09:25 – The 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. Those of us too young to remember Pearl Harbor had difficulty understanding the hatred for the Japanese that atrocity caused among Americans. My dad never fought in the Pacific. He was a navigator on a B-17 and flew many missions over Germany, with Germans trying to kill him the whole time. And yet he never had any hatred for the Germans, even at the time. He bought German-made products, including an automobile, and thought nothing of it. But he never bought Japanese products. I finally came to understand how my parents’ generation felt about Japan ten years ago, on 9/11.
Wednesday, 7 December 2011
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I don’t feel hatred toward Muslims, or “radical” Muslims, or toward Islam the religion or political organization or whatever you want to call it. I coldly, rationally think Muslims are a threat to my family, American culture, and civilization as a whole. If it were in my power, I would coldly, rationally kill everyone in the population centers of the Muslim world. I don’t know if that’s more or less dangerous than hating the goat-humping barbarians.
That makes an interesting contrast to my father. He served in the Pacific, USMC, but fortunately the war ended before the invasion of Japan when he would have seen combat. His attitude toward the Japanese was about how you describe at the time, but after the war he read The Chrysanthemum and the Sword he came to accept that the rank-and-file Japanese weren’t the problem, and even bought a Japanese car. On the other hand he never, ever, forgave Germany or the Germans, and would have walked before buying a VW. As far as he was concerned, trying to conquer the world twice in his life time was the end of the story.
RBT wrote:
“The 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. Those of us too young to remember Pearl Harbor had difficulty understanding the hatred for the Japanese that atrocity caused among Americans. My dad never fought in the Pacific. He was a navigator on a B-17 and flew many missions over Germany, with Germans trying to kill him the whole time. And yet he never had any hatred for the Germans, even at the time. He bought German-made products, including an automobile, and thought nothing of it. But he never bought Japanese products. I finally came to understand how my parents’ generation felt about Japan ten years ago, on 9/11.”
Back in about 1991, the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, Mad magazine had the Hiroshima mushroom cloud on its front cover with the caption “No Hard Feelings”.
Yep. It took us about a year to crush Japan, although there were three more years of increasingly one-side naval battles and island-hopping cleanup. And during those four years, we developed the fission bomb. If we’d already had it, the Pacific war would have ended in 1942.
And here we are more than 10 years after 9/11 and the islamics are still laughing at us. That’s what happens when a country has leaders of the caliber of Bush and Obama. We waste a lot of US lives and a trillion dollars or more on ineffective measures instead of showing them decisively what happens to anyone who harms us.
If the U.S. had had s fission weapon in ’41, would the Japanese have attacked? The Japanese strategy was predicated on the U. S. being unprepared for war,
which it was — mostly. U. S. military intelligence seems to been very busy in the months leading up to the attack.
Nobody was prepared for the speed at which the U. S. mobilized.
If the US had had a fission bomb in 1941, it’s unlikely that Japan would have been aware that it existed. Back then, we also were able to keep secrets.
Unfortunately, Yamamoto was one of the very few high-ranking Japanese officers who was at all familiar with the US. He was fully aware of the incredible industrial capability of the US, and how easily we would be able to shift from making automobiles and consumer goods to making tanks and planes. Having traveled widely here and met many industrialists and businessmen, he was also aware of the incredible natural resources available to the US, which meant (with very few exceptions) that nothing could constrain us from developing an overwhelming war machine. And, of course, as it turned out, for the few things we did lack, notably rubber, we were able to invent substitutes that actually turned out to be better than the original material.
Too bad no one listened to Yamamoto.
Re: Europe debt mess
As Bob keeps repeating, there’s no solution.. it’s a downward spiral.
But thinking about it, why should it be at all? If I was overdrawn on my credit cards, but owned my house, I’m not bankrupt.
Why can’t this apply to countries as well? While countries may promise they’ll pay, there’s nothing behind that promise but words. Instead, they might issue new bonds but this time attach specific collateral to the offering.. if there’s a default, the collateral is given to the bondholders. Assets of a country are huge, especially in land. National parks, government buildings, airports, even road systems are all assets with real value.
Now the problem might be that the country may repudiate its collateral options AS WELL, just making it a default in not just repayment but in collateral. The solution to that is to give the European Central Bank (or IMF) some actual power. They’ll own the title to the collateral during the duration of the bond and return it when the bond is paid, or turn it over to the bondholders if not. It’s really just the same as a mortgage.. your title is held and returned to you only after the loan is repaid.
So, with this in place, wouldn’t this solve the debt crisis? Instead of vague calls for austerity at the end of a failed loan, you make precise, enforcable, pledges at the start. Even I would be willing to lend Greece money from my pocket at low interest, if I was guaranteed to own a piece of the Acropolis if they didn’t repay.
I am Jewish, born in 1952. My father was on a Navy warship in the South Pacific during the war, but never saw combat. Both sides of my family emigrated from Europe in about 1880, one generation earlier than the masses who passed through Ellis Island. My great grandparents were all born in Europe and came to this country when they were young. Three of my grandparents were born in the U.S. and the fourth was born in Canada. The Germans murdered a number of my relatives during the Holocaust. My great grandmother, who was born in Kaliningrad/Königsberg (depending on who had won the last war) spoke German as a child. After the Nazis came to power, she refused to speak German and worked hard to erase her German accent. I do not remember her having an accent, but she died over 40 years ago.
My grandparents would never have bought a German car. My father never owned a foreign car, although my mother and her second husband bought a VW Microbus in the early 1960’s. I have owned vehicles made in the U.S., France, Great Britain, Canada, Japan, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Taiwan and Czechoslovakia.
We have a 16 year old German exchange student living with us this year. It is clear that she knows more about the Holocaust than virtually all of my daughter’s non Jewish peers. The Germans take their responsibility for what happened seriously.
Rick in Portland
I remember reading a Yamamoto story some time ago. He was travelling within the US and say a major road being built or repaired. The Americans had a very small number of men and several large machines doing the work quickly and efficiently. In Japan such a job would have required swarms of men because they didn’t have that much specialised machinery. He wrote that “if we ever take on these people [in a war] we’ll be in real trouble.”
Yo, check out the just-published history by the very late Herbert Hoover, now on Amazon in hardcover. Or wait until they pb or Kindle it. As he told his friends privately at the time, you keep sticking pins in a rattlesnake and you is gonna git bit at some point.
Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath (HOOVER INST PRESS PUBLICATION) [Hardcover]
George H. Nash (Editor)
I’ve come to believe that it doesn’t matter a whit whose bloody cars we buy and from what country of origin; hell, the parts and/or labor could be from all over anyway now. And as the very late Eric Blair wrote, and I paraphrase, this week one enemy and next week they’re our bosom buddies. Reverse the following week after that. Rinse and repeat. Cui bono? Not me or my late comrades-in-arms, I can tell ya that.
Like Paul Fussell has said about The Good War, or as Patrick Buchanan called it, the Unnecessary War; we fought the Germans and then rearmed them against our former allies the Russians.
Saddam was our buddy. Daffy Quaddafi had become one after his political rehab. Vietnam was our enemy; hell, now the Coca-Cola and Frito-Lay and other corporate nabobs are falling all over themselves to tap those markets. And we couldn’t buy Jap cameras, TV’s, and cars, along with German cars fast enough for decades, and fuck Detroit.
We talk a lotta shit but where we spend our fiat currency tells the story, and after each war, cui bono? Not the guys (and now gals, to our everlasting shame) at Walter Reed or wherever they just sent ’em when they closed that down, too.
http://buchanan.org/blog/did-fdr-provoke-pearl-harbor-4953
Rick the repentant lawyer wrote:
“We have a 16 year old German exchange student living with us this year. It is clear that she knows more about the Holocaust than virtually all of my daughter’s non Jewish peers. The Germans take their responsibility for what happened seriously.”
The Germans have had this drilled into them for the last 60+ years but the Japanese haven’t, not sure why. Neo-fascists in Germany aren’t that common and are looked on as wackos. Revisionists in Japan are mainstream and get the most outrageous lies published in school textbooks there. For some reason the US thought it best not to drill this stuff into the Japanese, something to do with keeping Japan a solid ally during the Cold War.
And what Greg said, above. The Japanese tell themselves and their kids all kinds of nonsense and it just flies OK with our lords temporal here, apparently. But the Germans must kneel in ashes and sackcloth forever. Meanwhile, another free ride for the Soviet murders and genocides, and yet another for Mao’s. But German evil lives on. And only for one group of people, too. Never a mention, ever, of the five million Roman Catholics murdered by the Nazis, or the other millions upon millions of Christians. A total black hole of utter silence.
Along with the slavery and murders still going on under muslim hadji rule in Africa. Only if some celeb swans over and Tweets it do we hear anything at all.
Yeah, the Poles (95% Catholic) were only slightly above the Jews in the Nazi’s reckoning. I never realized how much the Nazis had it in for them until I read *Masters of Death* by Richard Rhodes.
Much of Germany was Catholic. They murdered Catholics, and other religions as well, but not with the same systemic brutality.
And the Catholics in Poland were willing accomplices for much of it.
Germans were repentant, because they are much the same as us, given that we are mostly anglo-saxon in heritage. The Japanese still aren’t convinced they were wrong, while the Germans knew it from the word go.
Including Hitler, who was a catholic in good standing until the day he died. So, of course, were many of the worst of the SS, many of whom were from heavily-catholic Bavaria and particularly Austria. And the pope was complicit in war crimes, both during and after the war, when many fugitive major nazis traveled to South America and the Middle East on vatican passports that had been issued knowingly to them.
Mr. Grigg has a point. Several, in fact.
Still, the atrocities and murders committed by the Germans and Japanese, are dwarfed by those of world communism, particularly the Soviet and Red Chinese versions of it, but if you mention this anywhere, the Left screams that we’re not supposed to make those sorts of comparisons and supposed one-upmanship of who committed the worse holocaust.
Stalin and Mao and the Castro brothers still basically get a free ride.
RBT wrote:
“Much of Germany was Catholic.
Including Hitler, who was a catholic in good standing until the day he died.”
Oh come on! Some Nazis were religious, but most of them regarded the church as the last enemy. Kill the Jews, kill the Poles, kill the Commies, neutralize the West and, once it was all over, settle up with the church.” Not all were as extreme as Martin Bormann but he represented the iron fist within the Nazi velvet glove:
“His view of Christianity was epitomized in a confidential memo to the Gauleiters in 1942 by stating that Nazism “was completely incompatible with Christianity”.[9] Contrary to Hitler’s tactical judgment, Bormann pushed the Kirchenkampf forward at the height of World War II.[9] He reopened the fight against the Christian churches, declaring in a confidential memo to the Gauleiters in 1942 that their power ‘must absolutely and finally be broken.’ Bormann viewed the power of the churches and Christianity to be completely incompatible with Nazism, and saw their influence as a serious obstacle to totalitarian rule. The sharpest anti-cleric in the Nazi leadership (he collected all the files of cases against the clergy that he could lay his hands on), Bormann was the driving force of the Kirchenkampf, which Hitler for tactical reasons had wished to postpone until after the war.[10]”
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Bormann#Reich_Leader_and_Head_of_the_Party_Chancellery
Hitler and most of his gang were a bit more patient with Christians than they were with Jews and Slavs. That’s all there is to it. And Hitler wasn’t religious.
OFD wrote:
“Stalin and Mao and the Castro brothers still basically get a free ride.”
There’s a difference between Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Kim Il Sung and Hitler and his thugs? Not much in practice.
Bill wrote:
“Much of Germany was Catholic. They murdered Catholics, and other religions as well, but not with the same systemic brutality.
And the Catholics in Poland were willing accomplices for much of it.”
The Catholics in Germany were either in on it or on the receiving end. They weren’t mostly targeted because they were Catholic but for not towing the Nazi line.
The Catholics in Poland were on the receiving end. Being a priest, bureaucrat, army officer, intellectual or any sort of leader in Poland was supremely dangerous.
Yeah, try being a Jew in the thirties in Poland. I’ll take being a Catholic intellectual, if there was any such thing in Poland in those days.
And Stalin, Pol Pot, and the rest of the ilk don’t get any such free ride from any leftists I know.
And Castro? Seriously? He was small potatoes compared to the gang before him.
Being Jewish in Poland *or* a non-Jewish intellectual, or police officer, or army officer, or academic, or priest or just about anything else was *very* bad for one’s life expectancy. The Nazis were after the Poles too, so they could create *Lebensraum* for German soldier-farmers.
As to Pol Pot and the rest, you’ve obviously had a sheltered lifestyle. I was involved in so called student politics in the late Seventies and early eighties and knew plenty of leftists who ardently supported Mao and Pol Pot, even when it was obvious Pol Pot was running genocide against his own people. The factions within factions within factions on the left was something to behold.
Steve: The only problem I can think of is that, if the government in that country collapses, how can you rely on their enforcing your ownership?
Steve writes:
Re: Europe debt mess
As Bob keeps repeating, there’s no solution.. it’s a downward spiral.
But thinking about it, why should it be at all? If I was overdrawn on my credit cards, but owned my house, I’m not bankrupt.
That is PRECISELY what I have been trying to point out during the last couple of weeks. Not only do you have the house, but your yearly income (except for Greece) is STILL sufficient to pay off those debts!
This is a crisis only in the media. But they are doing a good job of scaring the hell out of the whole world, needlessly. And Germany’s recalcitrance in allowing anything but policies that will definitely cause massive suffering by the debtor nations, while not curing the problem at all, but actually making your income go down, and possibly risking your losing your job altogether.
Just because you personally believe in a balanced budget and not going into debt, does not mean everybody else in the world must live that way. Just ask ANY large American corporation.
Ah, but that was then, and I thought we were talking about NOW. Sorry for staying in the present. 😀
As for student protests, I was protesting Amchitka Island being used as a nuclear test sight in 1971 (age 11), with the “Don’t Make a Wave Committee”, which grew into Greenpeace shortly after. And I was hosed down on Burrard Bridge in 1972 by the Vancouver PD, for protesting what I thought was an unjust war. Actually, in 1972 I thought ALL wars were unjust, having heard so much about WWII and Korea from my parents.
Governments aren’t corporations. And corporations aren’t government, and I am VERY thankful they aren’t! Corporations use money that people willingly give them in the hopes of making even more money. Governments use money taken from people by threat of force, and are subject to much more scrutiny.
Besides, if Steve was to let his debt spiral out of control, and then lost his job, he would find himself in dire straights. You can’t eat a house. You can only sell it, and if you eat that money, then you’ll truly be bankrupt.
Chuck, I desperately hope you’re right, and not Bob. Sadly, I think you’re both wrong, by being far too optimistic. Anyone who doesn’t think we can have a modern Dark Age, wasn’t paying attention during the last one.
Has anyone done a better job of covering up a genocide than the Turks? Most people aren’t even aware there was an Armenian Genocide. Even the US government tap dances around it to preserve US-Turkish relations.
Wasn’t it Hitler that gave a speech about the need for the holocaust and not too worry about the consequences because, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
Oh, Britain and the US have their skeletons, I’m sure, but you do raise a valid point, for indeed it was Hitler who said that.
I know, because one of my oldest friends is Armenian, and his family fled Turkey during those times. I certainly wasn’t taught about it in school.
Bill, I have to admit being a bit confused about your
“Ah, but that was then, and I thought we were talking about NOW. Sorry for staying in the present. :D”
We were talking about two different pasts: the Forties and the Seventies. We weren’t talking about “NOW”.
And If I were you I’m not sure I’d want to be known as a founder of Greenpeace. And anyway, we were talking about leftist attitudes to leftist mass murders, not the demos we went to in the Seventies… 🙂
Chuck said:
Just because you personally believe in a balanced budget and not going into debt, does not mean everybody else in the world must live that way. Just ask ANY large American corporation.
BGrigg said:
Governments aren’t corporations. And corporations aren’t government, and I am VERY thankful they aren’t! Corporations use money that people willingly give them in the hopes of making even more money.
Well, sometimes — from what they get if they sell public issues. But there are many companies (most, actually) who borrow even more — often substantially more, — or companies like Cargill (Forbes #1), who are entirely privately held and derive much or most of their operating funds from banks, not investors.
Actually, governments that have their own currency can NEVER be out of debt. Every piece of currency in circulation is a piece of debt. There will never be a day when a country issuing its own currency is not in debt — unless the country ceases to exist or renounces all debt.
Governments use money taken from people by threat of force, and are subject to much more scrutiny.
Well, taxes are not debt. Bonds and other government issues are voluntary debt obligations — no one is forcing anyone to buy them, as Italy has found out.
Besides, if Steve was to let his debt spiral out of control, and then lost his job, he would find himself in dire straights. You can’t eat a house. You can only sell it, and if you eat that money, then you’ll truly be bankrupt.
Well, yeah, but his point and mine is that is not happening to him or in the EU. Only Greece does not have enough revenue to manage its debt obligations, which — in the other edgy countries — the debt obligations are a small and manageable percentage of their GDP. Only if Germany forces their GDP down drastically, which it is trying to do in every way possible and IS succeeding, will that debt not be manageable. Thanks, Germany. Still the dictator, I see.
But so far, neither Steve, nor Italy, nor Portugal, nor Spain, nor Ireland have lost their jobs. If Steve lost his job, then he might be in trouble overnight. But it is unlikely Italy, Portugal, Spain, or Ireland would lose all of their revenue overnight. That will happen slowly.