Posted on 03/31/2014 11:04:32 AM PDT by gwgn02
At the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin this weekend highlighted a video of Rand Paul speaking in 2012 about sanctions on Iran. In it, Paul disparages the notion of use of force, and for some reason claims the United States was partly to blame for World War II!
“There are times when sanctions have made it worse. I mean, there are times .. leading up to World War II we cut off trade with Japan. That probably caused Japan to react angrily. We also had a blockade on Germany after World War I, which may have encouraged them … some of their anger.”
Rubin spoke with David David Adesnik of the American Enterprise Institute about Paul’s remarks:
After viewing the video, he tells Right Turn, “Blaming the U.S. for Pearl Harbor is a long-standing isolationist habit that reflects tremendous historical illiteracy. Sen. Paul is very poorly informed if he thinks U.S. sanctions ‘probably caused Japan to react angrily.’” He explains, “The U.S. cut off oil supplies to Japan in August 1941, long after Japan had launched its atrocity-laden war against China in 1937. The evidence is conclusive that Japan was determined to dominate all of East Asia. Believing that the U.S. would not stand by passively if it overran Thailand, Singapore, Malaya and the East Indies, Japan launched its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.”
(Excerpt) Read more at therightscoop.com ...
Thanks gwgn02.
With suckers like these, is it any wonder why we wind up with McCain’s and Romney’s?
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So not selling things is grounds for war, then? If the bartender cuts you off, do you usually try to murder him?
s for your smartazz remark you are so correct no one was trying to invade Japan at that time.
So it was not an issue of sovereignty at all, then.
Trying to equate the aims of Japan and Germany is a losing proposition.
Both regimes believed as a matter of official ideology that it was their historical destiny to be imperial rulers of their continents.
Pearl was a trap and his military tried to tell him.
There is zero contemporary evidence of this.
You also totally misread Japanese psychology of the period.
The Japanese of the 1930s were human beings, not aliens from another planet. They had the same motives and desires as all peoples in history have ever had.
Japan was responding to the vacuum left by Roosevelt’s reluctance to maintain even a skeleton-force naval presence in the Far East. Sure, the country was nearly broke at the time (all right, it was BANKRUPT, but there has never been an admission of that by the Liberal left), and the decision to move the fleet command from San Diego to Pearl Harbor was just sticking some low-hanging fruit out for Japan to snatch off the limb.
A few patrols of the South China Sea in 1935, like a re-introduction of the Watch on the Rhine about the same time, would have done much to considerably delayed or even prevented the coming clash of civilization that engulfed the world between 1939 and 1945.
But no, both the United States and Great Britain had to continue their respective social experiments.
Sometimes am reminded of Jacob’s Dream while we trudge to find a way to find our boys and girls. Yes, Lord we are so tired and our feet are so tired and sore. We promise not to stray again from our cabin’s door.
The United States of America put sanctions in placed because the Japanese were committing the most atrocious acts of rape, murder, and torture against the Chinese people. At what point were those the fault of the United States. I just lost my respect for this guy. Check that: I think the guys is a raving lunatic.
That isn't accurate.
The combatants had fought at Verdun for almost a year, sustaining a million casualties without either side gaining an inch.
Then after five months of truce negotiations and subdued warfare, there was no resolution and full scale hostilities resumed. In other words, a year and a half of zero military or diplomatic progress.
That was not a stalemate the US created.
After all this, we entered the war.
Germany then attempted a last full-scale offensive and that failed in July 1918.
By September the first German ally surrendered and then Germany itself in November.
We broke the stalemate and ended the war.
No doubt. When Jeb or Christie is the GOPe candidate and they all say they’re going to write in Palin it will expose the hypocrites that they really are.
You wrote:
Imperial Japan probably beats Nazi Germany by a long shot on the brutality scale
If Japan was far ahead of the Nazis in terms of brutality, how is that different from saying that the Nazis were more humane than the supposedly far more brutal Japanese?
Your problem is that you are thinking like a man and a Christian, not a lunatic.
Oh, I’m aware of that, and thank you much.
It is IMO rather difficult to come up with a logical explanation of why it was wicked aggression for the Japanese to conquer territories from the European (and American, FTM) powers that they themselves had conquered from the natives 50 to 100 years earlier. Sauce for the goose and all that.
The utter blindness to this fact of most Americans and Europeans of the time can be seen perhaps most dramatically in the famous Marseillaise scene of Casablanca. Here was everybody getting all indignant about the wicked German invasion of France, when Casablanca was itself located in someone else’s country that the French had moved into only in 1907.
Why is it admirable for the French to conquer Morocco, but evil for the Germans to conquer France? Arguably it’s the other way around, since the Germans were at least picking on people their own size and technology.
What was wicked was the incredibly brutal and racist way the Japanese went about their conquest. Often blamed, rather ethnocentrically, I think, on Nazi influence. Japanese history and culture needs no lessons from anybody on how to be brutal, domineering and corrupt.
By no means all there was to Japanese culture, of course, anymore than it was to German society.
So I take it you’re not one of those who blame both of zero’s elections on the voters who voted third party or write in candidates?
I voted Palin first time (write in). Second time I gave them one more change and voted Romney. Never, Never again shall I compromise.
Sorry, but I don't see much of a moral difference between Bataan, Lidice and Malmedy.
Neither the Teikoku Rikugun nor the Wehrmacht had many well-thumbed copies of the Geneva Convention on their shelves.
Nonsense.
Almost exactly the same guy, and this thread goes to show it.
Dear Rand Paul,
I thank you for showing who you are, this far ahead of this coming November.
Any support, I will deter.
By your words, sir, you are not worthy to be considered by me as a Presidential candidate.
Right. That is, of course, why the defense of the Philippines was so successful when attacked by a smaller Japanese force. And why essentially the entire American air force in the islands was destroyed on the ground half a day after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
MacArthur was a very interesting guy. But his defense of the Philippines was not a high point of his career.
The attack on Hawaii was a truly bold, innovative stroke by the Japanese and not an obvious move.
True. But not even considering it as a possibility was a huge failure of American imagination. Probably largely attributable to racist notions of Oriental inferiority.
IOW, the classic error of underestimating the enemy, usually caused by too high an opinion of yourself.
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