Monday, March 17, 2003

On today's Prager Show, Dennis Prager talked mostly about the coming war and about what was left to say about the anti-war side. Much of the first hour was spent railing against the "it's not moral if we go it alone" argument. Prager quite correctly pointed out that whether or not a war is moral is not determined by the number of supporters we have. Much of this sort of talk continued into the second hour. In the third hour, Prager quoted from a history textbook his son is using at his college, and demonstrated the bankruptcy of university text with some examples of the coverage of the Korean War in the 1950s. Prager mentioned for example that the book accuses the US of holding up the armistice talks by refusing to enforce a provision of the Geneva Convention for Prisoners of War. The provision was that prisoners of war were to be returned to the home country whereas the US wanted to give the prisoners a choice as to whether they might prefer to stay in (presumably) South Korea rather than going back to Communist North Korea or China. He further recalled what happened the last time prisoners of war were returned to a communist country, namely the Soviet prisoners of war during World War II, which upon being returned to the USSR were murdered by Stalin's regime. But, as Prager points out, the text seems to mention none of that but rather chooses to focus on the apparent irrational stubborness of the United States in preferring to follow its own ideals rather than "international law."

Virtually all of my knowledge of history, particularly US history, came from my own reading. In High School I had the required year of U.S. History though I don't really remember too much of it. I only took one history course at UCLA and that was Japanese history which I actually did enjoy. The Professor was clearly Liberal, though he seemed mostly fair. It was clear from the way he talked that his personal view was that we should not have bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though he allowed some discussion of this and did not press the point to the best of my knowledge.

No comments:

Bookmark and Share