POW images from the past highlighted on Facebook

Hanoi Hilton

The above photo has been making the rounds on Facebook.I originally assumed it was of Hanoi Hilton vintage, as it reminded me of the one beneath, which I covered in my post called St. John’s Warts. In my opinion the John McCain POW story was just propaganda designed to sheep dip him and prepare him for the presidency.

Hanoi Hilton 2

This is, to me, an obvious fake. All the men, though being starved, enjoy fine grooming, regular shaves and haircuts. One might suspect they were spruced up for this photo-op, but given the degree of emaciation, I doubt the Vietnamese would want to broadcast a photo like this. Anyway, the lighting is a mess – faces on the second, third and fifth from the right of darker tone than the bodies, unnaturally so. The guy on the right enjoys different lighting than the others.

This does not detract from the fact that we are indeed looking at bodies in the process of starvation. It is just a question of where they originated. Were they from WWII concentration camps? We know that conditions were deplorable. They certainly look Caucasian, and the notable feature, the heads, are robust and healthy and well-groomed.

Hanoi Hilton

Here is the original photo again. Let’s take a closer look. I found the source on Facebook as “Occupy Democrats,” a page wherein members of that party emphasize that they really are different from their good-cop-bad-cop counterpart, the Republicans. That page does not link the photo to any source. So I have to go with their contention that these are prisoners of war, that they are Americans, and that they stand in heroic contrast to the “Draft Dodger Trump.” That is “Occupy Democrats” assertion.

First a little side trip – Facebook. It is apparent to me that it has taken on the role that was once played primarily by television, that of dissemination of propaganda to the American people. Other sources claim it is a mere CIA front, and that Mark Zuckerberg is a hired actor. I buy that – it makes sense. Facebook is overrun with images like this, and is used to reinforce every fake mass shooting, the worst being Paris where everyone pledged unity by superimposing a French flag over their image. Facebook has been an intricate part of our fake event culture.

Propaganda takes many forms – I would call the above “integration” (as opposed to “agitation”) propaganda, designed to unify us as a whole body with one outlook behind a common cause. Common enemies like communists, later terrorists, and now mass shooters serve this purpose.

I have looked hard at the above photo, and I want to say it is fake, but the longer I stare, the better it looks. I want to say that the two heads have been superimposed on two bodies of strangers from WWII. The heads look generally healthier and (at least the one closer) seems to have darker skin tone. I took it to Photoshop and reversed the contrast, and got the following result:

Hanoi Hilton withInvert

It appears to me that the necks on both men are of different tone than either the heads or bodies. I am seeing in the man closest a straight line under his left chin and ear to looks oddly like a darkroom splice (or a scar). And again, he is clean-shaven and has had a recent haircut, this as he is being starved to death. The arms in the foreground look oddly too long. The left arm, though emaciated, is far more muscular than the right. The dark space under and behind his right leg and calf (here a bright white space due to reverse contrast) is odd.

Of course, I cannot be sure. I usually get great input from readers and commenters, so have at it. Who are these men? Are they supposed to be at the Hanoi Hilton? What are you seeing that I have missed? What have I over-analyzed?

Have fun!

29 thoughts on “POW images from the past highlighted on Facebook”

  1. Mark, you are definitely not over analyzing…I see no distress in their faces as they stare mildly at the camera. I agree that the arms seem very long and the guy on the right is wearing some type of “diaper” as pants, while the other guy is wearing what could be striped pajama bottoms. Very suspicious to my eyes.

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  2. Nice, some photo analysis again. And although the topic is far from nice, we should be able to externalize ourselves from the subject, just as coroners, psychologists, judges and the whole military do on a daily basis. Now that I think of it, this is actually quite a strong argument (and never heard that voiced before) against the “emo terror” believers in the “terror event stories” who throw at us; “how dare you analyze those photos and smiles and videos, think about those children that DIED!”…

    What sprung to my eye immediately with the two man (A closest, B farthest) is:
    – A has a far too healthy head for his body. Too much fat, too little cheekbones to see, in B that is far more convincing.
    – B’s left lower arm (closest to us) is FAR too fat and his hand too. The hand could be explained away by some local swelling of the extremities (though I don’t know the exact process), but the lower arm definitely not.
    – The position of that arm on his knee also doesn’t make sense and his forearm is too short.
    – His (B) right arm (farthest from us), also is not resting on his knee/knee-femur junction, but behind it. Very uncomfortable.
    – Indeed as you say the heads look like pasted over, with the necks of both men very “spotty”, while the rest of their bodies do not show that pattern.

    The photo with the 5 men:
    – it seems the guy on the left is wearing some “mocassins” or so, the next three sports shoes and the one on the right decent shoes (sorry, don’t know how to better describe it in English).

    How is that possible?? If these were POWs, they were military men who wore their military boots, camouflaged, etc. Were they given new shoes by the Vietnamese? Why? And where did those shoes, obviously some sizes bigger than the average Vietnamese, come from? The French shoe store at the corner was still open, so give them boyz some new footwear??

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  3. I am thinking real image. Maybe these men were rescued and are in recovery. You have heard about the Eisenhower death camps of WWII after the liberation of the ghettos, right? By the sounds of it, very few got out of there alive, sadly. An interesting thing i’ve recently caught onto are the starving Jew images we are shown, when you focus in on the faces, they are all Europeans with maybe an exception of one that might could pass for Jewish looking. There are some out there of Jewish looking faces in the striped pajama looking outfits, but all are well nourished. I am not saying this to disparage the Jews, merely to un-bury the truth. The point being, if six million Jews died, then how many more millions of Europeans died and why don’t we get to hear about them? Well, that just wouldn’t be p.c. – lol.

    They do this sort of thing all the time, they show us images then tell us us what we are seeing and we just believe it. They did that on 9-11 and we just believed planes could take down tall buildings. Or they’ll show us images of a little girl with cherry pie filling on her face spliced in in front of men in mis-matched uniforms, and tell us she just watched the military murder her parents, and we just believe it… not to say that doesn’t happen, but if it were the real military and not some sort of pys-op, the uniforms would be uniform.

    We don’t, or that is to say, we haven’t critically scrutinized what we are being told against what our eyes should be telling us. Looking back on the old nuclear bomb footage drives that idea home pretty well. I think some of us are getting better at it but we’ve got a long way to go. Beware the media… that’s about all the more i can say.

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    1. I don’t know about the veracity of the image, but I do know that labor camps did exist in WW2, as I had a good number of relatives who claim to have been there. Now all of those people have passed on, as they were born in the 1910s and 20s, but they did tell their stories a lot while they were alive.

      What I also remember is my father marveling over why these people, who claimed to have been in camps, survived at all. The conditions they described should have provided near certain death for them. With stories like using the same vessel as both their food plate AND latrine. All of these people who went ended up coming back alive and well. And not just that, but they had cushy lives afterward, receiving what I can only describe as a living veteran’s pensions as well as a nice, easy job or even a position of leadership/authority in the local community. While many of the men who fought as soldiers, in contrast to labor camp inmates, in WW2 simply died. Some under mysterious circumstances, like my paternal grandfather. Make of that what you will.

      And, no. My family/people aren’t Jewish, but we are Slavs.

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      1. The Jews were kept in internment camps in Germany, just like how the Americans kept Japanese in internment camps during world war II. The Jewish Holocaust is a fraud.

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        1. Again, I know about internment caps, which I’ve always thought of as places where people were simply corralled and sequestered, a la the Japanese internment camps in the U.S. And I know about camps that were exclusively for people doing hard labor, as I’ve described. What you’re saying, Wallace, seems to point more towards reality than anything else I’ve heard yet.

          I’m a huge Kubrick fan, and there are so many opinions about his film “The Shining”. I’ve watched that so many times that I’ve lost count. Some people believe that movie is Kubrick’s confession about the moon landing, which I’m not sure about. Others believe, more pertinent to this discussion thread, that Kubrick might have been saying something about WW2, or history or wars in general, in that movie. When little Danny sees the specters of those two ghoulish little girls at the end of the hallway he says to his “imaginary” friend Tony “I’m scared”. To which Toney replies: “It’s just like pictures in a book. It isn’t real.”

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  4. Here’s another image- https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/two-emaciated-american-civilians-lee-rogers-john-c-todd-sitting-a-picture-id50693420?k=6&m=50693420&s=612×612&w=0&h=HF9fmzu1H2Z_C_dZXLOy6LKS1UGHel2oJa1qjc2Z_tQ=
    These two were civilians in the Philippines, kept on a university campus turned into a civilian internment camp by the Japanese forces- They are listed as Lee Rogers and John C Todd- The background is their food source and one theory about their arms is that working those gardens kept some muscle mass in tact to a degree- They have what looks like edible footwear but never got to that stage of desperation. They likely hallucinated about food for a long time after liberation, like the starving cartoon characters seeing each other as drumsticks or cheeseburgers. The re-nourishing process from this state has to be carefully monitored or people in this condition could kill themselves with too much food too soon. The only real sticking point for me are their necks, but I have no real experience studying human anatomy in this condition so I have no solid position on this one, though I lean towards real……

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    2. Thanks for the link, Tyrone. Seeing the hands in close-up raises some questions. Is that a semi- Baphomet ( devil’s horns) sign being done by the 2nd man, left hand? Secondly, if you look above the wrist on the same hand, is there a phallic type image, or just bad photoshopping? Perhaps it’s just my dirty old lady mind..

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  6. In the photo of the five men sitting, I am of the opinion that all of the bodies are real, of course, and that the photo is of WWII vintage, though I cannot know where or when. It appears as though the man on the left is real, head to foot, while the other four have had heads superimposed on the bodies in a darkroom.

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  7. those two faces on the main picture look somehow familiar to me. Just can’t place them now. As for “starving” it could be some kind of ritual starving actors sometimes obviously have to do:

    As for concentration camps, the British had probably the most of them not the Germans. And Ghettos are Jewish invention to bypass local taxes by the way.

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    1. Even though they are in starvation mode, their faces look intense, intelligent, alert. Compare that with the guy on the very left in the five-man photo above, who looks angry, despondent, ready to give it up.

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  12. I saw a few people in Frankfurt today on my way to the office looking very much like those on the pictures. Some of them were junkies and homeless people I saw at the train station, others were some women suffering anorexia. It’s obviously not a big deal to become like that. Even today. During the war and in the years after there still wasn’t enough to eat for everybody. Distribution of food was disturbed. There were different kinds of camps everywhere where crowded people had to eat less and less for a long time. I know many such people. Even in my own family. This people usually become very old. If they survive. Starving seems to be a quite healthy process for grownups. Not so for children of course. The African father of one of my children’s friends recently died in his early forties. He came as a starving child from Ghana to Germany in the 80-s and never really recovered. I would not read to much into your pictures Mark. The people look groomed, you said it yourself. And they seem to pose for the picture.

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    1. The picture (of two men) is part of a Facebook propaganda effort. The Democrats are promoting it, and offer no sourcing, but I think want us to believe that the men were part of the Hanoi Hilton effort, about which I have to ask if there are real photos, if the events were real, why are they using fakes? The photo itself may be real, but the fakery consists of transporting it in time from WWII to Vietnam. I consider this kind of propaganda to be a booster shot, to prevent the original dosages from that era from wearing off, in the same manner as the constant reminders we are given of the Holocaust. Hanoi Hilton was, in my opinion, fake.

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    2. “Starving seems to be a quite healthy process for grownups.”

      Yeah, it’s called “fasting.” It’s actually healthy if done intermittently, but not for long extended periods.

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  13. MT, I know you do not need support anywhere, but I just went to the still going “virtual party” and posted a pair of comments you might enjoy reading them.

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      1. Yeah! I can relate, I would’ve liked mines too! Yeah, they totally take it to heart. Like pitbulls, but for all the wrong reasons!

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      2. It’s standard reaction to any serious critics there. The same happened in the Tychos forum back them when it was still called the Clues. 🙂 It is him or them, it doesn’t matter. It is not a place for any discussion anymore. It never was. It is a propaganda display. I also wrote some comments there politely asking questions and they banned me immediately. I could place one comment though using my full first name which confused them. Our Taos-man lost his good manners a bit and is also suddenly commenting a lot. He also compares himself constantly with other bloggers which he avoided in the past. There are some main characters passing the ball to each other. It is a pathetic last scream of a dying squirt falling into insignificance.

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  15. John C Todd was my grandfather who passed away shortly after being released from the POW camp. My mother ( a young teen at the time) was able to see him once before he died.

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