By Rolf Yungclas ——Bio and Archives--May 31, 2016
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“And when we come together to do important things, it's usually because we told a good story about why we should be working together. You think about the United States of America. We have a really good story called the Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal; that we're endowed (sic) with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That's a wonderful story. There’s no -- when the Declaration was made, there really was not United States. It was just a good story that they were telling about what could be...”Mr. President, I heartily disagree. The Declaration of Independence was not a “story,” but a bold statement about what we as humans and as Americans ARE, regardless of how our British overlords were treating us. And notice he left out “by our Creator” after “endowed” when referencing the Declaration. While it’s true that the United States did not technically exist, in effect it did, and the colonies united as states-to-be to defeat the British. So it wasn’t at all a story, or “just a good story” that people could unite and feel good about, even though it was fiction. The Declaration of Independence was FACT, and God was involved in it, unlike Obama’s misquote. If he was telling stories, it was when he gave his supposed history lesson about the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima, Japan on August 5, 1945. Speaking at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial on Friday, May 27, Obama presented a false moral equivalency:
“The world war that reached its brutal end in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was fought among the wealthiest and most powerful of nations. Their civilizations had given the world great cities and magnificent art. Their thinkers had advanced ideas of justice and harmony and truth. And yet the war grew out of the same base instinct for domination or conquest that had caused conflicts among the simplest tribes, an old pattern amplified by new capabilities and without new constraints.”
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“When President Harry Truman announced the bombing of Nagasaki, which ended the war, he recognized ‘the tragic significance of the atomic bomb.’ However, he went on to explain ‘we have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved, beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans.’ ” “Mr. Obama wants to use his visit to Hiroshima to highlight the perils of nuclear war. But this is not the only lesson. Our service as veterans of the Pacific War needs to be remembered and not abandoned to some tumid oratory. The president’s visit to Hiroshima will be hollow, a gesture without motion, if the Pacific War’s full history is not maintained. Hiroshima does not and cannot exist outside the context of the Asia-Pacific War and all its dead. “Mr. Tenney, 95, was a member of the 192nd Tank Battalion, Company B that defended the Philippines in World War II. He lives in San Diego.”
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Rolf Yungclas is a recently retired newspaper editor from southwest Kansas who has been speaking out on the issues of the day in newspapers and online for over 15 years