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5/30/04 Liberals Failing "History WWII" Liberals are out in force, now that we are dedicating the WWII Memorial and celebrating Memorial Day, hearkening back to the glory and righteousness of WWII, contrasting it to what they characterize as the deceitful, unjustified, unpopular war in Iraq. Then, we were attacked, and our retaliation was justified. Our men bravely died to save our nation by liberating the world. Even as I type those things, I can't help but sense the blatant hypocrisy, or ignorance, behind them. They must not know what they are saying, or they would be too embarrassed to speak. If the liberals of today had been alive in 1938, they would have hailed Neville Chamberlain as a conquering hero for averting another world war and brokering a compromise with Adolf Hitler. In the wake of Pearl Harbor, they would have pointed out that our act of cutting off supply lines to the Empire of Japan had rendered the attack inevitable, and decried our imperialist policies for entangling us in these foreign conflicts. They would have protested against a declaration of war against Germany because there was no evidence that Germany had participated in the attack on Pearl Harbor. They would have insisted that the neutrality of states like Spain, Switzerland, and Norway demonstrated that there was no consensus of the great powers in the world that Hitler's and Hirohito's expansionism should be checked, and thus that there was no mandate for our intervention. They would have attacked FDR as a war-mongering cripple, and then for the next two years would have published pictures of sandy beaches, deserts, and crumbling cities littered with thousands upon thousands of dead U.S. servicemen, and polled the public to find out how many people today thought FDR (the war-mongering cripple) was handling the war as well as they would have liked. They would have peppered him with questions (had he ever granted a press conference) like, "Do you think you've squandered the bump in the polls following the attack on Pearl Harbor?" and "Are you prepared to apologize to those who died at Pearl Harbor for not preventing it?" and "Have you made any mistakes, and, if you have, could you please detail them for us?" and "What is your exit strategy from the Pacific and Europe?" (They should be digging him up today to ask him that question, since our troops are still in Germany and Japan nearly six decades after the end of the war--I wonder if they are ready for democracy, yet...) They would have pointed out, after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, that Josef Stalin was worse than Hitler, so should we really be allying ourselves with him? (This would have enraged the liberals native to the era, who considered Stalin a model of enlightened leadership in the areas of social policy and judicial ethics.) After all, if Hitler was worthy of our attacks, we should thus also have declared war on Stalin. (This would have been a rhetorical strategy, designed to discredit our unprovoked attack on Hitler.) And what is ironic is that they would have done all this in full view of all the evidence that the philosophy behind these acts was responsible for the unprecedented carnage the world witnessed in that conflict. Liberals criticize a strategy of pre-emption that would have averted most of the carnage of WWII. We would not have had to send hundreds upon hundreds of teen-agers to their deaths under the relentless guns of Hitler's Atlantic wall had Hitler never been allowed to occupy that territory in the first place. We would not have had to send our troops on deadly island-hopping invasions month after month across the Pacific had our fleet not already been devastated in a surprise attack and most of our remote bases wiped out in subsequent action. Liberals advocate the same toothless diplomacy that gave Hitler the breathing room he needed to build up his military to the point that, once he removed the real threat of the Soviet Union by engaging Stalin in a non-aggression pact, he knew he had free reign in Western Europe because the weaklings (I mean, liberals) running France and the United Kingdom would be able to do nothing to stop him. Any pacifist on the Security Council with accounts receivable in the name of a third-world dictator is enough to declare that dictator off-limits and give him carte blanche to thumb his nose at the world while he secretly (or even openly!) develops the means to start another bloodbath that will rival all bloodbaths that have gone before. Some real American should have been at that meeting with Hitler and told Chamberlain to sit down and shut up. He should have walked up to Hitler and said, "We know what you're up to, and you're not going to get away with it. Our troops are moving into Poland and Czechoslovakia, so if you don't get your troops off the borders, we will liberate Austria, and from there draw our lines straight to Berlin, and when we find you, you'd better hope you're already dead, because if you aren't, you really won't like the way things will turn out for you, if you get my drift." Chamberlain and the liberals of today would have erupted in outrage at the bluntness, the unilateral imperialism, the insensitivity, and the ham-handedness of such an American "cowboy." But that cowboy would have saved countless millions of lives and perhaps even averted the decades of cold war that followed. The Holocaust would not have happened, and hundreds of thousands of young American men would have grown up and gone to work and found productive lives instead of being dismembered on foreign shores to buy back the freedom their leaders and the leaders of those foreign lands had squandered through their gentleness and pacifism and excessive confidence in their own blessed good intentions. But those liberals would never have known how many lives were saved, how many years of suffering for untold millions had been averted, and so they would harp on every daily misstep and pitfall, lamenting the hopelessness and pointlessness of it all, spouting outrage at the manufactured excuses for the invasion of innocent Germany, and demanding to know how soon we could expect to bring our troops home from an unpopular entanglement in a nation that obviously doesn't want freedom from fascism. That's where we find ourselves today, facing the daily liberal onslaught against a policy designed to save their soft lives in ivory towers from ever having to see so many young men (and women!) piled up like driftwood on foreign shores, awash in kindred blood. Every day their ignorant rants fill our enemies with the hope (I used to think it was vain, but I don't know any more) that we can be worn down by incremental acts of brutality and eventually crushed in one final crescendo of unprecedented terror. George W. Bush did not bring us into this war because it was likely to be politically popular with the left, but because he recognizes, with a wisdom lost on the liberal intelligentsia, that self-defense on the world stage requires pre-emption, and that Saddam Hussein supplied all the required evidence to show to any reasonable observer that he was intent on mounting a threat to world peace. Only a liberal would insist that, in order to prove a threat is mounting, you have to let it mount and then watch it start threatening you before you can stop it. Well, a liberal, or a fool. Bush, fortunately, is neither. Modified: 09/10/2004 |
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