Eradicating totalitarianism; or I love it when Huffington Post makes a point for me

Hiroshima
Hiroshima

Huffington Post leans Left.  It is not a media outlet that believes that the only way to destroy the jihadist mindset is to wipe it out from top to bottom.  Instead, HuffPo’s editorial policy makes clear that, in keeping with most major media outlets, it’s very certain that, somewhere out there, there’s a peaceful resolution to our problems with jihadist Islam — and one, moreover, that does not involve HuffPo writers getting shot or beheaded.  The HuffPo collective believes this despite daily news reports demosntrating that the jihadis have world domination as their goal, and that they intend to achieve it through the purifying force of hundreds of millions of deaths.

Even Qatari-owned Al Jazeera is slightly further along the path of jihadist discovery than is the American media.  It is Al Jazeera, after all, that took the time to interview Jurgen Todenhofer, a German journalist who managed to embed with ISIL and return alive. Todenhofer, as is true for so many European (and American) Leftists, seems to have gone in assuming that the bad press about ISIS, much of which ISIS promulgates itself, just couldn’t be true. Imagine his surprise to discover that ISIS is even worse than we imagined:

As far as our meetings with the ISIL fighters were concerned, the discussions were very hard. I have read the Quran many times in German translation, and I always asked them about the value of mercy in Islam. I didn’t see any mercy in their behaviour. Something that I don’t understand at all is the enthusiasm in their plan of religious cleansing, planning to kill the non-believers… They also will kill Muslim democrats because they believe that non-ISIL-Muslims put the laws of human beings above the commandments of God.

These were very difficult discussions, especially when they were talking about the number of people who they are willing to kill. They were talking about hundreds of millions. They were enthusiastic about it, and I just cannot understand that.

Unfortunately, when push comes to shove, Todenhofer falls back into the usual rhetorical tropes of the Left: Make nice with Islam, stop bombing the bad guys, let them fight it out against each other.  Qatar, which is trying to be aggressively modern while maintaining a medieval economy (complete with serfs), all the while paying off jihadists in the hope that, like the crocodile, the jihadists will eat them last, tries to tip toe that same delicate line — it warns how dangerous jihadis are (and the jihadis are a lot closer to Qatar than to the US), all the while squirming away from doing anything that might turn the jihadis’ gimlet eyes on Qatar itself.

I don’t believe in any of that “peaceful solution” talk. I believe that, when people have imbibed with their mother’s milk a toxic ideology dedicated to murdering and enslaving all but a select few, they don’t just walk away from it or wear themselves out in a few months or years. Instead, if unchecked, they spread a wide swath of death and destruction. Look at how the Soviets managed to kill endlessly for seventy years while the Chinese communists kept the bodies piling up for forty years. Between the two of them, guesstimates as to the violent and vile deaths they cause run between 70,000,000 and 100,000,000 children, women, and men.

A survivor of a Japanese concentration camp
A survivor of a Japanese concentration camp

The reason that the German Nazi and Japanese Bushido culture didn’t achieve the decades’-long “success” that the Soviets and ChiCom did (although not for want of trying) is because the Allies — inspired by Churchill and powered by America — destroyed them. We didn’t do targeted strikes. We didn’t engage in endless rounds of peace talks. We didn’t diddle away time with partially enforced sanctions. We didn’t back down when they threatened us.

Instead, we ripped them out, root and branch, threw them away, and policed the next three generations to make very, very sure that they had fully abandoned their predecessors’ evil ways and embarked on a different path, one more conducive to freedom and peace.

Which gets me back to HuffPo. As I said, the HuffPo collective would never be caught dead admitting that the only way to preserve and promote universal freedom is to kill those whose ultimate goal is to wipe out liberty. And yet, apparently without irony, HuffPo has just published a post promoting a show of post-WWII photographs, and in that post, they make a stellar argument in favor of turning every gun in the Western world onto the jihadists as soon as possible:

After Japan’s surrender in World War II, the country rapidly changed from an imperial nation under an emperor, to a democratic and demilitarized state.

Much of Japan lay in ruins after the war, devastated by air raids and the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet the country’s economy grew so fast that by 1964, Tokyo hosted the Olympic Games. Japan adopted a new, progressive constitution, allied with the United States and enshrined limits on the use of military force.

A new exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery in the U.K., organized by The Japan Foundation, shows Japan’s transformation during this period through the work of 11 leading Japanese post-war photographers. “These two decades constituted a period truly brimming with creative energy – a time in which democracy led to the restoration of vitality and free photographic expression,” the Gallery explains.  (Emphasis mine.)

Modern Hiroshima
Modern Hiroshima

Looking at that text and at the amazing pictures following it, one really has to wonder:  Does the HuffPo collective actually bother to read what it writes?  Does it realize how stupid it’s “peace at any price in our time” position is, or how the reality of the world, when the collective periodically lets it peek through, invariably puts the lie to the Leftist philosophy when faced with totalitarian violence?

By the way, as I was looking for pictures of the infamous Bataan Death March, I learned that, just a few days ago, William G. Adair, an Army infantry man who survived the Bataan Death March and three years in a Japanese concentration camp, died at 97:

William G. Adair became a prisoner of war 11 days before his 25th birthday. He endured more than three years in Japanese prison camps during World War II, an ordeal that included the Bataan Death March.

Adair, 97, died Jan. 6 of congestive heart failure at Traymore Nursing Center in Dallas. The Alabama native had lived in Dallas for 64 years.

[snip]

Adair was born and raised in Anniston, Ala. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Alabama and enlisted in the Army infantry. After he completed his training, he was assigned to instruct troops in the Philippines.

In October 1941, he started training recruits on the Bataan Peninsula. Two months later, the U.S. entered the war after Pearl Harbor was attacked.

“The war started before we could train them to shoot guns,” Adair said in 2010 for a Library of Congress oral history project. “We had coconuts set up, put these boys back with five rounds of ammunition. That’s all the training they had before we went into battle.”

American and Philippine troops surrendered to the Japanese on April 9, 1942. Adair tossed his gun and valuables into the jungle and drove to the town of Mariveles, where he jumped aboard an ambulance.

He and two others rode part of the way to Camp O’Donnell — an internment camp for Filipino and American POWs and the final stop on the 65-mile Bataan Death March — before being discovered by the Japanese and forced to join the infamous death march.

“He didn’t have to walk [the entire distance], which probably saved his life, because he didn’t weigh too much to begin with,” his wife said.

The prisoners were starved, beaten and traumatized. After his group of prisoners was transferred to the Cabanatuan POW camp, two Japanese soldiers paraded before them the severed head of a Filipino civilian tied by its hair to a bamboo pole.

“You have to look at it like it were a movie and push it out of your mind,” he said in 2005. “What else could you do?”

Adair was held at several locations before being sent to the Zentsuji POW camp in Japan. He was liberated on Sept. 6, 1945. He received the Bronze Star for his service and five decorations from the Filipino government.

My mother, another Japanese concentration camp survive, turns 92 in five weeks.  These two survived, barely.  It’s crazy that, within their lifetimes, we’re facing again, and running away from, an ideology so evil it manages to put both Nazis and Bushidos to shame.