AUGUST 14 – AT 6:02 A.M. ET:  Today is the 65th anniversary of the end of World War II.  It was on this day in 1945 that Japan surrendered.  I remember someone shouting up to my mother, who was in our fourth-floor apartment in New York City, "The war is over, the war is over!"

The feeling, for many, was bittersweet.  Like many American families, we had suffered battle casualties, although none in our immediate household.  In apartments and homes that displayed gold stars in the windows, celebrations were muted. 

Victory was preceded by the use of two atomic bombs.  Americans understood why they had to be used.  Having read the horror reports from Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the last two great battles of the Pacific war, they realized how ghastly American casualties had become.  They understood what an invasion of Japan, made unnecessary by the nuclear bombs, would cost.

And yet, in the decades since, we have been repeatedly lectured by so-called "peace activists" about the use of the atomic bombs.  Some years ago, a group of "curators" at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington attempted to turn the exhibit of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, into a festival of left-wing thought.  Why, the Japanese were merely defending their "sacred" empire, the text for the exhibit said.  There was a moral equivalence.  Maybe we didn't quite understand the nobility of Japan.  There was nothing in the text about the rape of China, and the unspeakable behavior of the Japanese military in the Pacific.  Veterans were furious.  They'd been there.  They'd seen.

Fortunately, the Smithsonian withdrew the exhibit for rewriting.  On cue, the "intellectuals" of the mainstream media started their whine.  The New York Times accused the veterans of "hijacking history."  Well, history had indeed been hijacked by that withdrawn exhibit.  But it had been hijacked by the curators, demonstrating what came to be known as "political correctness."

The veterans who won that August 14th victory are dying at a great rate now.  The youngest American servicemen in 1945 would be about 82 today.  In the next few decades, a living World War II veteran will be a rarity.  We owe those veterans much, but perhaps the greatest thing we owe them is to prevent the wanton distortion of history that demeans their victory and the meaning behind it.  It is because of their sacrifice that Americans today can write, publish, broadcast, dissent, and interpret events any way they wish.  But with those rights come responsibility.  We hear a great deal about the rights.  We don't hear enough about the responsibility.

August 14, 2010