RUSH: World War II, I read today, those of you from the greatest generation, you World War II vets still alive, apparently Monday night PBS is going to run a documentary on World War II in which the whole notion that we were the good guys is going to be turned upside down, that we used totalitarian dictatorship tactics to win World War II, that all we did was bomb the innocent in Dresden and Hamburg and, of course, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that we were not the valiant and valorous victors that we were made out to be, that we couldn’t have done what we did had we not partnered up with another dictator and mass murderer named Stalin. I want to prepare you veterans, if you’re going to watch this, because it’s Niles something or other, I forget his name. I’ve got the story here in the stack. I’ll try to remember to find it before we get outta here. But they’re going to stand the whole legacy of World War II on its head. We were rotten to the core mass murderers of innocent civilians.
B.T. wrote this letter to the editor, and he said, ‘You people not understand something? What’s the purpose of armies? It’s to kill people and break things.’ It’s not Meals on Wheels. It’s not deliver food supplies. It’s to kill people and break things. War is a terrible, rotten thing. Of course we hit civilian targets. The Germans were bombing Berlin for crying out loud. The Germans were mass executing people in death camps. Now we’ve got this revisionist history trying to say that we’re no better and were no better than the Russians that we were allied with or the people that we beat, because we were using the same totalitarian tactics in World War II. So there’s no concept of anybody being the good guys in this documentary. If you are a World War II vet, and you watch this, I guarantee you, you are going to be enraged. Even if you’re not a World War II vet, if you just have an understanding of military history and World War II, you are going to be livid over this. They’re going to do it, and let me just find the story. It’s in the New York Post today, and the show is reviewed by their television critic, Adam Buckman. Yep. Here it is.
”PBS Show to Argue Allies as Bad as Nazis’ — Members of the Greatest Generation — especially those with weak hearts — might want to steer clear of an upcoming PBS documentary that suggests the Allied victory in World War II was ‘tainted’ and questions whether it can even be called a victory. Moreover, the documentary, titled ‘The War of the World: A New History of the 20th Century,’ asserts that the war could only be won by forming an unholy alliance with a dictator — Joseph Stalin, who was as brutal as the one they were fighting, Adolf Hitler — and by adopting the same ‘pitiless’ and ‘remorseless’ tactics practiced by the enemy. The three-part documentary is a companion to the best-selling book, ‘The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West’ by Harvard and Oxford historian Niall Ferguson. The one-hour Part One of the documentary premieres Monday night at 10 on Ch. 13. The other two parts air the following two Mondays. World War II is the focus of Part Two. His thesis: Instead of looking at the 20th century as having been disrupted by two world wars with periods of relative peace before, between and after them, it is more appropriate to view much of the history of the century as a continuous bloody conflict that was interrupted occasionally for a few short, exhausted catnaps of relative calm.
‘It is an illuminating viewpoint, and Ferguson does an effective job tying all of the century’s mass deportations, enslavements, ethnic cleansings and genocides together so that you can’t help being won over to his view that the violence of the 20th century was virtually never-ending. But it is Ferguson’s revisionist view of the tactics applied by the Allies in World War II that is likely to raise the hackles of those who have always believed in the ‘necessity’ of bombing German and Japanese civilians, culminating in the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to end a war we did not start. ‘I think it’s very hard for those who have imbibed the idea of a ‘great generation’ that what the Allies did to defeat the Axis was in some measure to adopt totalitarian tactics,’ Ferguson says in a Q&A on PBS’s website. ‘The aim of strategic bombing was … in large measure to kill German civilians by destroying the most densely populated parts of the country. And it only really worked when the level of destruction reached apocalyptic levels. It behooves us all to stare this reality in the face, by trying to understand what it was like to be on the receiving end of firestorms like the ones that engulfed Hamburg or Dresden.”
So we are going to have a PBS documentary on Monday night that is going to evoke sympathy for the innocent people that we bombed to smithereens, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Hamburg, Dresden, and so forth. We’re no different than the Nazis. And where is this airing, and who paid for this to be done? Government-financed public television. Harvard- and Oxford-educated Niall Ferguson. This is the kind of enlightened thinking that the American left embraces and promotes, and it is yet a latest example of their attempt on a mass media basis to convince as many Americans as possible that their country, the United States of America, is a hellhole, is a worthless sand pit, and has no right to exist as it does because our existence is based on a criminal existence, and we are no better than any of the worst despots and mass murderers that have ever lived on the planet. Thank you, PBS. Thank you, Niall Ferguson. And here we are, of course, the timing of this in the midst of the presidential campaign, when the war in Iraq has turned a corner, an attack on the US military. I mean, every element, every ingredient of what defines liberalism and leftism will be found in this presentation. So you have been warned.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Of course I’m mad about it! Snerdley can’t believe I was able to go through that so calmly. You don’t understand what makes people do this? They hate this country! They hate the country, Snerdley. How many times have you sat here and heard me define liberalism as clearly and as explicitly as it can be? They hate the country. No, no, no. It’s not about winning or losing World War II. It’s about taking the occasion and revising history to write that this country is not what people think it is. You go talk to the people who lived in France, who lived in Germany, who lived in Italy. We were liberators. We have liberated millions of people from bondage or whatever you want to call it, dictatorship.
No, they’re just taking the occasion to rewrite this using their credentials as academics from the greatest institutions of higher learning, Harvard and Cambridge or Oxford or what have you. (interruption) I don’t care. Look, we can argue Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To me, this is inarguable. The war was started; we were in it. We were on the verge of losing lots of men in Japan. It’s… (sigh) You know, war has always been won the same way. Once you go into battle, it’s always who kills the most civilians of the others. The other side’s always that. This notion of ‘surgical strikes,’ the liberals started that in the Vietnam era. And they imposed it during the Gulf War and so forth. And any time, any time an innocent civilian was taken out, guess what? Marines are rapists! (Hello, Jack Murtha.) It’s nothing more than an attempt to tie our hands.
Do you realize, folks, this thing in Iraq… I mean, it’s all well and good we’re talking about the surge finally working. We’re the United States of America! This could have been ended in five days if the United States had not been feminized itself and had not been forced by virtue of political correctness to fight a war with one-and-a-half arms tied behind our backs. I mean, it’s gotten to the point where the rules of engagement require a bureaucrat on site to translate for the man in uniform or the woman with the gun. We’ve got the firepower. If we wanted we could take out China and Russia today, we have the firepower to do it. We’re the United States of America! China might be able to take out part of us, too. I’m not suggesting any of this, of course. I’m trying to give you an illustration.
Everybody says, ‘Well, yeah, but it’s a new kind of war over there. You’ve got guerrilla warfare. You’ve got house to house fighting.’
In the old days: destroy it, rebuild it.
‘Can’t do that, Rush! I mean, these are ancient mosques. These are homes!’
We didn’t worry about that. What we worried about was not losing. What we worried about was winning. What we worried about was protecting the innocent and making sure that the bad guys were defeated. Now we’re into appeasement. Now we’re into the political correct way to fight wars, and we’re going to win ’em, but look at what’s going to happen. It’s going to take a long time and it’s going to give the left who oppose this country every opportunity to rip the country as being immoral or what have you. Of course that story makes me mad, but it’s just the latest opportunity for the left to bash this country. Make no mistake how much they hate it. Make no mistake whatsoever.