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Title: Conservatives used to criticize the Hiroshima bombing far worse than Obama did
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URL Source: http://rare.us/story/conservatives- ... bing-far-worse-than-obama-did/
Published: May 31, 2016
Author: Jack Hunter
Post Date: 2016-05-31 08:02:53 by Ada
Keywords: None
Views: 130
Comments: 3
President Obama was roundly slammed by conservatives last week for acknowledging the victims of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima, Japan that helped end World War II. These attacks from the right actually tell us more about today’s conservatism than they do the president. After the Hiroshima bombing, Russell Kirk wrote to a friend in 1945, “We are the barbarians within our own empire.” Richard Weaver wrote the same year, “The atomic bomb was a final blow to the code of humanity.” Who were Kirk and Weaver? Two of the most important conservative thinkers of the 20th century. Kirk’s landmark 1953 book The Conservative Mind is a primary reason right-wingers in the United States even call themselves “conservative” today, popularizing the term (before Kirk’s influential book, William F. Buckley described himself as an “individualist”). Buckley said of Kirk, “It is inconceivable even to imagine, let alone hope for, a dominant conservative movement in America without [Kirk’s] labor.” For well over a half century, Weaver’s landmark 1948 book Ideas Have Consequences has been an indispensible part of the conservative canon. President Reagan quoted from Ideas Have Consequences in a speech at The Heritage Foundation. Weaver wrote in the foreword that his book was “a reaction to that war (World War II)—to its immense destructiveness, to the strain it placed upon ethical principles, and to the tensions it left in place of the peace and order that were professedly sought.” Both Kirk and Weaver helped form the core of early National Review. In 1959—a decade-and-a-half after the use of the atom bomb—National Review editorialized that, “The indefensibility of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima is becoming a part of the national conservative creed.” So America’s premier conservative journal was essentially saying that abhorring U.S. use of the atom bomb was conservatism proper. Wow. Suffice to say, things have changed. After President Obama gave his Hiroshima speech, a Breitbart headline read, “If you don’t want to get nuked, don’t bomb Pearl Harbor.” Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump wanted to know if the president even mentioned Pearl Harbor. The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro called Obama’s speech “repulsive.” David French at National Review—the same magazine that 57-years prior had called the bombing “indefensible”—wrote, “The Hiroshima bombing was right and necessary.” And what was it that Obama said that drew such ire from the right? “Yet in the image of a mushroom cloud that rose into these skies, we are most starkly reminded of humanity’s core contradiction,” Obama said. “How the very spark that marks us as a species, our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our toolmaking, our ability to set ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our will — those very things also give us the capacity for unmatched destruction.” That’s it? It’s pretty tame by old school conservative standards. Kirk wrote, “Five months have elapsed since Hiroshima was destroyed…” and Americans had proven themselves no better than “little puppets.” Kirk said the dropping of the bombs was the “trump of doom; it was sounded, and the gulf yawning; and we got on listening to ‘the Hit Parade,’ striking, drinking, fornicating, cheating, hating.” Kirk wrote that Americans “are miserable animals in the shambles.” Obviously Kirk was deeply disturbed by Hiroshima. Kirk biographer Bradley J. Birzer even notes, “Kirk feared, America had embraced a new world of total war, becoming no better than the totalitarian societies of the world.” “If a just god or gods exist, the skeptical Kirk feared, he or they would make America pay for its crimes against humanity,” Birzer wrote. Weaver was just as horrified and explicit: And is anything saved? We cannot be sure. True, there are a few buildings left standing around, but what kind of animal is going to inhabit them? I have become convinced in the past few years that the essence of civilization is ethical (with perhaps some helping out from aesthetics). And never has the power of ethical discrimination been as low as it is today. The atomic bomb was a final blow to the code of humanity. I cannot help thinking that we will suffer retribution for this. Kirk and Weaver apparently both shared the view that God would judge the U.S. for the bombing. This is far removed from what Obama said. Keep in mind that the president didn’t apologize. He didn’t even necessarily say the U.S. was wrong in its actions. The president simply said those actions created horrific results that we shouldn’t forget. A half-century ago, a few intellectuals who couldn’t forget—and who never would—helped create the American conservative movement.
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#1. To: Ada (#0)
Thank you. THANK YOU..... peace is the classic conservative position. amerika is almost literally a madhouse anymore, with new rounds of war fever daily to the ecstatic acclaim of quadrillions.
----------------------------------------------------- You must have been one of Kirk's students :-)
Aw, thanks. A colyum of mine from 1997 (pub. in SC's oldest newspaper) at least parallels him. The Zündelsite quoted the MLK part for years, mebbe still does. History drag The liberals controlling the boob tube, the daily press, the schools, et al. have highly sophisticated methods of getting us where they want us. Their own specialists call this process mass "behavior modification." Top thinkers out here in the real world have tagged it "psychopolitics." I've been studying a propaganda technique of the liberals' which I call "history drag." History drag is what happens when important but "politically incorrect" information is kept from the public until they no longer care much about it. Such facts could, if released timely, overturn the libs' whole setup. When the truth gets out decades after the fact, the establishment claim they never knew it. "We've finally got the truth!" they brag. "And we're going to share them with you, for only $29.95, or $19.95 paperback!" A classic example was the book and TV special a few years ago called "Stalin: A Time for Judgment." The TV and bestseller people finally decided to acknowledge that Stalin was not all the great things Roosevelt had claimed. He murdered tens of millions of Russians. He took his country into a nightmare of repression and terror, ruining everything he possibly could in "Soviet" life. The West tragically failed to hear the screams from the underground Russian church and pronounce condemnation on the monster, Stalin, or his deeds during his lifetime. Let's see, Stalin came to power in 1941. That was the year of The Marx Brothers Go West. Uncle Joe died in 1953, the year we distracted ourselves with "My Little Margie" and "Schlitz Playhouse of Stars." Both years would have been fine times for Soviet war crimes trials, TV documentaries on the holocausting of the Russian people, and bringing Stalin to account, at least in the tribunal of the mass media. But none of these things happened. The next year, 1954, even saw America persecuting Joseph McCarthy, the one man who stuck his neck out in high places to expose American communism! Forty years, one Berlin Wall and many communist holocausts later, TV satisfied us rednecks with a drama on the evils of Stalin and his era. "Stalin: a Time for Judgment." -- how very with-it they are! The number one case of history drag is that of Dr. Martin Lucifer King, Jr. Like Stalin, he's quite well-known for the scoundrel he was. But the institutions keep up the charade that he was a hero. They sealed the King files for 50 years when he died, which should tell us everything we need to know about him right there. What other reason would they do it except dirt, dirt, dirt? The truth about Alger Hiss's communism is oozing out, now, too -- 50 years after he picked the opening staff of the UN! In closing let me reference once again the greatest untold story of secular history: the fact that white people apparently swarmed this continent long before the Indians. Digging around on that subject you'll soon realize that our knowledge of history is to the truth as a medieval world map is to a modern atlas. Funny, all we've ever heard from the historical experts is that whites came here and spoiled a "Native American" paradise! The day is coming when all these myths are going to fall away in tatters -- perhaps the day our Lord himself returns to "reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of JUDGMENT." (Wish somebody'd do it for the MS delta, which is " Disappearing Faster Than Any Other Land on Earth" [nextcity.org]. In the wikid map it's not anwhere near the Gulf coast....??) -----------------------------------------------------
#2. To: NeoconsNailed (#1)
Kirk wrote, “Five months have elapsed since Hiroshima was destroyed…” and Americans had proven themselves no better than “little puppets.” Kirk said the dropping of the bombs was the “trump of doom; it was sounded, and the gulf yawning; and we got on listening to ‘the Hit Parade,’ striking, drinking, fornicating, cheating, hating.” Kirk wrote that Americans “are miserable animals in the shambles.”
#3. To: Ada (#2)
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