It makes me deeply happy to see this here. Miyazaki's mind is truly unique (and by extension most Ghibli films too), nothing else quite compares (and as the author points out, certainly not Disney & co. despite being Ghibli's distributors in the West). I've introduced many people to Ghibli, a lot of whom would have never even considered watching an animated film (even less so a foreign one), and most came away truly touched.
Miyazaki is anti-war, but he's also extremely pro-ecology as is obvious in most of his films (Nausicaa is an obvious one, but perhaps more obvious would be Pom Poko or Totoro). Broadly speaking, he advocates balance in all its forms. A lot of his main protagonists are strong female characters, and not the "overly girly unicorn princess with magical powers" kind. Violence, like greed, is a disease as opposed to an end (in fact those two concepts are often expressed together in his films, e.g. Spirited Away).
But maybe the best accomplishment in most, if not all, of Miyazaki's work, is his ability to capture the interest and the imagination of the viewers without resorting to cheesy gimmicks, gratuitous violence or sexual innuendos, which seem to be the go-to for a lot of cinema (animation and otherwise, Western and Eastern).
In his own words, “You must see with eyes unclouded by hate. See the good in that which is evil, and the evil in that which is good. Pledge yourself to neither side, but vow instead to preserve the balance that exists between the two.”
> You must see with eyes unclouded by hate. See the good in that which is evil, and the evil in that which is good. Pledge yourself to neither side, but vow instead to preserve the balance that exists between the two.
As a statement, it sounds poetic at first, and the first two sentences are absolutely perfect; however, there's something very wrong about the notion of "preserving the balance", and I've seen that notion show up elsewhere as well. Evil should not persist out of any sense of balance, and nothing goes horribly wrong with the world if evil ceases altogether.
> Evil should not persist out of any sense of balance
I don't think the quote supports the idea of evil persisting out of balance, but rather that to advance the greater good one must balance the need to oppose the notionally evil things (which nonetheless contain good) with the need to oppose the evil contained in things which are notionally good.
Its the only interpretation I can see which makes sense in the context of the sentences that the one on balance follows. What is preserved is not the balance in the state of the world between the sides (or between good and evil), but the balance you recognize between the good and evil in each side, a balance that is lost when you commit to one as "good" and ignore the evil it contains, and the good contained in the other.
> I don't think the quote supports the idea of evil persisting out of balance, but rather that to advance the greater good one must balance the need to oppose the notionally evil things (which nonetheless contain good) with the need to oppose the evil contained in things which are notionally good.
That much is absolutely true; conflicts and war are evils in themselves, even when some would consider them "necessary".
The quote itself is somewhat vauge, but I think the movies exemplify more clearly the viewpoint.
Take The Lord Of the Rings - the good and the evil is very clearly defined. Sauron and the Orcs are objectively evil, and you can kill as many orcs as you want without feeling any remorse. Sarumans industrialization is pure evil. Aragorn is the rightfully ruler purely by virtue of being a "good guy" and having the right ancestors.
Now compare to Princess Mononoke. Obviously the corruption of the nature is an evil thing, but Eboshi is not "evil", she saves the outcasts of society, lepers and prostitutes and gives them life and dignity, but as part of her plan she upsets the balance of nature. This is much more complex conflict as in Tolkien, and the solution is not as easy, since you cannot just kill all the bad guys.
I believe the idea is that human notions of 'evil' are based on imperfect knowledge, at best. Therefore, quite often one person's 'evil' is another's 'justice' and letting people rampage in pursuit of it does not make for a peaceful society. Rather, people have to be able to work together in spite of their differing ideals, instead of hoping to be able to eliminate or marginalize everyone who might not believe the same thing.
On the other hand, if what other people believe is outlined in Mein Kampf, the attitude that you should work together with those people in spite of your differing ideals is quite wrong. We know this because of what happened in the Holocaust. Today, we have the luxury to judge this tree by its fruits. Even if someone else believes that the Holocaust was justice, there has to be some line of appeasement we won't cross, where we say "no, this really is evil" or we become complicit in worse things than just war, and will only be able to recognize that in retrospect.
This becomes concrete when we are talking about a state which formally supported the Nazis.
The Nazis would be a good example of a group that rampaged in pursuit of their ideal of "justice"--they believed that a group of rich people (Jews) were the source of all misery, however removed from reality that might be--then rampaged, not just in a figurative sense, but also a very literal one (e.g. kristallnacht).
I quite explicitly said that this was both an undesirable thing and something to put a stop to.
This is only true if you are the only one to follow that rule. Someone whose belief is outlined in Mein Kampf, but nonetheless follows the same rule, will seek other means than the historical of resolving his differences.
I think his statement is talking about people, factions, and sides. Not abstract concepts like "murder" or "eating babies".
So it's not that he's saying we need to defend the balance with evil; rather, we should defend the balance with the people we see as evil. Because their side sees us as evil, and unless we seek balance, the only solutions are extermination of one side or the other, or eternal war.
If you believe that 'good' and 'evil' are fundamental and inseparable aspects of humanity, meaning evil can never truly cease because it's part of what we're made of, then yes, you might believe that balance is the healthier option. Belief in either extreme can lead you to a dehumanizing view of people, and a lot of evil has been done in the world in the name of ridding it of a greater evil, for the sake of an unquestioned good.
> If you believe that 'good' and 'evil' are fundamental and inseparable aspects of humanity, meaning evil can never truly cease because it's part of what we're made of
A world of "no"; that's a kind of "balance" I want no part of.
Arguably, from that point of view, it's a part of you whether or not you want to be a part of it. Every human life suffers, and brings suffering to others, that can't be avoided. We're limited by hate, fear, greed, hunger, mortal terror, the need to survive and see our children survive, and our own point of view.
But perhaps the center path is itself evil if you refuse to stray from it. That would lead many Western minds to the parable of the Good Samaritan, after all. Who would refuse to feed the hungry because hunger is just part of human nature, or refuse to clothe the poor because poverty is just the result of bad luck and bad decisions?
Well... plenty of people who fall prey to the just world fallacy, but that's digressing.
All of the suffering of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was done in the name of good, and people were slaughtered until it was decided good was done, because the greater evil had to be opposed at any cost, and it was thought to be the lesser of all conceivable evils. But when you oppose evil with evil, where is the good to be found?
Consider things more abstractly, greed is generally thought of as an evil. Bur trying to distroy it is counter productive, but wuty care it can be useful. The drug war is a great example of taking an ideology past the point of usefulness.
But what is evil ? What you decide it to be ? What if I happen to disagree with your notion of evil, am I now evil as well ? You seem to make fundamental mistake in assuming that evil is something concrete and fixed in some sort of absolute moral framework. Realise that both the framework and the "place of evil" are, within very relaxed bounds almost arbitrary, is the point that's being made.
Some things really are evil. Not nearly as many as people call "evil", but some things genuinely, objectively, are evil.
Take Pol Pot, for example. He deliberately killed one quarter of his country's population. If you think it's just my decision to call that evil, then you are from a place that is so morally different from me that I don't know how to even begin having a conversation with you.
But Pol Pot thought he was doing good. The only response I can imagine is to try to resist that with arms. I don't know what else is possible. But in doing so, I have to make very sure that I don't become some kind of monster myself, rationalizing the evil that I do and calling it good.
Let's not forget the context in which poor and unsophisticated people decided that was a good idea, and the names of the international aggressors whose crimes encompass the evil of the whole conflict:
The point is that what you consider evil, somebody else considers good, and vice versa. Furthermore, we define good in terms of evil and evil in terms of good. The existence of one necessitates the existence of the other, whether in the past, present, or future.
That's weak. You can go down a definitional hole and say someone might consider anything good. Fact remains that things like, I dunno, torturing children and slaughtering villages are things that we'd be perfectly fine eliminating. We'd be A-OK without having people that have, as the near entirety of their existence, hunger and pain.
Even in nature, there isn't a real balance. Any perceived balance is simply the result of ongoing fighting and current stalemates. When things go "out of balance", groups or species go extinct and things move on. Absolutely nothing in nature is stopping a species from taking over the entire planet, consuming all resources, then going extinct.
And personally, I don't define good in terms of evil. Like a silly saying of defining light in terms of darkness (uh, no, I'll define it as certain energy bands or something, thanks).
Unless you meant this on a conceptual level, like, if we had never heard of the concept of insanity, it might be hard to say we value sanity since it'd just be an unquestioned state of affairs. I don't find that a very useful definition as far as a course for action goes; we'd be quite fine eliminating "evil".
I mean at the conceptual level. So many things are defined in terms of their opposite. If we have no knowledge, understanding, definition, experience of evil, we don't have a benchmark against which to compare our actions and make sure they are different. Hopefully once understood, it stays remembered but in the past.
> We'd be A-OK without having people that have, as the near entirety of their existence, hunger and pain.
That's exactly the kind of thing I meant, yes. Some things are universally wrong no matter where or how they happen, who is doing them, or what "side" they're on.
Here is the full quote, "When I say 'hero' do not picture someone with the strength to fight and conquer Evil -because Evil is not something that can ever be conquered or defeated, Evil is natural. It is innate in all humans. But while it can't be defeated, it can be controlled. In order to control it, and live the life of a true hero, you must learn to see with eyes unclouded by hate. See the good in that which is evil, and the evil in that which is good. Pledge yourself to neither side, but vow instead to preserve the balance that exists between the two."
Source: "The Whisper Within: Zen and Self" (p. 150)
How does one "preserve the balance"? Could you provide an example action you might take that is preserving this balance? I'm having trouble turning this into anything useful, other than a generic, general sort of "don't be hateful and rash; think things through; sides aren't perfect" kinda thing.
The word 'balance' is vague and overused, to be sure. Here's my suggestion for a kind of action: if you have to respond to aggression, make the response targeted and limited to what is necessary. For example, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, the right thing to do was use the military force necessary to kick him out. It should have stopped there. It should not have continued with twelve years of economic sanctions that condemned hundreds of thousands of civilians to death followed by an invasion and regime change that created a power vacuum leading to the rise of one of the worst regimes since the Nazis.
Well, Saddam's was one of the worst regimes since the Nazis. We really can't do anything right as far as intervention, at some point we have to accept we can't make things work out in other people's countries and there will always be evil rulers we can't do anything about.
> Well, Saddam's was one of the worst regimes since the Nazis.
Saddam was a villain to be sure, but as far as people actually living in Iraq were concerned, his regime was nowhere near as bad as what followed. For some reasons why, check out http://riverbendblog.blogspot.ie/
> We really can't do anything right as far as intervention, at some point we have to accept we can't make things work out in other people's countries and there will always be evil rulers we can't do anything about.
Spirited away is probably one of the most creative, beautiful films I've ever seen. Part of what makes it so rewarding are the fantastic landscapes it paints and the amazing adventure it portrays, but there's also an entire other level of symbolism in it that you don't have to know to thoroughly enjoy it.
Might be in the minority, but I strongly disagree with the assessment that Miyazaki-san's final film "The Wind Rises" was not amongst his greatest. I re-view it every few months for inspiration and find it holds up quite powerfully with each repetition. Japanese anime does Italian neo-realism in epic scale. The engineer as the manifestor of dreams. War as a terrible catalyst of progress. Surreally creepy voice acting by Werner Herzog as the mysterious Castorp in an homage to Thomas Mann. What's not to love?
For more on the controversy here's a link to the Chicago Reader review that sums up why some perceived it as being sympathetic to fascism:
One is that I'm tired of both the congratulatory and the flagellative uses of "Western." Feminism is no more a western tradition than it is an Arab, Chinese or Congolese one. It's a modern cultural movement. Similarly, simple good vs evil plot settings are not western. They exist everywhere. They're often from propaganda, naturally occurring hero worship, morality tales and depictions of a culture's own history. GRRM (mentioned here) is as western as Tolkien and is definitely a modern example western literature.
The complicated moral depictions in Game of Thrones are not new, but they are definitely strong in the current zetgeist. It comes and goes and has often reached the point of cliche. Hercules (and his analogues like Samson and Cuchulainn) are often depicted with character flaws, often involving women and madness in some way. We've been through a period when it was out of fashion. I think hollywood film tradition is very largely to blame, their perfect hero classics. The awesome comedic writer like Adams, Pratchet, Joseph Heller or even Franz Kafka earlier on mock this constantly. Humour is great for this kind of thing, satirising the current literary cliches.
That brings me to my second point. Today's storytelling is taking this stuff to a whole new level. The complex morality tales and decompacting of group decision making dynamics that we see in everything today is really awesome, in my opinion. I think it's great art, or at least to my taste. Playing with moral perspective and depicting the complexity of people acting in groups is an awesome thing to explore. There's a ton of depth there and a ton of artistic flair required to bite into it. In my opinion, it hits the best notes when you have been wrenched so much that your sheltered sense of morality breaks down. It still exists, but its grim rather than fiery. Evil gets demystified, banal and sad. When a bad guy gets a just end you take on the role of a reluctant but dutiful executioner rather than a hot blooded cheerleader at the gallows.
Walter White is awesome because he's complex like a real person. His angst isn't just a flat "he's angsty because X." That's very hard to do. I think the only way to get that stuff across is the moral grey areas and the "shit happens" unfolding of a person. Long format TV series give writers time to do it.
This stuff is really fantastic in modern art. TV shows, books...
This article rightfully praises the Ghibli movies for their non-Manichean stories, especially when compared to Disney or Hollywood blockbusters. Yet I'm surprised it missed an important example: in the first film entirely directed by Hayao Miyazaki, Nausicäa is far from an angel. In my eyes, she is Miyazaki's most ambiguous character. Warning, spoiler ahead.
When her valley is invaded, the peaceful Nausicäa runs to the room of her ill and bedridden father. He's dead, surrounded by soldiers. She screams, seizes her father's sword, and enters a killing rage. Truly, even a young and sweet girl can feel hate and killing intent, and she may even act accordingly. Nobody's born an angel nor a demon, but we can all become insensitive or cruel. Just read Primo Levi or Herman Langbein to see how most people transform in a few weeks. Anyway, that sequence made me cry.
I'd also like to mention the opening of this movie, inspired from the medieval "tapisserie de Bayeux" that relates England's invasion in the XIth century. The ballet of robots along a burning city is incredibly beautiful and moving. How stunning that Miyazaki starts his first film with the artistic beauty of a war scene!
If the author had portrayed the Imperial Japanese government as an innocent victim, I would be the first to despise the article. But he didn't. He mentioned the campaign of mass murder in China, the insane stupidity of the decision to attack Pearl Harbor and then to fight the war to the bitter end. In no way does he suggest any of these things are excusable. The people he portrays as innocent victims are the civilians of every nationality who are burned to death in bombing raids or starved by blockades - 'economic sanctions' if you want to use the current euphemism.
And he's right. The economic sanctions against Iraq that condemned hundreds of thousands of children to starve to death were an atrocity just about exactly as bad as the rape of Nanking. Just about exactly as inexcusable. We need to get to the point where we stop looking for excuses for such actions.
> Nobody is more familiar with what a curse airplanes can be when deployed for evil than the Japanese. Airplanes dropped the canisters that burned their cities, the mines that starved their children, and the nukes that instantly made vast irradiated graveyards out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — for the first time in history visiting solar-temperature hell upon human habitations, and hinting at mankind’s full capacity for suicidal madness. But their intimate familiarity with the “cursed dream” of airplanes also stems from the Japanese state’s own misuse of the great invention for its imperial dreams.
So the bombing of Japan was "evil", Japan's own bombings were just a "misuse" in pursuit of a "dream". How very neutral.
> The economic sanctions against Iraq that condemned hundreds of thousands of children to starve to death were an atrocity just about exactly as bad as the rape of Nanking. Just about exactly as inexcusable. We need to get to the point where we stop looking for excuses for such actions.
Economic sanctions are an alternative to war. Are you suggesting we should have bombed Iraq instead at the time? Or just let Saddam do what he pleased? Ironically, when the USA does nothing (Rwanda, Pol Pot, North Korea, Srebrenica) they are accused of complicity in inaction, yet when they do something, they are war criminals. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
And frankly one of the reasons I think they should be taken off the table entirely is because they are far too easy an alternative. At least in war, some of the victims have their faces broadcast on television. The victims of economic sanctions are never heard of except as dry statistics.
> Are you suggesting we should have bombed Iraq instead at the time? Or just let Saddam do what he pleased?
Saddam had already been stopped from doing what he pleased. He had been comprehensively kicked out of Kuwait. It should have stopped there.
> Ironically, when the USA does nothing (Rwanda, Pol Pot, North Korea, Srebrenica) they are accused of complicity in inaction, yet when they do something, they are war criminals. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
This is only a contradiction if the two kinds of accusations come from the same people.
I'm disappointed that what could have been a review of an excellent film contained so much anti-"US Warmongering." War is terrible. Sanctions have negative effects. How would this author propose convincing leaders who commit human rights violations to stop those violations? Asking nicely?
"Thus, the starvation of little Setsuko/Keiko was not 'collateral damage,' but a premeditated murder. [...] Of course elite war-bringers [...] do not themselves pay the 'prices' they decide are acceptable."
This author needs to remember that Japan was the war-bringer in WW2. Brought it right to Pearl Harbor.
If the label, "US Warmongering", upsets you so much, please consider joining anti-war efforts. There's a reason why we have that label. Since WW2, our military has been active throughout the world to protect our interests from Latin America to the Middle East and of course, even Europe with the Cold War. Our current president promised an end to the war in the Middle East but it has yet to materialize. The Republican Party wants to launch a full-on campaign against ISIS. That label will remain with us unless we, as citizens, get involved with our government.
With regards to your point into human rights violations, I'd strongly suggest you look deeper into the conflict itself as "human right violations" is smoke and mirrors. If "human right violations" were a reason to start a conflict, Russia and/or China should have invaded us by now for all the human rights violations our police force are committing against our citizens, for all human right violations at Guantanamo Bay, etc.
There is much more to the story. The history of the United States is full of wilful violence against others. Everything from theft of the south-west from Mexico (a war the US instigated and started) because "God has given us a 'manifest destiny'" to the barbaric atrocities we unleashed during the Spanish-American and later Philippine-American wars (the US has tried very hard to whitewash the concentration camps, rape, and wholesale butchering of men, women, and children).
America forced Japan to open it's borders (because the US wanted to use their lower islands to establish a more efficient trans-Pacific trade route). At that point, Japan realized that the game in Asia and the South Pacific was colonize or be colonized. Had we not invaded Japan for US trade route profits, had we not been demonstrating that colonial imperialism was the way forward, then Japan would have been far less likely to be pressured to behave similarly (the actions of all sides leading to an inevitable war no matter who fired the first shot).
I have no rose-colored view of Japan's actions (my adoptive grandmother and her parents spent most of the war being terribly mistreated and starved in a Japanese concentration camp). At the end of the war, most of these men were executed for their crimes, but despite all the well-known American war crimes, not even one American soldier was charged for crimes committed and everything was hidden behind the American flag.
In 'Grave of the Fireflies' a war is occurring, but is not the focus. It didn't matter to those children who the 'enemy' was and it didn't matter who the 'friendlies' were (neither side was willing to help them when they were incapable of helping themselves). It didn't even matter that the war ended exactly one week before Setsuko died.
I agree with the author that it was premeditated murder, but the murderer was not the US or even Japan. It is every one of us who are unwilling to stop this from happening in the here and now. WW2 is a fading memory, but the innocent casualties of war are not.
Check out the conquests of Caesar and Alexander the Great.
They preferred settling among the local populace, including forced marriages/rape. It's harder to rebel when the invaders are your neighbours or even your fathers.
Cynically speaking, that's better than just evaporating innocents.
1. The Japanese would not have capitulated until much more suffering would have taken place.
2. Negotiations with Russia were going on over the division of Germany and the atomic weapon blasts tempered Stalin's resolve that he had the more effective fighting force.
3. Innocents die in war. Whether from gas chambers or fire bombings or atomic bombs. If we want to stop this from happening then we need to reduce the frequency of war. Especially total war. Or do you really expect the US to send in it's bachelors to rape defenceless Japanese prisoners for decades? In the time of Alexander the great less than 3% of the population was used in fighting forces because manpower was required to keep up the food supply. It was a completely different era with a completely different set of circumstances that we don't even fully understand because we don't have the same level of records about it.
It was an answer to a ludicrous question... I certainly don't endorse the approach of Alexander the Great :)
Mainly, I feel the phrase "total war" is a hyperbolic, "binary" phrase that doesn't allow for meaningful, nuanced debate. That's all I was trying to counteract.
I don't think the parent comment should be downvoted. It makes some good points, even if you disagree with them.
I think you're misunderstanding what "war-bringer" means in this case. It's not America vs. Japan: it's the governments vs. the people. Both the American government and the Japanese government brought war, but the people of the countries (especially Japan) were forced to suffer for their governments' decisions.
It should be down voted because it seems obvious the poster didn't read the whole article. There are later sections, for example those covering Jiro Horikoshi, that address how Japan brought much of their pain on themselves.
Also, the comment missed the entire point of the article, as you established. Just because Japan attacked Pearl harbour doesn't mean an unnamed mother deserved to burn to death, nor that her child deserved to starve to death.
Neither victim, nor many of the other civilians in WW2 or Iraq, had a say in the politicking that led to their destruction, which is the true horror of war.
I read the whole article, and I thought the same thing as the parent. I appreciate a pacifist sentiment, but outside of the critical analysis of the films, this essay was fairly insipid.
There's such a thing as "pacifism", where you believe that violence should always be the final alternative. Then there's the sophomoric thinking of defining "pacifism" as "we should never go to war, ever". Sometimes, you have to fight.
The Japanese were in many ways more brutal and ruthless than the Nazis but have done a great job whitewashing their despicable past. Wiped away with mushroom clouds that they invited.
The Japanese civilians who are depicted in Fireflies bear no more responsibility for the actions of unit 731 or the rape of nanking than you do for LeMay's fire bombing of Japanese cities. If you can do nothing else, reject the lumping-together of a people into a collective 'they.' No matter what punishment Japanese war criminals deserve, we must also strive to protect civilians on all sides.
Your comment was going so well until that last sentence. Yes, the Japanese government committed atrocities. But I have a hard time seeing how that somehow justifies the US killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians that had nothing to do with it when Japan was basically begging to surrender. Yes begging to surrender, but the US only wanted unconditional surrender, which they knew to a society based on pride and honor was a huge slap in the face and they knew it would be turned down.
The only hint of surrender was the Japanese approaching the Soviets to broke a negotiation of surrender, to which the Soviets essentially ignored. That's hardly "begging".
They wanted to keep all the land they had gained imperially (Taiwan and some other land, I forget offhand). Which was essentially an "OK, we lose. But we get to keep everything we took before we lost." which was denied by the Soviets and would have been denied by the US.
The issue being glossed over is that anyone speaking against the war or saying Japan would lose would be murdered by fanatical military leaders. If you were against the war, you were against the Emperor and Japan. A traitor.
Civilian deaths are not justified by political military conquest. Especially when any civilians who speak out against the political military conquest are killed. That's a lose:lose scenario for the civilians and I don't see how anyone could morally justify such a choice.
"Die going against your country or die because of it." is hardly a choice...
> Yes begging to surrender, but the US only wanted unconditional surrender, which they knew to a society based on pride and honor was a huge slap in the face and they knew it would be turned down.
Arguably, the US was right. If I understand correctly, the US was determined to break Japan's militaristic social organization, to prevent another war. They needed unconditional surrender to do so. And, in fact, Japan has not been aggressive after World War II. They didn't re-arm and start another war, with hundreds of thousands of more (at least) casualties.
So the moral calculus is really not as simple as what you say.
> How would this author propose convincing leaders who commit human rights violations to stop those violations?
You kill several of those victims, of course, and make sure the rest won't ever escape from poverty. I'm pretty sure that'll teach a dictator to not victimize them.
Or, just maybe, a dictator oppressing its own people isn't good enough reason to start a war. But I'll not insist on such radical ideas.
When an entire nation becomes a support system for a war machine ravaging an entire region and killing tens of millions of innocent people, the notion of "innocent civilians" becomes a bit tenuous.
Japan was in the wrong. It was a criminal aggressor. The idea that the Japanese people should be able to sit back in their admittedly lovely gardens and sip sencha tea while their armies were committing massive crimes against humanity is a grotesque notion. The best way to show the Japanese people the horrific nature of war and occupation was to bring it to their doorstep. If they want to portray themselves of victims, it should be of their own leadership, not the countries that needed to defeat them.
This is ultimately the harmful conclusion of any absolutist idea that ascribes guilt to the citizenry for the actions of the state it is subordinate to. You will notice similar ideas spread in ostensibly democratic countries. If you vote and the nominee ends up going berserk, it's your fault for picking them. If you don't vote, it's your fault for not stopping them. The idea that the voting system used might be inefficient is completely discounted. Further, the idea that maybe most people have no real agency over the actions of their government is treated as a rather foreign one.
Sadly, and somewhat paradoxically, many of those who lament the bombing of Japan probably feel that way. For example, quoting the article, how do you think the author of this passage would respond to your question?
> the Israeli blockade of Gaza, US sanctions on Iran, and the new Saudi blockade of Yemen, as the infanticidal atrocities they are.
>how do you think the author of this passage would respond to your question?
I am the author, and I would respond that 9/11 was a despicable act of mass murder committed under the same terrorist rationale and collective guilt fallacies under which the above listed crimes are also committed. Two wrongs do not make a right, and neither do two atrocities. For more along these lines, see this other essay of mine: https://medium.com/dan-sanchez/the-symbiosis-of-savagery-68d...
MAJOR SPOILERS!!!
wtf! no spoiler warning at all.
Grave of the fireflies was one of the few Ghibli films I hadnt got around to seeing yet.
Plot is totally spoiled in the first few sentences.
fuck you author!!
I agree; some stories are more damaged by spoilers than others. If the primary appeal of a story is a shocking surprise, the spoiler takes much of the fun out of it. But some stories aren't particularly hurt even if you know the details.
However, in this case, the spoiler (which I read long ago) told me that it's a film I want to skip; I don't enjoy stories with bad endings, no matter what message they're trying to convey or point they're trying to make. There's too much of that in reality already to seek it out in fiction.
I mean, it's an 18-year old movie. What did you expect? That nobody ever talks about the plot of movies forever and all time? There's a time when we have to say "okay, people have probably watched it, it's safe to talk about it freely now", and 18 years is definitely more than enough time for that to be the case.
> It's a 27 years old movie actually. Get your facts right.
That... I mean... That just proves my point more. Jesus. I'm sorry that I apparently made a blunder in my quick mental math and provided a more conservative answer than the truth. Stop making it sound like it ruins my entire argument, especially since my argument wasn't even based on the exact number of years.
Instead, my argument was that after a certain amount of time, it's pointless to worry about spoilers because enough time has passed to actually give a person a chance to have watched the movie if it interested them. Stupidly declaring everything a spoiler just makes it so that it's impossible to talk about a movie and have a real discussion, as this article does. If we worried about spoilers for a 27-year old movie, this article wouldn't exist.
Yes. They had several years as teens to have watched the movie if they so choose. They decided not to, maybe because they hadn't heard of the movie (and, really, would have probably heard of the movie based on the interests before seeing the spoiler), maybe because it didn't interest them (in which case, whatever, the spoiler won't ruin anything). Too bad for them. They had their chance, they didn't take it. It makes no sense for everyone else to suffer for this absolutely ridiculous hypothetical. And it is ridiculous. It won't happen, and if it does, then big fucking whoop. It's a spoiler. It's not the end of the world. You're making this seem like a far bigger deal than it actually is.
Plus, many platforms don't have spoiler tags by default, so have fun putting these magical spoiler tags in.
Edit: And you know what? If you were a 15-year old teen with an interest in Miyazaki's movies, or war movies, or whatever interests you to want to watch said movie, and you've just been let onto the internet, what are you going to look for first? The movie that you so desperately want to see, or an article about it that could potentially spoil it? Like seriously, that's how ridiculous your hypothetical is right now. The chance of it happening is so absurdly low.
> LeMay also oversaw and championed the enforcement of the total blockade of Japan by filling the waters around its port cities with aerial-dropped mines, which, for example, caused shipping through Kobe to plummet by 85%. This campaign was dubbed, with a refreshing lack of hypocrisy, “Operation Starvation.” Thus, the starvation of little Setsuko/Keiko was not “collateral damage,” but a premeditated murder.
Newsflash: people kill other people in wars. Including civilians. Wow, I would have never imagined. And yes, you try to kill as many people as you can, because that's how wars stop, when the losses are big enough that you consider capitulation. Japan's military indoctrination gave the US not much choice anyway, since they were ready to fight till the last man.
> LeMay was instrumental in the US shift from high-altitude bombing with general purpose explosives to the low-altitude incendiary bombing of Japanese cities that resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and the famine-inducing ruination of the economy. He later became a tireless advocate for bombing Vietnam, as he put it, “back to the Stone Age,” and for bombing the whole world back to the Ice Age by launching a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union.
That's a complete misunderstanding of the thinking of LeMay. There are many documentaries/books about him, and you can read "Command and Control" if you want to get a good view of LeMay and why he acted like that during that period. Whether you liked him or not, he was a rational person. His idea of nuking the Soviets first came from the fact that for some time, the US had clear superior nuclear power vs the Soviets, and that one should not wait until the Soviets develop enough bombs to be able to destroy the US if they decide to strike first. If the Soviets had decided to strike first, it would have destroyed the US chain of command and left nothing for retaliation - that is why LeMay started the SAC program to have bombers constantly in the skies with nuclear weapons, "just in case". That program lasted until after the fall of the Soviet Union. And bombing the Soviets first when the US had a clear advantage (in the early 50s basically) would not have resulted in the whole world being destroyed, most likely only the Soviet Union would have paid a hefty price while the losses in Europe/US would have been less.
Seriously, don't write about History if you know nothing about it.
> And bombing the Soviets first when the US had a clear advantage (in the early 50s basically) would not have resulted in the whole world being destroyed, most likely only the Soviet Union would have paid a hefty price while the losses in Europe/US would have been less.
And this is a better outcome than what _actually_ happened how...?
Not saying this is better or worse. Just explaining the way he was thinking - and noting that we were on the brink of nuclear war in two times in the 60s and the 80s, with actual total annihilation being very close - if it had happened you would not be there to pass that judgment in the first place, and LeMay may have been proven right.
Most observers agree that it was "mere luck" that we did not annihilate each other at those precise time points.
Miyazaki is anti-war, but he's also extremely pro-ecology as is obvious in most of his films (Nausicaa is an obvious one, but perhaps more obvious would be Pom Poko or Totoro). Broadly speaking, he advocates balance in all its forms. A lot of his main protagonists are strong female characters, and not the "overly girly unicorn princess with magical powers" kind. Violence, like greed, is a disease as opposed to an end (in fact those two concepts are often expressed together in his films, e.g. Spirited Away).
But maybe the best accomplishment in most, if not all, of Miyazaki's work, is his ability to capture the interest and the imagination of the viewers without resorting to cheesy gimmicks, gratuitous violence or sexual innuendos, which seem to be the go-to for a lot of cinema (animation and otherwise, Western and Eastern).