Anti-war myths quickly eroding

Jewish World Review ^ | Dec. 16, 2003 | Jonathan Gurwitz

[JohnGalt]

No wait, these quotes are from 1954, before Buckley had fully embraced Trotskyites likes James Burnham...

As late as 1954, Buckley was denouncing the US military as incompatible with a free society. Soldiers emerging from the armed forces, Buckley argued, were brainwashed with militaristic platitudes. In his essay, Buckley proposed a debriefing regime for all military men "solely based on the great libertarian documents of our civilization" and study of the lives of the world's "great individualists." But, as they say, the times, they were a changin'.

[zook]

Some people do grow up.

[JohnGalt]

LOL

That was good material. I can't tell if the ambiguity is intentional or not, but if it was, you have demonstrated wit.

Cheers, to never growing up, then.

[1rudeboy]

WFA^® at #55.

By the way, I came-up with a new one: NWA.^®
It stands for Newbies With Attitudes, and I am certain in will be useful this upcoming Election year.

[BlueLancer]

"The powers in charge keep us in a perpetual state of fear keep us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real. - General Douglas MacArthur August 17, 1957"

This is the same Dug-Out Doug who, many hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, allowed his Air Force to be decimated on the ground and his Navy bombed out of their bases in the Philippines?

Obviously, he didn't pay enough attention to "some terrible evil". Quoting this megalomaniac doesn't help your case at all.

[BlueLancer]

And the same Dug-Out Doug who obviously found some "terrible evil" in Korea when he least expected it up at Chosin ... and then couldn't think of anything else except to demand that US government employ nukes to save his reputation.

[CWOJackson]

The same Dug-Out Doug who, along with his chief of staff, accepted a monetary gift from the President of the Philippines shortly after agreeing to evacuate him and his family from the approaching Japanese?

[zook]

Merry Christmas, Peter Pan!

[JohnGalt]

MacArthur didn't fully appreciate that the Communists he thought were pulling the strings of the Bonus Army in 1932, had taken over the White House and sold his boys out to Uncle Joe.

[CWOJackson]

General Wainwright might have a different opinion on who it was that sold out the troops.

[BlueLancer]

"MacArthur didn't fully appreciate that the Communists he thought were pulling the strings of the Bonus Army in 1932, had taken over the White House and sold his boys out to Uncle Joe."

And the same Dug-Out Doug who allowed his occupation troops in Japan to deteriorate so badly in their training and equipment that he sent the good men of Task Force Smith to their deaths, under one of two conditions: either knowing that they wouldn't be trained well enough or equipped well enough to do anything, or unknowingly because he was too busy setting himself up as the New Mikado of Japan and forgot that he was a General in the Army and responsible for his troops.

Sounds like MacArthur didn't appreciate a whole heck of a lot, and was too naive, too stupid, or too full of himself (and maybe all three) to have been put in charge of American troops.

[JohnGalt]

I'm as much a critic of the general as an admirer of a unique American life, but nevertheless, always fun to bump into a Truman Liberal on a conservative website.

MacArthur did his best to end the Pacific War without the bomb, but FDR simply did not have the courage or soul to stand up to Stimson.

Great Uncle Forbes, hero of Okinawa, healer of wounds in Nagasaki, made his peace with MacArthur, and thus, I follow his example.