On August 15th 1945, Japan accepted "unconditional surrender" and the worst war in human history came to an end.
On August 15th, 1945, Japan's Emperor Hirohito spoke to his people at noon for the first time via a taped radio broadcast:
To our good and loyal subjects....After pondering deeply the general trends of the world and the actual conditions obtaining in our empire today, we have decided … [on] an extraordinary measure. Japan would endure the unendurable and suffer what is unsufferable and surrender.
With Nazi Germany's surrender four months earlier, World War II was finally over.
Since then historians, and some of us, have pondered the "what ifs" of WWII. Following Nazi Germany's surrender, Japan refused to follow suit and capitulate to the Allied forces in the Pacific. Given Japanese martial proclivities --justified as an almost religious adherence to the Bushido Code--as evident in the various brutal hard fought campaigns throughout the Pacific from Burma to Okinawa, the Allied side was justified in its concerns over a mainland Japan campaign.
Given the Japanese mentality based on incessant universal martial indoctrination, whose shame based ethos often precluded surrender on the Japanese side, conquest would be a hard fought bloodbath on both sides to force a unconditional Japanese surrender. One didn't need to wargame the outcome to clearly understand the grave ramifications of a full scale mainland Allied campaign.
The dead toll would have been in the millions, with the bulk of the dead on the Japanese side (mostly civilians).
Thus, notwithstanding revisionist history, the historical record up to that point provided clues as to what horror lay ahead for all sides with an inevitable allied invasion of mainland Japan to force the surrender of Imperial Japan.
In early 1945, my father, Hamidullah Khan Burki, had participated in the Arakan Campaign. In March of 1943, he'd volunteered to transfer from the Royal Indian Army (RIA) to the Royal Indian Navy (RIN) when the RIN sought volunteers from the Army infantry as crew for their few landing crafts. Given the Burmese terrain, with its lush jungles and many waterways, with non-existent roads, along with air drops (of supplies and men), these landing craft were pivotal
In the coastal province of Arakan, Allied amphibious landings secured vital offshore islands and inflicted heavy casualties, although the Japanese maintained some positions until the end of the campaign.
My father was slated to participate in Operation Zipper. They were trained up for this mission. With the two nuclear strikes, and the war at an end, my father and his fellow warriors never embarked on this next mission which may have led to his death, and the death and maiming of his fellow warriors. For this I am eternally grateful.
“This will happen in America if you allow the Schumuks to bring the country to crisis, promise people all kinds of goodies and paradise on Earth, destabilise your economy, eliminate the principle of free-market competition, put a Big Brother government in Washington DC with benevolent things,” Yuri Bezmenov, 1984.
On a more positive note, Bezmenov missed identifying the inevitable downfall of the Soviet Union following its misadventure in Afghanistan. The USSR's Communist-Statist controlled economic system, under the rubric of "Communism," by its very nature, was a deeply flawed economic and political system. A system embedded with seeds of its own destruction. Every single country under the "communism cloud" was/is a totalitarian hell hole. Note the economic dichotomies: Taiwan and Hong Kong vs China; South Korea vs. North Korea; Venezuela since Chavez; West Germany vs. East Germany; Cambodia under Pol Pot; Cuba pre-Castro and Cuba today. On and on and on. There isn't a single country that has thrived under Communism. Not one. Therein lies the seeds of their respective, and inevitable, demise. However, the painful irony is that the active measures of the KGB post WWII in the US, and the West, have borne amazing, destructive, results decades after the demise of the Soviet Union. Russia today isn't the Soviet Union.The Russian people threw off the oppressive yoke of communism and are thriving like never before in their history notwithstanding ongoing challenges. Ditto with Eastern European countries. Wonder what they think about all the crazy shit that is happening in the US today where the Democrat Party has openly embraced "communist ideals;" and advocated the destruction (in essence) of these United States as they try to wipe out both the history and culture of this once great nation.
It’s just a mask.It’s just six feet.It’s just two weeks.It’s just non-essential businesses.It’s just non-essential workers.It’s just a bar.It’s just a restaurant.It’s just to keep from overwhelming the hospitals.It’s just until the cases go down.It’s just to flatten the curve.It’s just a few inmates.It’s just to keep others from being scared.It’s just for a few more weeks.It’s just church. You could still pray.It’s just prayer.It’s just until we get a vaccine.It’s just a bracelet.It’s just an app.It’s just for tracing.It’s just to let people know you’re safe to be around.It’s just to let others know who you’ve been in contact with.It’s just a few more months.It’s just some more inmates.It’s just a video.It’s just a post.It’s just an email account.It’s just for protecting others from hate speech.It’s just for protecting others from hurt feelings.It’s just a large gathering but for protests.It’s just a few violent protests.It’s just a little micro chip.It’s just a blood test.It’s just a test.It’s just a scan.It’s just for medical information.It’s just to store a vaccination certificate.It’s just like a credit card.It’s just a few places that don’t take cash.It’s just so you can travel.It’s just so you can get your driver’s license.It’s just so you can vote.It’s just mail-in voting.It’s just a few more years.It’s just a statue.It’s just a monument.It’s just a building.It’s just a song.It’s just a lyric.It’s just an anthem.It’s just a few words.It’s just a piece of paper.It’s just a book.It’s just a movie.It’s just a TV show.It’s just a cartoon character.It’s just a piece of cloth.It’s just a flag.It’s just a dog at a protest.It’s just a clump of cells.It’s just a fetus.It’s just a religion.It’s just a holiday.It's just your guns.It's just the police.It's just the military It's just your freedoms....gone forever.And "It's just" the way they planned it. Please note: Feel free to Copy and Paste on your timeline. I've done so here. Thanks to the anonymous person who posted this elsewhere.
Watch this prescient video and ask yourself "where was everyone while the conquest was well underway in America?
Judging from its own dismal track record, communism had been one of the most detrimental "isms" in human history.
Alas, so many fellow citizens act like sheeple. Willingly moving towards the edge of the cliff as though in some sort of zombie like trance.
Ironically, it is the supposedly "well educated" people who seemed to have been separated from good ole commonsense, aka intuition, aka gut sense. And this is happening in our "finest" universities which have been co-opted by Marxists since the 60s, especially political "science" and other social "science" departments.
I should know. As someone who managed to survive/complete a PhD in political science (although choosing Utah for my PhD was in no small part in order to get away from the "liberal" East Coast) but only by keeping a very low profile, and carefully picking my classes and teachers.
Few students or faculty really knew much about me. Partly personality, partly self preservation. Rarely participating. Unlike UVA.
Wanted to be a teacher, an academic, a scholar. But I could not, in good faith, compromise my integrity for a tenured track faculty position.
Deception can eat away at your soul.
Can you imagine living a lie just to get tenure? Can you imagine trying to teach American Politics that distorts the historical record that is America, and/or working to indoctrinate students to hate their own country, not to mention question their own existence in society? Couldn't do it. Not for a single day.
Judging from my student reactions at the University of Mary Washington, where I was an adjunct professor, I was an anomaly. Here's a tid bit: my students in American Politics were amazed --yes, AMAZED-- that I defended these United States and, given my own background, told them we were all privileged (especially females) to live in a free country where anyone can succeed (since there was no established class structure, although today one could argue that point) if they worked hard and never gave up i.e. persevered. Not so sure about the "free" part these days.
You should've seen the looks on their faces. I might as well have been a Martian. An alien.
Many told me no other professor had praised America in any other course. There you have it. Academia in America. In a nutshell.
Needless to say, one feels angry at oneself for not getting into the fight. Utilizing deception, like the hard left has done, to wiggle into a tenured position in order to then encourage students to look at things from different prisms than the only one allowed by the so-called "leftists;"to read history (you cannot separate political theories from the historical record); to not fall prey to the wonderful sounding propaganda spewed by the so-called "socialists" who are actually "wolves in sheep's clothing," or worse, spewed by wolves many useful idiots (i.e the sheep).
I fear for the next generation. How betrayed and deceived they have been by the very entities they intuitively trusted (to include their well indoctrinated --school/college-- parents).
The vile indoctrination begins in our schools and then our universities. Those are the "ground zero" of this not so invisible war. Enemies of individual freedom (and I don't mean the "feel good"pseudo slogan type either but REAL freedom to choose to live our lives as we so wish without impinging on other's right to the same) are the communists.
One must struggle against this insane effort to brainwash the minds of our children. To recognize that inherent in the ethos of "communism" --which deceptively proclaims all will be "equal" and have access to "equal" resources if they submit to the absolute power of the state and its "leaders"-- there is the goal of absolute control of the so called "masses" by the elite/rulers/leaders (in various forms). The same leaders who lie and proclaim that "there will be a dictatorship of the proletariat" when, in reality, just like in the Soviet Union or China, a select few in power will lord it over the rest.
At least under feudalism, the serfs were under no illusions as their lords didn't try to deceive them about the brutal reality i.e. the lords weren't hypocrites.
Since I never drank that "socialist" kool aid (my parents did), and took the time to read up on communist/socialist societies like Mao's China, Stalin's Soviet Union, Hitler's Germany, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Castro's Cuba etc, the proof was right there in the pudding. A shit sandwich, no matter how much mayo you apply, is still a shit sandwich. Ditto with communist countries. No matter how neo-Marxists try to dress them up, they are still shit holes. No utopias these. NONE.
Advocates of socialism (communism lite) stress that state control is mandated to ensure everyone has access to medical care and other free goodies.
News flash, and excuse the much used, and abused, sound bite: "there ain't no free lunch." Someone will have to pay. And WHO gets to be in charge to determine allocation of finite resources. No surprise that everywhere there is a "socialist-lite" government (California, New York, Illinois etc) their state employees have the best of the best (pensions etc) which are bankrupting these states, among other things. Who pays? That is the question when the lunch ain't free.
Judging from their high state tax rates, some citizens are "more equal" than the rest. And, the ones paying the piper are the lifeblood of these "liberal" states. Those paying the taxes are the hardworking, vital, segment of these states who the government bureaucracies (among other parasites) depend on for sustaining their lifestyles.
In a sense our whole edifice is a fragile ponzi scheme, sustainable as long as there are more at the bottom of the pyramid, in terms of numbers, paying taxes to sustain those on top.
This isn't Free Market. More like an "Enslaved" one since no one is allowed to opt out of the system. This is like a "rentier state" situation. However, instead of dependence on foreign aid and/or foreign revenue, these state governments hold hostage their productive citizenry for payment of "rent."
So is capitalism with a upper case "C" the solution? Unchecked capitalism IS a problem too. Note the global conglomerates and the periodic monopolies; and the dying family farms and mom and pop stores. Small and medium size businesses are the life blood of a genuinely competitive society. As are the family farms. Thomas Jefferson would agree.
There is a role for government oversight of a genuinely "Free Market," otherwise it may be slowly back to a Hobbesian "state of nature." But who watches the watchers?There is always the risk of the Iron Law of Oligarchy*, whatever the system, which is why our Founding Fathers designed our Republic as a system of checks and balances by distributing power between the three branches of government, and later with the creation of the Electoral College.
*The "Iron Law of Oligarchy" states that all forms of organization, regardless of how democratic they are, may drift into oligarchic tendencies, thus making democracy theoretically and practically impossible.
One could argue that in America we currently have at the state and federal level an "Iron Law of Bureaucracy," which seems to only work for self preservation at the expense of the rest of the populace. Note, during government shutdowns, federal employees always get paid. Not the case in the private sector.
As we muddle along in dangerous fluid times, it sometimes seems like our country is the Titanic and we've hit an iceberg; or we're about to hit an iceberg.
Chinese military strategist/general Sun Tzu (death 496 BC) famous quote is sadly an apt one here for what's transpiring, via indoctrination, through education and the media:
"The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting."
Folks, this is no longer a "liberal" vs. "conservative" issue notwithstanding the Grand Canyon like chasm that exists between the two sides. A divide that plays right into the hands of America's enemies. And they are quite a few (even so called "allies" are questionable at best for, at last measure, it is all about INTERESTS --state and otherwise). Chinese military strategist/general Sun Tzu(death 496BC):
"The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting."
PETER HITCHENS: From the lockdown to the destruction of statues, these febrile weeks show the pillars of our freedom and civilization are rotten. As the Left now controls every lever of power, we face nothing less than regime change.
Some excerpts from a superb --albeit depressing--article: What we now face is regime change. That is why these strange crowds have begun to gather round ancient and forgotten monuments, demanding their removal and destruction. That is why police chiefs kneel like conquered slaves to the new gods of woke, and the leaders of the Labour Party do likewise.
This time, as ignorant armies seek the final abolition of Britain, it is very frightening. I would not like to say where it will end. I cannot claim to have known this would happen but I will say that I had an instinctive fear of very bad things to come when the country began its mad, wild shutdown in March.
I have learned over many years to trust my instincts, to take that train, to make that phone call, to turn that corner. When I have heeded them I have either benefited or been saved from bad things. When I have ignored them I have been hurt. It may be inherited from our forebears, or learned by decades of experience. It may be a mixture of the two.
But on crucial occasions we know more than we think we do. And as the cities began to darken and empty, and the world as we knew it started to close, I feared that we should never again see the lights lit again as they had been before. It was like the start of a great war without limit, made more perplexing because there was no obvious end to it, ever.
The Diana episode had been a Dictatorship of Grief, in which even the most revered parts of the establishment had bowed to the mob. ‘Show us you care!’ shouted the headlines. And woe betide those who did not.
Then came September 11, 2001, and a Dictatorship of Security. No argument could withstand the claim that safety was paramount, and we willingly made a bonfire of our freedoms, wrongly persuaded that we could trust our governments not to take advantage.
And now we have the Dictatorship of Fear. It is not the largely fictional ‘R’ number which governs the behaviour of our feeble Government, which is only just beginning to grasp how much damage it has done and how hard it will be to repair. It is the ‘F’ number, the number of people scared into pathetic timidity by the slick but false claim we were all at risk from a terrible and devastating disease.
In fact, the country with the highest number of deaths per head is Belgium (843 per million). Yet Belgium introduced one of the tightest and most severe shutdowns on the planet. Sweden, without a shutdown at all, has suffered 472 deaths per million.
I am fairly sure these measures, like the house arrest and sunbathing bans which came before, have another purpose. They accustom us to being told what to do. Stand there. Wait there. Don’t use cash. Don’t cross that line. They permanently change the relationship between the individual and the state.
They accustom us to being told what to do. Stand there. Wait there. Don’t use cash. Don’t cross that line. They permanently change the relationship between the individual and the state.
Not only can the Government now tell us where we must live and when or if we can go out. Not only can it tell us who we can sleep with (apart from Professor Ferguson, who is still allowed to pontificate after brazenly breaking these rules). It can now even tell us what to wear.
This is something I have not had to endure since my schooldays. What is even more startling is that it can tell me what to wear on my head and on my face, which is somehow even more personal and more intrusive.
During these long dreamy weeks we have bit by bit forgotten who we were before, how we lived, what we thought, what we expected of life. I believe that forces hostile to our country, its history and nature, have seen this as an opportunity. Probably incredulous to begin with, they realised the British people really had gone soft, accepting absurd and humiliating diktats, believing the most ridiculous claims.
They also noticed that formerly great institutions and forces – the church, Parliament, the police, the armed services, much of Fleet Street, the universities – submitted to it without so much as a sigh. So did what remained of our great industrial and commercial companies.
As it happens, it was the death in Minneapolis, a city most British people will never even see, of George Floyd. Seeing the surging crowds, the rioting and the looting in the USA, the British radical Left grew jealous.
They imported the protest, converted it into outrage against some mouldering statues, and set the streets alight.
The important thing about these protesters, lauded by the Labour Party and deferred to by police chiefs, is that they help to strengthen the new establishment and destroy the old one.
They have already helped to make it very hard for traditional, normal, Christian conservative and patriotic opinions to be expressed at all. By using social media as a form of discipline, they have made everyone – including the Left-wing multimillionaire author J.K. Rowling – fear them.
Anyone, as she learned last week, can now be ‘cancelled’ – the new radicals’ chilling word for the obliteration they like to visit on their victims. She has been pursued for saying the wrong thing about the transgender issue. In fact, there is no right thing. I have known for years it was futile to try to respond with fairness and reason to the new orthodoxy.
However carefully and generously I might argue, I would still be denounced for thought crime. You cannot be right, nor can you know if you are right. That is a large part of the trick.
For the past few weeks have also demonstrated that all the pillars of British freedom and civilisation are hollow and rotten, and that we are ripe for a sweeping cultural revolution as devastating as the one Lenin and Dzerzhinsky launched in Petrograd in 1917.
Except that this time there will be no need to storm the Winter Palace, seize the railway station or the telephone exchange or the barracks. The Left are already in control of every lever of power and influence, from the schools the Tories are too weak to reopen to the police, the Civil Service, the courts and the BBC.
It is regime change. Do not worry too much about the statues which are now coming down. They mean surprisingly little. Worry more about the ones they are soon going to be putting up, and what they will represent. Perhaps our grandchildren will find the courage to pull them down.
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Will add my one cent to Hitchen's piece:
We have become soft, weak, lulled into complacency by our current lifestyles. Struggle and hardship, essential for building character, for most are things of the past. Everyone must be "equal" without any input or merit (except---dare I say it-- some are now "more equal," and they certainly aren't "white" males who apparently have been relegated to the bottom of the totem pole without a fight). Prizes for all... Wait. Nope. That's out now circa June 2020. Prizes for ALL the "victims." That is the "new normal" circa June 2020. And it now seems that many want to get on this bizarre bandwagon of "support", or at least appear to, in order to avoid the wrath of the criminal. Those who support all the poor "victims" in such obscene, and obviously insincere, virtue signalling ways deserve what's coming their way (groveling mayor of Minneapolis for one). The message is "you'd better get down on bended knee for all your 'sins'" (i.e. your very existence) or else. What an absolute insult to real victims around the world. I mean: WTF is wrong with so many privileged (yes, privileged) to live in the West?! Have so many drunk some weird kool aid that I haven't had (thank God!)?
Seems like we --the citizenry-- are being subdued on multiple fronts: from government surveillance to "shelter-in-place" to de-fund police departments, to remove historical statues to.....? Wait, I believe burning of books has started.
Tabula rasa. That's what malevolent forces want. Erase history. Rewrite history, and then a select group of people can DOMINATE the majority. All without firing a shot. Alaska is beginning to really look like the final FRONTIER it actually is in more ways than one right about now. More appealing every day. In closing: Again, must quote Sun Tzu:
"The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting."
One could argue that all those wars in foreign lands, and the constant drum beat of the Russian "threat" were decoys. And painfully costly ones all around (especially when it came to life and limb). It is the oldest state trick in the book: give em war, while you consolidate power back at home....
This all seems to be a test. And we, the people, failed (or passed) depending on one's vantage point.
Seven years ago, Edward Snowden was interviewed in Hong Kong:
THE GUARDIAN had just broken a story that still reverberates...the headline:
"NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily"
Exclusive: Top secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over all call data shows scale of domestic surveillance under Obama Excerpts:
"The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compels Verizon to produce to the NSA electronic copies of "all call detail records or 'telephony metadata' created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad" or "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls".
It is not known whether Verizon is the only cell-phone provider to be targeted with such an order, although previous reporting has suggested the NSA has collected cell records from all major mobile networks.
The court order appears to explain the numerous cryptic public warnings by two US senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, about the scope of the Obama administration's surveillance activities.
For roughly two years, the two Democrats have been stridently advising the public that the US government is relying on "secret legal interpretations" to claim surveillance powers so broad that the American public would be "stunned" to learn of the kind of domestic spying being conducted.
The law on which the order explicitly relies is the so-called "business records" provision of the Patriot Act, 50 USC section 1861. That is the provision which Wyden and Udall have repeatedly cited when warning the public of what they believe is the Obama administration's extreme interpretation of the law to engage in excessive domestic surveillance.
In a letter to attorney general Eric Holder last year, they argued that "there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows."
"We believe," they wrote, "that most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted" the "business records" provision of the Patriot Act.
The NSA, as part of a program secretly authorized by President Bush on 4 October 2001, implemented a bulk collection program of domestic telephone, internet and email records. A furore erupted in 2006 when USA Today reported that the NSA had "been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth" and was "using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity." Until now, there has been no indication that the Obama administration implemented a similar program.
These recent events reflecthow profoundly the NSA's mission has transformed from an agency exclusively devoted to foreign intelligence gathering, into one that focuses increasingly on domestic communications. A 30-year employee of the NSA, William Binney, resigned from the agency shortly after 9/11 in protest at the agency's focus on domestic activities.
In the mid-1970s, Congress, for the first time, investigated the surveillance activities of the US government. Back then, the mandate of the NSA was that it would never direct its surveillance apparatus domestically.
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A mere seven years later....the American people have de facto come to accept the "new normal" (our "deep state" politicians, along with embedded civil servants, spying on us) as par for the course in this "republic."
