a national day named after King.

He quoted one of the most beautiful sentences ever, written by Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers.
I don't have any quarrels with the use of 'Creator'.
They were deists.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

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