1. Welcome! Please take a few seconds to create your free account to post threads, make some friends, remove a few ads while surfing and much more. ClutchFans has been bringing fans together to talk Houston Sports since 1996. Join us!

President Obama's Speech in Hiroshima, Japan

Discussion in 'BBS Hangout: Debate & Discussion' started by peleincubus, May 29, 2016.

  1. peleincubus

    peleincubus Member

    Joined:
    Oct 26, 2002
    Messages:
    25,313
    Likes Received:
    13,165
  2. ThatBoyNick

    ThatBoyNick Member

    Joined:
    Dec 8, 2011
    Messages:
    28,281
    Likes Received:
    43,346
    Nice speech
     
  3. DaDakota

    DaDakota If you want to know, just ask!

    Joined:
    Mar 14, 1999
    Messages:
    123,886
    Likes Received:
    32,776
    History will consider him a GREAT president.

    We are going to be stepping down from him no matter who else takes over.

    DD
     
  4. Baba Booey

    Baba Booey Contributing Member

    Joined:
    Jul 25, 2012
    Messages:
    2,516
    Likes Received:
    822
    I am glad you posted this.

    I have been looking at lots of different "news" sites lately, as some of the regular ones I like to go to (Huffpo, for instance) have gotten really bad the last 6 months.

    So anyway, I was reading Breitbart the other day just to see what was going on on their site just after this Obama speech. Breitbart's article says this:

    This pissed me off a bit, as I didn't like those A-Bomb missions characterized as "evil." I asked my grandfather years ago (he fought in the Pacific) if he ever felt any regret that the bombs were dropped. He said "hell no!"

    After a while, I thought about the source, who I considered a bit questionable, and did a little research to verify because it just didn't feel right. Turns out that Obama didn't say that at all. I even watched the speech to confirm, just in case Breitbart was correct and the actual language was somehow scrubbed from the transcript as if one of their conspiracy theories were true.

    The bolded line is actually the inscription on the Hiroshima Memorial. Breitbart totally lied and they did it in a way that even riled me, and I am someone who mostly (not all) likes the job Obama has done. It's impressive propaganda. I will be double checking sources from now on...

    If it was already well known that Breitbart is totally making things up to piss people off, I am late to the party. At least someone has posted about this in that story's comments.

    http://www.breitbart.com/news/obama...he-evil-at-site-of-hiroshima-nuclear-bombing/

    Obama's speech was great. Anyone claiming he apologized is full of it.
     
    1 person likes this.
  5. A_3PO

    A_3PO Member

    Joined:
    Apr 29, 2006
    Messages:
    42,233
    Likes Received:
    5,577
    Agreed.

    That speech was on target.
     
  6. Liberon

    Liberon Rookie

    Joined:
    Nov 10, 2009
    Messages:
    8,838
    Likes Received:
    842
    Obama takes responsibility for a time that couldn't fathom him ever being president. Impressive.
     
  7. Invisible Fan

    Invisible Fan Contributing Member

    Joined:
    Dec 5, 2001
    Messages:
    43,149
    Likes Received:
    25,188
    When my friend mentioned Obama could be looked upon as another Lincoln, it didn't really sink in for me at the time.



    Meanwhile, in other circles desperately clawing to get into Facebook feeds...

    Daily Caller-On Behalf Of The United States, Obama Apologizes For Winning WWII

    NY Post- Obama’s shameful apology tour lands in Hiroshima

    Breitbart- Obama says ‘we shall not repeat the evil’ at site of Hiroshima nuclear bombing

    [rquoter]
    President Obama Gives One Of The Most Repulsive Speeches In American History In Hiroshima

    word dump:
    President Obama Gives One Of The Most Repulsive Speeches In American History In Hiroshima
    APObama Hiroshima
    BY: BEN SHAPIRO MAY 27, 2016
    469201363
    500 Comments
    353104
    The White House assured us last week that President Obama’s visit to Hiroshima would not be an apology photo-op.

    They lied.

    On Friday, President Obama said America’s use of the A-bomb to end the threat of Japanese fascism sprang from American desire for conquest, suggested that America had ushered in an age of “atomic warfare,” and said that we could achieve a “world without nuclear weapons” if only we clapped for Tinkerbell. This came shortly after his visit to Vietnam, where his White House announced that America would start selling weapons to the communist dictatorship.

    Yes, our president is a total disgrace.

    “Seventy-one years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed. A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself,” Obama said. This ignored the fact that mankind had in fact nearly destroyed itself over the previous three decades in two world wars, and that the Soviet Union and China would murder well over 100 million people using non-nuclear means. But the point of Obama’s speech was that the technology of atomic weaponry itself was uniquely evil.

    Obama continued:

    Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima? We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in a not-so-distant past. We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 Japanese men, women and children, thousands of Koreans, a dozen Americans held prisoner. Their souls speak to us. They ask us to look inward, to take stock of who we are and what we might become.

    In case you were wondering, at no point did Obama mention Pearl Harbor and the dead there, or the more than 100,000 Americans who lost their lives in the Pacific theater, or the half-million to one million Americans who would have had to sacrifice themselves to storm the island of Japan using conventional means. As Noah Rothman tweets this morning, veterans were overjoyed at the use of the A-bomb, knowing it ended the war and meant they would live to see their children.

    Obama noted that war is not unique in human history; he even went full moral relativist with regard to World War II itself: “the war grew out of the same base instinct for domination or conquest that had caused conflicts among the simplest tribes, an old pattern amplified by new capabilities and without new constraints.”

    This is disgusting. If you can’t spot the bad guys and the good guys in World War II, of all conflicts, you’re on the side of a valueless nihilism that allows the possibility of future world wars – after all, you can’t take a strong stand against evil if it doesn’t exist. Japan was wrong. America was right. Germany was wrong. America was right. End of story.

    But Obama continued his relativistic reverie:

    How easily we learn to justify violence in the name of some higher cause. Every great religion promises a pathway to love and peace and righteousness, and yet no religion has been spared from believers who have claimed their faith as a license to kill.

    Some religions are worse than others. Some ideologies are worse than others. But not according to Obama. We’re all equal in sin, according to the President of the United States – and the only solution is to destroy American nationalism, and replace it with some sort of Obama-created philosophy of peace:

    The wars of the modern age teach us this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth. Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well. That is why we come to this place….we have a shared responsibility to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again.

    Here’s an answer: take pre-emptive action to stop tyrannically fascist states from starting wars and then vowing to fight them to the last man. But Obama forbids that solution expressly:

    We may not be able to eliminate man’s capacity to do evil, so nations and the alliances that we form must possess the means to defend ourselves. But among those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them. We may not realize this goal in my lifetime, but persistent effort can roll back the possibility of catastrophe. We can chart a course that leads to the destruction of these stockpiles. We can stop the spread to new nations and secure deadly materials from fanatics.

    Obama is doing none of those things, because to deprive some nations of nuclear weapons while leaving moral nations with them would violate his code of moral equivalence. That’s why Iran will go nuclear within the next decade, why North Korea has gone nuclear, why rogue states around the world are rushing, in the absence of American power and influence, to arm up.

    Obama doesn’t want realism. He wants the remaking of the world in his personal image. He wants humanity itself changed:

    We must change our mind-set about war itself….we must reimagine our connection to one another as members of one human race. For this, too, is what makes our species unique. We’re not bound by genetic code to repeat the mistakes of the past. We can learn. We can choose. We can tell our children a different story, one that describes a common humanity, one that makes war less likely and cruelty less easily accepted…. Those who died, they are like us. Ordinary people understand this, I think. They do not want more war. They would rather that the wonders of science be focused on improving life and not eliminating it. When the choices made by nations, when the choices made by leaders, reflect this simple wisdom, then the lesson of Hiroshima is done.

    Hiroshima was not a “mistake.” It was a wartime decision. Pearl Harbor wasn’t a “mistake.” It was an attack driven by an aggressive and imperialistic Japanese policy that also resulted in the invasion of China and the murder of 100,000 civilians there.

    But Obama thinks that the way to stop war is to kill ideology altogether, not to support and strengthen proper ideologies. This is John Lennon’s Imagine on crack. And in practice, it’s meant the death of hundreds of thousands of people as Obama has pulled out of Iraq, sinking the region into total war up to and including the use of chemical weapons; the murder of thousands in Ukraine, as Obama has left the field clear for Vladimir Putin; the strengthening of the Iranian and North Korean terror regimes. Obama’s foreign policy leads to Hiroshima faster than Ronald Reagan’s peace through strength.

    Obama continued, “The world was forever changed here, but today the children of this city will go through their day in peace.” Neglecting to mention that Japanese children were living in peace thanks precisely to the use of the A-bomb he was decrying, Obama concluded, “What a precious thing that is. It is worth protecting, and then extending to every child. That is a future we can choose, a future in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known not as the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening.”

    As Jim Geraghty correctly notes at National Review, “Hiroshima and Nagasake weren’t the dawn of atomic warfare. Nobody’s used an atomic or nuclear weapon since then…How many people would have bet in 1945 that no nuclear weapons would be used in war in the next seventy years?” Also worth noting: as Max Roser shows, war deaths have declined markedly since the advent of nuclear weapons and interstate-conflict war deaths have declined most dramatically, largely because everybody knows that if things go too far, someone will push the button. According to Milton Leitenberg of Cornell University, there were somewhere between 136.5 and 148.5 million war deaths during the 20th century. “Only” 41 million of those came after 1945.

    But Obama can’t acknowledge facts or history – they undercut his basic argument, which is that peace can only be achieved by unilateral surrender of American patriotism and by the rise of a borderless, nationless, valueless world.

    Hiroshima happened because the world slept as fascism rose; Obama wishes to sleep on evil again (or worse, forward it), hoping that national narcolepsy becomes contagious internationally, and we share the same peaceful dreams. We don’t. If we go to sleep again, our enemies will use that reverie to rise. But Americans increasingly believe in Obamaism – more Americans now think using the A-bomb was wrong than right. The result will be more Hiroshimas after 70 years of nuclear peace.

    [/rquoter]
     
  8. Sweet Lou 4 2

    Sweet Lou 4 2 Contributing Member
    Supporting Member

    Joined:
    Dec 16, 2007
    Messages:
    37,714
    Likes Received:
    18,912
    I admit that I questioned whether Obama was a good president after so many disappointments, but in hindsight he has done an incredible job of navigating this country through a difficult time with such incredible interference. There are mistakes he made for sure, but on the sum of it, history will remember him as a groundbreaking president.
     
  9. Realjad

    Realjad Contributing Member

    Joined:
    Oct 4, 2005
    Messages:
    3,418
    Likes Received:
    1,726
    Obama will be looked at as both being one of the greatest orators in political history and as one of the worst American presidents in the countries history

    The crippling debt that he has set the country up for that really kicks in *conveniently* right when he leaves office to the Iran deal among other things. He will be looked at as being just as bad as Bush.

    The guy can talk though, the guy definitely knows how to deliver some amazing speeches that can ignite the feels.
     
  10. mtbrays

    mtbrays Contributing Member
    Supporting Member

    Joined:
    Jul 4, 2007
    Messages:
    7,645
    Likes Received:
    6,392
    A lot of hot takes from bloggers who have never been to Hiroshima are, of course, trying to cram this into their exhausted 8-year "Obama apologizes for X" narrative. But, anybody who has been to the peace memorial at Hiroshima knows it is a somber, introspective contemplation on both the atomic bomb and Imperial Japan's role is spreading warfare across Asia and the Pacific. The contrition is evident as is remembrance of those who were the first die due to atomic detonation.

    President Obama's presence at the memorial is a strong signal for world where there is hope for ending conflicts without hell fire.
     
    1 person likes this.
  11. rockbox

    rockbox Around before clutchcity.com

    Joined:
    Jul 28, 2000
    Messages:
    21,571
    Likes Received:
    10,436
    Not sure if one of the best, but definitely one of the classiest presidents we have ever had. He has stayed above the fray even when every racist ******* and every conservative crony has been aiming at him from day one.
     
  12. bobrek

    bobrek Politics belong in the D & D

    Joined:
    Sep 16, 1999
    Messages:
    36,288
    Likes Received:
    26,638
    I'm not a President Obama guy, but I have spent a lot of time on Facebook this weekend correcting all of the folks who claim he apologized. I thought his speech was on point and well said.
     
  13. dc rock

    dc rock Contributing Member

    Joined:
    Jan 10, 2001
    Messages:
    7,051
    Likes Received:
    11,897
    Great speech by President Obama. Thanks for posting.
     
  14. amaru

    amaru Member

    Joined:
    Jun 25, 2009
    Messages:
    16,609
    Likes Received:
    9,729
    President Obama has been a very classy president. Even when certain conservative groups have launched thinly veiled racial attacks against his family, he has managed to stay above the fray. He has revealed an ugly undercurrent of racial hatred that is still very much alive in this nation. Quite frankly, we don't deserve him. I'm not his biggest fan, even though I voted for him, but he will be missed.
     
  15. Cohete Rojo

    Cohete Rojo Contributing Member

    Joined:
    Oct 29, 2009
    Messages:
    10,344
    Likes Received:
    1,203
    200,000 Japanese were killed during fire bombing campaigns. Just saying.

    <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GzFjI7BIOQk?start=281" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
     
  16. hooroo

    hooroo Member

    Joined:
    Oct 16, 2003
    Messages:
    18,898
    Likes Received:
    1,492
    image & action, different or same?

    <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xUW5-LlLQ1Q?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
     
  17. KingCheetah

    KingCheetah Contributing Member

    Joined:
    Jun 3, 2002
    Messages:
    55,911
    Likes Received:
    47,624
    <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hOCYcgOnWUM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
     

Share This Page

  • About ClutchFans

    Since 1996, ClutchFans has been loud and proud covering the Houston Rockets, helping set an industry standard for team fan sites. The forums have been a home for Houston sports fans as well as basketball fanatics around the globe.

  • Support ClutchFans!

    If you find that ClutchFans is a valuable resource for you, please consider becoming a Supporting Member. Supporting Members can upload photos and attachments directly to their posts, customize their user title and more. Gold Supporters see zero ads!


    Upgrade Now