WW II Cemetery in the Netherlands

By Robin Itzler

Editor's Note:  This is one of the commentaries selected from Robin's weekly newsletter Patriot Neighbors.  Pictures added by me.  If you wish to get the full edition, E-mail her at PatriotNeighbors@yahoo.com to get on her list, it's free. RK

Given all the insanity, and all the vile attacks against the American culture by insane leftist race mongers and hate mongers, I think this is worth reviewing about how the Dutch treat the American WW II cemetery in the Netherlands

In World War II, approximately 250,000 American soldiers died in Europe fighting to free the continent from Nazi domination. The most famous cemetery is in Normandy, where 9,388 American soldiers are buried. It’s the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in Colleville-sur-Mer, France. 

 

In the Netherlands, there are 10,011 Americans buried or remembered at the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten. What makes this cemetery unique?

There are 8,301 graves and 1,722 names inscribed on a wall at the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten. Each grave is diligently and lovingly maintained by a Netherlands citizen or family, usually a local. They honor the memory of the soldier who died freeing their nation from Nazi tyranny by regularly visiting and maintaining the gravesite.

 

This is the only cemetery in the Netherlands for American soldiers who died fighting to free the nation from Nazi rule. Decades later, it is still considered an honor to adopt a grave, which is why there is a waiting list.

Moral Equivalence Means Either Moral Confusion or Hatred of Israel

Dennis Prager Oct 17, 2023 

Moral equivalence has two purposes. One is to enable the morally confused to hide their confusion. The other is to enable the immoral to hide their immorality. Here are two examples as applied to the Israeli-Arab conflict: One is the assertion we hear regarding the latest Israel-Hamas war by members of the Western Left, by Muslim supporters of the Palestinians and even by a few individuals on the right: "Palestinian babies are as precious as Israeli babies."

Professor Cornel West, a lifelong progressive running for president as a Democrat:

"As I have said for the past 50 years, a precious Palestinian child has the same value as a precious Israeli child." David Cronin, an editor at Electronic Intifada, a large pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel website: "Palestinian babies are just as precious as my new daughter." 

A second example is to avoid condemning Hamas for the wars they start by instead condemning the "cycle of violence."  Let's analyze the two statements

That the lives of Palestinian children are as precious as those of Israeli children is a given. But it is meaningless given that virtually no Israeli or Israel-supporter has ever claimed otherwise. Indeed, it is usually worse than meaningless. It is usually a nice-sounding way to attack Israel and its supporters. ......To Read More....

 

One Final Honor for Iwo Jima Hero

Woody Williams, 98, will lie in honor at the US Capitol 

By Newser Editors and Wire Service Jun 29, 2022 

Update: At a memorial Sunday in Charleston, West Virginia, Sen. Joe Manchin said Hershel W. "Woody" Williams, the last remaining Medal of Honor recipient from World War II, would lie in state at the US Capitol. But Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer announced he would actually lie in honor. The distinction, per to the Architect of the Capitol, is that government officials and military officers lie in state while private citizens lie in honor, reports the AP. A date and other details will be forthcoming. Our original story from Wednesday, which details Williams' heroics, follows. 

 Woody Williams, the last remaining Medal of Honor recipient from World War II, whose heroics under fire over several crucial hours at the Battle of Iwo Jima made him a legend in his native West Virginia, died Wednesday at age 98 at the Veterans Affairs medical center bearing his name in Huntington, the AP reports. "Today, America lost not just a valiant Marine and a Medal of Honor recipient, but an important link to our Nation's fight against tyranny in the Second World War,"

As a young Marine corporal, Williams went ahead of his unit in February 1945 and eliminated a series of Japanese machine gun positions. Later that year, at age 22, Williams received the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest award for military valor, from President Harry Truman at the White House. "For me, receiving the Medal of Honor was actually the lifesaver because it forced me to talk about the experiences that I had, which was a therapy that I didn't even know I was doing," Williams said in 2018. Iwo Jima was where Marines planted the American flag on Mount Suribachi, a moment captured in one of the most iconic war photographs in history. Williams said he saw the flag from a distance after it went up as troops around him celebrated............To Read More....

 

On Grading Zinn-ers' Papers

By N. Greene, Posted by Mary Grabar, April 29, 2020 @ Dissident Prof

It’s that time of the semester. Time for research papers to be turned in and graded. I look forward to this part of the semester with a mixture of hope and dread. I often read papers that demonstrate learning, inquisitiveness, and the beginnings of student scholarship. However, I get my fair share of papers from students that have been thoroughly misled by the writings of Howard Zinn. I ask my students to pick an historical topic that lends itself well to debate so that they can craft a thesis and defend it in their papers. The Zinners among them, typically fall back on Zinn’s one sided thoroughly unobjective rants against America. This is the easiest course of action; they have been thoroughly indoctrinated by the time they get to my college class and this course of action requires no real thought or examination, just the spouting of righteous indignation at the United States.

One topic that is a favorite each semester in the American History survey is the bombing of Japan with atomic weapons. To be fair, I do have some students that argue that the bombings were justified and necessary. My assumption is that these students did not do their history homework in high school or they recognized Zinn’s one sidedness and rejected it. However, most students that write about this topic write about it from Zinn’s point of view; that being that Japan was the victim rather than the aggressor. Zinn starts with the assumption that Japan was provoked into the war by the Roosevelt administration. This is a major assumption to make and to justify it he cites one of the dissenting judges from the Tokyo War Crimes Trial that took place after the war, Zinn writes:

One of the judges in the Tokyo War Crimes Trial after World War II, Radhabinod Pal, dissented from the general verdicts against Japanese officials and argued that the United States had clearly provoked the war with Japan and expected Japan to act. 

Why cite one of the dissenting judges and not the majority? Zinn does not mention that Pal was one of three dissenting judges and that those three were outvoted by 11 other judges that were in the majority. Furthermore, the three dissenting judges from the trial did not all dissent from the majority opinion for the same reasons. So, Zinn simply found the judge (Pal) that he agreed with and cites Pal as the authoritative source because it makes the Allies and the United States look bad. Most high school students are not going to read Zinn with a critical eye – they are just going to take it all in and from what they can tell Zinn has authority and is presenting them with compelling evidence of Japan’s victimhood status and America’s treachery.

With the idea of Japan as victim firmly established at the beginning of his chapter on the Second World War, Zinn moves on to calling the use of atomic bombs on Japan “atrocities” later in the chapter, but not before spending page after page attacking America as an inherently horrible and racist place. Interestingly, Zinn spends no time discussing the war itself. For example, he never gets around to mentioning the millions of innocents slaughtered by the Japanese throughout Asia and the Pacific in concentration camps like those built in Europe by the Nazis. Zinn never mentions the tens of thousands of Korean women forced into prostitution to service the Japanese army. The Japanese army systematically raped as many Korean women as possible. The typical student can’t be blamed for coming away with the idea that that Japanese were victims and that there was no reason to drop atomic weapons on Japan to end the war. Here is what Zinn writes about the bombing of Japan:

The justification for these atrocities was that this would end the war quickly, making unnecessary an invasion of Japan. Such an invasion would cost a huge number of lives, the government said-a million, according to Secretary of State Byrnes; half a million, Truman claimed was the figure given him by General George Marshall. These estimates of invasion losses were not realistic, and seem to have been pulled out of the air to justify bombings which, as their effects became known, horrified more and more people.

Students mimic these ideas, writing that Japan was already beaten so there was no need for the bombs, or they will argue that a million American casualties was a made up number. But Zinn’s assessment here begs the question, who wouldn’t want to get the war over with as soon as possible? Would anyone, other than the Japanese, want the war to linger on year after year? Does wanting the war to end make America the bad guys? Also, the numbers given to President Truman regarding a potential invasion were not made up. They came from different sources within government and military and, most importantly, they were based on almost four years of fighting against the Japanese in the Pacific and they all indicated roughly the same thing. As the war went on year after grinding year, the United States slowly moved closer and closer to the Japanese home islands and the closer they got the more fanatical the Japanese became. In wresting the island of Okinawa from Japan, the U.S. suffered roughly 50,000 casualties, the Japanese nearly 100,000; and the Japanese civilians on the island committed mass suicide rather than surrender to the Americans. And that’s just one battle of hundreds that took place throughout the Pacific. World War II historian and widely recognized expert, Victor Davis Hanson, points out that Japans leaders bragged openly about their planned “Glorious death of one hundred million.” How could anyone at the time think that the Japanese would certainly surrender if given the opportunity? Hanson also points out that even late in the war Japan still thought that if it could prolong the war, the Allies might come to the negotiating table and settle on a favorable armistice.

Dropping atomic bombs on Japan was brutal, but of course, the entire war was human brutality in the extreme – to pretend that the war was simply just another war until the U.S. used atomic weapons is to ignore reality. Truman was faced with a horrible choice use the weapons on Japan or continue the blockade of Japan, and watch as millions slowly starved to death, or invade the island which would have likely resulted in millions of casualties for the Americans and the Japanese.

What if instead, we were talking about Atomic bombs being dropped on Germany to end the war? Would students have objections? Of course not, they rightly detest the Nazis and every genocidal thing that the Nazis stood for. Why isn’t it the same thing with Japan? What Zinn fails to teach is that the Japanese Empire was simply the Asian version of the Nazi Empire. The two committed heinous crimes against humanity. Their slaughter of everyone that opposed them had radical racial motives, they ran concentration camps, they conducted inhumane medical experiments on their prisoners, and they unleashed an unrelenting tide of murder and rape until they were forcibly stopped by brute power. Rather than correctly demonstrating that the Japanese were like the Nazis in so many ways, Zinn actually makes it seem like America was more like Nazi Germany because of its killing of civilians.

N. Greene (a pseudonym) teaches at a midwestern college.

Work Cited: Hanson, Victor Davis. 2018. “The Bombs of August” National Review August 23, 2018.
Photo of Howard Zinn by

By Slobodandimitrov - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57072235

My dad was better than John Kerry

October 2, 2019 By Steve Feinstein

Former Mass. senator and 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry is an accurate precursor for today's 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls. Unbearably self-absorbed and phony, Kerry's military career was rife with controversy, surrounded by justifiable doubt regarding the legitimacy of his having been awarded three Purple Heart medals. Kerry should have sloughed off the very idea of accepting those Purple Hearts for injuries no worse than a shaving cut, but he didn't. Kerry simply used his military service as a box to be checked off, to fulfill a requirement for his future political ambitions.............. contrast to the way the Greatest Generation served their country.

 Very few, if any, soldiers serving in combat in WWII publicly identified themselves as Democrats or Republicans, as liberals or conservatives.  They were simply Americans, united by a common goal, loyal to the country and to each other.

So it was with my dad.  He served in the 338th Field Artillery Battalion in Italy.  My dad was an F.O. (forward observer).........Obviously, the Germans hated the F.O.s,.............Germans spotted them and brought their own 88mm guns to bear on the house........My dad was struck in the head by a falling beam. The survivors managed to get back to base, and my dad was sent to the rear for emergency surgery, which included the placement of a steel plate in his head..........After the war, my dad returned home; got a degree in civil engineering under the G.I. Bill; earned a modest, respectable blue-collar salary in the construction industry; and raised his family. He never spoke of the war.........

Today's Democrats employ Kerry-like reasoning in every move they make, in every vote they take............My dad was better than that.

Much better......To Read More.....

American Concentration Camps? Where Would AOC and Other Millennials Get Such an Idea?

ByMary Grabar 2019-07-29 chat 66 comments

If you think that it is outrageous that Democratic presidential candidates want to eliminate the southern border and that Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calls our detention facilities there “concentration camps,” then you haven’t been reading and believing Howard Zinn’s best-selling A People’s History of the United States.

 

But if you have been taught by a teacher who is one of the 84,000 (as of September 2018) who have downloaded lessons from the Zinn Education Project, you will get a lesson that reproduces Chapter Eight, “We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God,” that begins, “Today’s border with Mexico is the product of invasion and war.” Zinn claims that the entire Southwest is ill-gotten and by a country that is based on a “pretense”--“that there really is such a thing as ‘the United States,’” one with the "national interest" “represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.” The Antifa chant, “No Trump, no wall, no U.S.A. at all!” sums it up. Recently, would-be (now-deceased) Antifa bomber Willem Van Spronsen left behind a manifesto decrying the “concentration camps” and offering as proof Zinn’s book.

 

Ocasio-Cortez is simply extending the Zinn-inspired school lesson about another period in history, when camps housed Japanese-Americans during World War II.

 

At the ZEP site teachers can find multiple lessons featuring role-play, a film, and reading material referring to the internment camps as “concentration camps.” Much of the material in the lesson on Fred Korematsu, who refused to be “incarcerated in U.S. concentration camps,” comes from the Korematsu Institute and the 2001 PBS film Of Civil Rights and Wrongs about the ACLU-inspired suit against the government, which went to the Supreme Court in 1944. Although Korematsu lost, in 1983 his conviction was overturned, thanks to Peter Irons, who became acquainted Zinn’s writing while in prison for draft evasion during the Vietnam War. The two corresponded and through Zinn’s influence, Irons was admitted with a full scholarship to Boston University, where Zinn was teaching. After completing his doctorate, Irons, along with Zinn, helped Daniel Ellsberg in his case involving the stolen Pentagon Papers. After law school, Irons became an activist, lawyer, professor, and author of A People’s History of the Supreme Court, one of the dozens of spin-off books for which Zinn received a percentage of the royalties.

 

The manufactured border crisis is being exploited by Democratic politicians and others. Public radio station KUOW recently interviewed Tom Ikeda, a former businessman and scientist and founding executive director of Densho, a non-profit dedicated to preserving the history of the Japanese internment. It was titled “Haunting symbolism: Migrant children are being held where Japanese-Americans were detained.” Indeed, Ikeda sees President Trump reenacting the policies of World War II, when people of Japanese ancestry were put in what the website calls “concentration camps.” Ikeda claims that “most of the country didn’t know it was happening.”

 

Actually, in 1942, you might not have known about the detentions if you never read a newspaper, went to the movies, talked to people who did, or in other ways stayed under the proverbial “rock,” as I demonstrate in my book debunking Zinn’s claims. Zinn writes that the United States came “close to direct duplication of Fascism. This was in its treatment of the Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast.” In a chillingly “calm” way FDR “signed Executive Order 9066, in February 1942, giving the army the power, without warrants or indictments or hearings, to arrest every Japanese-American on the West Coast—110,000 men, women, and children—to take them from their homes, transport them to camps far into the interior, and keep them there under prison conditions.” Furthermore, according to Zinn, “the story of the Japanese-Americans” was not “known to the general public” until the “month the war ended in Asia, September 1945.” And that was largely because “an article appeared in Harper’s Magazine by Yale Law Professor Eugene V. Rostow, calling the Japanese evacuation "our worst wartime mistake." Zinn then asks, “Was it a ‘mistake’—or was it an action to be expected from a nation with a long history of racism and which was fighting a war, not to end racism, but to retain the fundamental elements of the American system?”

 

It’s surprising that when Zinn’s book first came out in 1980 that there wasn’t a groundswell of opposition by those who had lived through World War II and remembered watching Milton Eisenhower narrating a film shown in movie theaters about the internments or reading daily newspaper accounts after Pearl Harbor about the arrests of Japanese suspected of engaging in illegal activity (along with supporters of Italian and German fascism), and then about the discussion about the order, the signing of the order, the construction of the camps, and the safe and orderly transit to them.

 

Zinn wanted readers to believe that the American government acted like the Nazis, shipping off certain ethnic groups in the dead of night to prison camps far into “the interior.”

 

Actually, Howard Zinn, who was a young man when this was taking place, could have read an article published in the September 1942 Harper’s, the same magazine from which he quoted in order to claim that internments were finally made “known to the public” in 1945. In June 1942, journalist Carey McWilliams visited the camp at the racetrack in Santa Ana—in the Los Angeles area. McWilliams reported that the camp housing 18,562 had “almost everything that any California city of comparable size would have: newspaper, hospital, police and fire departments, recreational centers, stores, ball parks, workshops, and libraries”—and “a flourishing post of the American Legion.” The food was good and ample, and the kitchens were clean. To counter a meme that evidently was already in circulation, he stated, “It would certainly not be accurate to characterize Santa Anita as a ‘concentration camp.’”

 

In fact, there are Japanese-Americans who recall stories from relatives. One, political science professor, Ken Masugi, confirms McWilliams’ description. He tells about family members who chose to leave the camps (not prisons) for jobs and school in Chicago. He also stated in his article, “Any honest study of the relocation or WWII will discuss the Niihau episode” which took place only hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor and on the remote Hawaiian island of the name where a Japanese fighter-bomber landed. The American-born Japanese farmer and his wife, brought to the scene by native Hawaiian Hawila Kaleohano as interpreters, decided to help the pilot and claim “the island for the Emperor.” Both the pilot and farmer were killed in the fight that ensued. The incident was publicized in the Roberts Commission Report the following month.

 

The author of the 1945 article cited by Zinn, Eugene V. Rostow--a hawkish Democrat who served under Presidents Roosevelt, Johnson, and Reagan--along with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Republican Senator Robert Taft, and conservative African American journalist George Schuyler, opposed the internments.

 

Zinn’s goal, however, was to present the internments as an undercover right-wing conspiracy and himself as the heroic expositor.

 

Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez, educated like most millennials to see all internments on American soil as equivalent to Nazi concentration camps, utters “never again” without any apparent historical awareness. Her fist-thumping is the well-rehearsed gesture of the millennial social justice warrior boosted in self-esteem and educated in Zinn-inspired role-play lessons. Her degree in economics from Boston University did little good and much harm, as her ignorance about economics and government demonstrates.

 

But as one interviewee who attended BU from 2006 to 2008, told me, Howard Zinn, though retired from teaching, was still “idolized” on that campus.

 

Howard Zinn repeatedly said that “real learning takes place outside the classroom.” He meant the street protest and the jail cell. He has been dead for nearly a decade, but his work is coming to fruition in violent street protests and in the halls of Congress.

The B-17 squadron that began to bring America back in the Pacific

Larry Thornberry November 23, 2018

It’s appropriate that I started writing this on Thanksgiving morning. We all have every reason to be thankful for the courageous Americans who stood up and did their duty during WWII, including the flyers military historian Bruce Gamble brings us in the very readable Kangaroo Squadron.......They flew the sturdy and all around commendable B-17, one of America’s reliable war horses in WWII and a character in this book almost as much men who flew them. The squadron’s name comes from the fact that these American warriors were stationed mostly in Australia in the early days of WWII, when America and her allies had few troops, few assets, and little in the way of prospects in the South Pacific.........

The Pacific didn’t get much in 1941 and 1942. But it got the Kangaroo Squadron, the members of which performed admirably while having to deal not just with a well-equipped and battle-hardened Japanese air force and navy, but with primitive conditions, tropical diseases, bad food, bad water, terrible flying weather, little in the way of the parts and maintenance their planes needed, and in the case of crews downed in New Guinea, perhaps the most hostile-to-humans environment on the planet. Most of the men whose experiences Gamble chronicles, whether or not they ever battled the Japanese, had to battle with one or more of malaria, dengue fever, dysentery, typhus, hookworm, or various skin diseases we will not linger over.

Another complicating factor and a very real danger for flyers in the Pacific campaign was the sheer size of this huge ocean which covers a quarter of the planet’s surface. Navigation was a much more primitive art in those days. No global positioning systems to exactly pinpoint where an aircraft is in relation to where it’s going. Flyers had to rely on a navigator, hopefully well trained, with charts and an instrument to “shoot the stars” (if it wasn’t daytime or too cloudy). Crossing thousands of miles of ocean, the navigator’s position estimate couldn’t be verified until a landmark could be seen. And guess how many landmarks there are in thousands of square miles of ocean in which navigators hoped to find their way to the tiny islands that were their destinations. God had to be looking over those who made it...........To Read More.....

Kangaroo Squadron: American Courage in the Darkest Days of World War II
By Bruce Gamble (Da Capo Press, 400 pages, $28)

70 Years Since the Marshall Plan

Originally produced on June 5, 2017 for Mauldin Economics, LLC

By George Friedman and Jacob L. Shapiro

Seventy years ago on June 5, US Secretary of State George Marshall gave a speech at Harvard University. Few speeches in modern times have had as much geopolitical consequence. In just eight paragraphs, Marshall made the case for significant US involvement in Europe’s economic reconstruction after World War II.

Within 10 months, the United States passed the Foreign Assistance Act of 1948. Better known as the Marshall Plan, it provided over $13 billion to 16 European countries (approximately $150 billion in 2017 dollars). According to the Congressional Research Service, the annual appropriation in 1949 alone accounted for 12% of the entire US federal budget.

The Marshall Plan became a significant instrument of American power. It represented a substantial sacrifice for the US, but one that paid dividends long after the US stopped providing funds to Marshall Plan recipients.

At a time when the world is divided on the merits of nationalism versus internationalism, it’s worth reflecting on why the Marshall Plan worked.......To Read More....