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The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the RESULT of what happens to a nation bent on “domination or conquest”

President omits context in Hiroshima speech

By Rolf Yungclas ——--May 31, 2016

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As Barack Obama finishes out the last eight months of his second term as President, he has started working through his bucket list of things to do before he leaves office. This cringe-worthy endeavor has gotten off to a treason-worthy start with his trip to Vietnam highlighted by a photo op with a picture of Ho Chi Minh behind him. And I can’t think why Obama would have made his trip to Hiroshima except to present his warped vision of history to the world, and right before Memorial Day. Speaking in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) on May 25, President Obama showed us how little he thinks of the Declaration of Independence when he called it a “story”:
“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.”
We see here, since the subject of the event was the Hiroshima bombing, the conclusion has to be drawn from what he said is that the bombing occurred because of “the same base instinct for domination or conquest.” The reality is that the United States went to war after an unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, December 7, 1941, and after a 10-year effort by the Japanese to conquer East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean. The savagery and brutality of the Japanese was documented from their 1931 invasion of Manchuria up through the end of World War II. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the RESULT of what happens to a nation bent on “domination or conquest,” and stopped what could have been a prolonged ground war on mainland Japan to force Japan to unconditionally surrender. The wave after wave of kamikaze pilots during the Battle of Okinawa was just the beginning of the new strategy of making all soldiers as well as citizens into suicide weapons of destruction. With thousands upon thousands having died at each island taken from the Japanese up to that point, the death toll to defeat the Japanese on their mainland last stand would have been in the hundreds of thousands on each side. My father was a POW in Japan during those final days of the war. A crewmember on a B-29 bomber named “Sitting Pretty,” their plane was shot down during a bombing raid on May 29, 1945. A prolonged ground war against a populace indoctrinated in suicide warfare could also have cost the life of my father and his fellow POWs. Over 27,000 American POWs were liberated as a result of the atomic bomb induced surrender of the Japanese regime.

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Hiroshima does not and cannot exist outside the context of the Asia-Pacific War and all its dead

I’ll conclude with a quote from an op ed article by Lester Tenney that was in the May 11, 2016 Wall Street Journal:
“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——

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

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