Responding to Mr. John Buckley’s column and Mr. Michael Beadle’s column of Aug. 22-28, here are some thoughts.

Not long after the defeat of Japan in World War II, my Uncle Charles, then a young man in uniform, became part of the occupation force in Japan. Clearly had it not been for the use of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he and possibly tens of thousands of American and Allied forces would have faced the daunting task of a land invasion of the Japanese main islands. Obviously, thousands upon thousands of those boys would have died in that invasion, perhaps including my uncle. That prospect alone justifies the use of the bomb.

I reject the revisionist point of view as implied by Mr. Buckley that the United States was somehow the villain at that moment in history. And I am offended by the odious characterization that Truman’s action was a “final solution,” and amounted to an “American Holocaust.” The charge is abhorrent! It is the most hideous form of history rewriting. Aside from the fact that it is blatantly false, it belittles the suffering of those who had to endure the real and various holocausts of the 20th century, in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, Rwanda, and Red China, to name a few.

That year, America did win the war, but did not, as Mr. Buckley claims, “mark herself as the most vengeful and frightening group of people to ever live on the planet.”

In fact, the opposite is true. In the years to follow, America opened its collective heart and treasury to the defeated aggressors in a way never before seen in history. Within a generation, Japan and the western part of Germany were virtually independent and already making their marks as economic powers, raising the standards of living of their people as a direct result of America’s generosity. We even allowed the Japanese to keep their emperor! Vengeance and fear were the realm of the socialists, as is habitually the case.

I do join Mr. Buckley in thanking God that 1945 was the only time atomic weapons have been used (a “vengeful and frightening people” would have used them more). But the reason we didn’t is in large measure a result of the fact that we had them. The defeat of one socialist tyrant left us in a Cold War and arms race with another. MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction (the brain- child of liberals Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara), brought us the vast armaments Mr. Beadle now bemoans. It also brought us 50 years of relative peace, something that, had the disarmament and peace-at-any-price crowds been successful, would never have happened, not without losing our freedom.

In the final analysis, the best weapon against war and aggression is individual liberty. Free capitalist countries rarely start wars. Tyrants and socialists do. If we spread the ideas of limited central government, representative republicanism and capitalism around the world, the globe might be a far more peaceful (and prosperous) place. Come to think of it, if we more vigorously practiced the constitutional limits on our own central government, maybe we would solve Mr. Buckley’s complaints about an unresponsive federal government.

Jon Schleifer
Waynesville

 

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