I fully agree. Apparently, being labeled by the Establishment as a Truther carries about the same level of punishment as “holocaust denier” – and we all know what where that leads.

Ad hominem much?

It’s possible that the author believes that he might reach more people with the truth he is supporting if he avoids being labeled with the epithet of “9/11 truther”.

There is such a thing as TMT, Too Much Truth. The brainwashed (by Bernays methods) need to be weaned to the full truth gradually. A lot of commentators and columnists disclose truth in small bites to be digestible to the masses, such as when Ron Paul “accepted” the official line on 9/11 but asked us to consider motivations and blowback to get people closer to the whole truth.

Somewhere or other, maybe on a RedIce broadcast, Gilad Atzmon discussed how young zionist Jews flocked to join the “International Brigade”, with the goal of avenging Spain’s expulsion of Jews 500 years earlier.

In a conversation with a Lebanese newswoman in aftermath of 2006 Israeli assault on Lebanon, Norman Finkelstein chided the Lebanese for welcoming Bush & Condi Rice to Lebanon, after they had played a hand in allowing Israel to carry out the destruction of Lebanon. He said they should be more like Jews: “Jews never forgive, Jews never forget. I like that about Jews,” Finkelstein said.

I think you’re making a mistake by lumping Dower with “liberal professors.”

1. He’s very old — not sure he’s still teaching (I could research that but why mess with facts when biases work in my favor, aka the Wiz of Oz ‘razor’).

ok, I checked: 78 yrs old, retired from MIT. He may have been the last of the “liberal” professors to be uninfected by the political correctness that is wrecking/has wrecked the formerly tough universities.

2. He’s put himself through the wringer, psychologically and intellectually, plowing through the documents with an objective eye; discovering patterns.

Dower’s expertise was in Japanese martial history. Once again, my impression: he saw patterns in Japanese history — and Japanese suffering & reactions to WWII — that he sees being repeated by USA, and it is deeply disturbing to him. He’s a patriot who is trying to warn his own countrymen of the dangerous path they’re treading.

British spies who were in Guernica at the time of the bombing reported that the communists who occupied the town set off bombs on the ground which caused all the damage and deaths.

The Reds sacrificed their own people for anti Franco propaganda. The Spanish civil war began when Russian agents sent to “advise” the legitimate, elected Republican socialist government took over the Republican socialist government by murdering the Republicans and instituting the standard confiscation of property and reign of terror.

Had the Comintern not sent its agents to Spain, there would not have been a civil war.

Whenever ignorant idiot intellectuals refer to the Republicans I always correct them because that government was communist run by Comintern agents.

The author is a university history professor. Therefore he is anti American and anti White and a liberal Just as I don’t read newspapers and magazines or watch TV news and politics shows, I don’t read articles by liberal arts college professors.

He probably favors men in women’s bathrooms, the takeover of women’s sports by men claiming to be trannies, the impeachment of Trump for the crime of existing, and every other liberal fad in existence.

College professors, especially humanities profs are the enemy. Why read him?

Exactly. Like the current War on Terror, the Cold War was a contrived war for the exact same reasons.

It’s also interesting to note that the last Americans to die defending their country, were Confederate soldiers. All others died expanding the American Empire.

You could ask the same stupid question about the Vietnam War with the correct answer being even more obvious.

“The U.S. Has Only Been At Peace For 21 Years Total Since Its Birth. Below, I have reproduced a year-by-year timeline of America’s wars, which reveals something quite interesting: since the United States was founded in 1776, she has been at war during 214 out of her 235 calendar years of existence. In other words, there were only 21 calendar years in which the U.S. did not wage any wars.”

Perpetual war for perpetual peace – it’s the Anglo-Saxon way.

Sad to say, the author of this otherwise excellent article, effectively aids and abets America’s love for war and the fictions invented to justify them, by failing to acknowledge 9/11 as an obvious false-flag.

Americans remember the ‘Civil War’ because it was the conflict that determined the nation’s future. If the Confederacy had won, the Union would have been split and thus proven non-sacrosanct, non Eternal, and open to question. The Union victory made the Union inviolable, the object of sacred adoration. The Union victory thus was 100% necessary for the subsequent American Empire of Liberal Democracy.

It is no accident, no fluke that Karl Marx. writing in London, supported Lincoln and the Union war effort 100%. It is no accident that Pope Pius IX, perhaps the most studied anti-Liberal of the time, welcomed the CSA ambassador and after the War sent the imprisoned Jefferson Davis a personally woven crown of thorns.

WW2 is remembered because it allows us to believe that American becoming an Empire was necessary for the world. More, it allows us to believe that we always back ‘the good guys’ in war.

Joe Stalin says to Say Hey to Gomer.

The Communists, as everyone knows, never did have plans to conquer the rest of the world for their ideology. The whole thing was entirely invented by western leaders (who were probably secret Jews) for their own devious purposes. Heck, they even got in and planted all this information in the secret Soviet archives.

(Sarcasm off, if anybody doesn’t realize it.)

Actually, slash and burn generally refers to agriculture, which was many millenia after these events.

But the later Indians, pretty much throughout both continents, did do a great deal of burning, to the extent that the native flora and fauna evolved to handle it.

You are correct. The other idiosyncrasy that many Jews possess is this:
Call a Jew a scoundrel, liar, thief, criminal, shyster, etc. and those accusations roll off the Jew’s back like water off a duck, but, call a Jew a “Jew” and he will recoil in horror, having been “found out”.
Regards,

The quintessential, in your face “victim consciousness” this article brings up emanates from any and every Jew you will ever meet. If he doesn’t blurt it right out it will still be on the tip of his tongue ready to strike the aggressive posture. And it’s so “American” there days since it aligns perfectly with the fashionable SJW diatribe.

Deaths of the brainier/-est in England and Germany.

Well, that could be one explanation of post war economic growth differences – but to put it all down to one factor is pretty much oversimplification. There are/were other factors, e.g. West German firms could (and did !) issue subcontract work to their former compatriots, now under the Russian yoke, for all manner of engineering work. The Ossies had to do the work for slave lavour wage rates, and the Russians took all the profit. In addition, the Russians screwed the prices really low, because they were desparate for hard currency – remember the Deutschmark ? – so Vessie firms could undercut all other western firms for high quality, cheap products. Wanna buy a Mercedes Benz – mostly made in East Germany, assembled in the West – ?

And yes, Apple does it now with cheap subcontraqcting in China – but there are language differences, and cultural differences, and it took a long time for the US/China collaboration to get going on a large scale. But the Germans had slave labour, in close proximity, with good infrastructure – roads, rail, telephone, post, FAX – (remember ? a sort of pre-internet telecommunications device – better than post -) and no language or cultural misunderstanding – a communist engineer has the same technological “savvy” as a “capitalist” engineer – starting in 1945. They were about sixty years ahead of the Yanks. There has to be some advantage there.

I was intrigued by a report that three civilians died for every enemy combatant in the Boer war,
Are there any figures for the ratio of German civilian deaths to German combatant deaths at the the hands of HM forces in WW2?

A truly forgotten war occurred less than 100 years ago when US troops invaded Russia to fight the Reds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_Bear_Expedition

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Expeditionary_Force_Siberia

Mention this at a Memorial Day event to stun everyone. Meanwhile, our troops are massing at Russia’s borders now for another attempt.

That’s not what slash and burn is.

You haven’t read the book.

It’s called ‘slash & burn’. The Indians were quite good at it.

Thanks.

Yet Hoig produces no proof, just talk.

Rather like the laughable ‘contaminated blankets’ lie.

Bingo! You nailed it.

Thanks.

Your dodge of:
‘Who started bombing civilians first: Germany or Great Britain’

http://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=8172

is noted.

Answer: Britain.

I’ll give you just a few excerpts:

The Spanish civil war was not WWII. Your desperate subject change is noted.

However, your communist leanings are showing, you are embarrassing yourself.

Guernica was a military target, plain & simple

Guernica, by someone who has actually researched the event, with confirmation.
http://www.fpp.co.uk/History/General/Gu … index.html

Who started aerial bombardment of civilians? How about 1914, when German Zeppelins bombed Antwerp.

More to the point: what’s the big fuss over who began aerial bombing of civilians? After all, rape, torture and mass murder of civilians had been wholly hands-on features of warfare from times long before recorded history. Aerial bombing is just another means of delivering ordnance, just as the use of catapults or artillery to bombard fortified cities – which also killed civilians – constitute means of delivering ordnance.

Terror is implicit in and inseparable from warfare, which – regardless of its scale – is nothing but organized butchery.

Few, if any, stop to consider that the Allied bombing of Axis cities forced the Axis powers to retain thousands of aircraft and tens of thousands of antiaircraft guns to defend against Allied bombing raids, and that all those Axis defensive aircraft and antiaircraft guns would have made mincemeat out of a lot more Allied troops on combat front lines. Had the Wehrmacht and the Japanese been able to deploy those same thousands of aircraft and antiaircraft guns on the front lines, those planes and guns would have prolonged the Second World War for at least another year, and would have allowed the Axis powers to have continued to mass-murder, by forced labor and starvation alone, millions more civilians than the Allied bombing raids managed to kill German, Italian and Japanese civilians.

What about submarine warfare? In two world wars Germany practiced unrestricted submarine warfare that killed tens of thousands of civilians – and the objective of unrestricted submarine warfare was the same objective that the Great War Royal Navy blockade of Germany succeeded in attaining: the starving out of Imperial Germany and the deprivation of war materiel, and this objective of starving out the foe is the same one pursued in sieges of fortified cities dating back to time immemorial. In the Second World War the U.S. Navy’s unrestricted submarine warfare against Japanese merchantmen also killed countless civilian crews – and even killed Allied POW’s aboard Japanese freighters. Yet it was the U.S. submariners’ successes that deprived Imperial Japan of the resources it desperately needed to continue to wage war.

Do not let the greater capacity, accuracy (or inaccuracy), or remote-control of today’s military technology distort or cloud clear-eyed appreciation of the character of warfare as it has been waged since before recorded history came along and as it is still waged today.

Is anyone sufficiently naïve to expect that if Islam had been the economic and technological superior of a backward (or pacifist) West or Buddhist/Hindu/Shinto Orient, that Islam would by now have somehow refrained from imposing its might upon all whom its adherents believe to be the enemies of Islam? Is anyone sufficiently naïve to expect that had the Soviet Union been the economic and technological superior to the West, that the Soviet Union would somehow have refrained from imposing its own, oh, so enlightened, Communist notion of world order upon the world?

Of course the United States has been imperial and aggressive – that’s inherent in the nature of great powers. Yet, along with the preceding British Empire, the U.S. imperium has been far less lethal to civilians than any domination by Islam or Communism would have inflicted upon civilians worldwide. Do Islam’s fourteen centuries of exceedingly bloody and lethal conquest, which enslaved, put to death, and consigned to misery scores of millions of people, and Communism’s less-than-a-century of bloody, lethal butchery, which murdered well over 100 million human beings, somehow compare favorably against the British Empire or the U.S. imperium?

No excuses are made here for U.S. excesses, such as the ones it made in the Southeast Asian campaigns (wrongly known as “The Vietnam War”), and this is especially true as the Pentagon Papers revealed that the U.S. leadership continued to wage those campaigns despite its own acknowledgement that, even had the U.S. invaded all of Southeast Asia, there was no way to win those campaigns. But aerial interdiction in the Korean War certainly played a big part in diminishing North Korean and Red Chinese military capacity in the field, and played just as big a part in forcing Kim Il-Sung to the cease-fire negotiations at Panmunjom – the U.S./UN leadership did know that they were indeed able by military means to force a return to the status quo ante.

Atop all that, isn’t it axiomatic that in warfare the objective is the defeat of the enemy, and that a necessary corollary to attaining that objective is the reduction of the enemy’s capacity to wage war by defeating his armies in the field (by the most cost-effective means) while depriving those armies of the materiel wherewithal to wage war, all while minimizing casualties suffered by one’s own side? Are wars won by mindless acceptance of inordinate numbers of casualties to one’s own forces? So much for the non-starter, non-argument predicated on the false premise that U.S. casualty rates somehow “mean” something or “show” something other than the wisdom of minimizing one’s own people’s sacrifice and suffering.

Further, I defy anyone to name a war that was won primarily by changing the “hearts and minds” of one’s enemy – because there’s never been such a victory. That’s why today’s GWOT (or “countering violent extremism” while admitting millions of the enemy’s source population into one’s own countries and propagandizing one’s own people to accept meekly, and even enthusiastically, such demographic influx) is the policy equivalent of p_ssing up a rope.

As an exceptional nation – how many people do we have to kill, maim, and displace to get over 9/11?

How much flesh is it going to take? What is a good number – what specific amount of carnage will satisfy our nationalistic exceptionalism?

It would be good to know, them we just attack until our quota is filled – and then we can declare peace and go home.

Peace — Art

p.s. It is so nice of the Muslims to provide us with endless jihadis to kill.

p.s. Hmm – how many of us have to die to fulfill this quota?

p.s. Funny, it seems that the more we kill – the more of them there is. (Strange – ha.)

p.s. Did the Muslims do 9/11 because of our unfair treatment of Muslims in Palestine?

p.s. Did the domestic powers who control the US government, bring this hell to America and the world?

Guernica was bombed to block the retreat and redeployment of Loyalist troops, not to mass murder the civilian population. It was Picasso’s lousy painting of a bullfight, which he re-christened as “Guernica” after the action, which has so captivated the leftist mind.

Ah the cold war or the iron curtain so Churchill called it along with the rest of his ravings that was after he had his people game attacking Russia, using allied forces and German POW ,we created the so called cold war for the deep pockets, after all without some threat someone to fear it would be hard to suck out billions of billions from the taxpayer and we always have to have someone to hate for its simply our nature…

For a different story
Stan Hoig, “The Sand Creek Massacre’, Oklahoma, 1961, 1982

I fully agree, the preceding world empire, the British, was managed far better.
As De Gaulle said ‘the USA tries to solve any problem with force’.
The British were far more subtle, or cunning, a different opinion of the same.

Whether early Americans were responsible for the disappearance of megafauna in North and South America is hotly contested.

It’s always seemed unlikely to me that primitive hunter-gatherers could exterminate such numbers of aminals across continents of this size.

The problem is that wiping out of megafauna happened many times shortly after the arrival of humans: Madagascar, New Zealand, Crete, Australia, etc. There’s no particular reason to assume it couldn’t happen in America.

No.
The Monroe Declaration, S America is ours, was already 1820, if I recall correctly.
Manifest Destiny was around 1840.
USA imperialism was interrupted by the secession of the southern states for some time, indeed with the war on Spain it was taken up again.

Ad did the Italians in Ethiopia.
Who is interested in massacres by the British before they used planes for the same purpose

Ian Hernon, ‘Britain’s Forgotten Wars, Colonial Campaigns of the 19th Century’, 2003, 2007, Chalford – Stroud

“Simultaneously, targeting innocent civilians was declared to be an atrocity utterly contrary to civilized “Western” values, and prima facie evidence of Islam’s inherent savagery.”

Great glory comes at a great price. The west doesn’t even realise the Faustian bargain it has struck to achieve the success it has.

I realise I was wrong.

Since the German Condor Legion bombed Guernica in 1937, I suspect the Germans win.

Though to be fair the British had earlier used planes in fighting in Iraq, the NW territories of India, and possibly in other places.

But those were “natives,” not civilian “real people.”

The day the US deviated from its providentially assigned role of being a great continental republic to the aspirations of becoming a thallasocratic empire was a fatal one. The Spanish American War initiated that great deviation. Ever since, the results have been catastrophic. US meddling in Europe’s business led to Versailles, the success of the communists in Russia and China, the Second World War, the current disaster in the Levant, the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, the dystopian EU and now the potentially world ending standoff against Russia and China. I know this is hard to swallow for those who believe the comic book “Saving Private Ryan” type propaganda but it is true.

I’m frequently amazed by the denunciation of the American military for what happened at Sand Creek and a few other times in our history.

The “atrocities” committed by our troops were darn mild by Indian standards and they were against the rules of the military. Meanwhile the atrocities committed by the Indians were much, much worse and those committing them gained prestige and status by doing so.

AFAIK, there is not a single instance of Indians being brought back to camp by whites for a few days of leisurely torturing to death. Something that was routine and admired by Indian societies. Or many of them.

You wrote, “The communists took and kept half of Korea.”

On this, you rate “half-right.” They were apportioned half.

The N. Koreans also claimed to be the legitimate rulers of all Korea. The USSR and China agreed.

In fact, both Koreas still make this claim, so I’m not sure of your point.

Anyway, it’s not clear the goal of the war went beyond getting the communists out of South Korea, which was inarguably successful.

Go for it, why don’t you? List “the various enemies,” and then the “violence perpetrated.” You can always seek shelter in your last sentence, and tell us how the Japanese not only would have nuked Seattle and Portland three days apart, but thrown in a couple more civilian targets in between.

No Samsung phones, no hyundai cars, no k-pop. The horror!

That’s a silly spin on the facts.

The S. Koreans claimed to be the legit rulers of ALL of Korea.
The US agreed.

The result:
The communists kept their half of Korea, in spite of the futile, incompetent US efforts to remove them.

A classic study in wasted US effort.

By contrast, Koreans have not forgotten.

SK has either forgotten or just follow the US narrative of Noble US savior.

NK has conveniently forgotten Chinese bailed them out.

Was the Korean War worth fighting?

Wrong question to ask.

The war happened because US imposed division on Korea and gave half to Stalin.

Question should be “Should US have forced division on Korea?”

Division was especially criminal since Korea got punished for Japan’s crimes.
Japan was kept united, but Korea got divided despite its colonial status under Japanese imperialism.

It was Israel and its Mossad that perpetrated the WTC destruction.
Google “dancing Israelis”–yes “dancing Israelis” who were on the New Jersey shore “documenting the event” along with their “moving company”…
When they were approached and asked what they were doing, they stated that “their problem was now our problem”…
Of course Bush and Cheney were in on it, as they KNEW that it would happen.
Bush saw to it that the Israeli “art students” (Mossad) were deported and the records put under seal.

The communists were apportioned half of Korea before the war ever began. They tried to take the other half and were pushed all the way back to the Chinese border. At that point, the Chinese mobilized 300,000 troops and sent them over the border, taking Seoul. The rest of the war involved re-establishing status quo ante.

Without U.S./U.N. intervention in Korea, there’s little question the whole peninsula would be under communist rule.

Check the Kennan Strategy. Though long term it succeeded. It’s hard to argue with success.

Too bad it appears to be our last thought out strategy rather than kneejerk reaction now extant.

Give me a break. The US merely “demonstrated” it’s military incompetence.

The communists took and kept half of Korea.

The US embarrassed itself in Korea and the Soviets & Chinese laughed out loud.

http://principia-scientific.org/crichton-environmentalism-religion/

Crichton: Environmentalism is a religion
excerpt:

And what about indigenous peoples, living in a state of harmony with the Eden-like environment? Well, they never did. On this continent, the newly arrived people who crossed the land bridge almost immediately set about wiping out hundreds of species of large animals, and they did this several thousand years before the white man showed up, to accelerate the process. And what was the condition of life? Loving, peaceful, harmonious? Hardly: the early peoples of the New World lived in a state of constant warfare. Generations of hatred, tribal hatreds, constant battles. The warlike tribes of this continent are famous: the Comanche, Sioux, Apache, Mohawk, Aztecs, Toltec, Incas. Some of them practiced infanticide, and human sacrifice. And those tribes that were not fiercely warlike were exterminated, or learned to build their villages high in the cliffs to attain some measure of safety.

see:
Who started bombing civilians first: Germany or Great Britain?

http://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=8172

No peril of conquest, true.

A key phrase. United States is simply not a Continental warfare nation. Civil War shtick is for internal consumption only.

US Imperialism 1800-1900

US Imperialism 1800-1900. The second part of the Timeline of United States military operations. The dates show the year in which the US dispatched troops.

US Imperialism 1900-2010

Timeline of United States military operations; dates show the year in which the US dispatched troops.

Following up on the author’s comment:

Despite panic about Communist threats in the past and Islamist and North Korean threats in the present, the United States has never been seriously imperiled by outside forces.

America Unhinged:

The story is this: America’s national- security elites act on the assumption that every nook and cranny of the globe is of great strategic significance and that there are threats to U.S. interests everywhere. Not surprisingly, they live in a constant state of fear. This fearful outlook is reflected in the comments of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, before Congress in February 2012: “I can’t impress upon you that in my personal military judgment, formed over thirty-eight years, we are living in the most dangerous time in my lifetime, right now.” In February 2013, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated that Americans “live in very complex and dangerous times,” and the following month Senator James Inhofe said, “I don’t remember a time in my life where the world has been more dangerous and the threats more diverse.”

From http://mearsheimer.uchicago.edu/pdfs/America%20Unhinged.pdf

I’m actually in favor of a full century of keeping Germany and Japan non-nuclear and mostly disarmed. The former has resulted in the remainder of Europe partially disarmed as they consistently cheat on their NATO commitments to military spending. But the rest of the world? No. Enough is enough.

More USA ‘boys’ died in WWI than in WWII

Don’t think so: US combat deaths in WWII were 5.5 times the level of WWI, and overall deaths were nearly 4 times as high.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_of_war

““the merciless Indian Savages” — a self-righteous demonization”

True. Also entirely accurate.

I’m always amused by the whitewashing of Indian atrocities, when nothing ISIS has done exceeds them.

“When Kim Jong-un plays this game, he is simultaneously ridiculed and feared to be truly demented. When practiced by their own leaders and nuclear priesthood, Americans have been conditioned to see rational actors at their cunning best.”

That entirely sane people sometimes find it helpful to not be thought overly rational does not mean that some people aren’t actually irrational.

The one I find interesting is that USA has completely forgotten our conquest of the Philippines. Those who know we fought a war over there think it was against the Muslim Moros.

“More USA ‘boys’ died in WWI than in WWII.”

WWI US war dead around 110,000, more than half not in battle, largely from Spanish flu.

WWII war dead around 400,000, about 300,000 in battle.

“the United States has never been seriously imperiled by outside forces. ”

Uhh. You may have heard of the Cold War, during which the USA could have been essentially destroyed utterly in a was lasting less than an hour.

No peril of conquest, true. Peril of destruction, quite real. Still present, of course, if at much reduced chance.

The only American war worth fighting was the Southern war against the Yankee invasion. And even that one was complicated by the fact that they were ultimately fighting to defend an inexcusable social system. But the average Confederate soldier was simply defending his home from an invading army.

Great article and I will add this detailed historical fact as well.

February 23, 2015 America Has Been At War 93% of the Time – 222 Out of 239 Years – Since 1776

The U.S. Has Only Been At Peace For 21 Years Total Since Its Birth. Below, I have reproduced a year-by-year timeline of America’s wars, which reveals something quite interesting: since the United States was founded in 1776, she has been at war during 214 out of her 235 calendar years of existence. In other words, there were only 21 calendar years in which the U.S. did not wage any wars.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article41086.htm

Nope, but then again neither was WWII and especially WWI.

Really, the whole trouble started in 1066 when those busybodies across the Channel inflicted themselves on those peaceful Anglo-Saxons.

Good question. I would say the Korean War was worth fighting. It’s easy now to mock those who feared the Red Menace. But, it’s important to remember that communism left a wake of death and suffering everywhere it was implimented. (The real tragedy of Korea isn’t just the millions of deaths the US caused. It’s that all that suffering was in vain for half the peninsula.)

The Korean War was important because the US had to demonstrate to the USSR and China that it had both the will and the means to oppose naked Communist aggression. After Korea, the Soviets and Chinese only nibbled around. There were no more large scale military invasion like Eastern Europe, Manchuria and Korea.

Another reason is because a united Korean Peninsula that was a patron of either the Soviets or Chinese would have been perceived as an existential threat to Japan. All of Japan’s post Westernization wars were related to Korea. Conflict would have eventually broken out and a war over the Korean Peninsula, in, for example, 1958, that would have involved the Koreans, Chinese, Japanese and Americans would have been much much worse than the historical Korean War.

Interesting. Probably the best security, climate, geography, natural resources and in many other aspects located nation turned such a spoiled brat and psychopath. Instead of enjoying her luck and leaving everybody alone America has no peace of mind and creates hell for the rest. I notice America and Americans has no empathy for anyone else. It is most probably result of the lack of real suffering on America part.

Mr. Dower writes as if the U.S. was the only actor in these wars. He accumulates facts about the unpleasant history of U.S. warmaking and never says a word about the violence perpetrated by the various enemies. If he really wants to argue that the U.S. is a “garden of violence,” isn’t a comparison necessary? And in that comparison, shouldn’t he examine both what the enemies actually did and what it is reasonable to think they’d have done if they’d had the means at their disposal that the U.S. had?

When al-Qaeda’s 19 hijackers crash-bombed the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001…

Except for that utterly sappy claim, this article did a fine job of describing the hypocrisy and self indulgence of the “excellent, superior, victors” who, as “victims,” are nevertheless perpetual “winners” while the “enemies du jour” are all “deranged.”

Kim is not insane or crazy … he saw what happened to Saddam and Khadaffi, both of whom failed to obtain the very nukes that might have guaranteed their very safety. In a world where the only thing that stops Uncle Sam is a credible nuclear deterrent, the most likely winning move is to have your own.

Japanese just took over western colonialism, in order to keep their sovereignty, what was taken from them by Roosevelt.
The stories about German horrors in WWII are as much propaganda as they were in WWI.
On the other hand, the stories about Russian atrocities in WWII are very true, as German refugees, fleeing before the Red armies, knew quite well.

The difference is just that after WWI the atrocities were debunked, not one Belgian atrocity could be proved after WWI, after WWII the horror stories exist to the present day.

French people were shocked, a few years ago, when, from an attic a collection of WWII photographs were found.
French sitting gaily on Paris terraces, single German soldiers walking unarmed through Paris.

Yet old Le Pen had to pay a stiff fine after stating ‘that the German occupation had been relatively benign’.

Have you considered how the multiple attacks on the same day fit the pattern of ObL’s Al Qaeda tactics as practiced for example in Kenya and Tanzania? Have you considered how well it fits his (higbĺy successful) strategy of getting the hated America bogged down in a Vietnam-like quagmire when the 9/11 attacks prove more devastating than expected and lead to the attack on Afghanistan? Have you also considered how extraordinarily chancy and uncertain it would be to plan 9/11 to set up a war against Iraq?

Absolutely not.

Extraordinary essay.

Thank you John Dower.

–
from a discussion of Dower’s “Cultures of War,” with Dr. Sanho Tree, 2010

https://www.c-span.org/video/?296186-1/words-john-dower

“Dower: [bombing] is peculiar to an alien culture; it’s those people who don’t respect individuals, whereas we do. The different standards. I think that’s where we have to really start asking deeper questions.

Tree: To take an 18-year old, whether it is a U.S. or Japanese or German or Chinese, and be able to turn an 18-year old into someone who is capable of doing horrible things to complete strangers for reasons of state, is a very unnatural act. It takes a lot of conditioning, so there’s a lot of dehumanization that goes on of the perpetrator and the victim and this carries over.

In order to do these things you have to dehumanize.
But if you dehumanize you can’t really get into the mindset that your adversaries .
And if you can’t get into the mindset, you can’t understand what’s motivating them
and if you don’t understand what motivates them you can’t get them to stop doing what you want him to stop doing in the first place. “

When al-Qaeda’s 19 hijackers crash-bombed the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001

Ooops, genuflection alert!

(Or does he actually still believe that? 15 years afterwards??? An M.I.T. guy? Nahhh, surely not…)

The Vietnam war was about USA prestige, and indeed the USA lost it.
Christopher Lasch, ‘The Culture of Narcissism, American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations’, 1979, 1980, London

GB had other ideas, they did not want to interfere.
Peter Lowe, The Origins of the Korean War, London, 1986

The great thing about the USA’s wars is that they cost less and less USA lives.
More USA ‘boys’ died in WWI than in WWII.

In WWII Roosevelt let the bloodletting to Stalin.
In return he got E Europe.

Churchill had learned from WWI and Gallipoli that spilling massive British blood no longer was possible, he therefore chose bombing.
What he did not realise that that the bomber crews consisted of the most promising British, the most intelligent.
Hardly anyone of them survived, they had to fly 20 missions, in each mission there was a five percent loss.
The relative backwardness of GB after WWII has often been attributed to this, intelligence is to a large extent hereditary, a fact about which politicians are uncomfortable.

What Churchill also did not realise that in bombing German worker areas he did not kill the brightest Germans, they were fighting the war, as officers.
It has often been asserted that the Wirtschaftswunder became also possible because the old medieval cities were razed to the ground, it was possible to build 20th century cities, an advantage London never got, it is one of the most congested cities.

The USA conquering Okinawa lost 7.000 men, 100.000 Japanese soldiers died, plus 40.000 civilians, a one to twenty ratio.

In Afghanistan, Anatol Lieven calculated there was progress, the ratio improved to one USA man on fifty Afghans.

Now in the drone era it will have further improved.

The cost to the USA is gigantic, in my opinion, the hatred of the USA increasing all the time, necessitating to check anyone entering the USA with great cost, and irritation, and spying on everyone living in the USA.

Here in Europe it is the same, I for one do not expect French martial law ever to disappear in the near future, Fench police and other security personnel under constant stress, and trigger happy.
This then now every few weeks causes riots, when the police again has shot some non white suspect.

For South Koreans yes. For Americans no.

Was the Korean War worth fighting?

Of course it was. We didn’t want those dirty Commies taking our money. That’s what they do. So we showed them in Korea and Viet Nam. But then, alas, along came China and those dirty Commies are eating our lunch. And they cheat! They do it by being better Capitalists; what nerve! We’ll fix ‘em. Somehow. I guess. If they lend us enough money.

http://robertmagill.wordpress.com

Was the Korean War worth fighting?

In one form or another, populist nationalisms today are manifestations of acute victim consciousness.

Yes, but not necessarily in the military sense. It could be also a victimhood mindset induced by perceived injustices; in this case, the perceived betrayal of the elites, in the context of economic globalization.

It’s fine if you want to talk about the wars the way you do, but using it to smear perfectly legitimate (imo) populist movements? That’s uncalled for, and you should be ashamed of yourself…

The Priss Rule of Politics.

If you want to know what most people are, the most reliable rule is as follows:

“Most people are what they accuse others of being but deny being themselves.”

So, what are most people? They are ‘fascists’, ‘haters’, and ‘race-ists’.

Those are things that EVERYONE is accused of being by the other side.

Not everyone is accused of being a communist, a capitalist, a Satanist, a Islamist, an anarchist, a libertarian, a radical, a conservative, a liberal, a leftist, a rightist, etc.

But everyone is accused of being a ‘race-ist’, as in ‘Republicans are racist’ and ‘Democrats are the Real racists’.
Everyone is accused of being a ‘hater’, as in ‘White people are haters’, and ‘blacks are haters’.
Everyone is accused of being a ‘fascist’, as in ‘white nationalists are fascists’, ‘fascism is really leftist and socialist’, ‘Progs are liberal fascists’. Pat Buchanan once called homo radicals ‘homo-fascists’. Zionists say Arabs are ‘fascist’, Arabs say Zionists are ‘fascist’.

Now, guess what? Everyone is ‘race-ist’, ‘hateful’, and ‘fascist’.

“Paranoia may be part of the American DNA — or, indeed, hardwired into the human species. Or perhaps the anticommunist hysteria of the Cold War simply metastasized into a post-9/11 pathological fear of terrorism.”

But the Founding Fathers were not paranoid. And soon enough, the new republic patched things with the British Empire and Canada, and they all got along just fine.

After WWI, US didn’t want some gigantic role in the world.

So, this ‘paranoia’ thing is relatively recent.

Btw, did it ever occur to Dower that the Cold War ‘paranoia’ may have been carried over from WWII paranoia? Yes, Germany and Japan were indeed bad guys, but neither planned to invade the US. But there were lots of paranoia about ‘krauts’ and ‘japs’ surrounding America with submarines and the like.

Also, US could easily have been allies with Germany and Japan. Such alliances were offered by both powers. Or US could have remained neutral, in which case Japan and Germany would have been fine with the US. They turned on the US because the US meddled in favor the enemies of Germany and Japan. They felt compelled to butt heads with the US because of America’s hostile stances toward them. I don’t say this to justify German or Japanese aggression, which was terrible. But purely from American security standpoint, neither Japan nor Germany meant any ill will or posed any threat to US itself. US pushed both nations to a position that forced them to be anti-American. One can argue that US was morally right to antagonize Germany and Japan that had grown overly ambitious and murderous, but it still doesn’t negate the fact that US could easily have avoided bad relations and wars with them if it so wished.

As for the Red Scare, there are two parts, and there were two scares.

There was the genuine justifiable concern over the fact that all of Eastern Europe had been swallowed up by Stalin and then China fell too. To be sure, the US shouldn’t have been surprised by this and was even responsible for it to some degree.
US sided with USSR against Germany and then dragged its feet while USSR did most of the fighting before finally deciding to make a landing in Normandy. So, the Soviet juggernaut was bound to take all of Eastern Europe. Soviets lost the men, so they got the booty.
As for Asia, US was even more responsible since Soviets didn’t initially want to fight Japan or enter China(and Korea). It was the US that insisted, and that led to China and Korea being halved. Communists(with help of Soviets) took north of China and Korea, and ‘nationalists’ held onto the South. This resulted from the US request for USSR to enter Asia.
In time, Mao took all of China, and North Korea would have united Korea…. but US got involved and failed to unite from the south, and that led to perpetual division.

(Mao was like Muhammad of his age. How did Muhammad and his Muslims take power so fast over such vast area? Clash of empires creates a giant vacuum from all the war-weariness and exhaustion. Persian Empire and Byzantine Empire battled one another time and time again, and they were ground into exhaustion…. and that gave a huge opening to Muhammad and his ragtag Arab raiders. Same in China. The clash of big powers — KMT, Japan, and US — led to a huge power vacuum in China, and Mao, esp thanks to Soviet intervention at the request of the US, found his opening and took all of China. The lesson to learn from his for minor power is that it should look for opening when the big guys clash.)

Anyway, there was legit reasons for Americans to fear communism since, during WWII and the onset of the Cold War, it went from a Russian thing to an ideology that took over all of Eastern Europe and China too. Also, with the decline of European empires, US was right to be worried that Third World nations would choose communism as either weapon against European imperialism(or American presence) or against ‘reactionary’ native regimes.
Furthermore, the US was worried because much of media and culture in both US and EU was infected with strains of leftist radicalism. Dower, as a fellow-traveler and communist-sympathizier, is a good example. Most intellectuals and artists in the West were on the Left.

So, one part of Red Scare was totally justified, especially since it was later came to light that tons of commie agents were crawling inside FDR’s administration. And let’s not forget America’s mostly closely guarded secret, the atom bomb, ended up in Stalin’s hand. I mean how can one NOT be somewhat fearful?
Just think about it. Suppose Nazi Germany had won in Europe, and the Cold War was between US and Nazi Germany. Suppose US has one advantage in nukes.. but suppose the US administration is addled with pro-Nazi spies and agents who slip Hitler the Bomb.
Had that been the case, of course leftists like Dower would have been up in arms. And if a leftist McCarthy came forth and called for huge purge of pro-Nazi ‘far right’ elements in government, media, education, and Hollywood, then surely the likes of Dower would have supported it.
So, Dower and ilk are full of BS when they go on like this.

That said, it’s true enough that McCarthy and others overplayed their card and often exaggerated stuff in demagogic ways.

But then, let’s not forget that there was also a anti-Red-Scare paranoia. Indeed, the main narrative during much of the Cold War was paranoia about ‘paranoia’ about the Cold War. McCarthyism existed for just a few yrs. And if anything, the culture of distrust under Eisenhower wasn’t anything like the paranoia during WWII when entire populations were under suspicion and ‘interned’; and Hollywood was in total paranoia mode about Germany and Japan and made tons of movies about Eeeeeeevil Germans and Japanese. McCarthyism was short-lived, and most of the Cold War was not about the Red Scare but about the Liberal media and academia trying to invalidate everything about the Red Scare as just a lot of hooey. Later revelations proved that communism was a total monstrosity. It was also revealed that there were tons of agents and spies for the USSR in the US and Europe. And even as Western leftists aided the USSR, they themselves never wanted to live under Stalinism. They wanted to enjoy liberal democratic capitalism while playing the radical game. They wanted to have the cake and eat it too: enjoy freedom(of capitalist democracy) and support radicalism(at war with liberal democracy). Since these leftists were totally safe from Stalinism and Communism as they were protected by democratic rights and liberties, their main enemies were conservatives and patriots. And by vastly exaggerating the extent of McCarthyism, they made themselves holy victims. One thing for sure, McCarthyism was kidstuff compared to communist purges and tyranny. Also, it ended as quickly as it began, and McCarthy was soon disgraced. In contrast, PC never seems to end. We now live in a nation where entire lives are destroyed because they won’t bake ‘gay wedding cakes’ for perverts. We live in a nation where entire lives can be destroyed if someone speaks honestly of MLK — that he was Fartin’ Poother Bling in terms of character. People like Dower surely chuckle at the fate of Charles Murray at Middlebury. They are bogus. And I’m so sick of hearing about how someone was fired from Hollywood cuz of communist ties. I mean Hollywood has an ideological and tribal litmus on everything. If anyone in Hollywood is known to have neo-Nazi, KKK, or even Alt Right ties, he is finished. And if anyone says he wants to make a movie about Nakba or Jewish role in communism, forget it. He’s blacklisted for good. Hollywood has always been about censorship.

The reason why so much has been made of McCarthyism is that the Left was targeted and many of them happened to be Jews. It’s really Jews and leftists looking out for their own.
Time has prove that Jewish tribalists and leftists like Dower have NO principles.
They once pretended to be for free speech, but ever since they got the power, they want speech controls and even look the other way when people like Charles Murray are attacked.

Also, McCarthyism and Red Scare were NOTHING compared to total nuttery over Russia today, much of it driven by Jews in media and academia.
For one thing, USSR was a real superpower with a menacing ideology. Current Russia is a much reduced power with no anti-American or anti-capitalist ideology. So, why all the hysteria? Because paranoid Jews fear that the Russia example might undermine globalism.

Now, I don’t wanna bash Dower too much. I found much of his book EMBRACING DEFEAT filled with all sorts of useful information. And most of the book is mostly fair-minded… until the end when Dower berates the US for having favored the right-wing regime over leftist ones. Now, the LDP has been a den of corrupt vipers and worse, but why would a leftist regime been better for Japan? Japanese leftists were a bunch of puppets of the Soviets and later, the Maoist ones were even nuttier. And over the yrs, the leftists around the world became bigger proponents of US globalism and the sicko homo agenda that destroys identities and cultures.

At any rate, Dower is an institutional man. Institutions are necessary, and without them, we don’t have organization and structure. BUT, all institutions are inherently about conforming to norms and standards. Now, that is a good thing insofar as every discipline has its rules and principles. After all, a chemist has to know real chemistry, and his work has to be approved by his peers. If every alchemist posed as chemist, chemistry would soon turn to crap.
So, institutions must have standards. But when do standards turn to dogma and ideological pressure? Whether scholars are right or left, they should ideally live up to academic standards of research and discourse. In some fields, it’s easier to uphold proper standards. It’s harder to fake studies in math and hard science. But history and social sciences are open to interpretation, bias, ideology, passion, and personalities. So, as Jonathan Haidt discovered, most of the social sciences and humanities are rigged systems. They don’t so much uphold high standards of academics as enforce or nudge-nudge the peer-pressure of dogma. Indeed, some academics have admitted that they favor their own ideological kind. So, they prefer a second-rate ‘leftist’ to a first-rate ‘rightist’ even though, by objective academic standards, the latter is more deserving.
Institutions are exclusive and open to just a few. Every academic department hires just a handful of people for coveted slots. So, everyone knows he has to play ‘politics’ and say the ‘right thing’ to get accepted. Also, even though professors, esp those with tenure, are supposed to be free in their academic pursuit, they know if they say or do the ‘wrong thing’, they will be disfavored, demoted, or not promoted any higher. Or, SJW’s trained by PC professors might come barking at them and even physically assault them.
This is the curse of all institutions, secular or religious. This is why nearly all great religions arose from outside the institution: Jesus and Muhammad.
For most of history, academic institutions enforced strict dogma or canon of what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’. This is one reason why so many false theories of Aristotle were accepted for so long. This is why China was stuck on Confucionics.
But the modern German university changed the academic culture and allowed much greater leeway and freedom for thinkers. But that model came under attack time and time again from the far right, the far left, the tribalists(Jews here, Hindus in India and even UK and Canada), and religious forces(in nations like Iran and now Turkey).

When institutions become excessively ‘institutionalized’ — a tendency that exists in all institutions — , it is a fortress of dogma, the island of Nurse Ratched. And PC has really done damage to lots of Western academia and media(which are worse because nearly all of media are owned by 6 conglomerates that hire and fire based on PC dogma or tribal/globalist interests).
But thankfully, there is the internet. Now, in terms of erudition and access to sources/material, internet people like Stefan Molyneux and other such ‘thinkers’ fall short of full time academics and best of journalists. But here is one difference. Whereas those in the institution — even the very best, most honest, and most capable — must always look over their shoulders and pee their parents left they be denounced by peers, hunted down by SJW’s, or fired & blacklisted, no such fear exists among internet ‘thinkers’ who can notice and say whatever they want since they got nothing to lose. “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” If institutions allowed total freedom to academics, were open to anyone with qualifications, and protected real free speech, the internet personalities on youtube couldn’t compete with professors or media people. But the fact is you must play the PC game to be part of media and academia. So, no matter how experienced or knowledgeable you are, there are tons of things you can’t say and there are lots of topics you can’t broach. When institutions grow Byzantine, it is the rag-taggers with guerrilla freedom who have a sudden advantage. This wouldn’t be the case without the internet, but it’s here. Some youtube ‘thinkers’ reach many more young people than professors or media people can hope to. And many people find them refreshing because their views are unfettered by PC dogma.

Leftists once spoke of ‘long march through the institutions’, but this metaphor of faulty. Mao’s long march was not into the center of power to away from it. During the march, Mao and his men trekked some 6,000 miles to the hinterlands. And it was from the periphery that Mao planned to take power by appealing to the masses.
In contrast, the Western leftists lost connection with the people and burrowed into institutions where they became the new monastic clergy. They claim to talk about the Real World, but 50% of what they have to say is ‘gender politics’ about trannies that has nothing to do with nothing.
If anything is long-march-like, it is the politics on the internet. Because internet is not institutionalized, it is a place of free movement of ideas. While some of these ideas are crackpot and crazy, there are also expressions of obvious truths that the media and academia simply won’t over. It’s like Colin Flaherty has the guts to talk about the racial character of US violence where institutions of media and academia haven’t the guts to be honest.

So, it’s turning into Long March through the Internet vs Fortress siege-mentality of the Institutions.

I imagine a big part of it is military keynesianism: ‘defense’ spending as a stimulus. Domestic employment. 2-3% of the GDP – just enough to make the difference between growth and recession. Massive amount of exports – certainly helps in the age of chronic account deficits.

Plus global military domination of course, but on the great scale of things maybe it’s just a nice bonus… Or is it vice versa? Who knows…

“Combating terror involves practicing terror — including, since 2002, an expanding campaign of targeted assassinations by unmanned drones. ”

Dower forgot to add the increasingly prevalent and dominant practice (now more and more out in the open, not even denied anymore, and actually beginning to be outright DEFENDED in the Western MSM) of using jihadi terrorist armies as proxies to spread death, devastation and destabilization in targeted sovereign countries and regions – a practice FAR more egregiously criminal and destructive than pinprick drone assassinations.

Otherwise, a very good essay.

We’re only three quarters of the way through America’s violent century and there’s more to come.

That’s what is frightening, the yet to come part. The American political class seems mediocre and short-sighted. There’s little to inspire confidence that they won’t end up walking us all into mutual disaster. Since the start of the cold war the public has been subjected to unrelenting war hysteria. The Russians, Saddam Hussein, terrorists or whoever were coming to get us. This has been a deliberate, long-running campaign to scare and bamboozle the American people.
There’s always been these controversies on which ‘ism’ killed more people, who racked up the biggest body count. Usually it’s broken down to Mao-Stalin-Hitler with side discussions about the distinctions between killing one’s own citizens versus killing foreigners, per-capita or in the aggregate, etc. Left out of all this is the fact that the US probably comes in fourth on this list as to number of people caused to die by the actions of the US state. The afore-mentioned bad actors were in a hurry so were more noticeable than the US which has increased it’s score over a longer period of time. An actual tally really needs to be made as to how many the US has killed, directly or indirectly. The death toll from terrorism is absurdly low compared to the democide of state terror and aggression as retail is to wholesale.