The point is this: why waste time complaining about someone else’s artistic vision or product when one could be busy writing and producing their own to fill in those gaps? If Burns’s work has a gap, surely there is a Latino artist or concerned party who can produce their own film to rectify that oversight. That’s my only point and nothing anyone could say will affect my opinion of Burns or his work, which I believe is almost the perfect meld of history and popular culture (the perfect meld is a dramatic HBO show like Rome which truly makes history come alive).

The Japanese atrocities in China (and other occupied Asian countries) are very much a live issue which continues to affect the politics of that region today, especially since Japan (unlike Germany) has hardly acknowledged the enormity of its actions during that period.

I don’t know which is more nauseating — the interminable whining of the present-day Japanese about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the hand-wringing of ignorant and misguided Americans on the same issue. I once asked a Chinese woman about the view some Americans hold, that the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was in some way immoral. She said that (a) this was literally the stupidest idea she had ever heard, and (b) in her opinion I could search the whole of China and not find even one person who would agree that the use of the atomic bombs was wrong. The view of the Japanese as congenitally evil persists in much of East Asia today in a way which is not paralleled in, say, present-day Russian or Polish feelings towards Germany. The Japanese sadism of World War II, compared with which Hiroshima and Nagasaki were barely pinpricks, is the main reason. You cannot understand the reality of present-day international relations in that part of the world without thoroughly grasping this point.

It’s true that Japanese society has changed its attitude to the extent that a repetition of such barbarities is pretty much unimaginable. The lion’s share of the credit for this should go to the atomic bombs and to the earlier massive bombing raids on Japanese cities (see my comment at the end of this thread). Where World War II is concerned, we have nothing to be ashamed of.

The tendencies are still there, dormant in each of us, but for now they have been mostly sublimated into the political process in the west (and to a large degree, I include Japan in my definition of The West).