President Truman inspect Navy personnel aboard USS Missouri in 1947. (National Archives)It’s easy in retrospect to fault Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan, but he had only worse options at his disposal.
On Aug. 6, 1945, the United States dropped a uranium-fueled atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, another U.S. Army Air Forces B-29 repeated the attack on Nagasaki, Japan, with an even more powerful plutonium bomb.
Less than a month after the second bombing, Imperial Japan agreed to formally surrender on September 2. That date marked the official end of World War II — the bloodiest human or natural catastrophe in history, accounting for more than 65 million dead.
Each August, Americans in hindsight ponder the need for, the morality of, and the strategic rationale behind the dropping of the two bombs. Yet President Harry Truman’s decision 73 years ago to use the novel, terrifying weapons was not considered particularly controversial, either right before or right after the attacks. Both cities were simply military targets.
Hiroshima was the headquarters of a Japanese army unit, and a key manufacturing center and port. Nagasaki — a secondary target after clouds and smoke obscured the city of Kokura — was the site of a huge Mitsubishi munitions plant.
Yet the sheer destructive power of the two bombs — the 15-kiloton “Little Boy” Hiroshima bomb and the 21-kiloton “Fat Man” Nagasaki bomb — ensured catastrophic civilian casualties well beyond soldiers and munitions-plant workers. During the blasts — and long afterward, due to radiation showers — perhaps 150,000 Japanese were killed.
Truman wanted to use the bombs to avoid invading the Japanese mainland. The recent battle for Okinawa had resulted in an estimated 50,000 American casualties — the bloodiest of all the American battles of the Pacific War. Truman’s military planners warned that invasions of the Japanese mainland to end the war might cost the equivalent of 20 more Okinawa campaigns.
Japan’s leaders swore that they would fight to the bitter end, bragging of their planned sacrifice as the “Glorious Death of One Hundred Million.” They planned to draw on 10,000 suicide planes and 10 million soldiers, militiamen, and irregulars.
Truman also had other worries.
The Soviet Union had done nothing during the war to harm Japan following its cynical 1941 non-aggression pact with the Japanese. But in August 1945, the Soviets were opportunistically preparing to invade a reeling Japanese empire in hopes of stripping Japan of its colonies in China, the Pacific, and Korea. After Josef Stalin’s recent Russian occupation of Eastern Europe, the idea of a Soviet Russia replacing Imperial Japan seemed not much better to Truman.
Thousands of Allied prisoners, as well as civilians in Japanese-occupied China, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific, were dying each day the war dragged on. More than 1 million Japanese soldiers abroad were still brutally killing the innocent.
There were still other, less publicized considerations. The incendiary B-29 bombing campaign from the distant Mariana Islands had already killed far more Japanese than would the two atomic bombs.
With new airfields on Okinawa, General Curtis LeMay envisioned a far greater force of four-engine bombers to be sent on daily missions against Japan. LeMay would have had at his disposal nearly 10,000 four-engine bombers, including B-29s, along with transfers of idle B-24s, B-17s, and British Lancaster bombers after the surrender of Germany three months earlier.
The ensuing napalm inferno might have precluded the invasion of Japan. But more nonstop firestorms also would have caused far more Japanese deaths than the two atomic bombs — at a time when Japan was already blockaded by the U.S. Navy and running out of food and supplies.
In other words, the novelty of the two horrific atomic bombs helped to shock the Japanese emperor into a sudden surrender. And the abrupt end of the Pacific War saved millions of lives — whether Asians under brutal Japanese occupation, Allied soldiers fighting against Japanese expeditionary armies, or Japanese civilians who likely would have been incinerated by an unimaginable second round of the firebombing campaign.
In the security and prosperity of peace, it is now common to fault Truman for his seemingly cruel decision. But in 1945, many Americans were blaming the U.S. government for thousands of American deaths from fighting in the Pacific. Right after the war, they complained that the atomic bombs should have been used even earlier to preclude nightmares such as Okinawa.
We also forget that Imperial Japan of 1945 was not the model democracy of Japan today, but a brutal, genocidal dictatorship. By August 1945, it already had butchered millions of Asians in occupied China, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific.
Japan was still convinced that if the war could just continue, and it could kill thousands more American and British soldiers, then the exhausted Allies might finally negotiate a favorable armistice.
It is now hard to imagine any choices worse than dropping an atomic bomb. But in August 1945, there were some that most certainly were.
Thanks to the European decision to invite in the Islamists, not only won’t we always have Paris, we won’t have the rest of Europe either. Europe is dying.
Bruce Bawer, a gay American man who moved to Europe only to be mugged by Islamic reality, is a clear-headed thinker and a marvelous writer. Today, FrontPage Magazine published an essay he wrote about the change in thinking about Islam amongst European elites. Back in 2007, when Bawer was invited to speak to these elites about rising concerns on the ground regarding the growing Islamic presence in Europe, the elites were shocked — and greatly offended — that some little upstart would insinuate that their pro-Muslim policies might change Europe’s face:
It’s easy to read an audience. As I spoke, I could feel the snappily dressed, self-impressed-looking crowd growing restive. When I was done and they were invited to ask questions, I didn’t get questions but incredibly condescending razzes, remonstrations, and reproaches. A German envoy reacted angrily to my account of some recent incident – I don’t remember what – that had taken place in her country. Her colleagues from a couple of other countries had similar bones to pick. “These are just anecdotes!” one diplomat thundered dismissively. I tried to engage them in a reasonable give-and-take, but they weren’t having it.
What made the experience especially striking was that over the course of the previous year or so I’d given a number of talks about the same subject in Europe and North America. The audiences had been composed not of credentialed foreign-policy experts but of ordinary citizens. All of them had recognized that what I was saying was true. During the Q&A sessions, they’d been eager to express their gratitude that someone was talking about these matters, eager to recount their own horrific experiences with the consequences of mass Muslim immigration, and eager to vent their frustration at political leaders who refused to listen to them, to care about their sufferings, or even to acknowledge the plain objective facts.
In sum, in 2007, Bawer was a mean-spirited and stupid racist to think that Islam could affect Europe in any way.
Fast forward to 2018:
As it turns out, it’s not Europe but Islam in Europe that’s been moving from strength to strength. As the number of terrorist atrocities, mass car burnings, and gang riots and rapes across Western Europe climbs relentlessly, it’s harder and harder to hold up Europe as “a new lamp unto the nations.” Consequently, the elite’s message about Islam in Europe has begun to shift. Only the day before yesterday, it seemed, they were telling us – and many of them, to be sure, are still telling us – that it’s preposterous to suggest that Western Europe’s present order is on the verge of being undone. But now at least some of them are starting to sing a different tune. Yes, they admit, Islam is taking over Western Europe – but hey, there’s no reason to worry about it!
[snip]
Case in point: on March 28 of last year, the Dutch newspaper Trouw ran an interview with Maurice Crul, a professor at the Free University of Amsterdam who “has been conducting research on migration and integration for twenty-five years.” Since only every third Amsterdammer under age fifteen is of Dutch descent, noted Crul, ethnic Dutch people will soon be a minority in that city. The same holds for other major Western European burgs. For Crul, the lesson here is obvious: integration “now works in two directions.” Meaning what? Meaning that Western European natives who have been complaining for years about the failure of immigrants to integrate will themselves henceforth be obliged to integrate into the new, multicultural urban landscapes.
I urge you to read the whole thing. It’s fascinating and depressing. What really got me were the statistics Bawer cites:
Crul isn’t alone. This past August 6, the German newspaper Tagesspiegel published a column by Barbara John, a retired 80-year-old politician who belongs to Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union Party. John noted that in some major German cities, people with foreign backgrounds already outnumber native Germans. In Frankfurt, for example, 51.2 percent of the population is non-German. This trend, John pronounced, “is irreversible.” It “awakens fears,” she added. “But they are unfounded.” She held up Rotterdam and Amsterdam as examples of immigrant-heavy cities that are doing just dandy. “After all,” she stated, the new majorities in those cities consist of “many immigrant groups, which differ enormously in education, ethnicity, religion, culture and finances,” and are thus divided from one another, and from ethnic Dutch people, in many ways.
Yes, there are people from all kinds of backgrounds in Western Europe’s largest cities. But only one of those backgrounds is problematic. At this point, no one needs to be told why. At present, Muslims make up about 17% of the population of Antwerp and Brussels, 22% of Birmingham, 25% of Marseille, 11% of Amsterdam, 13% of Rotterdam, and 13% of Frankfurt. Immigration patterns and demographic trends indicate that those numbers will increase steadily in the years to come, and eventually, I repeat, all of Western Europe will be under sharia law. Or, as John puts it so prettily, “many things will be different and some things will be better.”
So what do those numbers mean in terms of life in Islamicized Europe? Let’s take Paris as an example:
You can call these Muslim immigrants (both legal and illegal) freeloaders. You can call them conquerors. You can call them culturally different. What you can’t call them, though, is people anxious to assimilate to and become a part of Western culture. The ugly reality, the one the elites refuse to acknowledge when living in their clean, bright, gated suburbs, is that when you get a big enough group of unassimilated, hostile people within your country, you don’t have a country anymore.
But wait, if that video’s not enough for you, there’s more:
A man armed with “several knives” killed his mother and sister and seriously injured another woman in a town near Paris on Thursday, officials said. The man, who police said had been on a terror watch list since 2016, was later shot and killed after confronting police in Trappes.
He also stabbed a third victim, a female passerby, who was gravely injured in the attack. France’s interior minister Gerard Collomb told reporters the attacker had “serious psychiatric problems”, and said the attack was not being treated as terrorism.
Despite providing no evidence, the Islamic State group claimed the attack via its propaganda channel.
The attacker, 36, reportedly shouted “Allahu Akbar” during the rampage, and was shot dead by police after the assault in a residential street.
The authorities insist that what happened wasn’t terrorism. I kind of agree. The Allahu Akbar murders of Mireille Knoll or Sarah Halimi, both elderly Jewish ladies brutally slaughtered by young Muslim men, weren’t terrorist attacks either. Terrorism implies a subset of formal warfare. For Europe’s newest immigrants (legal or not), these Allahu Akbar killings are just business as usual. Kill the Jews. Kill the Christians. Kill your own women. Rape the kafir women. It’s what they do.
Not all Muslims do this, obviously, but a large enough percentage are programmed through their religion to engage in this behavior to make it a very unhealthy choice for a country to allow indiscriminate Muslim immigration, whether legal or illegal. Once it happens, you can wave good-bye to all the trappings of civilization, everything from the rule of law, to free speech, to clean streets, to women’s rights, to gay rights, good plumbing. They will destroy everything.
But hey, that’s France and . . . you know, it’s France. Except of course it’s not just France. In Holland, the Dutch government is prosecutingsomeone for saying mean things to Erdogan, the Turkish dictator for life:
A 64-year-old man from Sittard will face the court in The Hague on Friday for insulting Turkish president Recept Tayyip Erdogan. In 2016 the man sent multiple offensive emails to the Turkish embassy in The Hague in which he compared Erdogan to Hitler and called him a “goat fucker”, among other things, 1Limburg reports.
In one email he wrote: “Erdogan, you fucking goat fucker, burn in hell.” An attachment added to the email showed Hitler and Erdogan, with a swastika between them and the text: “There’s no difference”. In another email he said: “Erdogan takes the whole world hostage with his pernicious ideas. More than seventy years ago, a similar dictator made exactly the same mistake. I regret the Turkish people with this idiot, you do not deserve better.”
According to the newspaper, the Dutch man is facing charges of insult, insulting an official, and insulting a friendly head of state. The Sittard man’s lawyer did not want to comment to 1Limburg about the case. “It is not in my client’s best interest to respond at the moment.”
Please note that the man wasn’t threatening Erdogan. He was just calling him names. In turns out that, in 21st century Europe, there’s no difference between living in Holland or living in Iran (or Turkey, for that matter) when it comes to saying mean things to a Muslim leader. Either way, you’re in trouble with the law.
The only thing for which the Dutch man can be grateful is that, in Holland, he’ll still just be imprisoned, rather than actually executed. But even that’s not quite true. As Tommy Robinson’s ordeal in a British prison showed, if they can’t execute you directly, they’ll still try to do it indirectly. Otherwise, why would the authorities, after he was illegally imprisoned, have transferred him from a non-Muslim controlled prison to a Muslim-controlled prison, and then refused to take any steps whatsoever to protect him from everything from direct threats, to feces attacks, to poisoned food?
The Netherlands, once the world’s most free country (and I’m going all the way back to the 17th century when I say this) has now not only invited in the Trojan horse, it’s given it a nice stable and is keeping it comfortable with hay and water. The same is true for England, which was probably the second most free country in the time of the Enlightenment. And the French always pretended to be something sort of free, didn’t they? What a joke.
But that’s just Holland, France, and England. Surely there isn’t a problem in other European nations? Daniel Greenfield has numbers that say there’s a problem in all European nations:
Last year, Austria had 503 anti-Semitic incidents.
That’s impressive considering that the country only has around 9,000 Jews. There has been 1 anti-Semitic incident to every 18 Jews in Austria.
That same year, Germany had 1,453 anti-Semitic incidents to approximately 100,000 Jews.
In Bonn, Germany, a Jewish professor from Baltimore was assaulted by a Muslim yelling, “No Jew in Germany!” When the police arrived, they assaulted the professor. There was a protest march. A videotaped attack by a Syrian Muslim refugee in Berlin had led to another protest march and a slap on the wrist for the assailant. 10 Syrians attacked a man wearing a Star of David while screaming anti-Semitic slurs. A Jewish teen was assaulted in a Berlin train station. “I’ll slit your throat, you f***ing Jew.”
One statistical survey listed the number of anti-Semitic incidents in Germany rising by 60% in 2017.
In the UK, there were 1,382 incidents to 263,346 Jews. In Italy, there were 109 incidents to some 28,000 Jews. In the Netherlands, there were 113 incidents to 29,900 Jews.
Spain’s having a few problems too. Here’s a story from yesterday’s WaPo (which really, really wishes it didn’t have to report these kind of dark things showing democracy dying overseas):
A group of around 300 migrants stormed fences separating Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta from Morocco on Wednesday, and 116 of them made it onto European soil, authorities said.
Seven policemen were burned by acid and quicklime, a skin irritant, allegedly thrown by some of the migrants as they overran border defenses, the Guardia Civil said.(Emphasis mine.)
That report isn’t about a few immigrants slipping over the border. It describes a full-fledged invasion, complete with deadly weapons. Nor is it the first. As I said, that was yesterday’s news. Three weeks ago, this video emerged from an African assault on the Spanish border:
And a month ago, a mob attacked Spain’s presence in Africa:
As many as 800 African migrants stormed a Spanish border outpost in North Africa, breaching a security fence and attacking guards in an attempt to gain entry to migrant shelters inside, police said Thursday.
The migrants used bolt cutters to rip open holes in the barbed-wire fences and then hurled feces and quicklime, a skin irritant, at police who were trying to beat back the onrush, Spain’s Guardia Civil said in a statement. About 600 migrants managed to break through police lines in the attack, which left 15 officers and 16 migrants injured, the Associated Press reported. (Emphasis mine.)
As Daffy Duck would say, “You realize, this means war.” Except the Europeans haven’t twigged to that fact that they’re on the receiving end of all out war. They’re still anxious to play the gracious host to millions of people who want to finish what the Holocaust started (kill Jews, because it’s part of their core religious doctrine) and then continue the conquest, enslaving the rest of the European people.
Europe’s dying and it deserves to die. In some ways it’s very painful. After all, some of the most beautiful sites in the world are in Europe: Gorgeous churches (empty), magnificent palaces, charming towns, gracious landscapes, beautiful art. All of that, of course, will be destroyed under Islam’s not-so-tender-loving-care.
I’m desperately sorry for the ordinary Europeans, the ones who are being sold out by the elite who hide behind fenced estates in expensive enclaves, but the reality is that too many Europeans have become inert due to decades of socialism. As long as the elites kept promising ordinary people free things (funded in significant part by hard-working Americans during the Cold War), the descendants of Europe’s serfs and peasants were going to keep voting for the same people who have always kept them under dainty and expensive heels.
Unless the ordinary Europeans want to have their own American-style revolution, one based on individual liberty rather than free stuff, they’re going down in Islamic chains. Moreover, those chains are wrapping around them with ever-increasing speed. It’s doubtful, at this point, whether anything can stop them.
As Brazilian troops move toward the Venezuelan border to sort that hell out, and Argentina of all places takes Venezuela to the World Court for crimes against humanity, and the U.S. sends out the USNSComfort to aid thousands of Venezuela's starving, sick refugees desperately huddled in Colombia, there's obviously a whirlwind coming that that socialist regime is overdue to reap. Economically, they've just committed suicide, with dictator Nicolás Maduro's socialist solution for the country's economic meltdown a simple matter of lopping five zeros off the virtually worthless currency, as if that will fix the five-digit-going-on-a-million-percent inflation, devaluing it 95%, pegging it to a made up crypto-currency that's even skeezier than bitcoin, known as the "petro," and raising the minimum wage 6,000%, a move that will shut down pretty much every private business left in Venezuela, given that businesses cannot raise prices.
We are looking at complete mayhem. Even the Castro dynasty in Cuba, which rules through collective economic ruin, hasn't achieved anything on the scale of this lunacy. The Castros only squandered a leading global sugar industry, not the world's largest oil reserves. It's as if the Maduro regime is at war with economics itself: the regime doesn't like what the economic forces are telling it about its bad socialist decisions, so it shuts down the economy altogether, and that's the solution. As a direct result, Reuters reports that the Mother of All Human Waves is about to break, with would-be refugees leaving that hellhole even earlier than planned. Already a new report holds that 4 million out of the country's 30 million have fled, most of them in the past year, and rapidly becoming a refugee crisis even bigger than Syria's. In the meantime, ordinary Venezuelans have enacted something classical rabid lefties have dreamed about for years, ironically against one of their beloved socialist regimes: an actual general strike. Get a load of the pictures. No more colorful moving big avalanche protests in Caracas now; what we see there are the bleak witnesses:
Surely Keynes's law, that anything that can't go on won't, must be operative here. This analysis and this editorial (retweeted by Vice President Mike Pence) are well worth reading for the perspective. We've been saying for years that the regime can't last. As the analyst notes, a Colombian general told him the Maduro regime could last only six months, tops, except that everyone has been saying that for years. Now we see the entire economy gone, troops on the border, the Mother of All Human Waves rising...and we have a leader in place in the U.S. who does things differently. Can we possibly be right this time?
As Brazilian troops move toward the Venezuelan border to sort that hell out, and Argentina of all places takes Venezuela to the World Court for crimes against humanity, and the U.S. sends out the USNSComfort to aid thousands of Venezuela's starving, sick refugees desperately huddled in Colombia, there's obviously a whirlwind coming that that socialist regime is overdue to reap. Economically, they've just committed suicide, with dictator Nicolás Maduro's socialist solution for the country's economic meltdown a simple matter of lopping five zeros off the virtually worthless currency, as if that will fix the five-digit-going-on-a-million-percent inflation, devaluing it 95%, pegging it to a made up crypto-currency that's even skeezier than bitcoin, known as the "petro," and raising the minimum wage 6,000%, a move that will shut down pretty much every private business left in Venezuela, given that businesses cannot raise prices. We are looking at complete mayhem. Even the Castro dynasty in Cuba, which rules through collective economic ruin, hasn't achieved anything on the scale of this lunacy. The Castros only squandered a leading global sugar industry, not the world's largest oil reserves. It's as if the Maduro regime is at war with economics itself: the regime doesn't like what the economic forces are telling it about its bad socialist decisions, so it shuts down the economy altogether, and that's the solution. As a direct result, Reuters reports that the Mother of All Human Waves is about to break, with would-be refugees leaving that hellhole even earlier than planned. Already a new report holds that 4 million out of the country's 30 million have fled, most of them in the past year, and rapidly becoming a refugee crisis even bigger than Syria's. In the meantime, ordinary Venezuelans have enacted something classical rabid lefties have dreamed about for years, ironically against one of their beloved socialist regimes: an actual general strike. Get a load of the pictures. No more colorful moving big avalanche protests in Caracas now; what we see there are the bleak witnesses:
Surely Keynes's law, that anything that can't go on won't, must be operative here. This analysis and this editorial (retweeted by Vice President Mike Pence) are well worth reading for the perspective. We've been saying for years that the regime can't last. As the analyst notes, a Colombian general told him the Maduro regime could last only six months, tops, except that everyone has been saying that for years. Now we see the entire economy gone, troops on the border, the Mother of All Human Waves rising...and we have a leader in place in the U.S. who does things differently. Can we possibly be right this time?
President Cyril Ramaphosa answered questions in Parliament on Wednesday.
President Cyril Ramaphosa says if the current process of land redistribution were to be followed, it would take the government about 75 to 100 years before it achieves its objectives. Ramaphosa was answering oral questions in the National Assembly.
He says there is a demand from people for land reform to move with speed. The President says under the current process, it will take time for government to achieve its target due to budgetary constraints.
He says the announcement he made on expropriation of land without compensation, was in his capacity as African National Congress President and not to pre-empt the Parliamentary process on the amendment of section 25.
The President says just like all other political parties, the ANC also has a position on this matter. “I made the announcement as the president of the ANC just as any leader of parties that are here have been able to speak about this issue but the ANC being the majority party has all the rights to give leadership in the country about what needs to be done. That’s precisely what needs to be done, you may not like it but that’s what it is.”
The Freedom Front Plus believes that expropriation of land without compensation will not lead to speedy land reform. Party leader, Pieter Groenewald, says it is not only investors who want certainty on the land matter, but also owners.
However, Ramaphosa was quick to respond that the landless want certainty too. The Democratic Alliance (DA), which is also opposed to land expropriation without compensation, says government must first release land that it owns, before amending section 25.
DA leader Mmusi Maimane, thanked the authors of the Constitution for incorporating section 25. “I agree with you that land ownership patterns in this country must change that’s a good thing and I want to thank the authors of the Constitution who put section 25.”
Ramaphosa, however, did not have to respond, as Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader Julius Malemaresponded. “ What is more comforting is that when people talk about the people who wrote the Constitution as if those people are dead forgetting that they are talking to one of them but if you come late to politics this is what happens.”
The United Democratic Movement, meanwhile, complained about lack of transparency when presiding officers take follow up questions.
