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Monday, May 30, 2016

Memorial to The Fallen

The religious man will acknowledge that Humanity is 'fallen'. We have to make do with the 'Human Condition' we find ourselves in and that includes WAR. Why? Because there are bad folk in this world where Evil stalks and all the Pollyannas and John Lennons will not change the fact.

Some men and the occasional woman are born to be Warriors: they follow the Profession of Arms. 'Tis a Noble and Honourable profession.  But most wars are fought by farm boys conscripted to the fight. 


And they fall like tears. 
Hiroshima
They may be ordered on and around the field by men of skill and knowledge of battle; men who value life. But those in turn are mostly ordered by fatuous men - and women - who sit in comfort  far behind the lines and pontificate, later, at Memorials. Those 'leaders', politicians, say they care, but their words betray not just themselves but the men who died.

So it was that some people gathered. My fine and gracious friend the Southern Gal proudly showed us her family's contribution; they care. 

Meanwhile her President disgraced her abroad. And his memory is as deliberately neglectful as ours is poor.

Southern Gal told me.....
This weekend my husband, son and I went to a local cemetery and placed flags on the graves of those that fought to preserve the freedoms that are so often taken for granted for in this country.  It’s a small gesture to give something in return to those have given everything.
 For those who continue to serve, we pray you come home safe. For those gone, we will never forge t you………..
 “It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the press.  It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us the freedom of speech.  It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who gives us the freedom to demonstrate.  It is the soldier who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag.”
-Charles Province

Noble, grateful, honouring, powerful. But she does not wield the destructive power of Presidents, whether they are dropping bombs or words of dishonour.

Many in America reacted with dismay at the words of President Obama when he visited the Memorial at Hiroshima in Japan. You would think a man in his role would think very carefully about speaking gelatinous platitudes in that place. But no. His mind was on golf, in all liklihood. And his forgetfulness was both deliberate and cruel. The 'most intelligent man who ever sat in the Oval Office' cannot have been stupid, shirley.

Ben Shapiro gave him his due.
President Obama Gives One Of The Most Repulsive Speeches In American History In Hiroshima
On Friday, President Obama said America’s use of the A-bomb to end the threat of Japanese fascism sprang from American desire for conquest, suggested that America had ushered in an age of “atomic warfare,” and said that we could achieve a “world without nuclear weapons” if only we clapped for Tinkerbell. 
This came shortly after his visit to Vietnam, where his White House announced that America would start selling weapons to the communist dictatorship.
Yes, our president is a total disgrace.
“Seventy-one years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed. A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself,” Obama said. 
This ignored the fact that mankind had in fact nearly destroyed itself over the previous three decades in two world wars, and that the Soviet Union and China would murder well over 100 million people using non-nuclear means. But the point of Obama’s speech was that the technology of atomic weaponry itself was uniquely evil.
Obama continued:
"Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima? We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in a not-so-distant past. We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 Japanese men, women and children, thousands of Koreans, a dozen Americans held prisoner. Their souls speak to us. They ask us to look inward, to take stock of who we are and what we might become."
We have been warned for several millenia that psychopaths in Thrall to evil will use honeyed words to decieve you. Obama is a master of such deceptive rhetoric.  I prefer the sword, m'self. It is honest.
In case you were wondering, at no point did Obama mention Pearl Harbor and the dead there, or the more than 100,000 Americans who lost their lives in the Pacific theater, or the half-million to one million Americans who would have had to sacrifice themselves to storm the island of Japan using conventional means. As Noah Rothman tweets this morning, veterans were overjoyed at the use of the A-bomb, knowing it ended the war and meant they would live to see their children.
Taking Okinawa
Obama noted that war is not unique in human history; he even went full moral relativist with regard to World War II itself: “the war grew out of the same base instinct for domination or conquest that had caused conflicts among the simplest tribes, an old pattern amplified by new capabilities and without new constraints.
This is disgusting. 
If you can’t spot the bad guys and the good guys in World War II, of all conflicts, ..

you’re on the side of a valueless nihilism that allows the possibility of future world wars – after all, you can’t take a strong stand against evil if it doesn’t exist. Japan was wrong. America was right. Germany was wrong. America was right. End of story.
But Obama continued his relativistic reverie:
"How easily we learn to justify violence in the name of some higher cause. Every great religion promises a pathway to love and peace and righteousness, and yet no religion has been spared from believers who have claimed their faith as a license to kill."
Some religions are worse than others. Some ideologies are worse than others. But not according to Obama. 
We’re all equal in sin, according to the President of the United States – and the only solution is to destroy American nationalism, and replace it with some sort of Obama-created philosophy of peace:
Here’s an answer: take pre-emptive action to stop tyrannically fascist states from starting wars and then vowing to fight them to the last man. But Obama forbids that solution expressly:
Obama doesn’t want realism. He wants the remaking of the world in his personal image. He wants humanity itself changed:
"We’re not bound by genetic code to repeat the mistakes of the past. We can learn. We can choose."
Hiroshima was not a “mistake.” 
It was a wartime decision. Pearl Harbor wasn’t a “mistake.” It was an attack driven by an aggressive and imperialistic Japanese policy that also resulted in the invasion of China and the murder of 100,000 civilians there.
But Obama thinks that the way to stop war is to kill ideology altogether, not to support and strengthen proper ideologies. 
This is John Lennon’s 'Imagine' on crack. 
Hiroshima happened because the world slept as fascism rose; Obama wishes to sleep on evil again (or worse, forward it), hoping that national narcolepsy becomes contagious internationally, and we share the same peaceful dreams. 
We don’t. If we go to sleep again, our enemies will use that reverie to rise. But Americans increasingly believe in Obamaism – more Americans now think using the A-bomb was wrong than right. The result will be more Hiroshimas after 70 years of nuclear peace.
There are still some around who think that the Atom Bomb was evil and that America was even more evil to use it.

But what about Japan's Atom Bomb?

What? You have never heard of it?

You heard about Germany's efforts to build an atom bomb. Heck there were even war-adventure-heroism films made about it. But about Japan's efforts..... silence.  Rob Wilcox was in the bar telling us.
The Japanese were trying to make an atomic bomb, too
In all the press about Obama visiting Hiroshima, Japan, where the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb on its enemy in 1945, not one word has surfaced about the fact that the Japanese were, at the same time, working on their own atomic bomb, and would have used it on Americans had they been able. 
Nor has anything been said about the fact that they were much closer to making an atomic bomb than most Americans know.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/05/the_japanese_were_trying_to_make_an_atomic_bomb_too.html
The Japanese had begun a program to develop a “uranium” bomb even before the sneak attacked on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, killing some 2000 Americans and starting war with America. 
They had top scientists working on their atomic bomb, including a future Nobel-prize winner, Hideki Yukawa. Over the course of the war they spent millions on the program, hunting uranium, building crucial separators, designing a workable bomb, and elevating their program to a top priority at the end of the war as they frantically sought “miracle” weapons with which to turn the tide going against them. 
 Had America not used its atomic bombs and instead invaded the Japanese mainland, the Japanese were planning to use atomic weapons on the invasion fleet, which certainly would have been devastating. Kamikazis had been bad enough. Imagine if they had been armed with nuclear weapons.
Of course none of this was mentioned by Barack Obama in his non-apology apology in Japan. 
He may or may not even know about this history, so successful has been the effort by both Japan and the American Left to bury it. 
Both want the Japanese to appear solely as victims of the bomb. 
It keeps Japan’s conscience clear for their part in World War II’s atrocities, and helped, after the war, gain sorely  needed aid. For the Left, it makes attacking America easier if this part of the world’s atomic bomb story remains buried.
But you can’t bury the truth. 
The Japanese were not stupid. Like other countries in the late 1930s, they became aware of the potential for a stupendous weapon in splitting the atom. They started exploring it, as did the Germans and the U.S. As they planned for war with America they did not think they’d need such a weapon. After devastating the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor, they planned a short war in which they could grab much of Asia quickly and then sue for peace. But it didn’t happen that way. 
The U.S. fought back doggedly. The war dragged on. The Japanese began to lose their protecting fleet and conversely America and her allies began to win back what the Japanese had conquered. With the tide turning, the Japanese atomic bomb project, diffused amongst its army and navy labs, began to unite and gain steam.
The Japanese scientists knew how to make a bomb. 
Plans discovered in 2002 showed an actual diagram of their bomb.  Their problem was industrial strength and fissionable material. There wasn’t a lot in Japan. They had to import uranium – and other fissionable ores like thorium, which may have figured more into their nuclear plans. One of the main program areas in Tokyo, the Rikken lab, developed separators for isolating isotopes so important in nuclear bomb making. But in early 1945, the lab was destroyed by B-29 bombers. A Rikken separator however was used as a prototype by Sumitomo and multiple separators were moved to Korea, which was relatively free of bombing. There were also Japanese atomic bomb efforts operating in Manchuria and elsewhere in China about which less is known.
A person who dies by atom bomb or bayonet- to him, 'tis a gratuitous distinction.
As the U.S. drew closer to Japan proper, the Japanese war government made development of an atomic bomb a top priority. The army and navy programs began to cooperate with each. Frantic efforts to gather more uranium were launched, including trying to get it from the Germans. The navy spent over 100 million yen alone in Shanghai buying and gathering uranium ores. In May 1945, the last Nazi submarine to leave Kiel, Germany, had on it uranium to be smuggled to Japan. The exact nature of the uranium – whether simply refined or the isotope U235 has never been publicly released. Unfortunately for the Japanese, the sub, rather than make the dangerous voyage to the Pacific, opted to surrender in the Atlantic and full understanding about its cargo has so far been buried in government secrecy.
In Korea, right after the Hiroshima bombing, US intelligence received reports that the Japanese had test fired an atomic device off the coast. Those reports continued well into the Occupation but the Russians, in their first act after declaring war on Japan in the war’s last days, rushed in and to this day have kept that area – North Korea – off limits to western investigators.
The Soviets were the next country to explode a nuclear bomb. The intelligence reports say they took Japanese nuclear scientists and integrated them into their atomic program. How much did the Japanese scientists help? That is another unknown question. 
Intelligence reports also say the Japanese left a system of underground caves and bomb factories in North Korea. We can speculate that the reason a tinhorn country like North Korea can continue to be a thorn in the side of a giant like America with its sabre rattling and threats is that they picked up from where the Japanese left off.
There is still more to be learned about the Japanese atomic bomb program. But we know enough to say with certainty that they were working on an atomic bomb themselves and had they succeeded, Obama, the America-blaming Left, and the rest of the world would have an entirely different perspective. 
As it is, the story of Japan’s effort and intentions continues to be buried – as is the truth.
(Robert K. Wilcox is the author of  Japan's Secret War: Japan's race against time to build its own atomic bomb.)
War is nasty, brutish, violent, cruel. It is what we get when evil runs riot. A surgeon does not make pacific speeches about how cancer and a broken leg are really just the same and we should lament having to cut cancerous cells out with 'Invasive' means. He does not condemn the white corpuscles for attacking the virus in the bloodstream. He does not claim that using asprin is really just the same as shooting up heroin in a back alley. 

(Oh dear. Someone is bound to be offended by 'white' being the name. Obama may even decree it be changed). 

Someone has to stand up to evil regimes. 

It is usually farm boys who do and they die in droves. 

We must give them the honours due. Some were heroes. All played their part.

Warriors, Knights, Captains and Generals may covet the kudos, but the Grunt, the Trooper, the Digger and the Tommy take survival as a gift from those of their colleagues who did not.



Drink up. 

Pax. 

6 comments:

  1. Poignant pic at the top, top post.

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  2. Thanks for giving me some time in the bar today:). (The Southern Girl)

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    1. My bars are yours. You have free and full rights here. :)

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  3. Very well said. War is ugly, but the effects of relativism are uglier. Hopefully the world will wake up and realize that sometimes bad things have to happen to make good things come about. Too many people have paid the ultimate price and now the U.S. president marginalized it. Let us never forget our comrades in arms who died fighting for their country. A toast to those who have gone before...

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    1. We weep for the innocents and those who pay the price for confronting evil.

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Ne meias in stragulo aut pueros circummittam.

Our Bouncer is a gentleman of muscle and guile. His patience has limits. He will check you at the door.

The Tavern gets rowdy visitors from time to time. Some are brain dead and some soul dead. They attack customers and the bar staff and piss on the carpets. Those people will not be allowed in anymore. So... Be Nice..