Sure:
Raging anti-Americanism, or, the Canadian mental disorder/Inferiority complex Update
…If the Marine Corps did not exist perhaps God would create them. My personal theology or something.
Sure:
Raging anti-Americanism, or, the Canadian mental disorder/Inferiority complex Update
…If the Marine Corps did not exist perhaps God would create them. My personal theology or something.
I expect that Caplin would be singing a different tune if you asked about the Soviet Union and the Red Army.
Ken Kulak – Nice shooting. You nailed it. Most anti-Americanism among academics boils down to, the US is an outgrowth of its Constitution, and said constitution is foursquare against the liberal ideology. Thus, to them anti-Americanism is anti anti Communism/liberalism.
One e.g. among many: “… the Barbary wars against North Africa 1801-05 (what were the Marines doing over there anyway?)…” It’s not possible that he doesn’t know but it doesn’t matter. Ignoramus, idiot or liar, he has no business commenting on anything.
Mike;
It may not matter, but it is clearly ignoramus. Worse, it is the kind of ignorance that could be cure by five minutes or so on the web. (The web, made possible by that American warmonger spawn, DARPA.)
That abomination of a column was published in The Globe and Mail. Amazing.
I like Ken’s comments. They have a way of hitting the bull’s eye. Got me saying “Damn – I wish I had said that”.
Caplan’s comments are typical leftard revisionist history.
Witness his comment regarding the Atomic bomb dropping on Japan. This is a typical backhanded slap at using ‘the bomb’, that the US had a choice to not use it.
While technically correct, realistically:
The Japs were warned, and dithered.
The US made a (correct) decision not to continue the ground war, where the US would suffer myriad thousands of dead and injured troops, all the while wiping out every last Japanese citizen, as they had shown to fight to the bitter end. Facts that are conveniently overlooked by peaceniks around the world…….
Yes, Ignoramus nails it for Caplan the traveller
re Japan & A-Bomb: according to Laura Hillenbrand’s new book, the bombs shook the bushido crapola out of the Japanese and that saved hundreds of thousands of Allied POWs on the home islands, along with, of course, perhaps a million lives saved when an invasion became unneccessary.
That sort of revisionist statement about the use of the atomic bombs always enrages me. It’s quite possible that I owe my very existence to the atomic bomb, and who knows how many millions of others might say the same. My grandfather was in the US Navy during WWII, piloting landing craft during amphibious assaults in battles all over the Pacific theater of operations. He was on Saipan where they were being marshaled for the invasion of mainland Japan when the bombs were dropped. Having made the invasion of the Japanese Home Islands unnecessary, at least a million Allied casualties were thereby averted.
The willfully ignorant, such as the author of that article, make me think of that quote from Orwell:
“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
Good comment Ken.
Caplan demonstrates that he’s a moron in a very public manner. If one looks at wars over the past 200+ years, one finds that statists are the primary instigators of armed conflict. Most of the wars the US has been involved in have been a reaction to statist provocation although the US, when statists were in positions of power, has been far more likely to instigate military attacks on other countries.
I suspect if one looks at the number of wars started by Republicans and Democrats, the Democrats will be clear winners.
The US is the only country in the world where Libertarianism is a significant political force. Libertarians are against aggressive wars, but given the dangerous state of the world outside the US borders, the US should be very well armed and prepared to respond to statist aggression. Canada has depended on the US for military protection for far too long and idiots like Caplan can’t understand that the amount of military spending avoided by Canada as a result of having a common border with the US.
I suggest that Caplan and his fellow travelers go to N. Korea to demonstrate against the government there and its militaristic policies.
Could have been written by Lloyd Axworthy. Or countless other Canadian progressives. Who cares.
To be PC incorrect,there was absolutely nothing wrong with dropping the bombs on the Rising Sun.
They were warned,and decided to sacrifice millions in a land invasion.
My only bitch is,they should have dumped one on the Kremlin too.
After reading that diatribe I just had to zip over to wiki-etc to see Caplan’s CV.
Lifelong activist,CCF-NDP’er, permanently attached to the public teat.(Yawn)
The most outrageous item though, was that he’s a founder of “Friends of CBC”,and believes fervently in Public Broadcasting.
Oh, yeah, he hates Americans, and doesn’t mind a bit of historical revisionism, just like every other NDP’er.
What a maroon.
Massive resources were devoted to the WW2 American atomic weapons project which was a crash program with all kinds of parallel research projects being explored many of which eventually went up blind alleys and died without any useful results. But every possible avenue had to be checked out for success to be reached in a minimum amount of time.
People in the American military and allied forces around the world died because the bomb project took up resources that could have temporarily saved them on the battlefield but would have left final victory to be won by a huge bloodbath of epic proportions. To have decided to not use atomic weapons under those conditions would have madness in the extreme. Of course marxists would have been in the forefront of opposing any choice that put the west in a stronger position vis a vis their precious “Uncle Joe”, who had yet to be fully revealed as the monster and embarrassment to the left that would come later despite their best efforts.
I’m glad to see wikipedia fueled essays are becoming more socially acceptable outside undergraduate studies. I like how Caplan just copy and pasted the list of American foreign wars without even a modicum of context or understanding. It’s amazing that he managed to even figure out where the Barbary states were. The mention of black hawk down is particularly annoying since the only reason the US was in there in the first place was to rescue the spectacular disaster that was the first UN mission there. Isn’t the UN the sacred cow of the lefties?
The truth is that America spends more on the military than the rest of the world combined is because it subsidizes global defense expenditures and security. American military spending in effect allows Canada, Western Europe and Japan to spend money on generous social programs instead of say, building their own nuclear bombs or it’s own navy to stop rampaging pirates hitting international shipping. If it weren’t for American aircraft carriers there would be virtually no relief for Haiti or tsunami stricken areas for weeks. Not that the left actually cares about people or the ramifications of their proposals mind you.
In regard to American use of nuclear weapons against Japan,
only fascist sympathisers could object.
And of course the two bombs by causing Japanese
capitulation saved tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of lives – Japanese as well as Allied.
It is also possible that a really dogged persistent Japanese defence
(and the Japanese army’s tactics improved dramatically with no diminution in fanaticism in the last year of the war)
might have led to a stalemate, with a small rump fascist state left in place to fester.
What Caplan fails to recognize is that most criminal statutes state specifically that:
One should never be in receipt of STALIN goods!
Cheers
Hans-Christian Georg Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
Will add to Kevin S. comments. My father served as a lieutneant in the Canadian Army in WW II. My perception is that, being older and having two young children (my brother born in 1942 and sister in 1944) he was kept at home as a training officer, primarily with the Royal Canadian Artillery.
By early 1945 (about the same time as Iwo Jima, but before Okinawa), however, with the outcome of the war in Europe appearing to be largely determined, all resources were starting to be re-directed to the war with Japan. He volunteered to go into field intelligence and was sent, along with numerous other Canadians, to Camp Ritchie (sp?), Maryland to begin training for the invasion of Japan. (I still have his Japanese translation code books and US style helmet from those days).
When the A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagaski he was, thankfully, still at Camp Ritchie. When you look at the unbelievable casualty rates for Okinawa and then extrapolate by whatever factor the experts use (say 10 to start) and then add in the number of Japanese military and civilian casualties that would have resulted, I just don’t get how Harry Truman had any choice.
At the end of the day, believe that the evolution to “total war” that was WW II should leave us all with the understanding that the fundamental answer is that there is no substitute for winning and that the only way to win, unfortunately, is to keep killing the other guys (armed combatants and their civilian “go alongs”) until they are either all dead or those that are left don’t want to be dead.
It will only be when our collective perception reaches this point, in terms of the war against Islamic fascism, that we will be really ready to fight for our freedom and individual liberty.
For the record, by the time I was born in 1954, my father was 40 years old.
Gerry Caplan. Would that be the same G.C. who used to star on the weekly comedy series “My three Political Putzes” with Segal and Kirby?
Your kidding. No one took him seriously then, has anything changed?
Isn’t it interesting that if you say Muslims are warmongers you get called a hater and sicced on to the HRC, but if you say Americans are warmongers you get a column in the Globe, and a host of approving commentators.
Logic was never the left’s strong point.
This is all that needs saying about Caplan (from the linked Wikipedia bio):
“From 1967 to 1977, Caplan was an associate professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.”
Wayne and Shuster (remember them?) neatly pegged Caplan and his party years ago:
“The Good, The Bad, The NDP”.
I saw that NDP fool Paul Dewar on the news last night talking about this pending leak of diplomatic traffic.
One reason we can never trust this party to lead the country is that they really haven’t a clue about the ways of the world. US diplomats talking in critical terms about Canada in their classified reports to Washington? Shock! Horror!
Even that dear old superannuated UN hack Paul Heinbecker felt moved to point out the realities of diplomatic reporting, bless him.
By the way, in my opinion, Germany still holds the record for being the “world’s worst warmonger for over two centuries.”
It’s going to take a hell of a lot more “warmongering” if the US has any hope of ever matching the record set by the Germans in World War Two alone.
That famed american philosopher Will Rogers commented….
……ever notice that prior to a war the diplomats are working desperately? Perhaps if we got rid of the diplomats we would have peace.
……The art of diplomacy is how to say “nice doggy” while reaching for a rock.
What is so ironic is that Neville Chamberlain pressed rearmament in Britain at the expense of his parties favoured social programes, against much resistance in his own cabinet.
Despite Churchill’s public disdain for Chamberlain, he was appointed a key cabinet in Churchill’s “National Government”(wartime coalition).
Roosevelt (naive idiot) in a wartime conference hinted to Stalin that the US was developing a weapon of incredible power. Stalin, fully aware (due to espinage) simply replied it should be used at the first opportunity.
IMHO…..the signal instance of US meddling was their 1917 entry into WW1. That just resulted in prolonging that conflict another 2 years at a point when both sides were receptive to a negotiated settlement. In the event, the US had a only trivial contribution to the final result.
A blunder which can be laid at the feet of Woodrow Wilson and his clique—-lefty democRATS!
He was the architect of the League of Nations….
@jjm Disagree French and British involved in more (but smaller) wars. The Germans unquestionably did much more damage than anyone else with the Japanese as runners up. The Americans probably come fifth.
Here’s some little-known but hugely thought-provoking nuclear weapons usage history that, thankfully, never was:
I read the text of an interview done by the late Col. Paul Tibbets, the commanding officer of the US Army Air Force’s 509th Composite Group, done shortly before he died. This unit was the specially formed and trained B-29 unit that carried out the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tibbets, a highly decorated veteran B-17 pilot of the bombing campaign agaist Germany, personally commanded the B-29, named the Enola Gay after Tibbets’ mother, that bombed Hiroshima.
Tibbetts stated that after the bombing of Nagasaki, he had a phone call from General Curtis LeMay, commander of the strategic bombing campaign against Japan.(presumably an encrypted radio phone call, LeMay being elsewhere at that moment). They discussed the just-completed nuclear strike against Nagasaki. LeMay then asked him how many atomic bombs they had left. Tibbets replied that they had one left, which was currently at Hill Field (now Hill Air Force Base, in Utah). LeMay ordered him to have it immediately flown to Tinian (the Marianas island on which the 509th was based) and to stand by for immediate orders for a third nuclear strike mission. Of course, Japan surrendered before this was carried out. Tibbets never received the order and never found out what the intended target was to have been.
Another not-well known piece of history is the planned use of nuclear weapons in the US/Allied invasion of the Japanese home islands. The first phase of this was Operation Olympic, the invasion of the island of Kyushu, planned for November of 1945. The Manhattan Project leadership had promised to have 7 … SEVEN! … of the “Fat Man” plutonium bombs ready for use in the invasion of Kyushu. (The bomb dropped on Nagasaki, determined to have a 14 kiloton yield, was one of the “Fat Man” plutonium types.) The death toll, both US/Allied and Japanese military and civilian would have been horrific. And there wouldn’t have been much left of Kyushu after that campaign. And that wouldn’t even have been the “main show”, the invasion of the main home island of Honshu, scheduled for March, 1946. Assuming use of most, if not all of the 7 weapons on Kyushu, the number of mushroom clouds over Honshu would have been even more.
I’m a war monger and proud that I am, if I had my way the savages ala Arab Janjaweed would be pounded back into the seventh century where they belong and nearly half a million black Africans in Darfur would be alive today.
“@jjm Disagree French and British involved in more (but smaller) wars. The Germans unquestionably did much more damage than anyone else with the Japanese as runners up. The Americans probably come fifth.”
Sorry but no. When it comes to professional warmongering, success is measured in overall destruction and the body count.
By those measures, the Third Reich still holds the title!
Incidentally, don’t you love it when certain types of atheists prattle on about how “murderous” religions are?
And yet, when it comes to deadly ideologies, the reigning champ quite clearly remains that greatest of atheistic belief systems: communism.
Al-Qaeda and all those other Islamist extremists can’t hold a match to the communist body count.
The same people who call the US “warmongers” also attack them for failing to enter the world wars as fast as we did.
ebt – yes, and those same people also attack the US for “allowing” the Rwanda massacre, the Darfur massacre, etc. The righteousness of intervention is never the point for those people, the premises of an argument can change from day to day as long as the same conclusion is reached: America is evil and responsible for everything remotely wrong with human existence.