Tom Hanks is a fine actor. He’s also done a lot of good work on bringing some American history to the big and small screens – including “Band of Brothers,” and “John Adams.”

But it appears as though his latest project is more of the typical Hollywood fare – America is evil and racist.

But the context for Hanks’ history lessons has changed. Band of Brothers, HBO’s best-selling DVD to date, began airing two days before 9/11; The Pacific, his new 10-hour epic about the Pacific theater in World War II, plays out against a very different backdrop, when the country is weary of war and American exceptionalism is a much tougher sell. World War II in the European theater was a case of massive armies arrayed against an unambiguous evil. The Pacific war was mainly fought by isolated groups of men and was overlaid by a sense that our foes were fundamentally different from us. In that sense, the war in the Pacific bears a closer relation to the complex war on terrorism the U.S. is waging now, making the new series a trickier prospect but one with potential for more depth and resonance. “Certainly, we wanted to honor U.S. bravery inThe Pacific,” Hanks says. “But we also wanted to have people say, ‘We didn’t know our troops did that to Japanese people.’”…

And he is pleased that The Pacific has fulfilled an obligation to our World War II vets. He doesn’t see the series as simply eye-opening history. He hopes it offers Americans a chance to ponder the sacrifices of our current soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. “From the outset, we wanted to make people wonder how our troops can re-enter society in the first place,” Hanks says. “How could they just pick up their lives and get on with the rest of us? Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”

Maybe your time would be better spent watching (or re-watching) Clint Eastwood’s two excellent flicks: “Flags of our Fathers” and “Letters from Iwo Jima.”

How screwed up does your head have to be to think that we went after the Japanese because “they’re different” and not because of their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor?

And we’re supposed to feel some sort of guilt over what we did to the Japanese people? Someone needs to re-watch the first few minutes of “The Great Raid.” If a society wants to complain about their treatment during WWII, maybe the Japanese would be better off asking the Chinese and Koreans.