Brutal But Accurate

With the 2022 Olympic Winter Games being held in Beijing, I thought this biathlon poster I found today on Facebook seemed timely.

If you don’t get it, do an Interwebs search for “uighurs”.

UPDATE: The above was done by Chinese dissident artist Badiucao. He has won the Vaclav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent in 2020.

Badiucao’s work above is part of a five canvas series criticizing Chinese human rights abuses ahead of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. He resides in exile in Australia where this art was created. It seems some Australian billboard companies are fearful of pissing off China and have refused to allow his work to appear on their billboards.

Jon Wertheim of CBS News just did a long story about Badiucao and his artwork this evening on 60 Minutes.

Here is a preview:

Promoting Marksmanship

Sweden in 1941 had Nazi-occupied Norway on one side, Nazi-allied (through mutual hatred of the Soviet Union) Finland on the other, and Nazi Germany itself across the Baltic Sea. It was hard being a neutral nation in the midst of all of that. Like the Swiss, the Swedes believed in armed neutrality.

The 1941 Swedish propaganda poster below is promoting marksmanship. The wording translates as “shooting skills increase the defense force.” Both the civilian and the soldier are firing what appears to be a Model 96 Swedish Mauser.

A Day That Will Live In Infamy Plus 76 Years

Most of those who were involved in the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, whether as attackers or defenders, are not alive today to tell their story. It is up to us in the succeeding generations to remember it and to tell it.

First, let us remember those men and women on the American side who died during the attack. The casualty list is here. As to the Japanese, I’m not sure where to find any of those records.

The US Navy has an official account of the attack. It was compiled by CINCPAC for the Secretary of the Navy and was dated 15 February 1942. The report gives the disposition of the US Pacific Fleet on December 7th, an after action report, damage reports, and the current state of readiness after the attack. It is quite comprehensive.

Remembering that there was no social media at the time, the role of propaganda posters was critical for energizing the populace of the United States on to a wartime footing. Some of these posters were simple and some were not. The last poster below shows the Japanese wearing glasses. That plus buck teeth seem to be the common characterization of the Japanese in these propaganda posters. There are many other posters I could have used but I thought them too overtly racist. Unlike the war in Europe, World War II in the Pacific Theater was brutal, nasty, racist, and without mercy. A good book on war in the Pacific is John Dower’s War Without Mercy.

Finally, of the movie accounts of the attack, I still think Tora Tora Tora is the best. Sometimes it is included with Amazon Prime and sometimes not.