If you can get past the warm, fuzzy stories about the POW camps (see also this) — and in case anyone needs reminding, the fatality rate for US Army POWs in the Korean War was about 40%, which topped even the Japanese in barbarity — this 2005 documentary on the 21 American POWs who chose to go to China after the Korean War is really, really fascinating.
(HT to reader)
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I d/l’ed and watched that a couple of years ago. Truly fascinating stuff.
I saw an earlier documentary on Clarence Adams, the black POW. It showed his Chinese restaurant, the first one (I believe) in Memphis, TN.
He owned this Chop Suey restaurant complete with neon lights, Chinese decorations and everything. It showed Clarence in the kitchen, stir frying up a storm. A black man owning and operating a Chinese restaurant starting in the 60′s in the deep South. It must have been an odd sight for that time.
Clarence’s autobiography can be read here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=cPpwuQ8DKf4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=Clarence+Adams+american+dream&source=bl&ots=kxDvrn_G3Z&sig=HfQrm-V6UjGbCmciCK11DnKbhHA&hl=en&ei=yvCRS6OdPI_esgOw_6D8Aw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CAYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=&f=false
It was indeed fascinating. I thought I would watch a few minutes of it and then go out for a bit. 43 minutes later, I guess I won’t be going out…
Fascinating indeed. The charges against McCarthy at the beginning caught my attention. Justin Raimondo, historian of the American Old Right, makes the case that McCarthy was absolutely right, in that the enemy was at home, within our shores, and not overseas, where the liberal interventionists had sink our blood and treasure. Witness “Mr. Republican” Senator Robert Taft’s opposition to the Korean War.
The American aggressive stance against the Soviet Union was fomented by former Trotskyites (who later became neolibs and neocons) hashing out their old stupid quarrel with Stalin. The wiser America Firster isolationists realized we were protected from the rest of the world by two great oceans.
#4,
Nah, McCarthyism was anti-intellectual nonsense. It wasn’t protecting the US from Communists, it was forcing American society to remain conservative.
Gee, if I were a dumb kid in that situation, given the choice of American “freedom” (10-20 years in the brink) versus staying relatively free in pre-Mao China and hooking up with a hot local honey (hopefully sans kids), I can’t say I’d do any differently than these boys.
Its hard to see any difference between the Chinese propaganda and flag-waving of the time and that of the US. (Was Mike Wallace being an a-hole in that interview or what!)
So glad I wasn’t a young adult during that period in the US.
Woops, sorry I’m a dumb ass–not pre-Mao. Been reading too much of the Party’s literature. Gotta go March.
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