These politically correct days, it may seem like the anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bomb is something to get all depressed and guilty about. Nonsense.

Everyone’s in on the act. CBC headlines Canadians remember horror of atomic blast. CNN headlines Doves, silence for Hiroshima victims. They also share the dimly lit mutterings of one John Schuchardt, a tourist from Massachusetts.

Our goal is to apologize to those who suffered and are still suffering the horrible, unspeakable atrocity of the atomic bomb,

This gentleman represents the cream of the pacifist left, chanting about peace, disarmament, gun control, while clinging to an invincible ignorance about the realities of conflict. They bemoan the deaths of those Japanese city-dwellers, while refusing to contemplate who started the war (Pearl Harbour is not just a crappy disney movie), and how many American (and Japanese) lives were saved by the abrupt end to the war brought about by this show of force. To them, to this day, the use of force is by definition wrong, especially if it is a western democratic nation doing the forcing.

After WW1, just such intellectual onanism by the naive populations of Britain and elsewhere led directly to the conditions that made WW2 inevitable. Winston Churchill’s book The Gathering Storm goes into detail about the astonishing negligence and shortsightedness of all the western governments, which were no match for the evil but clear-headed scheming of Hitler. The parallels to today’s “war on (islamic fascist) terror” are brutally clear.

UPDATE: This Washington Post article presents the cliche “human side” of the atomic bombs, in a fairer way than I expected. Here is another good essay from Victor David Hanson.