Unlearning the lessons of history

I had seen their propaganda videos on Twitter for years, but I never bothered to look up what it was before. It was just one of many radical left-wing outlets pumping out videos of half-truths and straight up lies, nothing special or unique. When I finally did look it up, it all made sense.

I’m talking about the AJ Plus social media feed, not only on Twitter but also on TikTok, YouTube and pretty much anything else you can think of. Despite its extreme anti-American and anti-western agenda, it’s popular because the algorithms allow it to be popular — algorithms put in place by companies which either lack values or share those of AJ Plus.

I do not support a ban on leftist propaganda, but it’s important to call it out for what it is, lest anyone mistake lies for truth.

The AJ Plus account is Al Jazeera, a network I have even appeared on many times. But until I saw a video about the movie “Oppenheimer” premiering in Japan, I had never made the connection between the television network, which seems to welcome diverse opinions on at least some matters, and its far more radical social media footprint.

The AJ Plus video about the movie attempts to rewrite the history of World War II and how it ended, with a predictable but still obnoxious focus on attacking the U.S. and making Imperial Japan the victim.

It accuses the U.S. of war crimes while ignoring the very real, documented and often memory-holed war crimes that Japan had been committing against people of all nationalities throughout the Pacific Theater, until we finally put an end to it. Their atrocities against the Chinese and Koreans were especially appalling, and of course they did not spare American prisoners of war, either.

The Bataan Death March deserves its own epic Hollywood movie, but it will probably never be made. Many Hollywood producers are ideologues determined to make the U.S. into the world’s uniquely villainous nation. We are prodded by our education system into a corrupted view of history in which only our own sins count.

In truth, the Japanese hardly let the Nazis outdo them in cruelty. But the war in Europe became more romanticized than the one in the Pacific, which was fought mostly on sparsely populated islands.

Whatever the case, the discussion surrounding the war in the Pacific is moving toward one where the U.S. is the real bad guy, largely over the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But this narrative requires one to ignore how the U.S. entered the war in the first place, as well as the commitment by the Japanese leadership to fight to the last man.

It also requires a blind eye toward the atrocities Japan unambiguously and willingly committed, from the Rape of Nanking to biological weapon experimentation conducted on civilians and prisoners of war.

We don’t hear nearly as much about this part of the war’s history. The morality of the leveling of Dresden isn’t raised nearly as often as Hiroshima. And the impetus for dropping the bomb — the prospect of saving as many as a million American lives by avoiding an invasion of the Japanese homeland, not to mention perhaps millions of Japanese civilians — is discarded in favor of a historically ignorant progressive narrative about white racism, colonialism and oppression.

Could the Allies have won World War II without using the atomic bomb? Probably. We were winning by that point. But the cost had already been very high and was about to get much higher. The decisions in the last days of the war were made in real time, with perhaps millions of lives hanging in the balance. And it didn’t really matter what color the skin was of the enemy; they were the enemy, a cruel, destructive enemy that could not be allowed to avoid unconditional surrender.

There was a time when people understood that. Actually, many still do, beneath the surface, it’s just that some are too scared to say it out loud, and others are too morally corrupted to want to. 

As George Orwell wrote, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” We need a concerted effort to preserve the truth about our history and to counter lies on social media. Otherwise, truth everywhere else will cease to matter.

Derek Hunter is host of the Derek Hunter Podcast and a former staffer for the late Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.).