Daily Archives: July 26, 2017

Fact meets fiction in director Christopher Nolans Dunkirk, the latest film to dramatise the second world war. Photograph: Bros/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

Four generations have been born since the end of the second world war. The infants of today Generation Z in demography-speak arethe great-great-grandchildren of the wartime generation. Since the defeat of Germany and the capitulation of Japan, countless terrible conflicts have been fought, andtens of millions have died in them. Indeed the numbers killed in wars since 1945 will, in the coming decades, inevitably exceed the death toll of the second world war. Yet even as we approach the third decade of the 21st century, and as 1945 slowly slips beyond living memory, it remains the case that when we talk about the war, everyone understands that we are referring to the calamitous conflict of 1939-45.

The borders between numerous nations, the widespread acceptance of the principle of national self-determination, the transnational institutions that for 70 years have attempted to order theworld economy, and the political power still ascribed to the victorious nations of 1945 are all legacies of the war. Yet, as Keith Lowe powerfully argues, the seemingly simple fact that the war made the modern world does reward further examination. The conflict remains a staple of TV, publishing and cinema two second world war movies, Churchill and Dunkirk, are currently on release in the UK. Meanwhile, our understanding of what the war meant to the people whose lives it shaped both combatants and civilians is distorted by layers of myth, the lingering echoes of wartime propaganda and the act of forgetting.

In The Fear and the Freedom, Lowe asks us to question the most critical delusion of all: that the allied powers acted as morally as the circumstances would allow and that this war, more perhaps than any in history, was a good war, fought against an ultimate evil for entirely laudable aims. One of the more discomforting voices raised against this view of the war comes from Yvette Lvy, a Jewish inmate of a Nazi labour camp in Czechoslovakia. She saw little to distinguish the conduct of her various liberators. The Tommies, she says, behave just as bad as the Russians The English soldiers said they would give us food only if we slept with them. We all had dysentery, we were sick, dirty and here was the welcome we got! The notion of allied moral purity is further undermined by Lowes account of the mass rape of German women and widespread looting by the Red Army in 1945.

As a historian of the modern era, Lowe enjoys an enormous advantage over scholars who write about more distant epochs: he is able for the moment at least to draw into his writing the experiences of those who lived through the conflict. Perhaps no historian since Gitta Sereny, in The German Trauma, hasgrasped that opportunity as firmly as Lowe, or done so much with it.

As every journalist knows, the art ofthe interview rests on two principles: asking the right questions and putting them to the right people. With journalistic nous, Lowe has assembled a remarkable chorus of voices and asks the most probing of questions. Their testimony, combined with the authors pointed analysis, elevates a laudable volume into a very readable and startling book.

These are not well-rehearsed stories, worn thin by overtelling. We hear from Leonard Creo, a decorated former GI, aveteran of a war in which all allied soldiers, whether frontline troops or back-office clerks, were designated heroes. From old age he recognises that his single, dramatic experience of combat made him neither hero nor victim. For him, the war and the American GI Bill opened doors to opportunities that would otherwise have remained closed. Another of the more memorable voices is that of Ken Yuasa, a former Japanese army surgeon, who expresses acceptance and guilt. He was one of the infamous doctors who practised surgical procedures on innocent Chinese peasants. These dehumanised human guinea pigs died on the operating table. Only when Yuasa read the words of the mother of one of his victims was he able to acknowledge his crimes.

Disturbing in a different way is the testimony of those who found the war exhilarating. Consider Ogura Toyofumi, a witness to the nuclear attack onHiroshima, who recalls marvelling at the destruction and the loss of life, finding himself able to locate beauty inthe atomic flash and its aftermath.

Lowe shows how the conflict was not just European but fought across the world by people of many different nationalities

Established beliefs are thrown into question. The famous postwar interview in which Robert Oppenheimer tearfully recalled how the scientists ofthe Manhattan Project reacted to thesuccessful test detonation of the atomic bomb is overturned by one of the books most remarkable passages. Oppenheimer did, as he later explained, recite a line from The Bhagavad Gita: Iam become Death, the destroyer of worlds. But he spoke these words of Lord Vishnu not while lamenting the manifest horror of the weapon he had helped bring into existence, but while strutting around like Gary Cooper in the Hollywood western High Noon.

The second world war is still too often written about and imagined as essentially a European conflict. Lowe shows how it was fought across the globe by people of many different races and nationalities. Adding to this global perspective are the insights of Sam King, a celebrated Jamaican-born RAF veteran. Kings story helps Lowe make one of his more nuanced points that the war was as capable of generating diversity as it was of drawing lines of ethnic division on the new map ofEurope.

It has been said that the most impressive and worrying features of human behaviour is our capacity to adapt to the most terrible of circumstances. As one of the messages of theBritish war recently turned into anostalgic cliche suggests, most people have the capacity to keep calmand carry on. Yet the testimony in these pages demonstrates that adaptation to the extremes and horrors ofwar was made possible only by the forging of myth. Both combatants and civilians came to define the war as a clear-cut struggle between good and evil, or as a conflict that would save future generations from the abyss. This myth was an essential tool of survival. Now it is an obstacle to a proper understanding of how this most terrible of allwars continues to shape our lives.

David Olusogas Black and British: A Forgotten History is published by Macmillan. The Fear and the Freedom is published by Viking. To order a copy for 21.25 (RRP 25) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99.

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The Fear and the Freedom by Keith Lowe the moral surprises of the second world war - The Guardian

The first trailer for CW Seed's Freedom Fighters: The Ray has arrived. The animated series is set in the same continuity as other CW superhero shows, but is set on an alternate universe (like Supergirl) where the Nazis won World War II.

Check it out:

And here's the official description:

Raymond Ray Terrill was a reporter who discovered a group of government scientists working on a secret project to turn light into a weapon of mass destruction. But before he could report on his findings, the project head exposed Ray to a genetic light bomb. The bomb failed to kill him and instead gifted Ray with light-based powers. With these abilities, Ray realized he could go beyond reporting on injustice he could take action to help stop it. Calling himself The Ray, he was recruited by Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters to fight violence and oppression wherever it exists.

The series will feature other Freedom Fighters incuding Black Condor and Red Tornado.

Freedom Fighters: The Ray debuts on CW Seed later this year.

Originally posted here:

First FREEDOM FIGHTERS: THE RAY Trailer - Newsarama

The Trump administration has approved a plan to regularise US freedom of navigation operations against Chinas claims and actions in the South China Sea. The White House will now know in advance about upcoming patrols, which will supposedly quicken the approval process. An official said this means operations will be implemented on a very routine, very regular basis. The US move could lead to dangerous misunderstandings and be counterproductive.

Under the Obama administration, the Defence Department (Pentagon) forwarded requests for such operations to the National Security Council (NSC), where they would often languish, over concern about getting anybodys feathers ruffled, the official said. Indeed, the Obama administration paused freedom patrols in the South China Sea from 2012 to 2015 and only approved a few last year, apparently so as not to upset relations with China.

The operations were requested, considered, and approved on a case-by-case basis, a process subject to delays at each level of decision making. This sometimes resulted in their implementation being interpreted as a response to some transgression by China, rather than routine operations.

Many Southeast Asian countries perceive these provocative probes as political statements

Joseph Liow of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies observes that the frequency of such patrols is often seen as a litmus test, for better or worse, of American commitment. Indeed, many Southeast Asian countries perceive these provocative probes as political statements. Some at home and abroad argue that these patrols are the tip of the spear of a strategy to support the US hub-and-spoke regional security architecture, and to persuade China to comply with the international rules-based order.

This order includes the Hague arbitration decision against Chinas nine-dash line sovereignty claim in the South China Sea. Indeed, despite US attempts to downplay the political meaning of the operations, most Asian nations, including China, interpret them as a signal of US resolve to remain the dominant power in the region.

Early in the Trump administration, requests for freedom operations against China were still not being approved. When US anti-China analysts and politicians complained, it was explained that Defence Secretary James Mattis did not want to approve patrols there until an overall strategy was devised. In May, a bipartisan group of senators formally urged the Trump administration to restart the patrols, arguing that: US engagement in the South China Sea remains essential to continue to protect freedom of navigation and overflight and to uphold international law.

Subsequently, the US conducted three such patrols in the South China Sea, the first on May 24, when the destroyer USS Dewey sailed within 12 nautical miles of Mischief Reef in the Spratly Islands.

Under the new plan, patrol requests will be forwarded by the Pentagon simultaneously to the NSC and the State Department to ensure they do not conflict with any diplomatic strategy or initiatives. This is supposed to speed up approval, but therein lies a problem.

If there is disagreement or, as rumoured, unusual tension between State, Defence and the White House, a request may still be delayed or modified in favour of diplomatic concerns. This means patrols will still be approved on a politically determined case-by-case basis, and a counterproductive cycle will begin all over again.

It would start with raised expectations of aggressive navy operations, a delay in implementation resulting in recriminations from the anti-China commentariat and angst among fence-sitting friends and allies, and culminating in a knee-jerk, catch-up response.

This would confuse friend and foe alike, and could have dangerous consequences, such as underestimating US resolve or intent.

The second problem is that freedom operations are ineffective. China has not ameliorated its claims or militarisation of features it occupies in the South China Sea, and is unlikely to do so, regardless of the frequency and nature of the US patrols. It may even respond to these regularised operations rather negatively.

On July 2, the USS Stethem sailed within 12 nautical miles of Chinas long-claimed and occupied Triton Island in the Paracels. Harshly condemning the act, Chinas defence ministry said it seriously damaged the strategic mutual trust and undermined the political atmosphere surrounding the development of Sino-US military ties. It warned that the Chinese military would bolster its efforts in the waters including an increase in the intensity of air and sea patrols according to the extent of the threat that its national security is facing.

Moreover, this is counterproductive to Donald Trumps lets make a deal approach to foreign policy. The USS Stethem incident occurred just hours before Trump called President Xi Jinping () to urge China to do more to help with restraining North Korea. Not surprisingly, Xi told Trump during the call that negative factors were affecting US-China relations.

As professors Peter Dutton and Isaac Kardon of the US Naval War College put it: Conflation of routine naval operations with the narrow function of a formal FONOP needlessly politicises this important programme, blurs the message to China and other states in the region, blunts its impact on Chinas conduct, and makes the programme less effective in other areas of the globe.

Why do them at all? The US could protect its legal position by declaring it and recording its objections in diplomatic statements and communiqus, rather than resorting to what some see as gunboat diplomacy. The diplomatic option seems to be sufficient for many other nations whose rights the US claims to be protecting. This programme of freedom patrols against China should be re-evaluated as to its effectiveness and necessity.

Mark J. Valencia is an adjunct senior scholar at the National Institute for South China Sea Studies, Haikou, China

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US 'freedom' patrols in the South China Sea are risky, and may backfire if China is pushed too far - South China Morning Post