Dec 7, 1941 and Sept 11, 2001

[usmc1]

quote:

Originally posted by FMII:
Well USMC!1..The way I see it is that the political machine of ours today. Only goes half way, in oder to get the job done. On the other front, they do not want to offend other countries so they tend to be very astute at being "Political Correct". It's unfortunate that we fail to have an Ormar Bradley or Cheste
Fuller among us.
FCMII

I agree with you about Omar Bradley, I'm not certain we need a Chesty Pullar anywhere but in the field at the battalion or regimental level, despite the fact that he is one of my favorite military men alongside U.S. Grant.

But, somehow I do not see branding countries as belonging to the axis of evil or harboring and supporting terorists as Bush accused Chavez as being "politcally correct" or careful not to give offense. Or if you'd like a real failure of "politcal correctness" how about our "crusade in the middleceast"?

[FMII]

Well USMC!1..The way I see it is that the political machine of ours today. Only goes half way, in oder to get the job done. On the other front, they do not want to offend other countries so they tend to be very astute at being "Political Correct". It's unfortunate that we fail to have an Ormar Bradley or Cheste
Fuller among us.
FCMII

[usmc1]

quote:

Originally posted by FMII:
In all the dribble. What Professor Markholtzer is trying to convey in his message is that pacifism, and liberalism have adverseley affected the ideology of those associated within these groups. Being 'Politically Correct" is not the answer to the problems we are faced with today.

Political Correctness? What's that got to do with 9/11, 12/7/41, or the price of beans down at the Fiesta Mart?

[FMII]

In all the dribble. What Professor Markholtzer is trying to convey in his message is that pacifism, and liberalism have adverseley affected the ideology of those associated within these groups. Being 'Politically Correct" is not the answer to the problems we are faced with today.

[missouriboy]

The main thing that Prof. Holzer failed to address is that after 12/1/1941 war was declared against the official military faction of the attacking government(s), while after 9/11/2001 war was (NOT EVEN LEGALLY) declared against a noun. A noun describing undefined entities. Apples and oranges, indeed!

[nacktman]

Apples and Oranges there is no use attempting to equate the two, they are not the same.
Yet ignorance is put forth as intelligent thought as evidenced by the author of the tripe above, but that is what we expect from the syncophants of the right and on cue they deliver.

[Sanslines]

DECEMBER 7, 1941, AND SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

Henry Mark Holzer

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, and from time-to-time since then, it has been said that the day was akin to the one about which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke: December 7, 1941. The comparison is apt—but not completely. Despite the similarities, the differences in what followed each of those days are profound and the aftermath of September 11, 2001, may well portend far worse consequences than did World War II for the United States of America.

The esteemed historian Samuel Eliot Morrison, in his The Oxford History of the American People, has written of December 7, 1941:

"At the end of this sad and bloody day, 7 December 1941, the 'day that shall live in infamy,' as President Roosevelt said of it, 2403 American sailors, soldiers, marines, and civilians had been killed, and 1178 more wounded."

In Hawaii, nearly 150 planes had been destroyed on the ground, at least six battleships had been sunk or rendered non-operational.

Soon, American air assets in Manila would be destroyed. The Japanese would roll over the Malay Peninsula and take Singapore. Guam and other islands in the Pacific would fall. Hong Kong would be taken. The fate of Bataan and Corregidor would be told by the Death March and hellish prison camps. And more. Much more.

Morrison, again, about December 8, 1941:

"To millions of Americans, whether at breakfast in Hawaii, or reading the Sunday paper in the West, or sitting down to dinner in the East, this news of disaster after disaster, seemed fantastic, incredible. As the awful details poured in, hour after hour, incredulity turned to anger and an implacable determination to avenge these unprovoked and dastardly attacks. On 8 December, Congress with but one dissenting vote declared a state of war with Japan . . . President Roosevelt, in his war message . . . declared, 'Never before has there been a greater challenge to life, liberty and civilization'."

Yes, on December 7th and September 11th there were sneak attacks. Yes, each day was one of infamy. Yes, there were considerable losses of American (and other) lives. Yes, substantial symbols of American power—the Pacific Fleet, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—were destroyed. Yes, Americans fought back at Pearl Harbor and on United 93. Yes, the news on those days was “fantastic, incredible.”

And yes, then, as now, “Never before has there been a greater challenge to life, liberty and civilization.”

And yes, on December 8th and September 12th there was among our people “an implacable determination to avenge these unprovoked and dastardly attacks.”

But with these comparisons, the picture changes.

In 1941, and for nearly four year after, we saw full mobilization of our great nation’s resources: military, economic, social, spiritual, political. Every sector of our society was engaged.

Men and women volunteered for the armed services.

Women went into factories.

Rationing was imposed.

Religious leaders prayed, and went into combat with their flocks.

Politicians joined hands, giving FDR what he needed to fight ruthless enemies.

Civilians willingly endured shortages and blackouts.

Kids (like me) collected newspapers, tin cans, used fat and grease—all for the war effort.

The radio, newspapers, and magazines supported the war effort, and exercised disciplined self-restraint about what they published.

Celebrities, who hadn’t enlisted, sold War Bonds and entertained the troops.

Images kept patriotic spirits high: Joe Rosenthal’s photo of the Iwo Jima flag raising; MacArthur wading ashore in the Philippines; repatriation of emaciated POWs from Japanese prison camps; Patton, with his pearl-handle revolvers; the London blitz; the liberation of Paris. VE-Day. Then, VJ-Day. Times Square overflowing with joy.

And the man-in-the-street, and his wife, and his children, and all other Americans, knew that we were fighting Germany and Japan (and Italy) because, as FDR said, they posed a grave threat to “life, liberty and civilization.”

As do the radical Islamists who on 9/11 showed us a preview of their nihilism-driven corrupt religion’s vision for mankind, and who, before and since, have maimed and murdered thousands of innocent men, women, and children throughout the world.

But after President Bush’s rousing post – 9/11 speech to Congress and the American people, after flags flew everywhere for a few months, after passage of some useful but inadequate legislation, do we see within our country Morrison’s “implacable determination to avenge these unprovoked and dastardly attacks”?

Sadly, we do not.

Indeed, we see the opposite.

We see a narrow Supreme Court majority, infatuated with the romance of international law at the expense of American sovereignty, giving due process rights to terrorists, ignoring established precedent to nullify military tribunals, and treating irregular enemy combatants as if they were mere burglars to be dealt with by our domestic criminal law system.

We see international busybody organizations inspecting our detainee facility at Guantanamo, and solemnly pronouncing a verdict on our treatment of Islamic murderers who would make American citizens their next victims.

We see those murderers coddled—uninterrupted sleep, prayer time, outside recreation, nutritious food, health care—by a soft administration bent on mollifying these international busybodies and their domestic crybaby cousins.

We see America-hating organizations such as the ACLU, the National Lawyers Guild, and the Center for Constitutional Rights enlisting thousands of lawyers whose task is to monkey-wrench the terrorist adjudicatory system, as if they were representing O.J. Simpson in a Los Angeles courtroom.

We see leading newspapers disclosing top secret defense information—surveillance, money tracing, secret interrogation facilities—not only with impunity, but to the cheers of America’s left and those in the world who would destroy us.

We see a mostly partisan Democrat Party—in Congress and at the National Committee—playing politics with laws essential to our national security.

We see a weakened Republican president proffering legislation for military tribunals that provides for terrorists process at once unnecessary and dangerous, only to be trumped by the likes of grandstanding Republican Senators McCain, Warner, and Graham, who, not content to provide Islamic murderers with all the due process enjoyed by domestic criminal defendants, want to provide them, as well, with classified information about “sources and methods.” We see this senatorial quartet also determined to prohibit the time-tested “good cop/bad cop” technique of interrogation, sleep deprivation, loud music, dietary manipulations— apparently believing that our military and CIA are dealing with some Chicago street gang, not savages out to destroy us and our way of life.

We see public officials acquiescing to the demands of homegrown Muslim organizations, in an effort not to offend—blinding themselves to that religion’s core belief in jihad, martyrdom, and its ultimate triumph.

We see in America, according to a nationwide Scripps Survey Research poll, that more than one-third of our countrymen suspect the government “assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East.” Worse, if that be possible, is that sixteen percent of those polled attribute collapse of the World Trade Center towers not to the jet planes hijacked by Islamic terrorists, but to agents of George W. Bush who somehow, clandestinely, blew up the buildings.

We see in our colleges and universities an inbred corps of fanatic intellectuals whose life’s purpose is to brainwash the young minds entrusted to their care into believing that the enlightenment, Western values, and the political philosophy that created and sustained our nation are all malevolent, and that Islam, the religion of nihilism and murder, is mankind’s true aspiration.

We, who at the Battle of the Bulge shot captured German troops wearing American uniforms and on Guadalcanal incinerated Japanese defenders with flame throwers, we who firebombed Dresden and Tokyo, we who dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, now send Senators to Washington who fight the president over “harsh” interrogation of terrorists who often have information that can save American lives.

We see the recruitment of radical Islamists in our prisons, aided and abetted by radical Islamic clergy— paid for by the American taxpayer.

We see politicians willing to turn over America’s national security, and perhaps the ultimate survival of our civilization, to unelected judges, responsible to no one, many of whom have been cloistered for so long that they lack an adequate understanding of the real world.

We see the much heralded publication of the Army Field Manual, providing Geneva Conventions protection barring “outrages against personal dignity” like “hooding,” forced nudity, and duct-taping eyes, to Islamic terrorists who behead, dismember, and disembowel captured Americans.

We see, in short, an utter, indeed a frightening, lack of understanding of the principles that animated our creation as the freest most successful nation ever to exist on this earth, principles that carried us through revolution, civil war, world wars, and a cold war.

We see that too many Americans have become ignorant and complacent, and thus broken the faith with those who fought at Yorktown, died at Gettysburg, survived the trenches, landed at Normandy, froze at Chosin, and were imprisoned in Hanoi.

We see our country in thrall to pernicious ideas that have sucked from us the understanding of what we face and the will to face it.

And time is running out.

Unless America wakes up fast—parents, clergy, intellectuals, workers, educators, veterans, celebrities, students—one day, perhaps sooner than later, we will look up and no longer see Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill.”

We will see a Mosque.

______________________________

Henry Mark Holzer, professor emeritus at Brooklyn Law School, can be contacted through his website, www.henrymarkholzer.com.
Another viewpoint that most will object to here. I personally don't agree with all of this. Any catcalls (as there certainly will be) can be sent to the author at the above listed website address.

[Sanslines]

DECEMBER 7, 1941, AND SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

Henry Mark Holzer

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, and from time-to-time since then, it has been said that the day was akin to the one about which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke: December 7, 1941. The comparison is apt—but not completely. Despite the similarities, the differences in what followed each of those days are profound and the aftermath of September 11, 2001, may well portend far worse consequences than did World War II for the United States of America.

The esteemed historian Samuel Eliot Morrison, in his The Oxford History of the American People, has written of December 7, 1941:

"At the end of this sad and bloody day, 7 December 1941, the 'day that shall live in infamy,' as President Roosevelt said of it, 2403 American sailors, soldiers, marines, and civilians had been killed, and 1178 more wounded."

In Hawaii, nearly 150 planes had been destroyed on the ground, at least six battleships had been sunk or rendered non-operational.

Soon, American air assets in Manila would be destroyed. The Japanese would roll over the Malay Peninsula and take Singapore. Guam and other islands in the Pacific would fall. Hong Kong would be taken. The fate of Bataan and Corregidor would be told by the Death March and hellish prison camps. And more. Much more.

Morrison, again, about December 8, 1941:

"To millions of Americans, whether at breakfast in Hawaii, or reading the Sunday paper in the West, or sitting down to dinner in the East, this news of disaster after disaster, seemed fantastic, incredible. As the awful details poured in, hour after hour, incredulity turned to anger and an implacable determination to avenge these unprovoked and dastardly attacks. On 8 December, Congress with but one dissenting vote declared a state of war with Japan . . . President Roosevelt, in his war message . . . declared, 'Never before has there been a greater challenge to life, liberty and civilization'."

Yes, on December 7th and September 11th there were sneak attacks. Yes, each day was one of infamy. Yes, there were considerable losses of American (and other) lives. Yes, substantial symbols of American power—the Pacific Fleet, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—were destroyed. Yes, Americans fought back at Pearl Harbor and on United 93. Yes, the news on those days was “fantastic, incredible.”

And yes, then, as now, “Never before has there been a greater challenge to life, liberty and civilization.”

And yes, on December 8th and September 12th there was among our people “an implacable determination to avenge these unprovoked and dastardly attacks.”

But with these comparisons, the picture changes.

In 1941, and for nearly four year after, we saw full mobilization of our great nation’s resources: military, economic, social, spiritual, political. Every sector of our society was engaged.

Men and women volunteered for the armed services.

Women went into factories.

Rationing was imposed.

Religious leaders prayed, and went into combat with their flocks.

Politicians joined hands, giving FDR what he needed to fight ruthless enemies.

Civilians willingly endured shortages and blackouts.

Kids (like me) collected newspapers, tin cans, used fat and grease—all for the war effort.

The radio, newspapers, and magazines supported the war effort, and exercised disciplined self-restraint about what they published.

Celebrities, who hadn’t enlisted, sold War Bonds and entertained the troops.

Images kept patriotic spirits high: Joe Rosenthal’s photo of the Iwo Jima flag raising; MacArthur wading ashore in the Philippines; repatriation of emaciated POWs from Japanese prison camps; Patton, with his pearl-handle revolvers; the London blitz; the liberation of Paris. VE-Day. Then, VJ-Day. Times Square overflowing with joy.

And the man-in-the-street, and his wife, and his children, and all other Americans, knew that we were fighting Germany and Japan (and Italy) because, as FDR said, they posed a grave threat to “life, liberty and civilization.”

As do the radical Islamists who on 9/11 showed us a preview of their nihilism-driven corrupt religion’s vision for mankind, and who, before and since, have maimed and murdered thousands of innocent men, women, and children throughout the world.

But after President Bush’s rousing post – 9/11 speech to Congress and the American people, after flags flew everywhere for a few months, after passage of some useful but inadequate legislation, do we see within our country Morrison’s “implacable determination to avenge these unprovoked and dastardly attacks”?

Sadly, we do not.

Indeed, we see the opposite.

We see a narrow Supreme Court majority, infatuated with the romance of international law at the expense of American sovereignty, giving due process rights to terrorists, ignoring established precedent to nullify military tribunals, and treating irregular enemy combatants as if they were mere burglars to be dealt with by our domestic criminal law system.

We see international busybody organizations inspecting our detainee facility at Guantanamo, and solemnly pronouncing a verdict on our treatment of Islamic murderers who would make American citizens their next victims.

We see those murderers coddled—uninterrupted sleep, prayer time, outside recreation, nutritious food, health care—by a soft administration bent on mollifying these international busybodies and their domestic crybaby cousins.

We see America-hating organizations such as the ACLU, the National Lawyers Guild, and the Center for Constitutional Rights enlisting thousands of lawyers whose task is to monkey-wrench the terrorist adjudicatory system, as if they were representing O.J. Simpson in a Los Angeles courtroom.

We see leading newspapers disclosing top secret defense information—surveillance, money tracing, secret interrogation facilities—not only with impunity, but to the cheers of America’s left and those in the world who would destroy us.

We see a mostly partisan Democrat Party—in Congress and at the National Committee—playing politics with laws essential to our national security.

We see a weakened Republican president proffering legislation for military tribunals that provides for terrorists process at once unnecessary and dangerous, only to be trumped by the likes of grandstanding Republican Senators McCain, Warner, and Graham, who, not content to provide Islamic murderers with all the due process enjoyed by domestic criminal defendants, want to provide them, as well, with classified information about “sources and methods.” We see this senatorial quartet also determined to prohibit the time-tested “good cop/bad cop” technique of interrogation, sleep deprivation, loud music, dietary manipulations— apparently believing that our military and CIA are dealing with some Chicago street gang, not savages out to destroy us and our way of life.

We see public officials acquiescing to the demands of homegrown Muslim organizations, in an effort not to offend—blinding themselves to that religion’s core belief in jihad, martyrdom, and its ultimate triumph.

We see in America, according to a nationwide Scripps Survey Research poll, that more than one-third of our countrymen suspect the government “assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East.” Worse, if that be possible, is that sixteen percent of those polled attribute collapse of the World Trade Center towers not to the jet planes hijacked by Islamic terrorists, but to agents of George W. Bush who somehow, clandestinely, blew up the buildings.

We see in our colleges and universities an inbred corps of fanatic intellectuals whose life’s purpose is to brainwash the young minds entrusted to their care into believing that the enlightenment, Western values, and the political philosophy that created and sustained our nation are all malevolent, and that Islam, the religion of nihilism and murder, is mankind’s true aspiration.

We, who at the Battle of the Bulge shot captured German troops wearing American uniforms and on Guadalcanal incinerated Japanese defenders with flame throwers, we who firebombed Dresden and Tokyo, we who dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, now send Senators to Washington who fight the president over “harsh” interrogation of terrorists who often have information that can save American lives.

We see the recruitment of radical Islamists in our prisons, aided and abetted by radical Islamic clergy— paid for by the American taxpayer.

We see politicians willing to turn over America’s national security, and perhaps the ultimate survival of our civilization, to unelected judges, responsible to no one, many of whom have been cloistered for so long that they lack an adequate understanding of the real world.

We see the much heralded publication of the Army Field Manual, providing Geneva Conventions protection barring “outrages against personal dignity” like “hooding,” forced nudity, and duct-taping eyes, to Islamic terrorists who behead, dismember, and disembowel captured Americans.

We see, in short, an utter, indeed a frightening, lack of understanding of the principles that animated our creation as the freest most successful nation ever to exist on this earth, principles that carried us through revolution, civil war, world wars, and a cold war.

We see that too many Americans have become ignorant and complacent, and thus broken the faith with those who fought at Yorktown, died at Gettysburg, survived the trenches, landed at Normandy, froze at Chosin, and were imprisoned in Hanoi.

We see our country in thrall to pernicious ideas that have sucked from us the understanding of what we face and the will to face it.

And time is running out.

Unless America wakes up fast—parents, clergy, intellectuals, workers, educators, veterans, celebrities, students—one day, perhaps sooner than later, we will look up and no longer see Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill.”

We will see a Mosque.

______________________________

Henry Mark Holzer, professor emeritus at Brooklyn Law School, can be contacted through his website, www.henrymarkholzer.com.
Another viewpoint that most will object to here. I personally don't agree with all of this. Any catcalls (as there certainly will be) can be sent to the author at the above listed website address.