Category Archives: War Commentary

History, War Commentary

Seventy Years Since Pearl Harbor

Some thoughts on imagination, deception, audacity and 911. I recall on the thirtieth anniversary, my mother saying that she couldn’t believe that it had been thirty years. she went to work in Flint building machine guns in a converted auto plant, and later joined up as a WAC and went to Egypt. She’s been gone for twenty years now, and my father for thirty. Now the event is passing beyond living memory as their generation departs.

[Update a couple minutes later]

We failed to protect American soil from attack, however, which is the hard shock 9-11 shares with Pearl Harbor. Sept. 11 was another egregious failure of imagination linked with dismissive assumption. Al-Qaida declared war on the U.S., but American leaders preferred to treat the threat as criminal rather than military. Violent cults waging long-term cultural and theological struggles with the terms of social and technological modernity aren’t new. Their ability to employ massively destructive power at strategic distances is, however.

We continue, at our peril, to pretend we aren’t at war, and the current gang in the White House is particularly bad in this regard. Thinking that we defeated Jihad because we killed bin Laden is as mindless as thinking that we defeated the Japanese when we killed Yamamoto.

[Update a while later]

Memories of the Doolittle Raid. Note that they’re in their nineties now. I met Jimmy Doolittle about thirty years ago, when he was given an award at the Aerospace Corporation, where I was working at the time.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

The Left’s JFK Conspiracy Theories

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…matter:

Talk of the “atmosphere” of hate will be familiar to anyone who read the left’s reaction to the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords. But whereas Jared Loughner​ was a nonideological madman, Lee Harvey Oswald​ was a communist bent on assassinating an anticommunist American president. At Hot Air, Allahpundit wondered why on earth Democrats wouldn’t just blame Oswald’s communism:

Oswald wasn’t a mainstream liberal or, Lord knows, a mainstream Democrat. He was a fringe leftist, an honest-to-goodness commie. The Oswald apologists could, if they liked, simply emphasize his ideological extremism — his fringiness — as the key to his anti-Kennedy mania.

But they didn’t – just as they defend the Occupy Wall Street protesters, whose movement has been marked by violence, rape, and in one case sympathy for – you guessed it – a would-be assassin who shot at the White House. This is one reason anticommunists had mostly left or avoided the Democratic party. Ralph de Toledano, Whittaker Chambers​, and others like them argued there was a design flaw in the American left which would forever hamper their ability and willingness to cast out the crazies, even when they didn’t sympathize with them.

They argued, as the historian of the right George Nash once aptly put it, “that there was a philosophical continuity on the left and that this was disabling to American liberalism, because it could not quite bring itself to have a vigorous enough response to the communists.”

And it still can’t. Nor can it to the Islamists.