You Won’t Believe But You Have Been Sharing This Morphed WWII Photo With Tricolour All This While As A Symbol Of Patriotism
During a recent Newshour debate on Times Now regarding the Ministry of Human Resources Development’s decision to erect 207-foot high steel flagpoles and giant tricolor flags in central universities across India, BJP spokesman Sambit Patra showed a morphed image of raising the flag on Iwo Jima.
The image was of six soldiers hoisting an Indian flag. Patra said that the image was of “Indian jawans, Indian soldiers dying, but holding up the tricolor, at the border”.
Even the clumsy attempt to hack arrested JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar’s Facebook page features the similar photograph of the Tricolor being hoisted by soldiers. Ever since, the photo has gone viral with many posting it to their Facebook profiles.
In reality, it was the Pulitzer Prize winning photograph titled Raising the Flag at Iwo Jima, taken by Joe Rosenthal on February 23, 1945, on Mount Suribachi in the island of Iwo Jima in the Pacific Ocean, in the days leading up to the battle of Okinawa during the final months of World War II. This picture is something that has come to symbolize the stellar American contribution to victory in the war and the fighting spirit and resilience of the American GI.
In the case of original Iwo Jima picture, there are five US Marine Corps men – Harlon Block, Franklin Sourly and Michael Strank, Rene Gagnon, Ira Hamilton Hayes and Navy Hospital Corpsman John Bradley. Block, Sourly and Strank died in action over the next few days at Iwo Jima. Gagnon, Hayes and Bradley survived, and became minor celebrities after the war.
One of the men, Ira Hamilton Hayes, Marine, who died as a depressed alcoholic after the war was an “Indian” – a Native American of the Pima “Indian” tribe, from the Gila River Reservation, Phoenix Valley, Arizona.
Pima Indian is one of the men who raised the USA flag on Iwo Jima, WWII https://t.co/KyR5YfcyRO pic.twitter.com/7KgRVue5Yo
— AIVMI (@AIVMI) February 13, 2016
For the Tricolour, there are scores of photographs of Indians unfurling the Tricolour everywhere — on Mount Everest, at Kargil during the war, etc. What was the great need then to hijack a moment of American history and run it as Indian? Is it not an insult to the glory of India? Does this hoax make anyone a patriot? Perhaps it’s time to do some soul-searching.