Buchanan is right ...

... his code of morality will "get us to heaven" -- faster at least.

I probably won't have time to do this one justice, but then we all know by now that Pat Buchanan is a Nazi apologist anyway. (That post is second in Google for "Pat Buchanan"+"Nazi Apologist" and third for the latter phrase alone.)

Of course, one might argue that Pat Buchanan, in addition to being a Nazi apologist writes self-fisking material! A few choice passages should show you what I mean. All emphasis is mine.

That good came out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is undeniable. In a week, Japan surrendered, World War II ended and, across the Japanese empire, soldiers laid down their arms. Thousands of U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Japanese who would have perished in an invasion of Japan survived, as did Allied POWs who might have been executed on the orders of Japanese commanders when we landed.
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But were the means used -- the destruction in seconds of two cities, inflicting instant death on 120,000 men, women and children, and an agonizing death from burns and radiation on scores of thousands more -- moral?

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But if terrorism is the massacre of innocents to break the will of rulers, were not Hiroshima and Nagasaki terrorism on a colossal scale?

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why reason (with man's life as a standard) -- and not intrinsicism -- is the proper foundation for a system of morality. If an act -- like dropping a bomb -- is intrinsically evil, it makes no difference why that act was done. If for nothing else, we should thank Pat Buchanan for providing such a good example of the moral bankruptcy of an intrincisist ethics. (And, come to think of it, this is an excellent example of how intrincism and moral relativism end up being two sides of the same coin: Both cut morality off from man's life by failing to rationally evaluate man's actions. Here, the moral relativist will fail to condemn the initiation of force by Japan and so fail to distinguish it from retaliation by America. The moral intrincisist simply condemns any use of force (or at least beyond an arbitrary point as Buchanan does here). Interesting....)

So Pat Buchanan's already written an apologia for the Nazis, ably fisked by VodkaPundit here. But apparently, that's not enough. Now he has to call Harry Truman and the Greatest Generation terrorists!

Oh yeah. And if there was any doubt he didn't like what we did to his heroes, the Nazis, look what he says en route to basically repeating his loony accusation of terrorism.

Churchill did not deny what the Allied air war was about. Before departing for Yalta, he ordered Operation Thunderclap, a campaign to "de-house" civilians to clog roads so German soldiers could not move to stop the offensive of the Red Army. British Air Marshal "Bomber" Harris put Dresden, a jewel of a city and haven for hundreds of thousands of terrified refugees, on the target list.

On the first night, 770 Lancasters arrived around 10:00. In two waves, 650,000 incendiary bombs rained down, along with 1,474 tons of high explosives. The next morning, 500 B-17s arrived in two waves, with 300 fighter escorts to strafe fleeing survivors.

Estimates of the dead in the Dresden firestorm range from 35,000 to 250,000. Wrote The Associated Press, "Allied war chiefs have made the long-awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombing of German populated centers as a ruthless expedient to hasten Hitler's doom."

He does not say so explicitly, but this implies that he also regards our war against the Germans as terroristic, too.

And pardon me, but isn't the "ruthless expedience" required in war part of why we have sayings like, "War is hell?" That would be, Pat, because if we don't so it, it gets done to us. By this point, one hopes that even Buchanan is going to find a way to extricate himself from having to call America a terrorist nation. But he does not.

Yet, whatever the mindset of Japan's warlords in August 1945, the moral question remains. In a just war against an evil enemy, is the deliberate slaughter of his women and children in the thousands justified to break his will to fight? Traditionally, the Christian's answer has been no.

There you have it.

I think Don Watkins makes a hell of a lot more sense!

When a man's government steps beyond its proper bounds, when it violates his liberty, it is his responsibility to secure his liberty (either by working to change the government or by leaving the country). If he doesn't, or can't, he has to endure the consequences (just as he must endure the consequences if he won't or can't feed himself).

The citizen of an aggressor nation may very well be innocent (although usually he isn't), but he cannot ask the innocent nation (or its soldiers) to bear the painful consequences of the actions his government initiated -– since he is responsible for his government.

This is why nothing overrides the principle that a nation defending itself may use whatever means necessary to destroy its enemy as quickly as possible with as few casualties on its side as possible. And it is that principle that makes the use of the atomic bomb to end World War II one of the most profoundly moral acts of the 20th Century.

And so does Yaron Brook of ARI, when he says:

On August 6, 1945, American airmen detonated a nuclear bomb over Hiroshima, Japan, and three days later dropped a second nuclear bomb on Nagasaki. The bombs are estimated to have killed almost 300,000, most of them civilians.

Despite paroxysms of America-bashing by our professional intellectuals on the sixtieth anniversary of the bombings, America should be proud to have dropped the Bomb.

America was not the aggressor in World War II, but the victim of a brutal attack. Any deaths that occurred in America's self-defense, therefore, are to be blamed on the aggressors who made them necessary. It is the solemn responsibility of the U.S. government to protect American citizens, ruthlessly destroying those who threaten us. If civilians die in the process, as they did in Japan, it merely underscores the enormity of the stakes when a populace embraces (or submits to) a murderous, dictatorial regime.

Military historians may debate how much the Bomb shortened the war and how many American lives were saved. But the fact is American lives were saved--and this is the reason America should be proud of its grave decision sixty years ago.

It is worth remembering too that in the reconstruction of Japan there were no insurgents, no Japanese roadside bombs killing our soldiers. One reason is that the United States had shown, in the clearest possible terms, our willingness to wage total war against our enemies. Our military strategists in Iraq could learn from those who, sixty years ago, decided to spare no means in bringing the Japanese nation to its knees.

Buchanan has made himself clear: His code of morality places arbitrary dictates over all, including your life.

-- CAV