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On the 75th anniversary of World War II’s conclusion, Victor Davis Hanson looks at how the war continues to shape international affairs, and points listeners towards some of the war’s underappreciated figures.
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You think you know all about World War II?
Listen for 22 minutes and you will learn plenty more.
Hanson’s The Second World Wars has just been added to my reading list.
Information dense, as the saying goes.
The book is great.
VDH has a good video series onYouTube, based on the book. It was posted by American Freedom Alliance.
Scary…great minds think alike!
I had just finished rereading the VDH history and LAST NIGHT opened up Andrew Roberts’ STORM OF WAR..
Yes. I’ve never heard the 20,000 a day being killed by the Japanese in their occupied areas before. I read that it was very terrible, but I’ve not read a number before.
The next time liberals tout Japan as a victim …
I don’t know who “touts Japan as a victim.” I’ve lived in Japan most of my life and am a Japanese citizen. The vast majority of Japanese see the militarist madness for what it was: evil. Yes, there are ultra-neo-nationalists, but they are a thuggish minority, typically a bunch of kids in dyed red hair who get paid to drive around in sound trucks blaring militarist music. (I can’t remember when last we heard from them.) It is possible to sorrow for all those killed in the indiscriminate bombing of Japanese cities without making any excuses for the death cult that the militarists shamelessly propagated or for the crimes they committed.
An old friend here in Japan was the daughter of a military officer. She once lived in Hiroshima and lost a cousin in the bombing. She says that in 1945, the year I was born, she was a 13-year-old training with other schoolgirls to fight the invading Americans with farm implements and to die for the emperor. And? She would heartily agree with VDH’s assessment…As a German-speaking citizen of Japan, I wince, without necessarily disagreeing, when reminded of the insanity and cruelty of Japanese militarism—and of the fecklessness of contemporary Germany. (I also chafe at the consistent mispronunciation of “Hiroshima” and “Merkel”–admittedly a minor matter.) Upper-middle-class Germans tend to share (and reinforce among themselves) a loathing of Donald Trump that is both irrational and Teutonically immovable, and this is surely related to a longstanding view of Americans as delightfully naïve, while distressingly ignorant and crude. And yet Germans as a whole are not anti-American. In fact, they’re arguably the most “American” of Europeans. The problem is mostly political. An old friend of the old German aristocracy called me yesterday evening. He airily said in passing that the entire world will miraculously improve once Trump is gone. Ever so politely, I started to offer a word of dissent. He ignored me and went on preaching.
I would have said that 100% of the commemorations of the Hiroshima bombing present Japan as a victim. (Not to mention motion pictures like Grave of the Fireflies, 1988.)
“A view among critics of the bombings, that was popularized by American historian Gar Alperovitz in 1965, is the idea of atomic diplomacy: that the United States used nuclear weapons to intimidate the Soviet Union in the early stages of the Cold War. Although not accepted by mainstream historians, this became the position in Japanese school history textbooks.” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
I recall that Alperovitz made much of a contemporary US government document that projected 20,000 American soldiers killed if Japan were to be conquered by invasion, using conventional weapons. But this was an obvious typographical error: the conquest of tiny Iwo Jima, by itself, cost 8,000 American lives.
I haven’t been there myself, but I have seen multiple descriptions of the Hiroshima Peace Museum that describe the tone of the place as if Japan was just minding their own business and all of a sudden the Americans just decided to drop the Atom Bomb on them for some reason.
Apparently I repeated that almost word for word from a Dave Barry book I read at least 20 years ago:
http://www.graceguts.com/reviews/outcry-from-the-inferno