Yeah, I played with those same plastic soldiers, Spaw. Yanks, Germans, and Japanese. The Japanese guys were particularly fanatical looking, Banzai charging and screaming, and waving knives and swords and stuff. They also had sculpted glasses put on quite a few of them! You never saw glasses on the German or American soldiers. It reflected the general nasty image of the Japanese at the time as buck-toothed, bespectacled, snarling, sadistic little "monkey-men" that was being pushed in movies, comics, and TV in the 50's and early 60's. Those plastic soldiers were made by a company called Marx Brothers. You could buy a bag of 50 of them for maybe a buck or less. All the kids had them.

I was naturally interested in the war, because stuff about it was everywhere back then, and my dad had served in the British forces, driving a Stuart tank.

What I remember from grade school and high school was this tremendous amount of what truly was sheer hate propaganda, all designed to depict WWII Japanese and Germans as monsters. (The Italians were barely spoken of...) I never forgot that. I don't like hate propaganda, no matter which way it is aimed, and I don't like it being shoved down my throat by schools and media.

I don't understand why, when a war has already been totally won and the enemy utterly conquered, it must still be seen as necessary to teach a new generation of kids to hate the people who lost it. That's what was being done in those days. What good could that achieve? I consider it quite similar to what the German and Japanese propaganda spinners were doing on their side when things were going their way. It's the automatic assumption that "We're better than they are. We're good. They're evil."

I hear rhetoric like that from George Bush regularly. He imagines he is fighting a war against evil.

Such assumptions are dangerous, they're self-serving, they're blind, and they are untrue. They lead to future great evils committed by the very same people who think they are above that sort of iniquity.