Tucker: what happened?

His recent diatribes condemning Israel and rationalizing Islamic terrorist depredations therein were bad enough, but this I consider a bridge too damned far for my taste.

On Tucker Carlson's Moral Myopia
Tucker Carlson recently was on the Joe Rogan Show and quipped that dropping nukes on Japan was “prima facie evil.” He said:

I love, by the way, that people on my side — I’ll just admit it, on the Right — have spent the last 80 years defending dropping nuclear weapons on civilians. Like, are you joking? That’s just, like, prima facie evil. If you can’t — ‘Well, if we hadn’t done that, then this, that, the other thing, that was actually a great savings’ — like, no. It’s wrong to drop nuclear weapons on people, and if you find yourself arguing that it’s a good thing to drop nuclear weapons on people, then you are evil. Like, it’s not a tough one, right? It’s not a hard call for me. So, with that in mind, like, why would you want nuclear weapons? It’s like just a mindless, childish sort of intellectual exercise to justify, like, ‘Oh no, it’s really good because someone else could get’ — how about, no? How about spending all of your effort to prevent this from happening?

Carlson is fond of moral absolutes. One of his favorite tactics is to monologue, make a point, and end it with a laugh and say, “Obviously.” Or, like his appearance on Rogan’s show, claim that a group has taken a position that they never have taken. He claimed that people on “the right” have said that nuking two cities was a “good thing.” That’s false. Allow me to speak for “the right.” War is bad. Ending a war is good.

Carlson’s moral myopia avoids the obvious. Far more civilians died during conventional bombings than died as a result of atomic bombs. On March 9 and 10, 1944, Tokyo was firebombed. It was called the “Night of Black Snow,” and it killed about 100,000 people – most of them civilians. Like Dresden, people fled to water and were “boiled.” WWII was but 50 years removed from men on horses attacking entrenched combatants, often with swords in hand. Bombs, in WWII, were “dumb.” Gravity took them to the earth and killed people – noncombatants and soldiers alike. War 80 years ago was very messy.

War still IS messy. War is ALWAYS messy, always will be, among many other double-plus-ungood things: regrettable, painful, hideous, and many more dire descriptives spring to mind.

Know what else they are though, sadly enough? Eternal, in the sense that humans will never stop causing and waging them against each other, whether at the tribal level fought between primitives using the lowest of low technology weapons or between more advanced nations and/or alliances of same. That’s just how it is, because that’s the way people are. Unless and until we’ve evolved beyond governments themselves, a development which ain’t exactly in our foreseeable future, as Francis knows:

Nuclear explosives will continue to exist. That djinn cannot be rebottled. And while we tolerate governments, we will endure wars. For nearly eighty years, the nuclear arsenals of the United States and other powers have gone unused. It can be argued that the knowledge of their existence and their destructive power has kept the degree of peace we’ve enjoyed since World War II; I’ve done so myself. But there have been wars over those eight decades – many of them – and not one of them has confined the suffering it caused to willing combatants alone.

There’s no point in demanding that governments agree not to assault civilians and civilian properties. There’s no point in demanding that they refrain from conscription. There’s no point in demanding that they limit their weapons to some agreed-upon threshold of destructive power. They won’t do it. There’s no way to force them to do it.

This is the world in which we live. It’s hagridden by States, and States are inherently predatory, violent, and heedless of moral considerations. You cannot compel them to limit their predations or their destructions. You cannot have peace while you tolerate them, and a tragic number of people – some of them very smart – sincerely believe that “we must have government.”

If there’s more to say on this most agonizing of all worldly subjects, I’ll leave it to someone else to say it. I’ve said my piece elsewhere, and further bloviation is not for me.

Fair enough. Now, back to the first article.

Carlson and Rogan didn’t moralize over Hamburg, Dresden, or Tokyo. Instead, they bobbed their heads and lamented the use of a particular type of weapon, not the death toll or civilians roasting alive from firebombs.

Even with that horror, Japan was not moved to surrender after Tokyo was set on fire 17 months before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan didn’t surrender after a half million of her civilians had died from conventional bombs. Japan only surrendered when Truman bluffed and assured Japan that her cities would be leveled with more atomic bombs.

When Truman ordered Fat Man and Little Boy to drop on Japanese cities, he saved countless lives, both civilians and combatants. When Emperor Hirohito ordered his country to stand down, he saved countless lives – both civilian and combatants. Both decisions saved the lives of Marines like my father. Men who came back to build lives and raise families. The deaths of civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were regrettable, but the lives of Americans and Japanese were spared because of it. That act was “good” in that the resulting surrender and peace clearly were.

More lives were spared when Japan surrendered than had America been forced to invade Japan. The lives of countless Marines were spared. The lives of countless Japanese were spared. When my dad saw innumerable white flags on gun emplacements, he knew the odds of him surviving another year of combat were slim to none.

That fact might be uncomfortable, but it is nonetheless a fact. Am I sorry that my dad survived the war because two atomic weapons were used?

No, Tucker. I am not the least bit sorry that my dad didn’t die on a Japanese beach. Sorry, not sorry.

Nope, me neither, except in the verymost general philosophical sense that most non-politicians regret and deplore ALL war. Just to put the capper on it:

75 Years Later, Purple Hearts Made for an Invasion of Japan are Still Being Awarded
The decoration, which goes to troops wounded in battle and the families of those killed in action, had been only one of countless thousands of supplies produced for the planned 1945 invasion of Japan, which military leaders believed could last into 1947.

Fortunately, the invasion never took place. All the other implements of that war --- tanks and LSTs, bullets and K-rations --- have long since been sold, scrapped or used up, but these medals struck for their great grandfathers’ generation are still being pinned on the chests of young soldiers.

In all, approximately 1,531,000 Purple Hearts were produced for the war effort, with production reaching its peak as the Armed Services geared up for the invasion of Japan. Despite wastage, pilfering, and items that were simply lost, the reserve of decorations was approximately 495,000 after the war.

By 1976, roughly 370,000 Purple Hearts had been earned by servicemen and women who fought in America’s Asian wars, as well as trouble spots in the Middle East and Europe. This total also included a significant number issued to World War II and even World War I veterans whose paperwork had finally caught up with them or who filed for replacement of missing awards.

It was at this point that the government agency responsible for storage and distribution of military medals, the Defense Supply Center in Philadelphia (DSCP), found that their decades-old stock of Purple Hearts had dwindled to the point that it had to be replenished. 

The organization ordered a small number of medals in 1976 to bolster the “shelf worn” portions of the earlier production still retained by the Armed Services at scattered locations around the globe. It was then that an untouched warehouse load of the medals was rediscovered after falling off the books for decades. The DSCP suddenly found itself in possession of nearly 125,000 Purple Hearts to add to their continually diminishing stock.

Interesting. Tucker may not see any necessity for dropping Fat Man and Little Boy on the Japs, but it appears the WW2-era US government would beg to differ. And FederalGovCo today? Those assclowns would’ve probably surrendered on Dec 8th, 1941, weeping and begging for mercy.