Posted on 12/07/2013 1:11:32 PM PST by massmike
What's really remarkable about December 7, 1941 isn't that we got sucker-punched by the Empire of Japan but how rapidly we recovered and why.
Coming out of the worst depression in our history (in 1940, unemployment was still 17%), we fought a global war on two fronts, against the world's strongest military powers (fueled by fanaticism and plotting war for almost a decade) and won, becoming the dominant power on the planet in the process. And we did it all in three years and eight month after Pearl Harbor.
It's all the more remarkable when you consider how far we came in that time. In June of 1940, the U.S. Army Air Corps had 51,000 pilots. The Royal Air Force had 500,000 pilots. The Luftwaffe had a million.
Americans of today had their own Pearl Harbor twelve years ago – with almost the same number of dead (around 3,000). We responded by half-heartedly fighting futile wars which we announced in advance we didn't intend to win. In 1942, did Douglas MacArthur set a timetable for withdrawal from the Pacific?
What did we have then that we don't have now?
The differences between 1941 and 2013 are best illustrated by comparison:
• They had John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda. We have Matt Damon, Sean Penn and Jane Fonda.
• They had John Ford and Frank Capra. We have Oliver Stone and Michael Moore.
• They had Kate Smith singing "God Bless America." We have Lady Gaga singing "God Bless Transsexuals."
• They had swing. We have rap.
• They had Abbott and Costello and the Marx Brothers. We have Margaret Cho, Louis CK and Larry the Cable Guy.
• They had "Gone with The Wind," "The Wizard of Oz," "How Green Was My Valley" and "Abe Lincoln in Illinois." We have "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" in 3-D, "Kick-Ass 2," "The Last Exorcism," "Nymphomaniac," and "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter."
• They had books. We have 60-inch plasma TVs, cell phones and social media.
• They had conversations. We Tweet.
• They had "Remember Pearl Harbor." We have "Islam is the religion of peace."
• They had "Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition," "No atheists in the foxholes" and the Four Chaplains. We have the ACLU, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State and "America isn't a Christian nation."
• They had God, family and country. We have sensitivity, multiculturalism and inclusiveness.
• They had the 4th. of July, Thanksgiving and Christmas. We have Kwanzaa, Ramadan and Cinco de Mayo.
• They produced tons of consumer goods. We've outsourced production, while generating a mountain of debt – much of it owned by our enemies.
• They had Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. We have a 312-lb, 6'5' offensive lineman who quit the Miami Dolphins because he was (poor baby!) harassed by a teammate, or so he says.
• They had Winston Churchill, FDR, MacArthur, Ike and Patton. We have Obama and his toadies on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
But some things never change. They had a pathetic man waiving a meaningless piece of paper saying there will be "peace in out time," with the savages of Germany. We have a pathetic man waiving a meaningless slip of paper telling us that he's guaranteed the savages of Iran won't have nuclear weapons – for the next six months, maybe.
Okay, that's unfair. Whatever his failings, Neville Chamberlain loved his country.
Just a reminder that back then, America made things.
Right here.
Bring back American industries.
Not this kid.
Interesting. The problem is that I still haven't seen a good definition of what "victory" would consist of from the perspective of 9/12.
Nuclear annhilation of all Muslims countries. We could have done that, and indeed still can. Do we want to?
Invssion and conquest of all Arab countries? We could do that too. Then we'd be stuck ruling them. Do we want to?
IOW, before criticizing Americans for not seeking "victory" after 9/11, I think one should provide a definition of what that victory would have looked like.
Easy question. Then we had our factories, now we have exported them to China, Japan, Germany and the world to make a big buck.
But if we exported our factories then we would have lost WW II. Our factory production and Rosie the Riveter made victory possible. What is need now is the restoration of MADE IN AMERICA.
1941, “Those dirty Japs! We’ll show them!”
2001, “Oh what did WE DO to make they hate us so?”
I’m surprised Al Qaeda didn’t try something today.
” I think one should provide a definition of what that victory would have looked like”
Leave mecca a smoldering radioactive pool in the desert to consider before messing with us again.
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