| Original opinion. The link is to the BBC story of that day. The photo needs no explanation. |
In the words of Harry Truman, in an address to a crowd that had gathered outside the White House, "This is the day we have been waiting for since Pearl Harbor. This is the day when Fascism finally dies, as we always knew it would."
Fascism since has reared its ugly head in places like Serbia and Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. The fight goes on. Victory may not always look like V-J Day. It may not always be signed off on the deck of a battleship. There may be neither a ticker-tape parade nor a pretty girl to kiss in Times Square.
Some fear victory won't come at all. How many times did we think that in the dark times of the Bataan retreat, the shelling of Corregidor, the Battle of the Coral Sea? How many times did young Marines trapped on a hellish island wonder just why they were there?
We faced a brutal enemy then. We face another today. The Empire of Japan used everything she'd learned about the West to attack us and did so without mercy. The Islamofascists of today use their knowledge of the West to attack us and, like the Japanese back then, do so today without mercy. Like the Japanese, groups like al Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Taiba have managed to adapt technology from the West so as to attack us without coming to understand the most important weapon we have: the resolve of an angry people.
Japan learned better: the merciless reduction of their island fortresses. The continued attack on their Navy. The fire-bombing of Tokyo. Hiroshima. By the time it was over Japan had come to see that there few things more dangerous than an enraged Western democracy.
Some of us thought we'd seen that after 9/11. Lord knows we've had reminders since. Bali. 3/11. 7/7. How many others, and how many more in the future? Some of us, not enough of us, are enraged.
It's going to change. It may take another horrific attack on us or our friends. I hope not, I hate seeing innocents die. But whatever al-Qaeda does to enrage us, they need only look at history to understand what then will happen.
V-J Day. Remember.