Parallels with a war long ago and far away...

 Friends,

After reading this article at the Conservative Treehouse, and listening to Pentagon spokesman John Kirby in the vid embedded in that article, I was reminded of a war long ago and far away.

In WWII in the Pacific, the Japanese propaganda kept insisting, as the war wore on, that they were winning huge battles and decimating American naval and land forces; that the mongrel Americans could in no way stand up to the divinely inspired (i.e. the Jap Moon goddess Amaterasu) Nippon race, that the "Yamato Spirit" is indomitable, much like what this Pentagon spokesman Kirby in this video said about the Ukrainian fighting spirit.

However, in '43-'45, the Japanese people keep noticing the Jap military was winning these decisive victories in geography that somehow kept getting nearer and nearer to Japan! Odd, that, huh? That, and they experienced increasing food shortages, and ever less fuel and material.

Ain't that what we're seeing here? 'Oh, those amazing Ukrainians! They got the Russians on the run!' Yet the Russians are bombing the crap out of specific targets now in WESTERN UKRAINE! (I wrote about the formerly Polish city of Lvov, now Ukrainian Lviv, in my essay fo the other day.) And in the eastern half the country, Russian forces keep moving, slowly, maybe, but surely, onward. And we hear, 'Oh, Putin is panicked, fired 8 generals and two top spy chiefs and "unnamed sources" are reporting he's calling on China for help!' (Perhaps it is like the Japanese deposing Tojo after Saipan; of course, that was just "window dressing". Tojo's successors didn't deviate from his policies.)

Maybe. Maybe not. Perhaps some sort of truth lies behind some of this. But I think basically this is the sort of propaganda that did not fool the starving Japanese in '43-'45. It should not fool us, either.

Then, too, there's the fact that the U.S. military, since General William Tecumseh Sherman in 1864 in Georgia, has had a habit of fast maneuvering through territory, by-passing strong points, and "going for the jugular" because they're generally not trying to occupy territory, but crush the enemy. MacArthur learned to do that (it took some time to teach him) in the Western Pacific campaign, but then when he landed on Luzon in the Philippines, he shot through northern Luzon in true Blitzkrieg fashion, but his intention was to take and occupy Manila. Unfortunately for thousands of Filipinos and U.S. troops – and the irreplaceable heritage of the Filipino people – fanatical Japanese dug into Manila like maggots, and refused to leave the city. Commanding General Tomojuki Yamashita (1885-1946), the famous 'Tiger of Malaya' and 'the Beast of Bataan', refused clearly order their exit and said he would not declare Manila an "open city" (as MacArthur had done in 1942) because it "would reflect badly on the Japanese Martial spirit". (Yes, Yamashita actually said that; MacArthur made sure he hanged in in 1946.)

Thus, although MacArthur refused to allow the city to be bombed from the air, American artillery had to destroy the historic city on the ground. Street-by-street, house-by-house, room-by-room. The U.S. Army (MacArthur didn't allow the Marines anywhere near his operations) had to level the historic downtown completely and kill almost every single Japanese soldier and sailor in the entire area. It was as brutal a fight at the Brits had with the Japs at horrific battles at Imphal and Kohima in Nagaland in northeast India. (These fights made Stalingrad look, in comparison, almost mild.)

Every Japanese soldier and officer seemed to go insane, raping and bayoneting women, children, slaughtering ALL civilians they had their claws on. They raped the women at the German consulate/hospital, too, their own "allies" and bayoneted the men. Unspeakable slaughter – infants were not spared; then, like American Indians after a battle, they mutilated the dead. (This is what paganism really looks like.)

Manila, the "Pearl of the Orient" the only truly beautiful European-style (Spanish-Italian architecture) city in the Orient, four-hundred years old, full of Catholic Churches, ornate public buildings, universities and colleges galore, tree-lined boulevards, a magical, fairy-tale beauty of a city from the Catholic Empire that Royal Spain once ruled, was utterly flattened and demolished. Unlike cities in Europe, it could not remotely be restored, just completely rebuilt as something without the magic. And then, too, its libraries and official records going back centuries were lost, and a heritage so needed by the new nation of The Philippines was irretrievably lost. MacArthur had foolishly declared it liberated before this hand-to-hand fighting occurred; after the last insane Jap was killed, he rushed into the city center to celebrate its 'liberation' with a speech and parade, and was left speechless by what he saw. It's the only time I know of in his life that he publicly wept and could not finish a speech he started to give. They held no parade. Perhaps it is no wonder he never returned to the Philippines once he moved on to conquered Japan.

My point: in the Ukraine, the Russians are not going for an American "shock and awe" blitzkrieg; rather, they're encircling Ukrainian cities, and in the slow process squeezing out refugees on open escape routes, with the goal of either taking the cities intact or killing what fighters remain "holed up". It is similar to their maneuvers in the latter part of WWII. Sometimes the American approach works better; but it didn't in Manila. And in Iraq and Afghanistan, the American tactics just left chaos behind in its wake. Clearly, the Russians have a different agenda, that much ought to be obvious (except to the MSM). So, we'll just have to see.

N.B. Personally, I think it was perfectly predictable, after three years of fighting them, that the American generals should have known that the Japanese would do what they did in Manila; so Roosevelt or General Marshall or whoever should have offered a deal with the Japanese: "You declare Manila an open city and leave it and its people intact, or we will use our B-29s not just to bomb Tokyo, etc., into oblivion, but we'll specifically target Kyoto, your ancient ancestral artistic jewel of a capital." In actuality, Kyoto was the one Japanese city we didn't bomb. I'm sorry to write this but after what the Japanese did to Manila – as well as the infamous six-week massacre in late 1937-38 known as the "Rape of Nanking" – it should have been Kyoto we nuked instead of Nagasaki, which had a relatively large number of Catholics. The bombardier of the Boxcar B-29 actually used the Nagasaki Catholic Cathedral as his landmark to target the a-bomb "Fat Man' drop.

History reveals how brutal we humans can be; the Christian religion is the only one that reveals why we all shouldn't be exterminated. None of the rest can answer that query.

An Préachán