By Rich Kozlovich
Victor Davis Hanson did a Memorial Day podcast about this on his website, Blade of Perseus, which much of this piece is based on, explaining that Memorial Day is an update of an old idea:
.......that came out of the Civil War called Decoration Day where 700,000 died by putting flowers on their graves, which transmogrified into the modern idea of Memorial day, quite distinctly different that Veterans Day which evolved from Armistice Day in WWI. Memorial Day we give thanks to the 1.2 million people who died in combat in behalf of us.
Public education has become corrupted, especially education dealing with civic responsibility and war, getting a negative view of war. I don't have a problem with exposing the negatives. War is waste, it's brutal, it's a plague on mankind, but why do they fail to teach the whole story?
He notes they go on unending about the "Japanese internment, dropping the atom bomb the segregation of American troops", and rightly so, it's history. However, educators no longer explain why WWII started in the first place, or about the sacrifices made to secure victory.
When WWII broke out the American people were basically isolationist by nature, a stable society with 40% of the population living on farms. People who were in the midst of the Great Depression, who had no desire to go anywhere, least of all to go and fight another war in Europe.
America lost a lot of young men in WWI. Young men who went over to Europe to fight a war that wasn't their own, and now Europe's was at it again, just 20 years later. America wanted to stay out of it, in spite of the fact that FDR, just like Woodrow Wilson, was working hard in the background to get America involved.
When WWII broke out on September 1, 1939, America's army was the 19th sized army in the world, Portugal had a larger army. America didn’t have much of an air force and what they had was outdated, outgunned, and inferior to either Japan or Germany.
Then Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and Hitler declared war on a bunch of farm kids who had no desire to go anywhere, just wanting to live a peaceful life, but the Japanese and the Germans just wouldn’t let that happen.
As a result about 12 million people were sent overseas, fighting an dying in huge numbers, the Shweinfurt-Regensburg raid in August 1943 resulted in the loss of 60 B-17s, with crews of 11 men, young men.
"They went into places like Peleliu, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, and the worst nightmare of them all, 53,000 casualties 12,000 dead on Okinawa. They went to places like Normandy beach, they went to places like Sicily. 450,000 of them died, and why did they die? Because fascist dictators in Europe and Japan decided to start a war, and declared a war, on us. If they’d not done that these farm boys wouldn’t have had to go over there, who just wanted to mind their own business."
For those who think we retaliated in an excessive manner by fire bombing Japan or Germany, or dropping atomic bombs, let's get this story in context. If you're a moral person, you should be upset, if you're a rational person here's what you have to realize.
In terms of the number of soldiers lost per killed, the greatest killing machine in WWII was Japan. It lost about 2.5 million people, but it killed nearly 20 million, the vast majority of them civilians. The next most lethal army in terms of how many they lost and how many they killed was the German army. They lost somewhere between 3.5 to 5 million people, civilian and military, but they killed almost 20 million in Europe, especially on the Eastern Front.
Hansen goes on to ask:
How do you stop those people? How do you say to the Tojo government, quit butchering people in China, quit butchering people in Burma, quit murdering nurses that you take, Australian nursers, you take prisoners, you rape them and then kill them. Quit experimenting on Chinese civilians with bio weapons, quit killing six million Jews, quit trying to threaten the U.S. How do you stop them?
On Friday, July 31, 2020 I posted this piece, War's Not the Answer! Well Then, What's the Question?, saying:
In the case of WWII a bunch of ill trained, ill equipped farm kids:
"that had no experience in fighting ....[were going to be sent] across the world......to fight people who, in the case of Japan have been fighting since 1933/34 in China, a militaristic government and......to fight the Germans who’ve been fighting since 1939, the third European war they’ve started. That’s not an easy thing to do, and it’s not pretty."
It's long overdue for America to stop wasting American blood, lives, and money on foreign wars when America's interests and defense are not directly involved. Memorial Day is about honoring the brave young lives that were lost, and it should also be about not wasting any more young lives on foolish ill defined goals with insane restrictions, as we've seen since Korea, Vietnam, and every Middle East conflict.
The media and the leftist nitwits keep screaming about proportional responses in this latest Israel/Hamas war, and I keep coming back to this. If you don't like disproportional responses, don't start a war, a lesson both Germany and Japan learned the hard way. They lost.
I think most people grew weary of the arrogant pontifications of celebrities long ago, starting with Jane Fonda and the communist cabal that finally came out of hiding in Hollywood. One more thing. It wasn’t Joe McCarthy who went after Hollywood, he went after Communists in government. It was the House Un-American Activities Committee that investigated Hollywood, and did so for many years. For most of those years it was run by the Democrats, but that was before they were captured by communists, one of the 45 goals of the communist party.
And let’s not be delusional, the American Communist party was a marionette with Joe Stalin pulling the strings, and anyone who was a member of the Communist party was in fact required to be an agent for Joe Stalin and the Soviet Union, and the Communist party, all working to destroy America.
We now know from the release of the VENONA intercepts in 1996, all their fears were justified. Communists secretly infiltrated Hollywood, the media, government agencies, including the OSS which became the CIA, the unions, and academia.
The Soviet Union is no more, but these leftists are still pushing a globalist agenda for world domination, always working to impose an international socialist form of governance that’s blatantly irrational, misanthropic, and morally defective, and an unending insane failure. After all the decades of history demonstrating that failure, for anyone to be promoting this insanity the only conclusion one can come to; they must also be insane.
All the people listed below are ardent promoters of leftist philosophical concepts, which they're currently calling it being Woke, and while the term will change later, the philosophy remains the same.