Boston Globe Columnist: America Fought Japanese In WWII Due To "Foul Racism"

Again: happy Fourth of July, huh?

Even as the valor of what they did on one beachhead after another is properly honored, the American fighters of the Pacific War were not heroes. The desperation of island combat included exchanged barbarities of which no one would willingly speak for a generation. On the American side, there were foul racism, vengeful refusals to take prisoners, a generalized brutality that extended to a savage air war.

And there's more, of course. As The New Editor paraphrases, if you didn't like our reasons for fighting WWII, you'll hate our reasons for fighting in Iraq:

This isn't even moral equivalence with fascists. At least they killed for a reason. We're worse.

Note: Do not question James Carroll's patriotism.

James Carroll loves America. It's that passionate, crazy sort of love Ike Turner is justifiably famous for.

Not to give away the ending of What's Love Got To Do With It?, but James, honestly, America doesn't need you. After America dumps your abusive ass, we'll go on to record modestly-popular themes for James Bond and Mad Max movies.

Relinking Something I Didn't Write: Punitive Liberalism. An essay on the left's nasty impulse to forever put our country in the hairshirt.

It's only through savaging America that one expresses one's "higher patriotism," you see.

The sub-hed is What Regan Vanquished.

Well, not quite vanquished. Contended against, diminished, won a few battles against.

They're just not going away.

There is a certain sort of person whose intellectual vanity causes him to reject what he considers the low-class and uneducated "standard" form of patriotism exhibited by his cutlural and moral inferiors. It's the impulse to differentiate oneself from one's (putative) lessers and thereby elevate oneself into the ranks of the elite.

The same shallow impulse that causes eggheads to reject good movies, such as Dumb & Dumber, because they've got mass appeal.

It's high school jackassery, in other words. No different than suddenly deciding 'N Sync is now 'N Stync.

Carroll, you're not denigrating your intellectual inferiors when you denigrate the heroism of American soldiers. You're denigrating yourself. You're simply showing yourself to be a bitter, nasty, intellectually-insecure (and rightly so) old hack whose politics are, and will forever be, shaped almost entirely by a fucking Crosby Stills & Nash song.

posted by Ace at 04:02 PM

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