How the Right Learned to Stop Worrying and Love 9/11

David Cole's "lost" A-Bomb column

(As explained in today’s Takimag column, I wrote this in June when Tucker and Candy were obsessing over Hiroshima and Nagasaki for whatever bizarre reason, and I was planning to run it the first week of August to coincide with the bombing anniversaries, but I drank heavily all July and forgot. Still, I hate wasting a column, so, stale though it may be, here it is)

When “some people did something” on 9/11, I was in my L.A. Times op-ed phase (1999-2003), penning pieces about black-on-white crime, racial quotas in Hollywood (yes, I was covering that back then), and the value of racial profiling (yes, I was able to get such topics in the ultra-leftist Times).

As I’ve mentioned previously, a month after 9/11 I wrote an op-ed detailing my plan for Afghanistan: bomb it into a parking lot. Where there’s intel that there’s al-Qaeda, we flatten the entire area from above, no U.S. troops at risk. And then we tell the goatfuckers, “if we get attacked again, we flatten you again.”

But no – leftists insisted that every Afghan life is precious, so let’s get boots on the ground! Better twenty Americans die than one innocent Afghan. Neocons agreed because they wanted to “build a nation” in a wasteland that never had one.

I have no problem saying that I value some lives above others. I do not value Afghan lives. These cavemen have had centuries to prove their worth to the rest of us, and they haven’t. That “every life is precious” bullshit is what leads to open borders and decarceration; I’ll have none of it.

The very concept of “humane war” is not just foolish but dangerous. And you know it. Deep down (and I’ve written about this many times) you’re glad the Injuns were beaten until they had no more fight left in ‘em. Enjoy driving the interstate with your windows down without having to worry about getting an arrow through the neck? Thank the white men who realized that sometimes you have to not only physically defeat the enemy, but break his will.

Now, I’m trying to imagine if a time-traveler came to me in 2001 and said “In 2024, it’s right-wingers who’ll be the ones saying ‘war must be humane; let not a single civilian be harmed!’ And the apostle of that message will be a retarded black ghetto queen who sues whites for racism and couldn’t even get a community college degree. She’ll be the far-right’s antiwar guru.”

I’d probably kill the time-traveler, steal his machine, and go back to 1880 to give the Injuns AKs to stop 2024 from happening.

Candace Owens, she with brain fry to match her vocal, is the dumbest animal on the right today.

So of course she’s popular.

Her newest mania is that it’s never permissible to kill civilians in war, and dropping atomic bombs on Japan was inexcusable (this is Tucker’s new obsession, too).

Here’s the deal: you wanna argue that, fine. But Owens isn’t arguing as if she’s joining a debate that spans decades. In her latest video...and Jesus it’s painful to watch...she acts like she’s just initiated the debate for the first time ever.

“Today the media says you can’t debate whether or not dropping the atom bomb was necessary.” That may very well be the single most stupid thing spoken in 2024. The A-bomb debate saturates the media every year. Indeed, Owens only provides one example of a journalist who decries the A-bomb debate, and it’s a dude from The Federalist! A conservative.

“WWII is my childhood trauma, and yours too” she states with the earnestness of a Walmart skank telling the return counter why she gots no receipt. She continues, “The purpose of U.S. education indoctrination is ‘rah rah rah, we’re so free!’” Our schools “indoctrinate American children into believing America’s GREAT!”

“Just like Hitler Youth in Germany.”

If you don’t see the contradiction here, you’ve got mind-rot. People like Owens have spent years telling us that the public school system is anti-American. That the teachers union hates American greatness. That classroom materials teach kids that America is racist, violent, patriarchal, and intolerant, and that our history is one of shame.

And now she just reverses herself like that and you don’t notice?

She declares that our evil pro-American schools teach that the A-bomb was a good and necessary thing; “we had to kill civilians, as they told us in school.”

People don’t get dumber. Twelve years in L.A. public schools, I never had a single teacher who wasn’t a Democrat, pro-Carter, anti-Reagan, anti-nuke, anti-A-bomb activist. In August 1985, the 40^th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I emceed a series of events sponsored by history and social studies teachers from the entire county. So as a teen I met ‘em all. I even strongarmed my own drama teacher into dropping a particularly incendiary (pardon the pun) anti-A-bomb line from our school’s no-nukes program (note to Candace: a truly clever person doesn’t have to sue a school to right a wrong).

And during the W. Bush years? Owens wants you to believe that all public school teachers were pro-Bush and pro-war.

How does someone that stupid get so many fans? Is it the black thing? It has to be.

She goes further, claiming that nobody in the mainstream press ever opposes war. “The entire media is run by psychopaths...psychopaths that love war, that love war so much, they love the idea of killing innocent civilians SO MUCH!”

“People in the media” uniformly believe that “mass-killing civilians is necessary and okay.”

Again, how can you stand her? She’s telling you a lie about a period you lived through, when the media was flooded, daily, with “Bush the warmonger, Bush the Hitler, Bush the genocider” stories.

Again, I know this because while Owens was suing schools for being racist, I was fighting with the Times editors to allow my op-eds. That one pro-bombing op-ed from 2001 was the only op-ed of its type the Times ran after 9/11. It was a literal 1,000-to-1 ratio. One – me – against a thousand.

It’s in an alternate reality. The media, which cheers the incineration of people of color and allows no debate on the A-bombs, is finally being called out by Candace and Tucker, who stand fast against war-cheering public school teachers who indoctrinate kids into pro-Americanism.

You have to be so very dumb to believe that.

Owens states that “thee Japanese” were about to surrender and there was no need for the A-bombs. This is what happens when you empower rank amateurs who’ve never read a history book in their life (and who couldn’t comprehend one anyway; Owens admits in the video that her source is Wikipedia!). There was no “thee Japanese,” you fucking bimbo. There were factions, including a very powerful “fight to the last Jap, no surrender” faction made up of high-level military officials. That faction attempted a coup against the Emperor following the A-bombings when word of the planned surrender got out. The coup failed and the plotters committed suicide. Had the U.S. played nice and tried the humane war route, and had that faction survived as part of the government, you could kiss goodbye the lasting peace and friendship we’ve had with Japan for the past 80 years.

Owens rails against the fact that our bombing campaigns were intended to “demoralize” the Japanese.

Yes, bimbo, that’s how you win wars. And here we come to a major factor in the growth of Holocaust denial on the right: many rightists are too stupid to comprehend that the pacification period is part of the war. The war doesn’t end when the guns go silent, not if the victor has to administer a defeated people. Deniers, in their eternal ignorance, see footage of the U.S. Army showing off “human lampshades” and shrunken heads and they say “see? Holocaust history’s full of fakes.” But no, the history writing hadn’t started yet. The propaganda at liberated camps like Dachau and Buchenwald in April/May 1945 was still part of the war effort. Because the civilian pacification phase is every bit as important as the shooting phase (the Nuremberg Trial was also part of the war effort). The history-writing phase wouldn’t begin until 1953’s publication of Reitlinger’s masterwork The Final Solution. By ‘53, the war was truly over.

Regarding the European theater, Owens claims that the entire endeavor was an exercise in Christian genocide, as after the war the Soviets “ethnically cleansed” and murdered millions of Germans.

Weird how people like Owens never condemn Hitler for killing millions of Poles (Christians) and Russians (Christians). In fact, the postwar killing and cleansing of Germans in the East was merely tit-for-tat. The Nazis killed millions and cleansed cities in the East during the war, then the Soviets took their revenge and did the same in the closing and postwar months. Yet Hitler never gets any guff from the likes of Owens...odd considering that he started the whole thing by violating the nonaggression pact.

Also, Owens, moron extraordinaire, claims that Stalin’s domestic terror campaign constituted “genocide against Christians.” In fact, most of Stalin’s purges were directed at Party members – communists, likely atheists. And Bolshevik terror aimed at civilians focused far more on class than faith.

Jesus, she’s so fucking stupid. It hurts my bones to know how many of you patronize her (in both senses of the word).

“The mass killing of innocent civilians is always a wrong,” Owens concludes. “Especially when you’re doing it simply to collapse morale.”

And with that, the new antiwar rightists (who can’t bring themselves to admit that they’ve adopted the left’s post-9/11 language, so they spin a myth that leftists were the warmongers back then) complete their 180, zero awareness that the Afghan war failed because Bush and Obama tried to conduct it “humanely,” with Afghans as “partners” instead of targets. It’s exactly the “nice guy war” Owens and Tuck preach that made that war a disaster. Plus, you can’t “demoralize” an Afghan any more than you can demoralize a broccoli stalk (hence why you just bomb them flat without any attempt at partnership). But you can break down and raise up Germans and Japs. So yes, WWII, including the pacification phase, was hard on two fundamentally civilized peoples (who should’ve known better than to start up with us), but the resulting peace has been magnificent.

Owens closes by stating that she’s single-handedly trying to stop WWIII, and I’m not certain what’s funnier – the notion that the world’s fate lies in the hands of ghetto LaQuisha, or that rightists who’d likely refuse to board a plane with a black female pilot believe it.

As a final flourish, Owens tells her viewers that if they really want to help avoid WWIII, they should visit her paid sponsor, American Financing.

Again I ask, how do you stomach this?

Look, it’s fine to evolve on an issue, like from hawk to dove. But what Owens and Carlson are doing isn’t an evolution. They’re just pandering to a new batch of zombies. Early-2000s Carlson pandered to the hawks, the Gary Sinise neocons. Because post-9/11 that’s where the momentum was. Now the momentum on the right has shifted, and so’s Tuck.

When your “evolution” always seems to conveniently match where the money and traffic is, well...it’s only natural for your sincerity to be called into question.

But holy crap are you guys torturing WWII history for your money and traffic.

You know there’s not gonna be a WWIII (there just isn’t), so it’s clever to claim to be the bulwark against it, because five years from now you can take credit for the world still being here.

Smart move.

I just wish you didn’t spread so much stupidity in the process.

Surely there’s a less destructive way to save the world.

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