In the Year of Covid-19, Denmark Has So Few Deaths That the Country's Undertakers Are Asking the Government for Hand-Outs

NOT THE BABYLON BEE. More than one Danish reader thought these could only be joke articles when they first chanced upon their titles. (Only problem: it's not April…) 

In October 2020, Denmark's undertakers petitioned the government for redress because there have not been enough deaths in the Scandinavian country this year.

It's not just that fewer people have died than expected; it's that fewer people have died than over the same period in 2019, when there was no virus from Wuhan, or from China, or from anywhere else.

• Related: Now that Donald Trump Has Caught the Corona Virus,
Here Are the 7 Basic Points about Covid-19 that You Need to Know

That's right: In the year of the Coronavirus, there are fewer deaths than at the same period in 2019, and indeed, 2020 has the lowest death toll so far compared with the previous six years. So: the industry feels let down — "it is a [government] failure without equal" declared one funeral director.

"We made the mistake of trusting in the government's predictions that there would a sharp increase in deaths among elder citizens because of Corona," says Gunnar Ormstup to the Politiken daily, "and now the latest data now show that on the contrary, there have been fewer deaths under the pandemic." The Graulev undertaker added that "it is a failure without equal."

The morticians have been forgotten by the kingdom's prime minister (aka Mette Frederiksen), wrote Bent Falbert already back in August under the heading The Undertaker Branch Is Bleeding, who adds that "Some of them are complaining that they don't have enough corpses on their hands"!

Probably too many people are going overboard in washing their hands, maintaining social distance, and not touching each other, quipped Ekstrabladet's Falbert during the summer, who goes on to point out that

The 621 Danes who have so far been killed by the virus so far hardly represent a higher figure than the annual toll from suicide.  Not to mention the 15,000 who die every year of cancer, or the 6,000 victims from heart disease.

But these figures are not addressed by Corona Commander-in-Chief Frederiksen. Her propaganda consists in convincing others that they share her opinion.

Let us take a look at the death toll for the year's first two quarters. The Southern Denmark region has seen 214 fewer deaths than in the same period in 2019. And nationally, this year is trailing last year by 141 deaths

None of us must forget that the Northern Jutland home of Mette Frederiksen stands valiantly in solidarity with her stringent restrictions by being in "arrears" of 96 deaths [compared to 2019]. And nationally [as mentioned], we are still 141 deaths in debt.

One more statistic: the 621 dead represents 0.00107% of the Danish population, meaning 99.999% of the population have not been killed by the virus so far, and leaving the occasional skeptic wondering to what extent the corona virus is a threat so horrifying that it warrants sacking, bankrupting, and impoverishing thousands of citizens in the government's pursuit of the destruction of the national economy.

 A meme making the rounds has this to say:

Scary scary Covid-19. 2020 will always be remembered as the year in which Denmark was struck by a deadly pandemic, which … lowered the death toll to the lowest in the past six years. How ludicrous is that? Covid-19 is so "deadly" that undertakers are requesting compensation for the missing death toll. Welcome to Circus Corona…

Related:
• Now that Donald Trump Has Caught the Corona Virus,
Here Are the 7 Basic Points about Covid-19 that You Need to Know
And from the March and April archives:
• Is There 100% Irrefutable Proof that the Covid19 Pandemic Is Overstated?
• Anti-Americanism in the Age of the Coronavirus, the NBA, and 1619

In View of the 1619 Project’s "Serious Factual Errors, Specious Generalizations, and Forced Interpretations", 21 Scholars Demand that the Pulitzer Prize Board Rescind its Award to Nikole Hannah-Jones

We call on the Pulitzer Prize Board to rescind the 2020 Prize for Commentary awarded to Nikole Hannah-Jones for her lead essay in “The 1619 Project” … The Pulitzer Prize Board erred in awarding a prize to Hannah-Jones’s profoundly flawed essay, and through it to a Project that, despite its worthy intentions, is disfigured by unfounded conjectures and patently false assertions.

Peter Wood joins 20 other signatories from the National Association of Scholars in condemning the ludicrous 1619 Project and in writing a public letter to the Pulitzer Prize Board, calling on it to rescind the prize it awarded to Nikole Hannah-Jones.

That essay was entitled, “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written.” But it turns out the article itself was false when written, making a large claim that protecting the institution of slavery was a primary motive for the American Revolution, a claim for which there is simply no evidence.

… Beginning almost immediately after its publication, though, the essay and the Project ran into controversy. It has been subjected to searching criticism by many of the foremost historians of our time and by the Times’ own fact checker. The scrutiny has left the essay discredited, so much so that the Times has felt the need to go back and change a crucial passage in it, softening but not eliminating its unsupported assertion about slavery and the Revolution.

 … The Project as a whole was marred by similar faults. Prominent historians, most of them deeply sympathetic to the Project’s goal of bringing the African American experience more fully into our understanding of the American past, nevertheless felt obliged to point out, in public statements beginning in September 2019, the Project’s serious factual errors, specious generalizations, and forced interpretations.

 … Hannah-Jones did not refute these criticisms or answer them in a respectful or meaningful way. Instead, she dismissed them. In December 2019 five prominent historians wrote a joint letter to The New York Times expressing their “strong reservations about important aspects of the 1619 Project.”

The New York Times Magazine’s editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein brushed aside the letter with the explanation that “historical understanding is not fixed; it is constantly being adjusted by new scholarship and new voices.” True enough; but he refrained from also mentioning that the advance of historical understanding always involves the testing of new interpretations through a process of open criticism and the free exchange of ideas in honest debate, the very things that Hannah-Jones has consistently disdained. Despite this stonewalling, the criticisms of The 1619 Project continued, notably in another joint letter signed by twelve other historians on December 30.

 … Hannah-Jones’s refusal to correct her errors or engage her critics, we have recently learned, was accompanied by surreptitious efforts by The New York Times to alter the record of what it had published in the original magazine of August 18, 2019. 

 … Correcting factual errors in their published works, of course, is an important responsibility of both the journalistic and scholarly press. But such corrections are typically and rightly made openly and explicitly. The author and the publisher acknowledge an error and correct it. That is not what happened in this case. Rather, the false claims were erased or altered with no explanation, and Hannah-Jones then proceeded to claim that she had never said or written what in fact she has said and written repeatedly, assertions that the Project materials also made.

 … The Pulitzer Prize Board erred in awarding a prize to Hannah-Jones’s profoundly flawed essay, and through it to a Project that, despite its worthy intentions, is disfigured by unfounded conjectures and patently false assertions.

RELATED: 1619, Mao, & 9-11: History According to the NYT — Plus, a Remarkable Issue of National Geographic Reveals the Leftists' "Blame America First" Approach to History

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: quite a few contemporary Black problems have very little to do with slavery

NO MAINSTREAM HISTORIAN CONTACTED FOR THE 1619 PROJECT

• "Out of the Revolution came an anti-slavery ethos, which never disappeared": Pulitzer Prize Winner James McPherson Confirms that No Mainstream Historian Was Contacted by the NYT for Its 1619 History Project

• Gordon Wood: "The Revolution unleashed antislavery sentiments that led to the first abolition movements in the history of the world" — another Pulitzer-Winning Historian Had No Warning about the NYT's 1619 Project

• A Black Political Scientist "didn’t know about the 1619 Project until it came out"; "These people are kind of just making it up as they go"

• Clayborne Carson: Another Black Historian Kept in the Dark About 1619

• If historians did not hear of the NYT's history (sic) plan, chances are great that the 1619 Project was being deliberately kept a tight secret

• Oxford Historian Richard Carwardine: 1619 is “a preposterous and one-dimensional reading of the American past”

• World Socialists: "the 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of history" by the New York Times, aka "the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party"

THE NEW YORK TIMES OR THE NEW "WOKE" TIMES?

• Dan Gainor on 1619 and rewriting history: "To the Left elite like the NY Times, there’s no narrative they want to destroy more than American exceptionalism"

• Utterly preposterous claims: The 1619 project is a cynical political ploy, aimed at piercing the heart of the American understanding of justice

• From Washington to Grant, not a single American deserves an iota of gratitude, or even understanding, from Nikole Hannah-Jones; however, modern autocrats, if leftist and foreign, aren't "all bad"

• One of the Main Sources for the NYT's 1619 Project Is a Career Communist Propagandist who Defends Stalinism

• A Pulitzer Prize?! Among the 1619 Defenders Is "a Fringe Academic" with "a Fetish for Authoritarian Terror" and "a Soft Spot" for Mugabe, Castro, and Even Stalin

• Influenced by Farrakhan's Nation of Islam?! 1619 Project's History "Expert" Believes the Aztecs' Pyramids Were Built with Help from Africans Who Crossed the Atlantic Prior to the "Barbaric Devils" of Columbus (Whom She Likens to Hitler)

• 1793, 1776, or 1619: Is the New York Times Distinguishable from Teen Vogue? Is It Living in a Parallel Universe? Or Is It Simply Losing Its Mind in an Industry-Wide Nervous Breakdown?

• No longer America's "newspaper of record," the "New Woke Times" is now but a college campus paper, where kids like 1619 writer Nikole Hannah-Jones run the asylum and determine what news is fit to print

• The Departure of Bari Weiss: "Propagandists", Ethical Collapse, and the "New McCarthyism" — "The radical left are running" the New York Times, "and no dissent is tolerated"

• "Full of left-wing sophomoric drivel": The New York Times — already drowning in a fantasy-land of alternately running pro-Soviet Union apologia and their anti-American founding “1619 Project” series — promises to narrow what they view as acceptable opinion even more

• "Deeply Ashamed" of the… New York Times (!),  An Oblivious Founder of the Error-Ridden 1619 Project Uses Words that Have to Be Seen to Be Believed ("We as a News Organization Should Not Be Running Something That Is Offering Misinformation to the Public, Unchecked")

• Allen C Guelzo: The New York Times offers bitterness, fragility, and intellectual corruption—The 1619 Project is not history; it is conspiracy theory

• The 1619 Project is an exercise in religious indoctrination: Ignoring, downplaying, or rewriting the history of 1861 to 1865, the Left and the NYT must minimize, downplay, or ignore the deaths of 620,000 Americans

• 1619: It takes an absurdly blind fanaticism to insist that today’s free and prosperous America is rotten and institutionally oppressive

• The MSM newsrooms and their public shaming terror campaigns — the "bullying campus Marxism" is closer to cult religion than politics: Unceasingly searching out thoughtcrime, the American left has lost its mind

• Fake But Accurate: The People Behind the NYT's 1619 Project Make a "Small" Clarification, But Only Begrudgingly and Half-Heartedly, Because Said Mistake Actually Undermines The 1619 Project's Entire Premise

• The Truth Is Out: "The 1619 Project Is Not a History," Admits Hannah-Jones, and "Never Pretended to Be"

THE REVOLUTION OF THE 1770s

• The Collapse of the Fourth Estate by Peter Wood: No one has been able to identify a single leader, soldier, or supporter of the Revolution who wanted to protect his right to hold slaves (A declaration that slavery is the founding institution of America and the center of everything important in our history is a ground-breaking claim, of the same type as claims that America condones rape culture, that 9/11 was an inside job, that vaccinations cause autism, that the Moon landing was a hoax, or that ancient astronauts built the pyramids)

• Mary Beth Norton:  In 1774, a year before Dunmore's proclamation, Americans had already in fact become independent

• Most of the founders, including Thomas Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, writes Rick Atkinson, despite the fact that many of them owned slaves

• Leslie Harris: Far from being fought to preserve slavery, the Revolutionary War became a primary disrupter of slavery in the North American Colonies (even the NYT's fact-checker on the 1619 Project disagrees with its "conclusions": "It took 60 more years for the British government to finally end slavery in its Caribbean colonies")

• Sean Wilentz on 1619: the movement in London to abolish the slave trade formed only in 1787, largely inspired by… American (!) antislavery opinion that had arisen in the 1760s and 1770s

• 1619 & Slavery's Fatal Lie: it is more accurate to say that what makes America unique isn't slavery but the effort to abolish it

• 1619 & 1772: Most of the founders, including Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, despite many of them owning slaves; And Britain would remain the world's foremost slave-trading nation into the nineteenth century

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: Slavery was legal in Britain in 1776, and it remained so in all overseas British colonies until 1833

• Not 1619 but 1641: In Fact, the American Revolution of 1776 Sought to Avoid the Excesses of the English Revolution Over a Century Earlier

• James Oakes on 1619: "Slavery made the slaveholders rich; But it made the South poor; And it didn’t make the North rich — So the legacy of slavery is poverty, not wealth"

• One of the steps of defeating truth is to destroy evidence of the truth, says Bob Woodson; Because the North's Civil War statues — as well as American history itself — are evidence of America's redemption from slavery, it's important for the Left to remove evidence of the truth

TEACHING GENERATIONS OF KIDS FALSEHOODS ABOUT THE U.S.

• 1619: No wonder this place is crawling with young socialists and America-haters — the utter failure of the U.S. educational system to teach the history of America’s founding

• 1619: Invariably Taking the Progressive Side — The Ratio of Democratic to Republican Voter Registration in History Departments is More than 33 to 1

• Denying the grandeur of the nation’s founding—Wilfred McClay on 1619: "Most of my students are shocked to learn that that slavery is not uniquely American"

• Inciting Hate Already in Kindergarten: 1619 "Education" Is Part of Far-Left Indoctrination by People Who Hate America to Kids in College, in School, and Even in Elementary Classes

• "Distortions, half-truths, and outright falsehoods": Where does the 1619 project state that Africans themselves were central players in the slave trade? That's right: Nowhere

• John Podhoretz on 1619: the idea of reducing US history to the fact that some people owned slaves is a reductio ad absurdum and the definition of bad faith

• The 1619 Africans in Virginia were not ‘enslaved’, a black historian points out; they were indentured servants — just like the majority of European whites were

• "Two thirds of the people, white as well as black, who crossed the Atlantic in the first 200 years are indentured servants" notes Dolores Janiewski; "The poor people, black and white, share common interests"

LAST BUT NOT LEAST…

• Wondering Why Slavery Persisted for Almost 75 Years After the Founding of the USA? According to Lincoln, the Democrat Party's "Principled" Opposition to "Hate Speech"

• Victoria Bynum on 1619 and a NYT writer's "ignorance of history": "As dehumanizing and brutal as slavery was, the institution was not a giant concentration camp"

• Dennis Prager: The Left Couldn't Care Less About Blacks

• When was the last time protests in America were marred by police violence? 1970, according to Ann Coulter, who asks "Can we restrict wild generalizations about the police to things that have happened in our lifetimes?" (Compare with, say, China…)

• The Secret About Black Lives Matter; In Fact, the Outfit's Name Ought to Be BSD or BAD

• The Real Reason Why Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and the Land O'Lakes Maid Must Vanish

• The Confederate Flag: Another Brick in the Leftwing Activists' (Self-Serving) Demonization of America and Rewriting of History

• Who, Exactly, Is It Who Should Apologize for Slavery and Make Reparations? America? The South? The Descendants of the Planters? …

• Anti-Americanism in the Age of the Coronavirus, the NBA, and 1619

Now that Donald Trump Has Caught the Corona Virus, Here Are the 7 Basic Points about Covid-19 that You Need to Know

(Or: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Covid-19, But Were Afraid to Ask)

In view of the fact that Donald Trump has become, along with the president's wife, infected with the Wuhan virus (doesn't this mean that China's plan has succeeded?!), it is pertinent to do a thorough reassessment of the pandemic.

A close study of the Coronavirus — as well as of the various government responses thereto around the world since the epidemic erupted in January and February — ought to lead to the following seven main conclusions, which I consider definite:

1) The main question regarding the Coronavirus is:
A) whether we are facing one of the dreadful pandemics like the Middle Ages' Black Death, 1918's Spanish Flu, or the Athens plague of 430 BC;
or: B) whether we are facing one of the regular epidemics such as the 2009, 2002, 1968, and 1957 outbreaks — which being more common seems to be the more logical explanation (and all of which happened to originate in China) — where no action was taken and which came to an end because the various countries' population ended up having immunity, precisely due to… no action being taken (in this case refraining from reacting functions almost like a vaccination, which suggests that wearing a face mask turns out to be nothing if not outright counter-productive).

Into this equation comes a bunch of people, mainly politicians and élites, who affirm that we need to act, we need to restrain, we need to mask — just to be on the safe side. 

2) The only problem with that attitude is that there is nothing pointing to the virus being anything other than one of the normal epidemics. Besides the (far from inconsequential) fact that the scary statistics we received in the beginning ("457 Spaniards have died in the past 24 hours," "The death toll in Italy has now reached 34,000," etc) happened to apply mainly to weakened seniors in clinics and retirement homes (see point 4), those news reports have totally ceased — not in the past three to four days, not in the past three to four weeks, but in the past three to four months…

3) In that perspective, do you remember the Sherlock Holmes story about the dog that did not bark in the night? Fake news is usually not about stating flat-out lies, but about the medias' professional drama queens refraining from reporting a certain type of news — notably news that are… positive and inspiring. 

During the past nine months, has there been a single country, a single city in the world where a single person has seen a single (rotting?) corpse lying in the street or a single disfigured person wailing in the subway as he or she collapses to the floor, erupting in convulsions and vomiting black blood? The answer is No, correct?

4) In other words, most of the infected were/are already in hospices, and if anyone feels unwell, they can simply choose to self-quarantine (exactly as Donald and Melania have just done) or, if need be, head for a hospital (see point 6). This, incidentally, is based on the revolutionary concept that (wait for it) the average adult is actually a responsible being with little need for bureaucrats, politicians, and kings (see, say, 1776) and who can be counted on to (yes) behave with a minimum of maturity.

Speaking of which: wouldn't it be nice if élites and politicians — aka professional drama queens always on the outlook for crises, real or imagined — started treating adults like responsible adults and stopped their attempts to derail their respective economies? As far as I know, none of these knights in shining armor have made any sacrifices themselves, by, say, requesting that their salaries be lowered, if not outright canceled…

As for the main argument against my position — i.e.,  the argument of those who blindly follow every command given by authority — unless I am mistaken, it has little to do with the virus and knowledge of epidemics past or present: it seems to be based on this, and no more: that we must trust the authorities and we must follow the rules, i.e., we must trust that professional politicians and our élites know what they are doing and talking about…

5) Now the world is seeing another outbreak of Covid-19 (of which, more below), but the only news we get nowadays is "Denmark registers 76 new Corona-infected" or "1,000 new hospitalizations in France in the past seven days." And yet, these reports continue to frighten us (or, at least, the politicians) just as much as with the dreadful death tolls at the outset, in February, and they continue to create just as much mass hysteria.

Moreover, the word quarantine comes from the French (or the Italian) quarantaine, which means 40 days' internment (and not a single day more). After nine months, let it be known that there exists no such word in French as centquarantaine (140 days), or as deuxcentsoixantaine (260 days)… And in any case, quarantine has always been for sick people alone, not for healthy people…

6) Indeed, today, for the overwhelming majority of infected, catching the virus means nothing more than two or three weeks in self-imposed quarantine (as it happens, three weeks' worth of interment is just about half of the prescribed 40 days, so the quarantine itself seems historically to have been a safe side measure), just like it did for people as varied as Tom Hanks, Madonna, Silvio Berlusconi, Prince Charles, Monaco's Albert II, and Greta Thunberg (for Boris Johnson, a brief stay in a hospital). What this suggests is that the average person (or at least the average Westerner) is, again, someone who behaves responsibly and is doing exactly what he or she would do if taken ill under any normal epidemic, with any normal flu, or, really, with any disease at all — including… the common cold!

In fact, if the survival rate of the virus is close to 100%, one is entitled to ask: what is the point of all the fuss to look for a vaccine?

7) In other words, it becomes self-evident that A) the Chinese virus is not, and has never been, significantly different from one of the common epidemics and B) we are in the middle of an outbreak of either a global scam (of which, more below) or mass hysteria (if not a combination of both). 

In that perspective, the politicians and the central planners of all Western countries are hereby invited to stop with their attempts to get their respective healthy and non-infected citizens to dress up like Boba Fett or like a circus clown; and same politicians and bureaucrats are hereby summoned, without further ado, to bring their attempts to destroy their respective countries' economies to an immediate halt.

In short: Offer the elderly, and those with weak immune systems, quarantine, and break the chains of the rest of the population.

A final note about the new wave of Covid-19 — which occurred, by the oddest and by the most peculiar of coincidences, after America's Democrats and the rest of the world's alleged "health experts" abruptly made a 180º turn in May regarding face-masks, social distancing, and lock-downs (all for the citizens' safety, of course) and decided that gigantic crowds engaging in mass protests — in addition to riots, arson, looting, and statue toppling — were suddenly permissible, indeed encouraged, if only they were/are in pursuit of the fight against racism, real or alleged. (Yes, you're right, these would be the same politicians who passed rules to arrest a lone paddle boarder off the Malibu coast or who ordered police helicopters over the Vosges mountains to fine isolated hikers…)

There is a theory that the hysterical response to the Wuhan virus (as well as the 180º protests) actually is (are) little more than a more or less well-thought-out clandestine plan by the Democrats and the rest of the world's politicians — few, if any, of whom make any sacrifices themselves (aren't all of them still getting their salaries?) — to weaken the economies of the United States and of the entire West in order to defeat Donald Trump in November.

No matter how you feel, dear reader, rightly or otherwise, about Donald Trump, I ask you the following question: Is the leader of one country such a danger for America and for the world that regular folk across the planet, our fellow citizens, our neighbors, and our families must accept downturns, bankruptcies, and other means of sacrifice — in addition to riots and looting — in order to bring down said leader?

In that case, I have what I believe is a truly extraordinary suggestion to make (and I believe that this just might apply to whether you are an American citizen or the citizen of any foreign country): 

As a citizen who has never been asked (before an election or at any other time) whether I agreed to the stealth policies of our politicians (in the USA, they are called not "our leaders" but "our servants") destroying, directly or indirectly, the economy, our businesses, and our statues — and engaging in the creation of mass impoverishment among our people, our neighbors, and our families — I would suggest that the élites in America, in Denmark, and elsewhere in Europe might not only be just as dreadful as Donald Trump allegedly is, they might actually be far worse.

From the March and April archives:
• Is There 100% Irrefutable Proof that the Covid19 Pandemic Is Overstated?
• Anti-Americanism in the Age of the Coronavirus, the NBA, and 1619

“Speaking Truth to Power” et al: The Left’s Most Common Catchphrases

Father Paul Graney’s impassioned Saturday evening homily will not soon be forgotten in Michigan and beyond

writes Benny Huang.

The Dearborn-based Catholic priest … seems to have caused chaos and dismay when he spoke out against the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement as “evil.”

“Cars have been torched,” said Graney. “Property has been destroyed. Businesses looted and burned, and police officers and other people have been intimidated, assaulted, and even murdered. All in the name of justice.”

Naturally, some people said his message was beyond the pale. But I say, preach it, brother!

As if to confirm everything Graney had said, later that same evening an assailant ambushed two Los Angeles County sheriffs’ deputies as they sat in a cruiser.

Miraculously, both survived. Though we don’t know for certain that the perpetrator was a BLM activist, it isn’t a huge leap to make in this current climate of anti-police enmity to think that the shooting was meant to avenge the death of George Floyd.

We do know however that BLM activists made tracks to the local hospital after the shooting in order to block the entrances and exits. If BLM didn’t perpetrate the murderous act — and I suspect it did — it at least applauded it. BLM activists were apparently shouting, “We hope they f*cking die!” … They later swarmed the emergency room. 

 … Nike gave a shoe deal to third-rate ex-quarterback Colin Kaepernick for having the courage to take a knee during the national anthem. His actions caused “pain, anger, and frustration” among some NFL fans who made their gripes known to the league. But the league didn’t care about those fans.

 … But Kaepernick’s newfound fans, most of whom love his politics more than his football, assert without evidence that he paid dearly for speaking out about racism and police brutality, two of the fakest pandemics in America today. There is no epidemic of police violence against unarmed black men.

The disparate treatment between activists like Kaepernick and activists like Father Paul Graney puts the lie to some of the Left’s most common catchphrases. Here are just a few.

“Difficult Conversations”

If I’ve learned anything over the past few months it’s that we’re all supposed to be having “difficult conversations” about race, privilege, systemic racism, and police brutality. Some of us are forced by our employers to participate in these difficult conversations under the implied threat of losing our jobs.

All Father Graney was trying to do was to start a different kind of difficult conversation with his parish. He soon learned that difficult conversations about certain issues are prohibited because those conversations are difficult for the wrong people.

Rest assured that conversations about race, privilege, systemic racism and police brutality are not “difficult” for everyone. They’re not difficult, for example, for the black lady who runs the “diversity and inclusion” office at your workplace. It’s all she ever talks about. She has a four-year degree in those subjects and she reads books about them during her lunch break — just for fun!

These kinds of conversations are difficult for people who cannot say anything lest they be accused of “whitesplaining,” using “dog whistles” and “coded language,” or committing “microaggressions.” They’re difficult for people who haven’t kept up with the latest terminology — “Latinx,” “people of color,” “DREAMers” — and who know that at any moment they might face an extreme social penalty for using a term that was completely acceptable until just a few years ago.  And they’re most difficult of all for people who merely dissent from the domineering white guilt narrative that is constantly being shoved down our throats.

In other words, these conversations are difficult for people who make the mistake of believing that they are actual conversations. They aren’t. They’re Maoist struggle sessions in which one side lectures and the other side engages in copious amounts of self-flagellation. They’re degrading and that’s the point.

The first thing you have to do during these Maoist struggle sessions is to agree that you are hopelessly racist because not owning your racism is racist in and of itself. Also, you may not sit quietly in the corner and watch the clock tick by. When the wokeness police come knocking, you do not have the right to remain silent because “silence is violence.” Speech is also violence if the words express any kind of disagreement. The only thing that is not violence is unconditional surrender to their agenda coupled with a humiliating petition for racial forgiveness — which may not be granted.

“Peaceful Protest”

Father Graney’s homily was a peaceful protest in the greatest American tradition, yet he may still pay a price for it because not all peaceful protests are created equal. Peacefully protesting police violence against black people is lauded in our society; peacefully protesting against the much more common occurrence of black violence against police officers — or against one another — is not.

I’ll never forget the first time I heard the old “peaceful protest” yarn used to defend anthem-kneeling football players. After years and years of watching people lose their jobs for disagreeing with left-wing orthodoxy, it seemed disingenuous that left-wing orthodoxy was suddenly squarely behind peaceful protest. Talk about “strange new respect!”

Most people, I believe, would agree that peaceful protest shouldn’t cost a person his job. Most people, that is, except employers. Not one employer I have ever had has allowed me to “peacefully protest” while on the clock — and I’ve had a lot of employers. Nor have I ever had a job at which I had anything resembling unfettered free speech. I could have been fired from any of my many jobs for remarks made in private conversation, or even off the clock. I certainly would have been fired if my aggressive political opinions had alienated even a handful of customers — which is exactly what Kaepernick did.

The “peaceful protest” card immunizes people with the right opinions from losing their jobs, being disciplined, or even being criticized. However, those of us who engage in Wrongthink may not play this card. And that includes Paul Graney.

“Speaking Truth to Power”

Just days into the 2016 season, CNN informed us that Colin Kaepernick was “bravely speaking truth to power.” Leftists love that phrase.

But it’s a lie. Leftists never speak truth to power because they never speak truth. The best they can manage is to speak untruths to power and more often they don’t even do that. I don’t know what “power” Kaepernick was speaking to, but I do know that he was far afield of the truth. Cops are not hunting blacks for sport and in fact they kill more whites every year than blacks.

Father Graney on the other hand did speak truth to power. We’re living through an epidemic of violence and destruction all predicated on a myth and propelled by an evil, racist, anti-American, anti-family group of Marxist agitators called BLM. His homily struck a blow against the most powerful people of all: the architects of the official narrative. I’m talking here about Big Government, Big Business, Big Education, and most of all, Big Media. If that’s not speaking truth to power, nothing is.

I sure hope Father Graney hangs tough. We as a society have a duty to stick up for courageous truth-tellers. Not only should he not receive a lick of punishment, he really ought to have his stature elevated in the Church. Is it too soon to start talking about Graney for pope?

The Individuals Who Feel It Necessary to Come Up with a Question

 
Dilbert by Scott Adams

Also: public speeches.

A guy gives a speech, then asks if there are any questions; but the speech was so brilliant and complete that no questions are forthcoming, i.e., none are necessary. However: the silence feels nerve-wracking, and so finally somebody, just to be polite (virtue signalling?), stands to ask a question, which invariably is on a completely marginal subject, which leads others to ask more inane questions. Leaving the rest of the audience to groan internally.

Instead, after the first few seconds of hearing no queries, the speaker should be happy to finish the speech on a note of triumph. And since no answers are immediately forthcoming, offer to answer any further questions on a personal basis, after the presentation is over (which is now, as the question time has proven useless) and the clapping has subsided…

The Dark Secret About Black Lives Matter; In Fact, the Outfit's Name Ought to Be BSD or BAD

There is a tightly guarded secret that you may not know about the Black Lives Matter group, but here it is:
The real name of BLM is not BLM.

The real name of BLM is BSD or BAD.

I used to say that the real name was SBLM (Some Black Lives Matter) or OSBLM (Only Some Black Lives Matter), but I now realize that even that sounds far too positive:

The name should be BSD (Burn Society Down) or BAD (Burn America Down).

"Black Lives Matter is a Marxist organization," the president [told Fox News' Laura Ingraham]. "You remember [them chanting] 'Pigs in a blanket, fry them like bacon' [in 2015].

Yes, that's right: another more accurate name for BLM would be PIB or FTLB (Pigs In a Blanket or Fry Them Like Bacon).

Imagine sports characters, instead of sporting "Black Lives Matter" on their jerseys, being asked to wear clothes with the words "Destroy the Country", "Death to America," or "Burn Down Western Civilization." There would be a whole lot less enthusiasm for the idea.

The soft-sounding, common-sensical official name belies the fact that BLM is less a humanitarian organization than a cult, a far-left mob, and a Mafia gang.

We should all of us stop calling BLM by its official name and start referring to them as "the Burn Society Down outfit."

Congressman @BrianMastFL walking through protesters after leaving Trump’s RNC speech. Mob confronts: him: pic.twitter.com/1xvEdyOMBL

— Phillip Nieto (@nieto_phillip) August 28, 2020

While leaving the White House on the final evening of the RSC, guests were harassed by protesters. Although Rand Paul got most of the attention, Brian Mast's experience was much more interesting. A seemingly deranged woman kept asking the Florida Representative, "What do you think about police killing black people in this country?" "How do you feel about police murdering black people in this country?" — dementedly repeating "Answer the question!" 

The fallacy about the question is that "police" do not kill or murder "black people" in this country, nor white people, for that matter. An individual policemen (whatever the color of his skin) may have killed a black person here or there, just as an individual policeman (whatever the color of his skin) may have killed a white person here or there. Let that individual be punished — including by the death penalty — if so convicted by a jury of his peers…

But, in any case, the retort — had there been room for thought and tranquility and (yes) debate — should have been linked to David Dorn, Chris Beaty, Secoriea Williams, and a dozen or two other blacks whose lives definitely do not matter one iota to BLM and Antifa:

"How do YOU feel about protesters killing black people?! In fact, how do YOU feel about BLM and Antifa protesters burning black people's homes, looting black people's stores, and killing black people?! Answer the question! ANSWER THE QUESTION!"

The American People Must Choose Between the 1787 Constitution and Its Rival, the Riot Constitution of 1964

Based on by Christopher Caldwell's The Age of Entitlement (America Since the Sixties), Benny Huang signs a Liberty Unyielding post showing the extent to which LBJ’s Civil Rights Act of 1964 has undermined the 1787 Constitution of the United States.

Wasn’t it just about America living up to its founding principles?

 … With the benefit of hindsight it’s clear that the bargain made on that July [1964] day was a rotten deal for almost everyone involved, including many blacks — though not those few blacks who earn their living doing civil rights litigation. The law has been very good to them. Besides being more than most Americans had bargained for, the measures also proved to be both permanent and insufficient to satisfy the need of the self-perpetuating “Civil Rights” establishment (which little by little evolved into the “Civil Wrongs” establishment) to grow and consume.

Two weeks after the bill became law, an off-duty New York cop shot and killed a black 15-year old named James Powell who he claimed had been coming at him with a knife. Harlem quickly went up in flames followed by Rochester, Philadelphia, and Jersey City. To many Americans, this was mystifying. Hadn’t the new law settled old scores?

The obvious explanation is that the riots that followed occurred not despite the CRA but because of it. The government had sued for peace by rolling over and showing its soft underbelly.

And so the riots continued throughout the 1960s, with each subsequent cluster of riots met with an ever-increasing list of wealth-transferring government programs. Leaving aside for a moment the dishonor and immorality of paying people not to riot, is it even effective? The decades of history that separate us from that time have shown that dumping money on the inner city has only provided a perverse incentive to repeat the behavior.

 … And so the cycle continues into the third decade of the twenty-first century. Rioting begets concessions which beget more rioting.

Besides the monetary cost of the Civil  Wrongs Movement, there has been an even steeper price paid in terms of lost freedoms. As journalist and author Christopher Caldwell writes in “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties”: 

“What the reforms aspired and failed to do — produce ‘harmony’ between the races and peace between the sexes — may have been beyond the power of any government reform to achieve. But the costs of civil rights were high. New inequalities arose. Fewer things were decided democratically. Free speech was oppressed.”

 … Caldwell’s book, which I highly recommend, goes a long way toward explaining the revolution that America experienced during the heady years of Lyndon Johnson and Earl Warren. Nothing that has occurred since that time — not feminism, not Reaganomics, not the collapse of the housing market — can be understood without the Civil Rights Movement as a paradigm.

Caldwell argues that the revolution did not force the nation to live up to its founding principles but instead substituted a new Constitution for the old one. He writes:

The changes of the 1960s, with Civil Rights at their core, were not a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible — and the incompatibility would worsen as the civil rights regime was built out. Much of what we have called ‘polarization’ or ‘incivility’ in recent years is something more grave — it is the disagreement over which of the two constitutions shall prevail: the de jure constitution of 1788, with all of the traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture behind it; or the de facto constitution of 1964. …

And indeed we must choose between these two constitutions.

 … The “Mrs. Murphy” … exception … serves as a good example of the kind of dissembling that the Civil Wrongs Movement pursued in order to sell the American people a false bill of goods. Knowing full well that property rights and freedom of association were the true issue at hand — not bigotry — they set out to obscure them by tossing a sop to our constitutional rights as they had been traditionally (and rightly) understood for the first 200 years of our history. 

The Age of Entitlement
(America Since the Sixties)
by Christopher Caldwell

 

A Plethora of Quora Answers

FYI: I have now started taking to the Quora website to answer questions on various matters that I feel are important. There are answers in English, in Danish, and in French…

Not 1619 but 1641: The American Revolution of 1776 Sought to Avoid the Excesses of the English Revolution Over a Century Earlier

1492 and 1630 are more significant years for the founding of America than 1619. But neither is as significant in the stream of ideas and human rights as 1641. It was in that year that King Charles I went head to head with John Pym, leader of the Puritan faction in the House of Commons. For a stretch of a couple of months in late 1641 and early 1642, Pym and Charles went eyeball to eyeball and took England up to and over the brink of civil war.

In addressing the 1619 Project, Bryan Preston gives us a full rundown of the English Civil Wars at PJ Media:

England was by no means alone in religious strife. The Protestant Reformation had been bubbling around Europe causing wars since the 1500s. John Calvin had ruled Geneva as a dictator, which no one saw coming, in the 1540s. There were massacres and counter-massacres, burnings at stakes—it was a pretty sketchy time to be alive in Europe. Even before the Reformation, someone in Europe was usually fighting someone else. Hence, many wanted to bug out for the New World. It was the Belize of the age, a place to get away from all the noise, but with more hostile wildlife and other dangers. 

We have to take all this into account when we look at 1641, and how the upstarts in America saw things in their time. They weren’t standing on the shoulders of giants, but they were looking back at centuries of war and piles of dead and precedents for bringing bad kings and queens to heel. They had the Magna Carta of 1215, which established some basic rights and jurisprudence, and the various kingly proclamations and declarations of rights of the English, generally issued under threats of civil war, before and after that. They also had John Locke and the concept of natural rights bridging the time of the Pym vs. Charles showdown to their own.

 … a little over a century later, some very astute and well-educated leaders of English heritage on the other side of the Atlantic had serious issues with the king, George III. The long weeks in 1641-1642, the civil wars, the grim fate of Charles, the piles of dead, the role of state religion, the right of self-defense against government, the lack of freedom of the press, the ability to misuse circumstances to tilt government toward factions, the Cromwell dictatorship, the abuses of power by all concerned, and the utter pointlessness of it all surely informed the Continental Congress as they determined what to do and how to keep their heads away from gallows. “Let’s avoid all that, shall we?” was surely the subtext of most if not all their deliberations. 

They wanted to avoid as much as possible the problems and conflicts that dragged England into its civil wars. They wanted to enshrine natural rights and equality. They did not want a monarchy or anything resembling Puritanism, Pym, or Cromwell. A tyrannical king was top of mind, and they wrote down their 27 grievances against George III in the form of a Declaration of Independence, issued July 4, 1776. The Constitution they wrote after the Revolution sought to correct the issues that led up to and fueled the bloody English civil wars. For instance: regular and predictable meetings of the congress; an elected, not hereditary, head of state; checks and balances between three co-equal branches of government.

 … When George Washington left office after eight years as elected president, not a king or “Lord Protector,” surely the fate of Cromwell, the failure to progress, and the future of natural rights and liberty were on his mind. Washington’s voluntary exit and the peaceful transfer of power to another elected president under the established Constitution changed everything.

RELATED: 1619, Mao, & 9-11: History According to the NYT — Plus, a Remarkable Issue of National Geographic Reveals the Leftists' "Blame America First" Approach to History

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: quite a few contemporary Black problems have very little to do with slavery

NO MAINSTREAM HISTORIAN CONTACTED FOR THE 1619 PROJECT

• "Out of the Revolution came an anti-slavery ethos, which never disappeared": Pulitzer Prize Winner James McPherson Confirms that No Mainstream Historian Was Contacted by the NYT for Its 1619 History Project

• Gordon Wood: "The Revolution unleashed antislavery sentiments that led to the first abolition movements in the history of the world" — another Pulitzer-Winning Historian Had No Warning about the NYT's 1619 Project

• A Black Political Scientist "didn’t know about the 1619 Project until it came out"; "These people are kind of just making it up as they go"

• Clayborne Carson: Another Black Historian Kept in the Dark About 1619

• If historians did not hear of the NYT's history (sic) plan, chances are great that the 1619 Project was being deliberately kept a tight secret

• Oxford Historian Richard Carwardine: 1619 is “a preposterous and one-dimensional reading of the American past”

• World Socialists: "the 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of history" by the New York Times, aka "the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party"

THE NEW YORK TIMES OR THE NEW "WOKE" TIMES?

• Dan Gainor on 1619 and rewriting history: "To the Left elite like the NY Times, there’s no narrative they want to destroy more than American exceptionalism"

• Utterly preposterous claims: The 1619 project is a cynical political ploy, aimed at piercing the heart of the American understanding of justice

• From Washington to Grant, not a single American deserves an iota of gratitude, or even understanding, from Nikole Hannah-Jones; however, modern autocrats, if leftist and foreign, aren't "all bad"

• One of the Main Sources for the NYT's 1619 Project Is a Career Communist Propagandist who Defends Stalinism

• A Pulitzer Prize?! Among the 1619 Defenders Is "a Fringe Academic" with "a Fetish for Authoritarian Terror" and "a Soft Spot" for Mugabe, Castro, and Even Stalin

• Influenced by Farrakhan's Nation of Islam?! 1619 Project's History "Expert" Believes the Aztecs' Pyramids Were Built with Help from Africans Who Crossed the Atlantic Prior to the "Barbaric Devils" of Columbus (Whom She Likens to Hitler)

• 1793, 1776, or 1619: Is the New York Times Distinguishable from Teen Vogue? Is It Living in a Parallel Universe? Or Is It Simply Losing Its Mind in an Industry-Wide Nervous Breakdown?

• No longer America's "newspaper of record," the "New Woke Times" is now but a college campus paper, where kids like 1619 writer Nikole Hannah-Jones run the asylum and determine what news is fit to print

• The Departure of Bari Weiss: "Propagandists", Ethical Collapse, and the "New McCarthyism" — "The radical left are running" the New York Times, "and no dissent is tolerated"

• "Full of left-wing sophomoric drivel": The New York Times — already drowning in a fantasy-land of alternately running pro-Soviet Union apologia and their anti-American founding “1619 Project” series — promises to narrow what they view as acceptable opinion even more

• "Deeply Ashamed" of the… New York Times (!),  An Oblivious Founder of the Error-Ridden 1619 Project Uses Words that Have to Be Seen to Be Believed ("We as a News Organization Should Not Be Running Something That Is Offering Misinformation to the Public, Unchecked")

• Allen C Guelzo: The New York Times offers bitterness, fragility, and intellectual corruption—The 1619 Project is not history; it is conspiracy theory

• The 1619 Project is an exercise in religious indoctrination: Ignoring, downplaying, or rewriting the history of 1861 to 1865, the Left and the NYT must minimize, downplay, or ignore the deaths of 620,000 Americans

• 1619: It takes an absurdly blind fanaticism to insist that today’s free and prosperous America is rotten and institutionally oppressive

• The MSM newsrooms and their public shaming terror campaigns — the "bullying campus Marxism" is closer to cult religion than politics: Unceasingly searching out thoughtcrime, the American left has lost its mind

• Fake But Accurate: The People Behind the NYT's 1619 Project Make a "Small" Clarification, But Only Begrudgingly and Half-Heartedly, Because Said Mistake Actually Undermines The 1619 Project's Entire Premise

• The Truth Is Out: "The 1619 Project Is Not a History," Admits Hannah-Jones, and "Never Pretended to Be"

THE REVOLUTION OF THE 1770s

• The Collapse of the Fourth Estate by Peter Wood: No one has been able to identify a single leader, soldier, or supporter of the Revolution who wanted to protect his right to hold slaves (A declaration that slavery is the founding institution of America and the center of everything important in our history is a ground-breaking claim, of the same type as claims that America condones rape culture, that 9/11 was an inside job, that vaccinations cause autism, that the Moon landing was a hoax, or that ancient astronauts built the pyramids)

• Mary Beth Norton:  In 1774, a year before Dunmore's proclamation, Americans had already in fact become independent

• Most of the founders, including Thomas Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, writes Rick Atkinson, despite the fact that many of them owned slaves

• Leslie Harris: Far from being fought to preserve slavery, the Revolutionary War became a primary disrupter of slavery in the North American Colonies (even the NYT's fact-checker on the 1619 Project disagrees with its "conclusions": "It took 60 more years for the British government to finally end slavery in its Caribbean colonies")

• Sean Wilentz on 1619: the movement in London to abolish the slave trade formed only in 1787, largely inspired by… American (!) antislavery opinion that had arisen in the 1760s and 1770s

• 1619 & Slavery's Fatal Lie: it is more accurate to say that what makes America unique isn't slavery but the effort to abolish it

• 1619 & 1772: Most of the founders, including Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, despite many of them owning slaves; And Britain would remain the world's foremost slave-trading nation into the nineteenth century

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: Slavery was legal in Britain in 1776, and it remained so in all overseas British colonies until 1833

• Not 1619 but 1641: In Fact, the American Revolution of 1776 Sought to Avoid the Excesses of the English Revolution Over a Century Earlier

• James Oakes on 1619: "Slavery made the slaveholders rich; But it made the South poor; And it didn’t make the North rich — So the legacy of slavery is poverty, not wealth"

• One of the steps of defeating truth is to destroy evidence of the truth, says Bob Woodson; Because the North's Civil War statues — as well as American history itself — are evidence of America's redemption from slavery, it's important for the Left to remove evidence of the truth

TEACHING GENERATIONS OF KIDS FALSEHOODS ABOUT THE U.S.

• 1619: No wonder this place is crawling with young socialists and America-haters — the utter failure of the U.S. educational system to teach the history of America’s founding

• 1619: Invariably Taking the Progressive Side — The Ratio of Democratic to Republican Voter Registration in History Departments is More than 33 to 1

• Denying the grandeur of the nation’s founding—Wilfred McClay on 1619: "Most of my students are shocked to learn that that slavery is not uniquely American"

• Inciting Hate Already in Kindergarten: 1619 "Education" Is Part of Far-Left Indoctrination by People Who Hate America to Kids in College, in School, and Even in Elementary Classes

• "Distortions, half-truths, and outright falsehoods": Where does the 1619 project state that Africans themselves were central players in the slave trade? That's right: Nowhere

• John Podhoretz on 1619: the idea of reducing US history to the fact that some people owned slaves is a reductio ad absurdum and the definition of bad faith

• The 1619 Africans in Virginia were not ‘enslaved’, a black historian points out; they were indentured servants — just like the majority of European whites were

• "Two thirds of the people, white as well as black, who crossed the Atlantic in the first 200 years are indentured servants" notes Dolores Janiewski; "The poor people, black and white, share common interests"

LAST BUT NOT LEAST…

• Wondering Why Slavery Persisted for Almost 75 Years After the Founding of the USA? According to Lincoln, the Democrat Party's "Principled" Opposition to "Hate Speech"

• Victoria Bynum on 1619 and a NYT writer's "ignorance of history": "As dehumanizing and brutal as slavery was, the institution was not a giant concentration camp"

• Dennis Prager: The Left Couldn't Care Less About Blacks

• The Secret About Black Lives Matter; In Fact, the Outfit's Name Ought to Be BSD or BAD

• The Real Reason Why Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and the Land O'Lakes Maid Must Vanish

• The Confederate Flag: Another Brick in the Leftwing Activists' (Self-Serving) Demonization of America and Rewriting of History

• Who, Exactly, Is It Who Should Apologize for Slavery and Make Reparations? America? The South? The Descendants of the Planters? …

• Anti-Americanism in the Age of the Coronavirus, the NBA, and 1619

Republicans Pounce (European Version) Department: Trump Campaign Launches "Brutal Attack" and "Slaughter" on "New Buddy Couple" Biden and Harris

Following Joe Biden's choice of Kamala Harris as VP candidate, Danish readers learned that 

Trump's Campaigners Have Launched a Brutal Attack — And They Are Targeting Biden's Sore Point (Trumps kampagne folk har indledt et brutalt angreb og de går etter Bidens ømme punkt)

The actual title of Kristian Mouritzen's piece in Denmark's Berlingske newspaper is somewhat less excessive:

'Slow Joe' and 'Phony Kamala': Trump's staff is cracking down hard on Biden's vice presidential candidate (»Langsomme Joe« og »Falske Kamala«. Trumps stab slår hårdt ned på Bidens vicepræsidentkandidat). 

Still, check out the choice of words for the pouncing Republicans and the wholesome Democrats.

The subhead reads:

The president' election team is in the process of trying to crush the Democratic buddy couple for the presidential election in November. And the tone is already set. (Præsidentens valgteam er i gang med at forsøge at knuse det demokratiske makkerpar til præsidentvalget i november. Og tonen er allerede sat).

"Makkerpar" is not as quaint an expression in Danish as "buddy couple" is in English, as it can simply mean a more neutral-sounding "double team." However, it is an intrinsically positive and cool-sounding expression, like you would expect to see in the description of one of Hollywood's road movies and one which you would not expect for a Republican ticket. Meanwhile, the article's first sentence reads: 

President Trump's campaigners have already launched a brutal, verbal, and visual slaughter of the new Democratic buddy couple for the November presidential election, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris (Præsident Trumps kampagnefolk har allerede indledt en brutal, verbal og visuel slagtning af det nye demokratiske makkerpar til præsidentvalget i november, Joe Biden og Kamala Harris.)

Related: Check out the Republicans Pounce department

Hiroshima: During WWII, Japan Killed 7 Times More People (Most of Them Civilians) than They Lost

Among the "mind-boggling" nuggets that Victor Davis Hanson delivers in a speech at Hillsdale College on Why World War II Matters (6:16), the history teacher explains that of the victims,

80% of the 65 million [dead] were civilians! It's the only war in which the losers [the Axis or Fascist powers] killed 75% of the people. The losers did! … Japan killed seven times more people than they lost. And they lost [the war]!

I.e., the Japanese still managed to lose the war.

From the archives: 15 Facts and Arguments in the Hiroshima Debate Which Are Ignored by the MSM and Historians Alike:

A critical examination of some common charges against the Americans regarding the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (photos & images from Valérie Kubiak and Jean-Jacques Allevi's Géo article).

Racism

Americans may have felt hatred for the Japanese during WWII, but it was not for what race the Japanese belonged to and it was certainly not a hatred that allowed them to murder on sight (what did the so-called American racists hate, and fight, the Nazis for, then ; for being blond, blue-eyed Aryans?!). It was for what they had done, the treachery in Hawaii (remember Pearl Harbor?), the murders of POWs on the Bataan death march, and the numerous other atrocities committed throughout the Pacific, of which the rape of Nanking is only the most repellent. Still, that anger alone was not what led U.S. authorities to drop atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was the Japanese refusal to surrender, backed by the prospect that the blood-letting would continue and that the fighting would, in fact, intensify.

The Americans' Uncalled-for
Intensification of the War

Many more Japanese died in the hell-hole of Okinawa than in the nuclear blast of Hiroshima. More were killed in the battle of Leyte Gulf than in the explosion at Nagasaki. Based on America's 35% casualties on Okinawa, if 767,000 Americans were to attack Kyushu, one prediction said the dead and wounded would number 268,000, as many as the number of battle deaths that the U.S. had experienced in the war so far. As for Japanese battle death figures, they inevitably dwarfed those of the U.S. (On average, the ratio of combat fatalities was 4:1; on Iwo Jima, three Japanese died for every American; on Okinawa, that figure was 15:1; at Leyte Gulf, 20:1; on Attu, in the Aleutians, 50:1.) Japanese casualties on the battlefield by summer 1945 numbered 1.2 million total.

Nobody suggests that the Japanese be grateful for being the target of at atomic bombs — but, bearing those figures in mind, who can doubt that far more lives — as millions of soldiers and civilians rushed to the defence of their homeland — would have been lost in conventional warfare than actually were at Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

War on Civilians

Those who criticize the Americans for waging war, nuclear or otherwise, on civilians forget that the Japanese armed forces were arming every person available in Japan, from women and children to the elderly, and with everything from advanced firearms to primitive pointed bamboo sticks, to fight the Yankee invaders to the death.

Incidentally, this was not as fanatical as it may sound at first, given their own behavior on enemy soil. The Empire of the Sun expected American soldiers to submit the Japanese people to the same atrocities — in fact, it expected the "foreign devils" to treat them worse — that its soldiers had hoisted upon foreign civilians such as those at Nanking or Manila. Japan's coming victims might as well avoid dishonour and at the same time contribute to holding back the U.S. onslaught by, if possible, taking a few enemy soldiers with them to their death. Fight to the last had been the Japanese motto throughout the war.

Thus, the war promised to become even more bloody, as it indeed already had.

Still, the atomic targets were not chosen out of the blue. "[O]ne of the most important military-command and communications centers in Japan [that] would have become the Imperial headquarters had the islands been invaded and Tokyo been captured" (The New Yorker's John Hersey), the Honshu island city was (correctly) referred to as an "important naval base" by Le Monde back in August 1945, although it is typical that in a retrospective 60 years later (scroll to bottom), the independent daily omitted all types of strategic information and all types of context, for expressions such as "martyrdom", "crimes against humanity", "a haughty indifference of the laws created by men to check barbarism", and "a graduation as useless as indecent into horror". (Needless to say, Japanese actions at Nanking and the Bataan Death March did not figure into this kind of rants.)

Peace Feelers Ignored

It has become common for some to say that the Japanese were ready to sue for peace, and that the treacherous and demagogic Americans (or their leaders, if you want to be cute) ignored the peace feelers. There's so much to say to this charge one hardly knows where to begin. First of all, we are told the peace feelers were secret. If it was so obvious as we are told that the Japanese (or, at least, their government) as a whole were desirous to establish an era of peace and goodwill (unlike the murderous Yankees), why didn't they simply make the call for peace public (and thereby stigmatize the leaders in Washington, had the latter refused to take them up on it)? If asked the question, we will be told that it wasn't that easy and that Japanese pride was involved.

Well… exactly! If pride is involved, to what extent can you be sure the peace offer — or any message — is sincere, and especially, how much power does the individual (or the band of individuals) have in proffering it if he or they are surrounded by sizable parties of prideful leaders, soldiers, and other individuals?

As it happens, if and when you get a message (be it a peace proposal or anything else) from a mortal enemy — or even from a traditional friend (think Chirac and Villepin at the UN in early 2003) — how are you to know they are sincere? Is disinformation of some kind involved? How do you know they're not stalling for time? Time for what? To prepare their fellow leaders, and the population, for surrender? (In that case, how do you know what the chances are they will be successful in the task?) Or to build more weaponry (including their own… atomic bomb!), arm more combatants, launch more attacks, and/or kill more of your own nationals?

And who would the peace feeler have been from? From the entire government (in which case they could have made it public, supposedly)? From a clique in the government? And if, so, how much power did its members actually have — and were the latter sincere, were they wishful thinkers, or might they the victims of manipulation (from those who wanted to stall for time for military reasons)?

To use a surreal example of a peace feeler (from the same conflict), in May 1941 Rudolf Hess asked for peace between Britain and Germany (after flying a Messerschmitt solo to Scotland), only to be immediately disowned by Adolf Hitler. For months — years, really — British citizens, commoners and responsible leaders alike (not to mention nervous foreigners, and their governments), wondered what secret intentions, if any, might have laid behind the feat.

Also, to what extent should we go in trusting today's Japanese accounts of their willing and innocent peace-seeking forebears?

In any case, here are some things to ponder: it is well-known that the Imperial Army was full of officers and men of the type as those who, when they learned that Japan would eventually surrender, tried to prevent Hirohito's message to that effect from being broadcast. It is also known (not least to the Navy personnel at the time!) that while the Japanese were supposedly desiring peace, kamikaze pilots were crashing their Zeros into U.S. Navy warships. What is less known is that over 400 people were arrested in Japan in 1945 on the mere suspicion of favoring negotiation.

In conclusion: the Americans were aware of the propensity of the Japanese to fight to the very end, and untold thousands had bled, suffered, and died in so learning. And for very good reasons, Americans were not very trustful of the Japanese; indeed, the formers' tendency to regard the latter as duplicitous cannot be ascribed only to racism, far from it (remember Pearl Harbor?).

Related:
• Hiroshima 15: Examining the Issues Surrounding the Dropping of Atomic Bombs on Japan (Erik Svane)

• Hiroshima 14: "I regard Hiroshima revisionism as the greatest hoax in American history" (Robert Maddox)

• Hiroshima 13: Although It Is Not Said Openly, Hiroshima Also Played a Purifying Role, IE the Baptism of a New Japan, the Event that Put an End to 50 Years of Crimes (Le Monde)

• Hiroshima 12: Political Correctness in Japan: The comment "tramples on the feelings of victims", so… Shut the F**k Up and Lose Your Job! (re the forced resignation of Japan's defense (!) minister)

• Hiroshima 11: If Western elites cannot find perfection in history, they see no good at all; most never learned the narrative of WWII, only what was wrong about it (Victor Davis Hanson)

• Hiroshima 10: If Not for the Atom Bombs, Japan, as we know it today, would not exist (S L Sanger, author of “Working on the Bomb”)

• Hiroshima 9: Over one million warning leaflets were dropped over Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and 33 other Japanese cities 5 days before the Hiroshima bombing (Bill Whittle)

• Hiroshima 8: Was It Wrong to Use the Atom Bomb on Japan? (Father Wilson Miscamble)

• Hiroshima 7: Some Facts About Hiroshima and World War II That You Hear Neither From America's MSM, University Élites, and History Books, Nor From Japan's (New York Times)

•  Hiroshima: Did Japan's top officers know a bomber was approaching Nagasaki, 5 hours beforehand, and do nothing?

• Hiroshima 6: "Lance or spear practice was a regular women's exercise to practice for the anticipated U.S. landing" (a Japanese American)

• Hiroshima 5: Japan's plans for defense involved mobilizing the civilian population, including women and children, for the customary suicidal battle tactics (Thomas Sowell)

• Hiroshima 4: "Les 300 000 morts d'Hiroshima ont épargné bien davantage de Japonais, qui auraient été écrasés sous des bombes ordinaires" (Charles de Gaulle)

• Hiroshima 3: A mainland invasion could have resulted in millions of Japanese deaths—and that's not counting civilians (Wall Street Journal)

• Hiroshima 2: Hand-wringing over Hiroshima is just virtue-signaling by people who never said a bad word about Stalin or Mao’s mass murders (Glenn Reynolds)

• Hiroshima 1: Unlike the ends of the majority of conflicts, World War II in the Pacific grew increasingly bloody as U.S. forces approached the Japanese homeland (Erik Svane)