Freedom Daily Archive

What the Second Amendment Means

by Sheldon Richman October 1, 1995

The decline of education in the United States may be reflected in the high correlation between the amount of formal schooling a person has and his inability to understand the following words: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." The ...

Book Review: Scapegoats

by Richard M. Ebeling October 1, 1995

Scapegoats: A Defense of Kimmel and Short at Pearl Harbor by Edward L. Beach (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1995); 212 pages; $24.95. At 7:48 on the morning of December 7, 1941, the first Japanese planes reached the northern shore of Oahu. This first wave of attack planes had taken off from their carriers almost two hours earlier, from their positions ...

Repatriation — The Dark Side of World War II, Part 7

by Jacob G. Hornberger September 1, 1995

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 What purpose does it serve to talk about wrongdoing of fifty years ago? What relevance does the past have to us to today? So what if Roosevelt, Truman, Churchill, and Stalin cooperated in the ...

The War Crimes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

by Jacob G. Hornberger September 1, 1995

When U.S. military forces dropped atomic bombs on Japanese civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 275,000 men, women, and children were killed. Ever since, the killings have been justified by the claim that the bombings shortened the war and, therefore, saved the lives of American servicemen. Actually, the bombings constituted war crimes for which the perpetrators should have been tried and ...

Covering the Map of the World — The Half-Century Legacy of the Yalta Conference, Part 7

by Richard M. Ebeling September 1, 1995

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 Franklin Roosevelt was fascinated by the communist experiment in Russia. In a conversation with Secretary of Labor Francis Perkins in 1933, FDR admitted: "I don't understand ...

World War I and the Great Departure, Part 2

by Wesley Allen Riddle September 1, 1995

Part 1 | Part 2 During World War 1, the persecution of Germans in American society was so pronounced that Germans were forced to abandon their language and customs, at least in public. German books were burned outside numerous libraries, while Beethoven was banned from symphonic repertories. The atmosphere was such that Germans hid the fact they were German ...

Conserving and Destroying

by Joseph Sobran September 1, 1995

In my thesaurus, "conserve" and "destroy" are antonyms. Why is it, then, that so any conservatives seem to relish war? I have known conservatives who have joked pleasantly about "nuking the chinks" or flattening Tehran. Jokes are jokes, but some conservatives took an actual delight in the Gulf War; there was some loose talk of bombing, and even nuking, ...

Dresden: Time to Say We’re Sorry

by Simon Jenkins September 1, 1995

As the U.S. Fifth Army inched its way up Italy in 1944, its command constantly pondered which towns should be spared bombardment. Monte Cassino was destroyed. The centers of Rome and Florence were saved. The Pieros of Sansepulcro were reprieved at the last minute (I believe by an art-loving gunner). These decisions were taken out of respect for the ...

Killing Noncombatants

by Sheldon Richman September 1, 1995

In May 11, 1940, Great Britain made a fateful decision in its approach to fighting the second world war. On that night, eighteen Whitley bombers attacked railway installations in the placid west German province of Westphalia, far from the war front. That forgotten bombing raid, which in itself was inconsequential, has been called "the first deliberate breach of the ...

Book Review: The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek, Vol. 9

by Richard M. Ebeling September 1, 1995

The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek, Vol. 9: Contra Keynes and Cambridge, Essays and Correspondence edited by Bruce Caldwell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) 269 pages; $37.50. In 1941, American economist Kenneth Boulding reviewed Friedrich A. Hayek's The Pure Theory of Capital. He contrasted Hayek's views with those of John Maynard Keynes, and observed: "Mr. Keynes's economics of ... ...

Repatriation — The Dark Side of World War II, Part 6

by Jacob G. Hornberger August 1, 1995

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 The U.S. government's cry to the American people during recent wars has been: "Support the troops." A person might disagree with the war itself. Or the president may have failed to secure the constitutionally ...

Covering the Map of the World — The Half-Century Legacy of the Yalta Conference, Part 6

by Richard M. Ebeling August 1, 1995

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 In 1940, the Japanese consul general in Harbin, Manchuria, intercepted several messages sent from the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, to the Soviet ambassador in Tokyo. ...