Join the weekend show with Victor Davis Hanson and cohost Sami Winc: a look at government employee decadence, Musk’s compensation package, Hegseth’s nomination saga and DeSantis’s name floated, and bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end WWII.
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What you have taught in this episode, Victor, is recorded, also, by the late Sir Laurens Van der Post wrote a book, “The Prisoner and the Bomb”; he was a prisoner of the Japanese. Van der Post claimed that the Japanese had rounded up all their prisoners of war and intended to execute everyone of them; that the non-Japanese captives allowed themselves to survive and helped other captives to survive was considered a mark of dishonor and weakness. Only an unworldly powerful event, like the Bomb, could have changed the unshakeable resolve of the Japanese to die to the last civilian or soldier. This astounding revelation is also left out of the narrative that tells a revisionist history.
Ruth,
My mother’s step father spent 3.5 years in a Japanese POW camp during WW2. He had been guarding our embassy in China when he was captured by the JIA about 3 weeks after Pearl Harbor. The effects of this traumatic experience – eg. the recurring nightmares, high speed drives to nowhere at 2:00am, etc. – ultimately ruined the marriage.
In nursing school I was required to take a sociology class. It was really a revisionist history of the U.S. The instructor told us that America was nothing but a series of genocidal racist acts, from Jamestown, the Founding Fathers, the Civil War, etc. And White America was culpable.
One day we talked about WW2 and the atomic bomb. The instructor asked us a question:: “Does anyone know why we dropped the Bomb on the Japanese, but not the Germans? The reason we dropped the bomb on them was because the Japanese didn’t look like us.”
I politely informed him that the Germans surrendered on 8th May 1945 and that Trinity, the first atomic detonation, wasn’t until 16th July 1945, some two months later.
Prof Hanson. Two thoughts: 1). Tell Revisionists that if the Atomic Bombs had not been dropped, and if the war had not ended, then our fathers might not survived the war, and we would not have been born. We can always change the future, but we can never change the past.
2). As long as your hand is steady and your mind is clear, please continue to write. For, I still have much to learn.
I am reasonably well read on WW II in the Pacific so I was already familiar with much of the specifics Dr. Hanson covered BUT the mark of a great teacher is the ability to weave the historical, technical, political and humanitarian aspects of a great event or movement into a consistent cl ‘woth and to explain its components in a manner open to most. What a treasure.
I had the experience of being present when BGen Minoru Genda, who planned the attack on Pearl Harbour spoke as part of the Forrestal series of Sunday evening talks. Since the Academy is so close to Washington, D.C., there were plenty of politicians and flag officers in attendance. The talk was about Pearl Harbour but in the question-and-answer period, a Midshipman asked him how he felt abut us dropping the bomb on his birth city, Hiroshima. He had obviously expected this and his answer resulted in applause and his removal from the U.S. within a week; never to return. You can see it for yourselves:
https://www.britishpathe.com/video/VLVACIU6D4V0H4KCO4GEBB2DNI9S0-UNITED-STATES-JAPANESE-GENERAL-MINORU-GENDA-WHO-PLANNED-PEARL
I have enjoyed Victor’s chronology of the war in the pacific very much but I would have liked him to talk a bit more about the New Guinea campaign. After defeat in the battle of the coral sea the Japanese tried to go overland across the Owen Stanley ranges to Port Moresby and then to the Australian mainland. They were met by a ragtag militia who eventually turned them around at Kokoda and Milne Bay and inflicted the first ever land defeat on the imperial army. It wasn’t just the USA that won the war in the pacific .
Victor I agree completely
Both future book concepts sound fascinating.
Officials must be held accountable. Truely accountable. Otherwise, it will happen again and again. The best way to do that is by the people. Officialdom lets accountability slide for a variety of reasons we all know. However, the people who are the recipient of all bad and illegal official action, are the best at making it right. Citizens also have the legal right. I quote: “We hold this truth self evident….that if any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it [them]…for their safety and happiness” Declaration’s Rights of Man Law, Section1, U S Legal Code, Organic LAW ! Go to accountabilityrevolution .com for details, tactics, and process.