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Sixty-three years after U.S. forces vanquished the Japanese and planted the Stars and Stripes atop Iwo Jima's Mount Suribachi, the remote outpost in the Volcano Islands is the focus of another pitched battle. This time film directors Clint Eastwood and Spike Lee are sparring over the accuracy of Eastwood's two films about the clash, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Lee has claimed that by soft-pedaling the role of African Americans in the battle, Eastwood has whitewashed history...
...Clint Eastwood made two films about Iwo Jima that ran for more than four hours total, and there was not one Negro actor on the screen," Lee said last month at the Cannes Film Festival. "In his version of Iwo Jima, Negro soldiers did not exist...
...charge. "Has he ever studied history? [African-American soldiers] didn't raise the flag," he countered in an interview with the British newspaper the Guardian. "If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people'd go, 'This guy's lost his mind.'" Eastwood also suggested Lee should "shut his face." That didn't go down so well. Eastwood "is not my father, and we're not on a plantation either," Lee fumed. "I'm not making this up. I know history...
History, as it turns out, is on both their sides. Lee is correct that African Americans played a key role in World War II, in which more than 1 million black servicemen helped topple the Axis powers. He is correct too in pointing out that African-American forces made significant contributions to the fight for Iwo Jima. An estimated 700 to 900 African Americans, trained in segregated boot camps, participated in the landmark battle, which claimed the lives of about 6,800 servicemen, nearly all Marines...
TAKING TO THE STREETS More than 100,000 people protested in the South Korean capital on June 10 amid an escalating backlash against President Lee Myung Bak's move to end a ban on imported American beef. Lee's April decision sparked the protests, which have grown in scope to include his broader policies toward Washington and prompted his Cabinet members to offer their resignations...