Children's Crusades a la Postmodern America

In the Old Testament, King Rehoboam the heir of Solomon wanted to be flattered, and listening to flatterers caused him only harm. In modern times, vast segments of society can be deceived with flattery all at once. Notably, political manipulators can flatter emotion-controlled minors into thinking that they’ll be heroes if they do whatever the manipulators want. Yes yes yes yes yes, this manipulation CAN originate from either end of the political spectrum; but anyone possessing one-quarter of a clue about present conditions, knows very well that it is the left which is ALLOWED TO GET AWAY WITH deceitful flattery of the young.

Especially when leftists remember to use the popular buzzwords like “making a difference.” Then their trickery will seem innocent.

     Who can object to building playgrounds for inner-city children? Who can object to saving dolphins from being killed by tuna-fishery operations? Who can criticize the historical founders of labor unions, who met a crying need in a time when workers had no protection against unfair bosses? Of course, no one can credibly object to those undertakings. THEREFORE, if you have something despicable in mind, you may find it useful to camouflage your despicable plan under the cover of a book for juveniles, honoring such obviously commendable activities.

This is exactly what a man called Phillip Hoose did in 1993, when he wrote a book titled “It’s Our World, Too!” His book had a reprinting in 2002, a time when hard leftists were anxious to steer America’s response to Scimitarist violence in directions which would serve the hard left. The book’s author pretended to be in awe of the innate wisdom and virtue of children and teenagers; in reality, like other hard leftists, he was EXPLOITING THE IGNORANCE AND GULLIBILITY of children and teenagers by inflating their vanity.

For instance, he praised the air-headed girl Samantha Smith, who imagined that writing a letter to Yuri Andropov would promote world peace. In concrete fact, this naïve child never made even the tiniest little dent in the ironclad authoritarian tyranny of the Soviet Union. But Mister Hoose absurdly pretended that she HAD accomplished something. He had to pretend this, because it was in his faction’s program to pretend that Communist tyranny was not in any way a cause of unrest in the world.

AMERICA was required to be the cause of injustice and violence.

Which brings us to the most shamelessly America-bashing item in the book: the chapter titled “The Children’s Statue For Peace.”

Already in 1993, kids were woefully uninformed about what the Second World War had been about. This ignorance has not been remedied since. The ONLY thing about World War Two that you can find out from Hoose’s book is that those mean, hateful Americans dropped an evil atomic bomb on Hiroshima, resulting in deaths of children.

The chapter dwells on how American schoolkids did such heroic world-saving projects as turning an empty missile nosecone into a flower planter, and of course campaigning for the statue the chapter is named for. Whoop-dee-doo. Lots and lots of chatter about how “war is bad”-- without one thought for the truth about WHO STARTED the war under discussion.

To get at the truth, we need to go back to history which is even farther outside the knowledge of clueless children who are manipulated by hard-leftist adults. FORTY YEARS BEFORE Hiroshima was nuked, Imperial Japan was already starting its unprovoked aggression against essentially everyone it could reach in Asia and the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Chinese, Koreans, and other Eastern ethnicities who came under the Japanese heel were not merely governed by Japan, but forced to surrender their whole cultures to the supremacy of Japanese culture.  Now, leftists will manage to find it in their hearts to condemn the way the United States did the same thing to Native Americans; but NOT A PEEP will you hear, from any dedicated totalitarian I’ve met, about what Japan did.

Because Japan is not the target that hard leftists want to discredit and subvert.

AFTER Pearl Harbor was attacked (one of those trivial details Mister Hoose considers irrelevant), Japanese-Americans in the United States were interned in camps. Various other leftist authors have made this out to be one of the world’s grand-champion injustices. But those who weep and wail about the admittedly-harsh ordeal of the Nisei usually don’t care squat about how Japanese soldiers used swords and bayonets to butcher Chinese infants FOR FUN. They don’t care squat about the many thousands of girls from Korea, the Philippines and elsewhere who were forcibly pressed into service as “comfort women” for Japanese soldiers to rape. And they don’t care squat about the way Allied prisoners of war were worked to death as slave labor.

(Since writing this critique, I’ve learned that someone in San Francisco FINALLY DID create a memorial for the “comfort women;” but it sure was a long time coming, and it has yet to receive anything close to the tireless publicity given to those EEEEEEE-vil racist Americans nuking Hiroshima.)

Mister Hoose, in his “Statue For Peace” chapter, didn’t care squat about the Japanese having started World War Two (they were in the aggression game before Adolf Hitler graduated high school); one hundred percent of his indignation was aimed at the United States for being so mean and hateful as to WIN the war.

In this chapter, Hoose claimed that it was only some people’s opinion that the A-bombs shortened the war and caused a net reduction in total deaths. Well, what he labeled as only opinion, I have as fact from the testimony of a JAPANESE war veteran. Kuwahara Yasuo (whose name would be given the other way around for the American readership), was a fighter pilot in World War Two. Afterward, he wrote an autobiography titled “Kamikaze,” which I read while I was in grade school. Contrary to the claims of America-bashers that Japan was already trying to surrender, Kuwahara reports from direct knowledge that before Hiroshima, Japan intended to keep fighting to the last drop of blood. So yes, the A-bombs did reduce the final total of deaths.

I can also call a witness regarding the cultural genocide practiced by Imperial Japan: the Newbery Medal winner Linda Sue Park. Extremely well versed in her Korean heritage, she knows all about Koreans being forced, for instance, to assume Japanese names. She wrote a novel, “When My Name Was Keoko,” to help young readers understand how it was.

I conclude with one of those truths which are so screamingly obvious that hard leftists can confidently rely on people not to think about them. Phillip Hoose WAS NOT ARRESTED for publishing his book which used the standard Blame America First method. How do you suppose he would have fared if, living in the old Soviet Union, he had tried publishing a book which criticized THAT regime?

If you sincerely want to promote international peace, you just might do well to consider the significance of governments which don’t allow criticism. If totalitarian rulers are willing to persecute their own people for any act of dissent, then if they achieve "peace" on their  own terms, do you think those rulers will be MORE kindly and fair to US?