RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/9-11-lessons-terrorism-immigration

One of the reasons George Santayana’s famous line about forgetting the past resonates is because humans can be so bad at remembering. That’s especially true about the past 25 years of liberal Western democracy. The twenty-first century brand of progressivism that’s corrupted so much Western thinking is all about moving on from a past inevitably deemed regressive. To someone like me, who lived through 9-11 in Manhattan and spent years writing about what we learned from it, the extent to which we have forgotten the lessons of that day and discarded so many of the principles we developed to defend ourselves is shocking.

Just perusing what City Journal published in the weeks after 9-11 is a reminder of how dangerously we as a culture have moved on. One notable story from that time warned about our “leaky borders,” which subsequent investigations would show played a crucial role in enabling the massive conspiracy that culminated in hijacking of four planes. Another piece from 2001 chronicled the rise of something called “militant Islam,” a term derided by some as racist and which prompted President George W. Bush to insist, in response, “Islam is peace.” A third story, the most chilling to read today, though it’s not principally about the U.S., described the rise of an Islamic “fifth column” in the U.K. that was radicalizing British youth. To think that I once worried that that term—fifth column—might be too extreme!

Those three stories represent how clearly we saw the threats back in 2001, and how thoroughly we’ve ignored them since then.

The irony of 9-11 is that it was successful because the bad guys learned their lessons from the past. Many people forget that the 2001 terrorists undertook the second attack on the World Trade Center. The first, eight years earlier, failed to cause widespread damage because the Muslim perpetrators underestimated how many explosives they would need to destroy the foundation of the North Tower. “Only” six people died that day. But what lived on was the idea among terrorists that the World Trade Center represented something fundamental about the West that they hated and wanted to destroy. They just needed to find a more effective way to accomplish their murderous ends.

One of the many differences between Western liberals’ thinking and that of Islamists is that they, as fundamentalists, cherish the past and absorb its lessons. We had our chance to do the same after the 1993 bombing and failed. The weeks and months after that attack were filled with executive orders, presidential directives, new legislation, and promises of international cooperations against terrorism. The Anti-Terrorism Act and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 barred terrorists from entering the country, facilitated the deportation of those here, and authorized funds to expand anti-terrorism units within law enforcement. Some of that money was supposed to go to assist coordination and communication among federal and local law enforcement.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/11/disinformation-and-the-dropping-of-the-atomic-bombs/

Disinformation and the Dropping of the Atomic Bombs

Legitimate disagreement about the wisdom of dropping two bombs on Japan to end World War II in 1945 persists even 80 years later, as reflected in discussions this past week.

But recently, there has often been no real effort even to present the facts, much less to consider the lose-lose choices involved in using such destructive weapons. In an age of revisionist history—when Churchill is deemed a “terrorist,” Germany did not really mean to starve millions of Jews and Ukrainians in summer and fall 1941, the British forced Hitler to continue the war, and World War II was not worth the cost—so too are Hiroshima and Nagasaki judged as either war crimes or colossal and unnecessary follies.

For today’s generation, it seems so easy to declare one’s 21st-century moral superiority over our ancestors. So we damn them as war criminals, given that they supposedly dropped the bombs without legitimate cause or reason.

What follows are some of the most common critiques of President Truman’s decision to use two nuclear weapons against wartime Japan, with an explanation of why his decision to use the bombs proved, at the time and in hindsight, the correct one.

1) Why did the Americans not drop a trial bomb in Tokyo Bay to warn the Japanese to surrender or face the real thing?

That choice was considered at length. The liberal-minded Robert Oppenheimer had headed a commission to determine the most effective way to use the two bombs to end the war as quickly as possible.

A third nuclear weapon may or may not have been available within a few weeks after the bombing, but there were no others beyond those three at hand for at least a few months. So in early August, only two bombs, the uranium-fission bomb “Little Boy” and its plutonium counterpart “Fat Man,” were deliverable. The limited number of bombs affected the decision to use two on real targets.

Note that a third atomic bomb would not be exploded (in a test) for about a year after the war. Moreover, the uranium bomb used on Hiroshima had never been tested; the plutonium one had, but in the New Mexico desert on a tower and not loaded on and dropped from a plane.

As a result, no one knew for certain whether an air-dropped bomb would even work, the optimal detonation height, or the extent of the destruction it would cause. On the eve of the first test of the plutonium bomb on July 16 in the New Mexico desert, even scientists could not agree whether the plutonium blast would set the sky afire or might be not much more powerful than a large conventional bomb.

https://pjmedia.com/david-manney/2025/07/14/the-marne-was-just-the-beginning-how-july-15-marked-americas-rise-on-the-world-stage-n4941756

The River Where America Arrived

It was July 15, 1918. In the heat of a brutal French summer, German artillery opened up on Allied lines at the Marne River. A barrage unlike all others, it was Berlin’s final gamble to break the Western Front. What they didn’t count on was that a new player had arrived, and he wasn’t bluffing.

America wasn’t just sending weapons anymore. We were sending boys who would soon become men by force of fire, and in doing so, the United States proved, once and for all, that it was no longer a mere spectator on the global stage.

Modern Parallels: From the Marne to Ukraine

When Germany launched its last offensive at the Marne, they were gambling on exhaustion. They believed the Allies were too fatigued, too fractured, and too under‑resourced to withstand one final blow. But then American boots hit the dirt. More than 250,000 Americans stood in defiance—not just a token few—by the time the counterattack surged forward.

Today, in Ukraine, we see echoes of that gamble again. A significant power pushes forward under the illusion that the West has grown soft and wouldn’t respond, thinking that American strength is nothing but a bluff.

Although late to the game, the world learned in 1918 that the United States alone had the strength to alter the course of the war. Lessons learned echo in chambers deep inside the Kremlin, Beijing, and Tehran. The entire world knew then that when America commits, we don’t simply turn the tide; we bring a tsunami.

This isn’t arrogance talking. It’s the memory shared by each nation that watched the Marne become the moment the war turned.

The Grit of American Industry: Mobilization Without Hesitation