In this episode, Victor Davis Hanson and cohost Jack Fowler discuss Biden giving citizenship to illegal immigrants, war tales from the dinner table, the polls among Hispanics, Blacks and post-Hunter verdict, the DOJ charges a whistle-blower of transgendered surgery on minors, and the Left needs a little tit-for-tat treatment.
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Open Range is what your referring too
Speaking of Westerns: I just saw Viggo Mortensen’s The Dead Don’t Hurt. Mortensen (he was in Eastern Promises) wrote, directed, and acted in the film. It wasn’t bad. I would give it a 7/10. He plays a Danish immigrant (or should I say Swedish immigrant with his brains blown out? jk) who becomes sheriff of a small town after marrying a French woman. Mortensen leaves his wife and child to fight for the Union and has to seek revenge upon returning home. A bit like Odysseus and the suitors.
I hope the revival of the Western film continues.
BTW, after the ’22 midterm disappointment I stopped paying attention to polls. I think this election will come down to turnout and cheating. But even if Trump wins and the Republicans have filibuster proof majorities any change (eg. securing the border) will be ephemeral and reversed in the next election cycle. I think we’re headed for a world of hurt.
Another John Ford western that exemplifies the settler/rancher being pushed out by the new Twentieth Century man was “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence.” John Wayne cannot win Vera Miles because he lacks the formal education and suaveness of the Jimmy Stewart character but he takes out Liberty Valence. While the Jimmy Stewart character has the courage to face Valence, he lacks the physical talent to successfully do so. Lee Marvin would have dispatched him without breaking a sweat.
Your reminiscing about family gatherings and their reliving WW II reminded me of a nagging question I would like for you to address. That is the necessity of using atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the war. Born in 1956, I am a son of a flight engineer who flew many bombing missions from Saipan over Japan. As a New Mexican, I have known several who were on the Bataan Death March, one a close family friend. In my formative years I didn’t know a single adult that questioned the ethical or moral use of the atomic bomb to force Japan to surrender.
But now I am hearing commentators say that Japan was ready to surrender and we used the bomb anyway. Recently, Tucker Carlson said on his podcast that the US was immoral for using the atomic bomb on Japan. In the movie Oppenheimer it is stated that Japan was ready to surrender before we dropped the bomb. I see this as revisionist history navel gazing. I knew the generation that had sacrificed family members and years of their lives to defeat a brutal enemy. They had no qualms about using the bomb on civilians to end a cruel war. What are your thoughts?
Gnat,
Dropping the two atomic bombs ended the war and ultimately saved lives, both American and Japanese. I believe it was the right decision for two reasons:
1) We tend to equate the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the much more powerful hydrogen bombs of today. I think the revisionists tend to forget that conventional bombing raids had killed far more people than at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And per the Potsdam agreement, the Allies had given Imperial Japan the option of surrender which they chose to ignore. The Hiroshima bomb had the force of about 20k tons of TNT. This would make it the equivalent of 91,200 x 500lbs bombs, so it wasn’t that much different from conventional ordnance. And compared to the megaton hydrogen bombs that later followed Hiroshima was a fart. The one thing that did differentiate atomic bombs from conventional bombs was the radiation sickness, cancers, and social stigmas that later afflicted its victims. The pain and suffering that this caused was horrific and is certainly regrettable but is not, ipso facto, enough reason to say to we shouldn’t have dropped the bomb when you consider the millions of American and Japanese lives that would’ve been lost taking mainland Japan.
2) Another fact that revisionists tend to overlook is the difference between Japan and Western powers when it came to fighting wars. Per their Bushi warrior code surrender was unthinkable, and an enemy who did surrender had no honor. This is one reason why…
…so many Allied POWs and civilians were treated so abominably by the Japanese. In Ken Burns documentary on World War 2 an expert said that unlike the Germans who would surrender if the situation was hopeless (eg. Stalingrad) the Japanese would fight on to the last man and bullet. For example, at Iwo Jima we lost 6,821 men and had 19,217 wounded (Wikipedia; Battle of Iwo Jima) and spent over five weeks to take an 8 square mile island. I can’t imagine how much blood would’ve been spilled taking Honshu and Kyushu.
I share your annoyance with revisionist armchair historians. I once had to take a sociology class for the nursing program I was applying to. It was really a thinly veiled attack on our nation’s history and attempt to smear our Greatest Generation as being nothing more than genocidal racists.
One day our instructor said, all conviction, that “the reason we dropped the bomb on Japan and not Germany was because the Japanese didn’t look like us.”
I politely reminded him after class that the Trinity detonation happened on 16th July 1945 over two months AFTER the Germans had surrendered.
Not to mention the Japanese tactic used in WW2 fighter plane dog fights, when a US fighter pilot needed to bail out of his damaged fighter plane and then was hanging from his parachute, the Japanese fighter pilot would go after the pilot to had bailed out in his parachute. German pilots, otoh, reportedly, did not do that and let the pilot in his chute drift down. More than a few mainland Chinese and many Koreans still have stories of some of the horrific behaviors of the Japan army in WW2.
Japan didn’t surrender after we dropped the first atomic bomb. In 1969, at the Naval Academy, I was in the audience for a talk given by Minoru Genda, the man who actually planned the attack on Pearl Harbor. During the question and answer session, a midshipman asked him how he felt about us dropping the bomb on his birth city, Hiroshima. He stated that, while he deplored the losses of lives of his compatriots, we were at war and, had we (the Japanese) had the bomb, I believe we would have used it. He was wisked out of the country a couple of days later; never to return. If you want to see him speaking, here is a link to the BBC film:
https://www.britishpathe.com/video/VLVACIU6D4V0H4KCO4GEBB2DNI9S0-UNITED-STATES-JAPANESE-GENERAL-MINORU-GENDA-WHO-PLANNED-PEARL
Charles,
Did anyone ask Minoru Genda if Japan had any shame and regret for all of the unspeakable atrocities it committed during WW2 -eg. the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan death march, beheading of POWs?
Excellent point, Ron.
From what i am able to gather from friends in sound places in China, indeed they have not yet forgotten what the Japan army did to them in Nanking AND other places in WW2. Hopefully, in order to avoid something really, really ugly, what goes around does not come around.