TWO MONTHS DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE | 2010-04-08
For the World War II Generation everything was capitalized. They had no moral courage, but that was OK because they had Courage and they had the old costumes to prove it. One old vet told me that an officer wandered around a hospital ward handing out Purple Hearts. He gave them to the guys who happened to be in their beds right then and he left the others on the empty beds.
The reason the man told the story was because the man in the empty bed next to him got a Purple Heart for having the claps.
Every American was a Hero in WWII, just as everybody who died on 9/11 was a Hero. A person trapped on the fortieth floor that day was a tragedy, but not all tragedies make Heroes.
Have you ever noticed that everybody who was in the Greatest Generation fought against Nazism but not one person in Korea or Vietnam fought Communism? The media did not routinely honor Vietnam vets. They were spit on in the streets.
After the first War for Israel against Iraq in 1990, the media LOVED everyone in uniform. As a special favor, these guys not only had a Coming Home Parade, but they LET the Vietnam vets march WITH them! It was the first time returning American soldiers had been cheered since 1945.
A number of the scientists who developed the atomic bomb were "leftists." Einstein, for example, worshipped Stalin until both of them died in 1953. Fuchs was an open Party member. A majority of Oppenheimer's friends were card-carrying Communists, but he didn't actually JOIN.
And these were the guys who switched to being against the Bomb after WWII. The moment the world began to be divided between the USSR and the USA, they declared the A Bomb was an awful mistake.
But they also wanted CREDIT for it.
I have never seen anyone put the above two sentences together. Wilmot Robertson did mention forty years ago that the conversion of leftist scientists from pro-to anti-bomb did not involve a change of morals, but a change of ENEMIES.
You can only expect one revelation out of one scholar.
I am no scholar, so I am full of it.
Revelation, I mean.
But the anti-nuclear movement gave them a chance to brag about coming up with the bomb and being too moral to use it. The A-Bomb was developed specifically for use against the Nazis. But these Great Consciences were not awoken by VE-Day. They knew exactly what they were unleashing, but the personal cost of simply quitting in 1945 would have been immense.
So the guys who slobbered and peed on themselves for decades after the War about the racist use of The Bomb against Japan went right on cold-bloodedly for two months after VE Day.
No one, least of all respectable conservatives, every asked WHY.