1. Ron Unz, founder and editor of The American Conservative, skewers the mainstream American media for dropping the ball on all sorts of major scoops, including:
2. Richard Nixon’s abandonment of hundreds of surviving American prisoners of war after the end of hostilities, at a time when he had declared that all surviving POW’s had been repatriated; and
3. John McCain’s exceptionally weird and disturbing role in the decades-long stonewalling of investigations into the fate of these men and efforts to repatriate any survivors.
4. On a separate but similar topic, a discussion of some possible fates of Indian independence leader and Axis collaborator Subhas Chandra Bose. Bose, aka Netaji, officially died in a plane crash in Taiwan, but is widely believed to have died in the Soviet Gulag, to have disappeared into civilian life in asylum in the Soviet Union, and to have lived into his eighties as a “mysterious holy man” in Uttar Pradesh.
The Nixon piece was not much of a surprise, but the McCain piece still shocks me to some degree. Especially with pieces like this:
Tragic.
Thanks, Andrew, for that fascinating piece on Indian history as well. Especially interesting is Bose’s alliance with Imperial Japan against Imperial Britain. As the bitter memories of World War 2 continue to fade away, I think we’ll continue to discover and acknowledge some of the more awkward happenings associated with the 1940s-1960s.