Echoes of World War II

Those Goddamn Japs. I have heard that before from the Greatest Generation. You cant blame them. They fought the Japanese for four years after the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec 7 1941. The Japanese embodied everything that Americans hated for those war years. They attacked us and assumed we would cower and that they could consolidate their gains in the Pacific before we could fight back. A few of our carriers were not at Pearl and that happened to save us for that scenario. But what still echoes today is that Americans hated the Japanese yes because they attacked us, but there was a racial component.

Imperialist Dogs. That leaked out of Kims mouth recently. Close your eyes and listen to the the hyperinflammatory rhetoric and the racial component of the Korean Crisis  hits you between the eyes. The Americans are the aggressors and the Koreans are the pure people who have been wronged. North Koreans believe they are the purest race and that Kim is divinely chosen. In World War II we had the Emperor who was divinely chosen. The problem was that the Japanese were willing to fight to the last man woman and child for the Emperor. It took two atomic bombs to get him to tell his people it was over and even then the military wanted to fight on.

The North Koreans view us the same way we view them. Different. Odd. Dangerous. This was World War II thinking that allowed us to drop those two bombs. This is the racial component. Somehow the Japanese were not human. They had done inhuman things and so that allowed us to not treat them that as humans. We are drifting quickly to this same thinking. Hopefully, people will not be saying sixty years on...those Goddamn North Koreans.

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair

Otto Warmbier Stirs a Sleeping Giant

I saw him when he was first arrested It did not look good. He was heading into hell. Otto Warmbier has died. He had so much brain damage the tissue in his brain had died from lack of blood flow. Heart attack or respiratory arrest the doctors said...after that they had no explanation. Teddy Roosevelt would have had a very simple answer for the North Koreans. Lock and load. He would have screamed from the rooftops to attack and would not have been satisfied until the first American soldiers hit the beach. Things were simpler in 1906.

Otto Warmbier took down a political poster and for that he was sentenced to fifteen years. This we know. It was their revenge. Now what? Remember the Maine. That started the war with with Spain. Teddy saw it as inevitable. The war had to be fought and settled. It was. Now we have the Koreans building an ICBM. Teddy would see this one way. The issue would have to be settled sooner or later. Might as well be sooner.

Something about a human face put on the nebulous war of words. Otto Warmbier is gone for taking a political poster down. But we know he was killed for much more. It was the only way to strike at a giant. Step on his toes, tweak his nose, spit in his eye. What does the giant do? When Teddy Roosevelt died Woodrow Wilson said, death had to take Roosevelt when he was sleeping, otherwise there would have been a fight...

Otto never woke up, but you never know when a sleeping giant might.

Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt