Need help on "Tokyo Rose" e-mail

[monmouth]

I received this in an e-mail and was going to ignore it, maybe I should. Would love to get some thoughts from you guys on this. Should I let it go, or get some spiffy hard-hitting responses from DU??? This is a new one for me, I'm a little speechless.....


"TOKYO ROSE"
>
> She had the best music on her station and most
> people just laughed. The
> ship I was on was sunk no less than five times but
> each time Davey Jones
> threw her back up.
>
> Tokyo Rose During World War II -- the Japanese
> developed a way to
> demoralize the American forces. Psychological
> warfare experts developed
> a message they felt would work.
>
> They gave the script to their famous broadcaster
> "Tokyo Rose" and every
> day she would broadcast this same message packaged
> in different ways,
> hoping it
> would have a negative impact on American GI's
> morale.
>
> What was that demoralizing message? It had three
> main points:
>
> 1. Your President is lying to you.
>
> 2. This war is illegal.
>
> 3. You cannot win the war.
>
> Does this sound familiar?
>
> Is it because Tokyo Hillary, Tokyo Harry, Tokyo
> John, Tokyo Teddy, Tokyo
> Nancy, etc. have picked up the same message and are
> broadcasting it on
> Tokyo CNN, Tokyo ABC, Tokyo CBS, Tokyo NBC, etc., to
> our troops?
>
> The only difference is that they claim to support
> our troops before they
> demoralize them.
>
> Come to think of it, Tokyo Rose told the troops she
> was on their side, too!

[Hokie]

1. I would say this

The difference is that this President really is lying to us.

[Beaverhausen]

2. considering only 9% of the population supports the war

this doesn't even seem to be worth responding to.

[WorseBeforeBetter]

3. Tell the sender to "sign up or STFU."

And be sure to hit Reply All.

[ThoughtCriminal]

4. A bit of background

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Rose
http://www.fbi.gov/libref/historic/famcases/rose/rose.htm

I rather doubt that any of the broadcasts claimed that the war was illegal, but I have only heard tiny bits.

[AlCzervik]

5. why bother, really? You need help? here's your help

bounce that shit back to the dumbass that sent it to you.

[TheWraith]

6. Were the writer of this not a moron, they would have known some of the following:

Tokyo Rose was not one person--it was a generic name given to any and all of the roughly dozen English-speaking women who broadcast on Japanese radio. A good many of these broadcasts were not propaganda at all, but comedy sketches or news announcements, such as those voiced by Iva Toguri D'Aquino, the woman who was falsely tried for treason as "Tokyo Rose" and subsequently pardoned when it was learned that the two main witnesses against her had perjured themselves. Finally, the propaganda which was broadcast by Japan directed at US troops had nothing to do with the president lying or legality, it was mostly of the "woe to the Americans, what will you do now" variety, with a few tossed in references to war workers stealing the soldiers' girlfriends.

The troops were in fact not very demoralized by this--many of them found it terribly funny that the Japanese propaganda was so concerned over their personal welfare. Of course this was in large part because the Japanese were using captured POWs to produce their radio programs.

[Goblinmonger]

7. Plus, Call me skeptical

but I'm betting that a good number of war workers were making it with the girlfriends of soldiers. Oh, wait, that didn't happen in the good old days.

[John Gauger]

9. Yeah, that's exactly right.

Good to know somebody has some history.

[John Gauger]

8. Tokyo Rose never said any of that.

Tokyo Rose never said any of those things. She never said anything demoralizing to American troops. There is no record, either in transcripts or in recordings, that she ever said anything on the air other than the names of the songs she was playing. Millions of people claim that they heard her say things like 'your wife is cheating on you back home,' but that never happened. Those people claiming to have heard her are either confusing her with a different propagandist or just making it up - I listening to the radio a lot while I was deployed, so I must have heard her at some point, right? But they don't realize that she never did that. She was convicted of treason but pardoned later by Ford, I believe because someone told him that she was innocent. There was, however, a German-American woman that broadcast Fascist propaganda from Long Island, with the intention of demoralized US GIs. She was never charged with a crime because she was white.

Let's use our brains for a minute. "This war is illegal?" The Japanese started it, so why would they say that? That is collosally stupid.

[Turbineguy]

11. Sounds like Tokyo Rose was more

morally well grounded than the Wingnuts.

[catnhatnh]

14. Close...

I think you refer to...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_Sally

[John Gauger]

17. Yeah, that's what I was referring to.

I read that she was never even charged, but I guess that's not right.

[conscious evolution]

10. First para debunked easily

She had the best music on her station and most
> people just laughed. The
> ship I was on was sunk no less than five times but
> each time Davey Jones
> threw her back up.
They did play good music.
And the troops did laugh at her
As for the last line-The only boats that I know of that can 'sink' 5 times are little toy ones that a kid plays with in the tub.

[GoodSpud]

12. Apparently, she was also a registered Republican

I don't know the case intimately but apparently she was a registered Repuke according to this page:
http://www.dyarstraights.com/orphan_ann/stranger.html

Sounds like she was just a young lady that got stuck in the wrong place at the wrong time to me. She was charged, after a long fight to return home to the U.S. and convicted on one of eight counts. That count being, that she had talked about ships being sunk.

T.D.P.

[Warren DeMontague]

13. Except, in this situation, we attacked a country which never attacked us first.

Which -if you want to hold true to the WWII metaphor- makes us the Japanese.

[catnhatnh]

15. Oddly enough when I google "ship sunk five times"...

I get no pertinent ship names-which oddly enough just what is attatched to the bullshit E-mail....no pertinent name, like who said so....

[conscious evolution]

16. You didn't google hard enough

It was this ship.
http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/P/B00000IZRT.01._SS400_SCLZZZZZZZ
Or maybe one of these


Edited to replce link.