I have to be honest, the title is a small bit deceiving. This blog not about his nephew, the famous Rockstar who celebrates his 58th birthday today, but it is about Leonard M. Kravitz (technically Lenny is short for Leonard).
Leonard Martin Kravitz was an American soldier in the United States Army who served in the Korean War. He is a posthumous recipient of the Medal of Honor.
Leonard Kravitz ,of Russian Jewish ancestry , was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. His parents were Jean (Kaufman) and Joseph Kravitz. He was the younger brother of filmmaker and TV producer Sy Kravitz and uncle of musician Lenny Kravitz.
Kravitz is being recognized for his actions in Yangpyong, Korea, March 6-7, 1951. While occupying defensive positions, Kravitz’s unit was overrun by enemy combatants and forced to withdraw. Kravitz voluntarily remained at a machine-gun position to provide suppressive fire for the retreating troops. This forced the enemy to concentrate their attack on his own position. Kravitz ultimately did not survive the attack, but his actions saved his entire platoon.
Kravitz received the Medal of Honor posthumously, on March 18, 2014; Purple Heart, National Defense Service Medal, Korean Service Medal with one Bronze Service Star, United Nations Service Medal, Combat Infantryman Badge, Republic of Korea Korean War Service Medal, and Republic of Korea Presidential Unit Citation.
His niece Laurie Wegner was presented the Medal of Honor by President Barack Obama in the White House on March 18, 2014.
“Medal of Honor Citation For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty:
Private First Class Leonard M. Kravitz distinguished himself by acts of gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty while serving as an assistant machinegunner with Company M, 5th Infantry Regiment, 24th Infantry Division during combat operations against an armed enemy in Yangpyong, Korea on March 6 and 7, 1951. After friendly elements had repulsed two probing attacks, the enemy launched a fanatical banzai charge with heavy supporting fire and, despite staggering losses, pressed the assault with ruthless determination. When the machinegunner was wounded in the initial phase of the action, Private First Class Kravitz immediately seized the weapon and poured devastating fire into the ranks of the onrushing assailants. The enemy effected and exploited a breach on the left flank, rendering the friendly positions untenable. Upon order to withdraw, Private First Class Kravitz voluntarily remained to provide protective fire for the retiring elements. Detecting enemy troops moving toward friendly positions, Private First Class Kravitz swept the hostile soldiers with deadly, accurate fire, killing the entire group. His destructive retaliation caused the enemy to concentrate vicious fire on his position and enabled the friendly elements to withdraw. Later, after friendly troops had returned, Private First Class Kravitz was found dead behind the gun he had so heroically manned, surrounded by numerous enemy dead. Private First Class Kravitz’s extraordinary heroism and selflessness at the cost of his own life, above and beyond the call of duty, are in keeping with the highest traditions of military service and reflect great credit upon himself, his unit and the United States Army.”
Ending the blog with one of his nephews songs, with a message which is more needed now then it ever was.
It is a well known fact that the North Korean dictator Kim Jong -Un has “issues” (to keep it PC).
But this has been running in the family for generations.
In the late 1960s, Kim Jong-il, heir to the North Korean dictatorship at the time, became interested in making propaganda films.
Kim was already deeply fascinated by film. He had even established an underground operation to obtain bootleg copies of international films that were banned in North Korea for his viewing pleasure, expressly against the wishes of his father, national leader Kim Il-sung.
The younger Kim reportedly amassed a library of more than 15,000 titles, particularly enjoying the James Bond and Rambo franchises.
In the 1960s, Kim became fascinated in making films himself. Fortunately for him, it was at that point that his father began to place more responsibility on Kim, who was installed as director of the Motion Picture and Arts Division in the Propaganda and Agitation Department of North Korea.
Kim’s early movies focused on the anti-Japanese struggle of Kim Il-sung and his comrades in Manchuria during the 1930s. While these films helped Kim curry favor with his father, they were unfulfilling for the young movie lover.
He bemoaned that his casts and crew were far inferior in skill to those employed by Western productions and that his employees were unmotivated and lazy.
It was then that Kim began to obsess over Shin Sang-ok, the hottest director/producer in South Korea at the time.
In 1978, Shin had already created more than 60 movies and was well respected in the industry, but his future career was in jeopardy after his studio was shut down by the repressive South Korean government.
Kim believed that Shin was the only director that could save the North Korean movie industry, and began to create a complex plan to capture the director.
Kim lured Shin’s recently divorced wife, South Korean movie star Choi Eun-hee, with a forged message offering her a directing position in Hong Kong. Once there, Kim arranged for the actress to be abducted and brought to North Korea.
As planned by Kim, Shin began searching for his captured ex-wife and traveled to Hong Kong to try to find her, where he was chloroformed and abducted by North Korean agents.
Shin attempted to escape the tyrannical nation multiple times, resulting in him being imprisoned in a North Korean prison camp where he lived on a diet of grass, salt, rice, and ideological indoctrination.
“I experienced the limits of human beings,” Shin wrote of his experience there. After four years of imprisonment, in 1986, Kim was convinced that Shin was ready to start making films, and released Shin and Choi from their confinement and brought them to a meeting.
Shin and Choi had each not known that the other was being held in North Korea and were elated to see each other alive.
The two were brought before Kim, where, in a speech secretly recorded by Choi, he explained his plan for the couple. He wanted them to produce communist propaganda for him and to claim that they had come to North Korea to escape government repression in the South.
Shin agreed to cooperate with the dictator and was immediately put to work directing Kim’s propaganda films. Shin and Choi also remarried, on the recommendation of Kim.
“I hated communism, but I had to pretend to be devoted to it, to escape from this barren republic,” Shin recalls. “It was lunacy.”
While in North Korean captivity, Shin and Choi were showered with gifts and lived in some of the greatest luxury that the country could muster.
Despite this treatment, Shin said that, “To be in Korea living a good life ourselves and enjoying movies while everyone else was not free was not happiness, but agony.”
As a director for North Korean, Shin created seven movies, the most perplexing, as well as the last, of them being the 1986 Godzilla rip-off Pulgasari.
Pulgasari tells the story of an iron-eating Godzilla knock-off molded out of rice and blood by an elderly imprisoned blacksmith. The titular monster’s hunger for iron drives him to overthrow a villainous emperor, but then renders him the villain when he threatens the very resources of the farmers who supported him.
In feudal Korea, during the Goryeo Dynasty, a king controls the land with an iron fist, subjecting the peasantry to misery and starvation. An old blacksmith who was sent to prison for defending his people creates a tiny figurine of a monster by making a doll of rice, and before dying asks the gods of earth and sky to make his creation a living creature that protects the rebels and the oppressed.
When the figurine comes into contact with the blood of the blacksmith’s daughter, the creature springs to life, becoming a giant metal-eating monster who the blacksmith’s daughter names Pulgasari, which is the name of the mythical monster his father used to mention as an eater of iron and steel.
After much suffering, the peasants form an army, storm the palace of the Governor and kill him. The evil King becomes aware that there is a rebellion being planned in the country, and he intends to crush it, but he runs into Pulgasari, who fights with the peasant army to overthrow the corrupt monarchy. After the defeat of the king, Pulgasari attacks the people and eats their tools.
In order to create the special effects for the film, Kim stayed true to his methods and tricked a Japanese special effects team, the one who created the original Godzilla movies, to come to North Korea when they believed they were to work on a film in China.
What they created was a goofy, disjointed film that included a rubber puppet attacking swords and a despotic emperor whose attitude actually bore a resemblance to that of Kim himself. Its anticapitalist message is obscured by its bizarre central character.
Despite these issues, the film was a hit in North Korea, and Kim began looking for foreign distributors for the film so that he could spread his propaganda across the world. He began talks with a distributor in Austria, and later that year, Shin and Choi traveled to Vienna to meet with them.
It was there that the couple would make their escape. With the help of a Japanese movie critic friend, Shin and Choi were able to lose the North Korean agent supervising them and make their way to the American embassy where they were granted political asylum.
This escape outraged Kim, and Pulgasari was pulled from theaters around the country.
Due to this limited release, Pulgasari was virtually unseen outside of North Korea until it was given international release in 1998 in a rare period of greater openness from the North Korean government.
While the filmed bombed at South Korean theaters, it slowly began to gain a cult following worldwide for its eccentricities. Now the film can be found at underground and cult movie theaters around the world.
Somehow, despite how insane this movie can be, its absurdity is continually upstaged by the insanity of its backstory.
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