A second look at History

[ This is a re-post of an essay written several months ago, and re-posted now, with restored structure. It is reposted due to several excellent suggestions that only with the structure restored, could it be effective. For those suggestions, I thank the suggestors. Perhaps those who struggled with the sentence structure the first time can attest to whether the effort was worth it. ]

The reasoning was the same. Rather than fight the battle on the main streets of our coastal cities, the President, after consulting with his advisors, reasoned that it just possibly might be a good idea to pick up and move the fight over 7,000 miles away to a land that no one in the U.S. had ever paid much attention to, so that we might engage and destroy our enemies at a great distance from our cities.

The difference was that then, in August of 1942, we in the United States did not have a fifth column in our national press. We didn't have a Dan Rather or a Peter Jennings to preach defeatism and failure, to with sideways glances decry how we were losing; how the fight was a mistake, and that prostration before our attackers was a position that we could get used to...after awhile. Back then, such treachery would have been considered...treachery.

But words no longer mean what they used to mean. Back then, we had to find a way to take the battle to an enemy that seemed untouchable. The Imperial Japanese Army seemed as invincible then, as the press would have you believe that the Al Quaida is now. Everywhere the Japanese struck, their opponents recoiled in defeat. But why was that? After all, we were The Americans. Why, not to put too fine a point to it, or be too crudely honest about it, did our military suck?

We had a President, F.D.R., who had for years decided that confrontation with our enemies would be too 'confrontational'! Our gunboats were shot up on the Yangtzee river in China in the 1930's by the Japanese; our merchant marine ships were sank by German submarines, even though it was downplayed in the press. We had years of warning. And we starkly demonstrated during those years to our enemies that the killing of our citizens overseas would be immediately met with a sharp protest, or, even the dreaded diplomatic note. Apparently we reserved "deploring their actions", the DefCon 1 of State Department impotence, for some presumed worse transgression.

Was it that Roosevelt was a bad man? A weak man? No, let's be honest. Roosevelt could read the polls, and certainly could read the opinion columns of the nation's newspapers. The majority of Americans, just like the majority of British before war descended on that sad island, wanted no part of the war. Like the British, we watched newsreels of P.M. Neville Chamberlain returning from Berlin with a piece of paper which he waved for the cameras. The paper represented a deal. Quite simply, if the British people were willing to allow millions of people in small countries within Hitler's gaze to be enslaved, and do nothing about it, then Herr Hitler promised that he would leave the British alone and in peace.

London must have been so proud that night, when it's citizens looked furtively across the kitchen table at each other and justified themselves, "Look, as long as he leaves us alone, why should we care what horrors he inflicts on the continentals?" Perhaps, a few mused in their unspoken thoughts, "...they are only Jews anyway...and Catholics, and Gypsies and unattractive people. Not our problem..."

Did Roosevelt steer us into the war as many have argued? Did he know that an attack was imminent on Pearl Harbor, and allow it to take place simply so that he could stampede the nation into war? Did he actually want us to get into the war much earlier just to forestall the 80 to 100 million lives that were eventually taken, including 400,000 of our own?

Wouldn't it have been rather despicable for Roosevelt to want to take out Hitler or Hirohito back when he/they were a just a 'gathering threat', rather than to sensibly wait until a hundred million would die?

Roosevelt, I think to his credit, realized that his earlier gamble in the 1930's to risk "starving the military", so as to declare and fund a war on poverty, a "New Deal", became a deadly mistake. Roosevelt was enough of a man to realize that he needed to reverse his course and prepare the American people for war. As evidenced by his secret communications with Winston Churchill, he realized that 'consensus seeking' was the pitiful absence of national resolve. Roosevelt saw, as I have previously argued, that the Battle of Britain was NOT their finest hour, but rather the inevitable result of their trading the lives of countless others in the hopes that it might somehow buy their own immunity. It didn't work. It never does. It never has. Throughout all of history.

We Americans told ourselves that we had loftier excuses. Totally different. Instead of six reasons to sit idly through genocide and atrocity, we had instead a half-dozen. Oddly, though, the authors of indifference on this side of the ocean later seemed to disown and deny their previous words, and quickly change the subject, when war was then suddenly thrust upon us! But why? Couldn't we reach an international consensus, form an alliance with the Jews, the Gypsies, the French and the unattractive? (A little redundant on the last two, I suppose.)

Too late for that! They were all dead or subjugated. (Or French...nuff said). Divide and conquer the ones willing to trade the security and lives of others for some perceived safety on their own behalf. How transient and ephemeral that safety proves to be.

And yet, when war finally came- our torpedoes didn't work; our airplanes were no match for the Japanese; we had no assault landing craft; our ships' crews had no night action training at all, and, as was inevitable with such previous neglect, we suffered tremendous defeats in the Pacific. Strangely though, the press back then didn't feel like it made them seem really cosmopolitan and sophisticated to regard themselves as "unbiased", and accordingly to report on the unending series of defeats, with quite the same glee as today's CNN gobs.

Not that these defeats weren't reported at all, but rather the reporters wouldn't then rush to interview the families of each of the hundreds of dead sailors and marines, until they found ones that really hated FDR, and that could be relied upon, when placed in front of the microphone, to decry the waste and tragedy of it all.

But why not? Perhaps they had not been properly schooled in the defeatism and surrender that characterized the French, and earlier, the British. Or perhaps...they realized that the citizenry would burn down their newspaper offices after enough became apparently enough! So the modern element of sabotage from within, at least, wasn't present. But we still needed a strategy to win. We had to find a way to defeat the enemy that the French, the Dutch, and so many other colonial masters had sniffed scornfully were undefeatable by mere...americans. The sneer hasn't changed in sixty years.

It got to the point that somehow, we had to arrange a fight that favored us. Perhaps, it was time to think. Yes, to actually think, shocking though that may have been to the cowering hand-wringers. But what did that entail? First let's examine what it didn't require. It didn't require sorting through the available retired military men until a sufficient stream of compliant nay-sayers and doom-dealers could be interviewed to gravely explain why fighting back against the enemy would only result in hundreds of thousands of body bags. It didn't require the men in training for the upcoming time of death and destruction, to be assured by the Democratic antiwar opposition that all of their deaths would be inescapable, and that all of their sacrifices would come to nought.

But, what did it require? Oddly, the parallels to modern day Iraq are rather startling; but only, of course, to those who get their information solely from today's liberal networks. As stated above, in 1942 we needed to move the battle to a distant shore. And we needed to set the stage for maneuvering the enemy into a situation politically where he had no choice but to respond even though that meant sending troops into unfavorable combat. { Unfavorable combat? Is there any other kind? Tell you what- let's leave the liberals outside, close the door, and just have the adults talk for awhile...OK? }

Combat nearly always breaks down to the 'attack', the 'defense', or the mutually-dreaded 'meeting engagement', where neither side has prepared the battlefield, and forces having collided, simply let fly with what they have, like a spontaneous barroom brawl. We needed to prepare a defense, by starting with an attack! We needed to pick an area, and everything pointed to Guadalcanal, as the most valuable real estate in the Pacific.

Why? Well, much like Iraq, for people thinking strategically, it was the single area that neither side could afford to lose, and the first side that realized it and acted could bleed the other side dry, if they could force the other side into having to attack against prepared positions. And since the other side could not afford to lose that fight, they had no choice but to accept a battle area stacked against them, and continue the attacks no matter what their losses.

Simply speaking, strategically, and from a propaganda viewpoint, the Japanese could not possibly give it up without a fight, and could not afterwards call it quits, no matter what their losses. We knew that forcing them to accept battle on our terms was the best way we could hurt them, while the American citizenry could then slowly absorb the seriousness of the situation we were in, and could steel themselves to the true cost of winning. The only way for Americans to accept it, was to also have starkly explained to them the true cost of losing....

And so, we went in, just like we recently did in Afghanistan and Iraq, with our most motivated, most ready, and toughest military force, the U.S. Marines. { Not to denigrate today's Army divisions, which are a world removed in capabilities from the pitifully equipped Army of 1941.

We went in heavy, using effectively 2 divisions, or nearly 30,000 fighting men. What Americans at home didn't know, was that even though they were too few to do the job, when things got hot later...they were all we had. But we didn't have a national press at the times broadcasting across the world that "we sent in too few men to do the job..."

We couldn't send in a heavy division of nearly invincible M1 tanks, because such weapons didn't exist then. It would take a Ronald Reagan to insist on their acquisition and deployment. We had at that time only the underarmed and underarmored Sherman tank that would later be ripped apart nearly with impunity by tough German panzers. And even if we had the tanks at the time, we couldn't have landed them because of the impossibility of landing heavy tanks over beaches.

But we couldn't explain all of this to our citizenry, because we would also be explaining it to our enemies. Most small children and educated people, unlike modern elitist journalists, understand concepts like this.

And of course we sent in too few men! Because, just like today, that was all we had! If we had instead waited years to rebuild our military, and develop an 'international consensus', like John Kerry and his idiot speechwriters today propound, we would still today be defending from forts located all along our Pacific coast against the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, as it was styled then, headed and controlled by the Imperial Japanese Empire.

[ I suggest that those retired idiot generals that CNN and MSNBC get to make stupid comments, in exchange for getting their faces back in the limelight for a brief period, should pick up a few history books and spend less time shooting their mouths off, and more time reading about "making the most of what you've got." After all, that is the very FIRST thing that a young shavetail lieutenant is taught. That a squad of men, being where they are most desparately needed, when they are most desparately needed, are worth more than an entire army of apologists, explaining why the President was not at fault, though he spent his time sticking cigars up intern's alimentary canals, rather than fulfilling his duties as a Commander in Chief and a man, and somehow scraping up enough guts up to fulfil his duty and respond to attacks on American nationals.

But then, I suspect that, unlike the general public who are so unschooled in military realities...these TV generals may indeed know what damage that they do, and simply not care, as long as they get some face time. ]

So we landed heavy and left light. Left light? Yes, we failed to land the majority of the pitifully few stores that we sent along with the Marines to Guadalcanal. It seems that a Japanese fleet was on the way, and that same fleet, later that night blasted the hell out of our fleet with nearly no loss to their own, and cost many hundreds of sailors' lives. In a word, our supply ships skedaddled. But their captains had orders, and weren't to blame.

Though oddly, the press didn't thereafter begin endlessly commenting without surcease on how many more sailors and marines had been killed each night since the President declared that major hostilities had commenced. Personally, I don't understand that... It's a good line. I wonder why they didn't start repeating it? Didn't fit their agenda perhaps?

Fortunately for the Marines, they captured large stockpiles of enemy rice, and a few other consumables, and grimly held on. Our navy would not be back to re-supply them for a long, long time. And they knew it. Strangely, our press didn't then endlessly whine about an "exit-strategy", to get off of the island, and back home. Personally, I don't understand that. It's almost like...well, like...the press somehow realized that we were...beginning a long war. And somehow realized that, in spite of the fact that the President hammered that thought into their pin heads, worked out for themselves during drinks all around that - "Uhhh, do you suppose...that...(-work with me on this, I'm a liberal arts major-) we might...be fighting a continuing...war?"

In fact, you might say that we left the marines in a quagmire.... But back then, marines didn't talk of quagmires. Words like that were left to the defeatists at home, who slunk around dockyards in bars at night, and in the lower class parts of our cities, and tried to poison the morale of our citizenry. Strangely, the defeatists had the odd habit of almost inevitably bumping into a careless fist, throwing themselves through the entrance door without benefit of it being opened first, and strangely, kicking themselves down the street until dentistry no longer ever figured in their lives again.

Even more strangely...these acts of abuse weren't prominently and endlessly replayed on the news each night, with calls for investigation of whether the merchant sailors were acting on their own, or were following orders. Personally, I can't understand it....

The Japanese, forced to send their troops against prepared, tough U.S. marines, instead of the sad barracks British, ( who, though outnumbering the Japanese nearly two to one at Singapore, surrendered in mass...having evidently trained in the Vichy school of the military arts in Paris), found that a U.S. marine, strongly supported at home, and armed with whatever he can find to fight with, is one tough son of a bitch.

He wasn't worrying about an exit strategy. He may have complained about the rice for breakfast and rice for lunch. That was practically regulation. He might have cursed the mud and the kunai grass. He probably even had a few choice words for the REMF's that organized this mess. But no one- NO ONE- was pushing him out of territory he had bled to win. No twice paying for the same real-estate.

Apparently, this hasn't changed over the years. In fact, it's why we still enjoy the Bill of Rights. The Japanese quickly came to call Guadalcanal the "island of death". They infiltrated endless numbers of their troops onto that island, pulling them away from areas previously targeted to be conquered. The cream of their fanatics made bansai charges at the marines in sickening mass suicide charges, that, though killing marines, destroyed vastly more Japanese fanatics.

And they couldn't stop, because that would be losing face. In fact, as soon as F.D.R. said ssentially, "Bring it on", (and undoubtedly angered unthinking Americans who couldn't or wouldn't bother to understand the psychology of the conflict) ...the Japanese were neatly locked in- committed, involuntarily, even though the world would soon come to understand that their Imperial soldiers were not invincible superkillers, but rather were exposed as pathetic maniacs who needed to be efficiently killed, with as few American casualties as possible.

And a long period of killing would follow, until the world would be made safe from the age of the totalitarians. Let's break for a minute. Does any of this sound in the slightest bit familiar yet? Has any history been taught at ALL, to our young people, in between the "save the whales" classes, and the "Heather has two mommies" lectures? Was there any time allotted for children to have a chance to avoid tragedy endlessly repeating itself, by being forearmed with the knowledge of past events? Or, was that just too much to ask...?

When, for instance nowadays, the French and rest of the socialists, including an aggregious majority of our "journalists" sniff that the Iraqi interim governing council is hopelessly compromised because it includes..."exiles funded by the Americans, who then returned to Iraq after the tyrant was overthrown...", an educated American child might look up to the cameras, and quip, "You know, it's rather ironic that you should make such a remark, Frenchy. Why in school, they taught us about General DeGaulle, who spent years hiding in England funded by the British until, after the Americans did the dying and drove out the German masters, he then installed himself as rightful ruler in France! And, as I read in history class, your buddy and hero Chairman Arafat spent years in Tunisia, before returning to muscle his way into power in Palestine! How...odd...that you should, through ignorance or bias, omit such comparisons in your 'fair and balanced reporting'! "

When our children finally understand history, the liberal movement will effectively wither and die.

Returning to WW2, it was remarkable but Walter Chronkite wasn't there to expound on the glorious native resistance to the "American running-dog occupiers" every night, and tally hour-by-hour the body counts of 'despairing and demoralized marines..." Tom Brokaw wasn't there to put the embittered parents of a dead Marine on the air to accuse F.D.R. of "murder for oil". Dan Rather couldn't lecture America on the mounting death tolls nightly, and relentlessly. In fact, had he been, he almost surely would have been thrown out of the studios as soon as he had started. But why? Simply because Americans were smart enough, back then, to understand that the sacrifices being made by the Marines on that desparate island of death were the only hope they had of their grandchildren walking as free men. And when men are dying for your family, you don't lightly decry how badly they have been misled, and how no clear plan and strategy for the entire war has been broadcast in the clear, at the start of the war, around the entire world!

At least you don't if you have a shred of understanding of what these men are undergoing voluntarily on the behalf of you and your family. At least you don't if you have three or more neurons in your head, and understand that war is a contest of wills, a matter of out-staring the enemy and destroying his capacity and will to harm you. At least you don't if you have ever served yourself up on the sharp end, where your survival is in question- not from the vaguely imagined effects of cholesterol, but from the certain razor edge of a bayonet, and the ripping steel of shrapnel.

In fact, it's amazing the clarity of thought that you can achieve by being immersed in harsh reality. And I can tell you also...when the Japanese overran our positions, and captured wounded Americans, they very carefully avoided putting women's underwear on the Marine's heads, threatening them with barking dogs, and then taking pictures that their media obligingly replayed endlessly for the benefit of the American cause. They didn't even keep the Japanese women's movement happy by inducting untrained, part time, low I.Q. women soldiers to pose the captured marines in sexually suggestive positions, and then snap photos of them.

Thank God that the Fugi film company didn't start up until the late 60's, or God knows our civilians back home would have broken down into despair in our very streets and homes. Fortunately for our Marines, all the Japanese did, when they caught Marines, was to tie them up, and when they refused to talk, to hack off their arms, cut off their heads or perform certain acts of savagery that I just can't bring myself to type, out of respect for the families of those poor marines' families.

( Unlike, of course, today's modern, main stream press. And I am one profane son of a b****, who spent a lot of time in the mid-seventies on a tour of duty in the Phillipines where the survivors of Japanese torture showed me their scars. Some day, when you don't plan on eating for a week or two, I'll tell you about torture.... But don't count on sleeping well thereafter. I didn't, anyway. )

Yet, so long as no embarrassing pictures were taken, however, then that was all right. The marines, oddly, being on the receiving end, had a rather different conception of what constituted abuse, than the elitists at home. Make no mistake- while no Marine would shrink from killing an enemy, and risking life for a buddy; yet many a Marine might at least think about 'accidentally mishandling' a grenade into the tent of any idiotic commanding officer who would have allowed such poison to be smuggled to a press thirsting for any such ammunition, to discredit and denigrate the blood sacrifices of the fighting men.

But we still ask, "why?" After all, we still come down to...but why? Why occupy Guadalcanal? Our intelligence agencies, being fortunately unsupervised by Democratic House commitees, were allowed to actually do their jobs, and thereby discovered what appeared, in shakey bits and pieces of intelligence, to be weapons of mass construction. Bulldozers, graders, earth-moving equipment. But none of this could be proven. We had no agents on the ground.

It was, however, enough to convince military intelligence, and thereafter FDR, that an airfield was being built there which would soon threaten New Zealand and Australia itself by commanding the sea-lanes necessary to the U.S. to resupply those allies of ours.

General Douglas MacArthur, ( the most over-rated, over-publicised and self-promoting debutante to attain high office, until Bill Clinton redefined the limits later ), argued bitterly that attacking that island would detract from the war effort. Fortunately, there were no politicians despicable enough in the middle of a war THEN to echo his clamor. How times change.

No campaign was broadcast to the world that the President was an imbecile who didn't understand what he was doing. That only MacArthur could sort out those pesky Japs. Oddly, it seemed that every press report from MacArthur's theater simply didn't mention his subordinates. MacArthur did this, and MacArthur did that. I'm not even sure that, once he abandoned his Bataan troops to Japanese torture and fled to set up shop in Australia, that he even had any troops fighting his battles.

Apparently, as far as one could tell from his press releases, old Doug himself took time out from in front of the cameras to personally whip those Japs singlehandedly. Fortunately, FDR and his Vice, Harry Truman, (whom people whispered was really directing the war effort since FDR seemed occasionally preoccupied with his infirmities), took little notice of Dougout Doug, and used their military advisors for...oddly enough...military advice.

Men like Chester Nimitz and George Marshall quarantined a little area around Australia to keep MacArthur fenced in and busy with his nay-sayers and press syncophants, and then prosecuted the war with the grim effort and the certain knowledge that men were being spent needlessly.

Why needlessly? Depends on the point of view. If our military had been reasonably funded in the 1930's, instead of the suffering the vast amounts siphoned off instead by the government, for make-work projects across the U.S., the depression arguably would have ended just as quickly, and some economists argue much quicker.

And the war might not then even have happened. But our transparent weakness to our enemies practically demanded that they lose respect for us. And lack of respect guarantees eventual dead marines and soldiers in large numbers. Many of our men died needlessly because their deaths were critically necessary.

Boy, examine that last sentence- that's a hard concept! I've got news for you... there are a lot of hard concepts that aren't being taught. Because teaching them is...too hard. Needless and critical! Let's explore how such was possible. Marines died sometimes as cannon fodder, because we weren't ready to defend ourselves. And we- all Americans- were to some extent to blame. But we let those men die simply to slow down our enemy.

And their commanders undoubtedly paid a horrible price later in life as they thought back on issuing those terrible, unavoidable orders, (probably at around 3:00 A.M. on another sleepless night.) We also lost men in large numbers, due to mistakes and plain terrible luck on our part.

But these disasters weren't salivated over by modern network anchors with blow-dried hair. Second guessing by non-combatant, politically motivated "journalists" half way around the world didn't hammer down the hopes of the citizenry, and mute the accomplishments bought with so much blood.

Make no mistake, Marines died on Wake Island, abandoned to the Japanese onslaught, because we were busy wallowing in our despair at the stock market tanking years earlier, and not investing in a strong defense. We couldn't get the Marines off that island in time so we abandoned them. And numerous others.

We sent ineffective destroyers against battle-hardened, well-trained Japanese destroyers. Their torpedoes worked with awesome efficiency. Ours didn't. We sent pilots up in Brewster Buffalos, which the Japanese slaughtered with total disdain. Our P-400 was so bad that our pilots grimly referred to it as a "P-40 with a Zero on it's tail..." But with that gallows humor, they still took off, flew, fought and died.

We still have men like that around...but they sure as hell aren't in newsrooms. Then came Guadalcanal...and payback. Nothing gets a group of Marines through a night's bombardment by enemy cruisers firing 6 inch high explosive ordnance...like the thought of payback. "They may blow a number of us to pieces tonight-...but when they hit the wire later, we'll deal some payback, by gawd!"

When the next thought can well be your last, it is likely that surprisingly few fighting Marines pondered wealth redistribution schemes that might somehow "even the economic playing table", or mused about possible ways to "correct perceived inequities in standardized testing of 4th graders". Instead, oddly, they generally tend to think of taking it to America's enemies...and leave the poison of defeatism to the machinations of liberals safely at home.

And they took it to the Japanese on Guadalcanal. In a savage, no holds barred contest, they shot, stabbed, crushed, burnt and generally did discourtesies to the butchers who killed 750,000 civilians earlier in Nanking, China. Because they had no illusions about the difference between a nation of Japanese animals that could commit murder of civilians by the trainload, and the occasional, unfortunate, unplanned killing of civilians who got caught in their line of fire. Moral equivalence wasn't a game played by soldiers who decided to die, if necessary, so that others may live.

And the reporters who were with them, those Ernie Pyles of a totally different cut from today's weasels, who witnessed the horrors and atrocities of the Japanese firsthand, felt no professional shame at wearing the flag of the U.S. on their uniforms. They reported proudly on the unsparing courage of those iron men who suffered such shattering violence rather than cower at home and belittle the deeds of better men. And slowly, over the years- yes, YEARS-, from August 1942, through July of 1945, those same Marines, after triumphing in November of 1943 in Gaudalcanal, then placed that island in the hands of garrison troops and a burgeoning, increasing airfield, and after too little rest, went on to assault other islands...

were later shown not to have weapons of mass destruction, and to have had NO CONNECTION AT ALL TO THE JAPANESE PRIOR TO THE WAR!!! Because in the Pacific theatre, like all wars conducted by professional soldiers, battles were fought in a myriad of places that didn't detract from the war effort, because they WERE the war effort! Everyplace that we could force a fight to our advantage- rather than waiting for the enemy to strike and simply cleaning up all the bodies, and writing up police reports afterwards, meant mission accomplished.

And back then, "Mission accomplished!" was understood to mean that the unit tasked with a specific mission had completed it successfully. When the President cited a unit thus, sometimes in a Presidential Unit Citation, it wasn't perverted by the press to mean that he had just declared the war to be over! Over course, prerequisite for being a journalist back then, was being able to read, write and safely eat with a fork. Blow-driers hadn't yet been invented.

But...by what illegal, internationally unjustifiable pretext did the U.S. invade these islands? Strangely, no army of Democratic lawyers came forward to decry the islanders' civilian deaths that occurred during these invasions! Not a one! Why? Could it be that all of the Democratic lawyers got their sad butts drafted, and found themselves in a situation where they might have to personally pick up a weapon if worse came to worse, and fight for their very lives, even if they couldn't find it within them to fight for anything else?

If anything can be demonstrated by the last twelve months, it's that the disconnect between the liberal elite media, and the average citizen is no longer merely obvious. This drumbeat of defeatism, this slanting of reporting, this undeniable sorting between:

A.....any news which seems useful to cast a dark light on America's war effort, and:

B.....the rest of the news that will only briefly, belatedly, or perhaps even never, be shown.

....has now taken on a much darker and more dangerous cast. This perversion of the responsibility of telling the truth, no matter whether or not it fits into 91% of the reporters' ideological agendas, is now without exaggeration becoming a national security concern.

Because in truth, if we allow our news operations to continue their imitation of Pravda and Tass, and like their Soviet role models before them, so distort the truth in America that the undereducated citizens can no longer understand the difference between raw propaganda and reality, then we must inevitably suffer the same awful fate as the Soviets did during their eighty years of hell on earth.

I understand thoroughly the Bill of Rights. Do they understand the corollary Bill of Responsibilities?

Have we reached the point where the left, so utterly drugged and dazed with their agenda of unlimited abortion and unfettered freedom from responsibility for one's actions, have decided that even the future survival of the nation is now of only secondary concern to them? Has the liberal left, which pulls the puppet strings of the Democratic party, completely abandoned the very concept of responsibility itself? What other conclusion could be arrived at?

It may be that for too many years, a few good men have always been willing to undertake the killing and the dying necessary to insure that the Democrats are safely able to engineer the next pointless carnage, and then the next after that. It may seem to the apologists for evil, that no harm can come to them personally, since, in the crux, when it comes down to actual national survival, some good men will always volunteer to face the steel and fire, and thereby free the apologists from facing the consequences of their actions.

But nothing will absolve the American voter from doing the right thing on election day, and removing these people from power. Ronald Reagan would expect it. Chesty Puller would insist on it. A stadium full of the ghosts of dead soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines certainly deserve it.

Roosevelt saw, as I have previously argued, that the Battle of Britain was NOT their finest hour, but rather the inevitable result of their trading the lives of countless others in the hopes that it might somehow buy their own immunity. It didn't work. It never does. It never has. Throughout all of history.

A tad harsh, don't you think?

Agreed, the Brits (and French) could and should have squashed Hitler like a bug in 1936. But by the Battle of Britain, Britain, dragging France protestingly behind, had declared war on Germany in defense of Poland. They could have stood by and watched Poland fall, as they did for Czechoslovakia. But they had decided after the Czechs were crushed that enough was enough.

After Poland fell, and even after the fall of France, Hitler would have like nothing better than to strike a deal with Britain. He had absolute no interest in crushing the UK, as he thought they were good Aryans who could keeep the colored races overseas in line, while he dealt with the subhumans in Europe and the Middle East personally.

So it's not at all true that Britain was stuck with the war. They could have gotten out in a minute simply by striking a deal with Herr Hitler, as Stalin did. But Churchill, to whom none of your sarcasm about Britain should apply, and the British people (by this time well over their 30's fit of pacifism) would not even consider making peace with Hitler.

A truly fine piece of work. This is just awesome.

With a few minor revisions ( to keep it in context of time and occasion), it would make a great speech anywhere, but especially at high school and college graduations. It most certainly should be given at the begining of every journalism 101 course.

Would you have any objections to others using your piece, either in total or with some modifications for such purposes and of course, with all due credit to you?

Thanks for this inspiring reminder (even though you are "preaching to the choir" here on FR). You really should consider giving this as a speech or submitting it for publication (have a pro proof read it 1st - I caught just a few minor errors, nothing serious). If you do use it as a speech - consider shortening some of the longer sentences into separate statements (so that current leftists can better understand it ;^D ).

<...so it's not at all true that Britain was stuck with the war. They could have gotten out in a minute simply by striking a deal with Herr Hitler, as Stalin did. But Churchill, to whom none of your sarcasm about Britain should apply, and the British people (by this time well over their 30's fit of pacifism) would not even consider making peace with Hitler...>

There is some validity to your observation that my sarcasm was somewhat harsh. After all, I have been an admirer of the Brits for decades. But there reaches a point where we must stop trying to carefully dance around the hard lessons that history has taught us, and start looking at fact.
It is true that the Russians signed a non-agression treaty with Germany, (read my "The missing weapons..." for a tribute to our brave Russian allies), and so thought they had "gotten out in a minute" as you stated. What seems to be forgotten is that a few years later, after France had successfully been dealt with, that Germany then turned on Russia, invaded with a scorched earth policy, and killed millions. Churchill wouldn't deal with the devil, and back then adopted the same tactic that the U.S. does today.
"Stand alone among nations if we must...but stand we will."
Tony Blair is a great man, and, in spite of any hisses I might soon hear, has pulled a reluctant Britain along.
He stands with Margaret Thatcher among the world's truly courageous leaders.
For whatever excessive harshness you read in the article,
we need a reality check before millions die in an out-of-control religious war.
Mea culpa.

RebelTex,
You are welcome to use any part that you feel may be of any value. It may be, however, that Restorer has a good point about the diatribe against Britain. It wasn't my intent to impune all of the Brits, and he may be right that the essay doesn't clearly distinguish between the awesum record of the British, who have been allies of ours in nearly every conflict we have fought, and the Neville Chamberlain acolytes there, who should have been held accountable, harshly. I fired equally rough broadsides, I had thought, against those in the U.S. who also figured that it was someone else's problem. While Britain stood, we yawned.
I will, in future, try to..how did Kerry say it?...fight the war of words with more sensitivity. Without getting even more verbose than I already am, it is difficult to carefully target those who need targeting.

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