I expect Barack Obama to embarrass us yet again by apologizing (expressly or impliedly) for America’s dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Our ridiculous pseudo-prez has got to get his feels on, I guess. He’s got to show he and his ilk are nothing like those unwashed, knuckle-dragging barbarians who made it possible for his ilk to spout nonsense in English instead of German or Japanese. Just know that he doesn’t speak for me.
I’m not sorry for defeating our enemies. I’m not sorry for anything.
The two most common categories of responses to the moral illiterates who wail and rend their hemp-fiber garments over Fat Man and Little Boy are factual and anecdotal. The factual response is a simple cost-benefit analysis. If we invaded Japan to compel the Empire’s surrender – and the stories that Japan was on the verge of surrendering are the result of either raw ignorance or conscious lying – several million Japanese would have died. More importantly, hundreds of thousands of American and allied servicemen would have been killed or wounded.
Yeah, you read it right. American lives are more important than those of our enemies. Infinitely more important. One dead GI or a hundred dead Japanese in 1945? Easy. Save the U.S. soldier. I wouldn’t even break a sweat making that call. Neither did President Truman, back when Democratic presidents sided with America.
Note that, ironically, since 1945, millions of American servicemembers (including this one) have prepared and trained to die, if necessary, to protect the lives of Japanese subjects.
But apparently saving millions of people (including tens of thousands of our own) is morally inadequate when you talk about nukes. Apparently it is less moral to incinerate or blast apart people with A-bombs than with incendiaries or high explosives. Apparently .308 wounds are preferable, and bellies slashed with bayonets are somehow better, than death by nuke. But facts don’t matter about the atomic bombings because the point is not right or wrong, but power over the future stolen by morally hijacking the past. You know how we were all proud for helping stop the most hideous tyranny in human history back in 1945? Turns out we were the real villains, and therefore we have no moral standing today and need to simply submit to the instruction, guidance and control of our liberal betters. You know, like Barack Obama, who never met a tyrant he wouldn’t bow to nor passed up an opportunity to trash his own country by apologizing to the people who wronged us for their richly deserved payback.
Then there is the second response to the revisionist twerps, the personal anecdote. For many if not most of us, our uncle, grandfather, or great-grandfather, might well have died invading Japan. My grandfathers were both high school coaches in central Pennsylvania before they became overage naval officers and shipped off to the Pacific. Family legend has it that my mom’s father got strafed by a Japanese plane, and he didn’t take a Purple Heart for the shrapnel wounds on his face. My dad’s father almost got sunk by a Japanese torpedo while sailing on the U.S.S. General H.L. Scott to New Guinea. Would they have died in an invasion of Japan? I don’t know. I don’t care. I’m glad that we never found out because Truman chose victory.
I know what would have happened to the 40th Infantry Division, which I served in for about two decades while in the California Army National Guard. This unit was mustered in Southern California and saw action in the Philippines and elsewhere. In Operation Olympic, the planned invasion, it was supposed to be among the first to hit the outer islands. It would have been a bloodbath. But I guess I’m supposed to care more about our enemies than my family and (across the years) brothers-in-arms.
Whatever. Just understand that truth doesn’t matter to the revisionists because A-bomb revisionism isn’t about facts. It’s about leveraging the past to seize the moral high ground in the present. By apologizing, Obama and his kind seek to separate themselves from what they see as lesser men. In reality, those heroes are infinitely greater than that dog-nibbling fraud will ever be.
Sadly, today’s moral high ground is lightly defended because most people are untrained in basic morality. They confuse morality with mere feelings, as in “I feel that dropping the A-bombs was wrong.” Yeah, like their feelings are facts instead of the moral whims of pampered coastal elitists protected and safe because of the exertions of better men. So when you want to try and guilt me for defeating an enemy of unparalleled viciousness, who attacked us without cause or warning, who tortured our prisoners and entombed our sailors to die in the dark on December 7, 1941, you’re going to have to do a lot better to push my caring meter into the red.
I should note that about 15 years ago while on a mission to Japan – for a bunch of posers so concerned with Japanese lives, I don’t remember those dorks there training on how to save them – I visited Nagasaki. There’s a really nice museum there. If you don’t know anything about history, you’ll walk out thinking the Japanese were minding their own business when, for some reason, the Americans dropped an A-bomb on them and ruined their whole day.
But if you went to the very back, you would find the ‘Fess Up Corner. There was one little display there with a photo of a battleship smoldering in the water – the U.S.S. Arizona. That’s it. No context. No explanation. No apology.
So on the way out, I signed the guest book, and I added a little message.
“Remember Pearl Harbor.”
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