Wishes Aren’t Horses

I read some interesting stuff this weekend, and it got me thinking about the leftist obsession with lying about history.

First off, the Niihau Incident.

Niihau is one of the main islands of Hawaii, and it’s privately owned. During the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese thought it was uninhabited, and they instructed fighters with damaged planes to set down there and wait for rescue. A pilot named Nishikaichi did just that. He crashed a Zero there.

When Nishikaichi landed, the first person to see him was a Hawaiian named Hawilo Kaleohano. Mr. Kaleohano didn’t know about the filthy attack on our naval base, or the piles of dead bodies, or the garbage cans full of amputated limbs, but he knew our relations with the Japanese were bad, so he took the pilot’s papers and pistol and refused to return them.

The Hawaiians were polite to Nishikaichi and threw him a party, but they absolutely refused to hand over his belongings.

Three interpreters worked with the Hawaiians. The first was a Japanese-born resident named Shintano. He walked off abruptly and abandoned the effort. The next two were an American-born couple, Yoshio and Irene Harada. Obviously, they were American citizens.

The Haradas turned on the Hawaiians. They bickered with them, insisting, without success, that Nishikaichi’s belongings be returned.

Shintano also turned on his neighbors, offering them $200 for the items Nishikaichi wanted. He claimed it was a matter of life and death.

The Haradas and Shintano helped Nishikaichi escape and recover his pistol. They helped him remove two machine guns from the plane and take them with him. With their assistance, he was able to take a hostage and demand his items. In the end, the Hawaiians had to attack and disarm him, and in the process, one received three non-fatal gunshot wounds. Thankfully, the wounded man and his wife were able to crush Nishikaichi’s skull with a rock and slit his throat.

Mr. Harada was so distressed, he shot himself to death on the spot.

Why is this interesting? Because not too long ago, a Japanese-American group succeeded in getting the Haradas’ treason expunged from an exhibit at a museum. The island was (still is) owned by a family named Robinson, and the Robinsons generously donated the Zero’s remains to the Pacific Aviation Museum in Pearl Harbor. The Robinsons donated the Zero with the understanding that the Haradas would be mentioned in the display, so they are not happy.

Michelle Malkin, an American of Asian extraction, wrote about this incident in her head-exploding book, In Defense of Internment. At the time, leftists were flipping out over profiling, which, in retrospect, turned out to be a great idea we needed to implement. Malkin’s thesis was that, yes, foreigners and even the children of foreigners DO sometimes turn against us in times of war, and it makes perfect sense to give Muslims added scrutiny. Instead of focusing on the only group likely to perform major acts of terrorism, our addled keepers took naked pictures of every person who tried to board a plane.

When human beings plan their actions, they generally look to the past for guidance. That only works when they have all the facts. Garbage in; garbage out. If we are going to hide history from ourselves, how are we supposed to learn from it? The Haradas were unquestionably traitors. The Niihau Incident should have been considered and publicized when we were falling all over ourselves, pretending terrorism was not primarily a Muslim issue. We should be talking about it today when we discuss Trump’s travel bans and the idiocy of making blue-eyed old Christian and Jewish ladies submit to groping at airports.

Here’s the other thing I read about: the real nature of Robert Stroud, better known as “the Birdman of Alcatraz.”

Stroud was not really the Birdman of Alcatraz. He was the Birdman of Leavenworth. He was jailed for beating a man unconscious and shooting him in the back of the head, and he also stabbed a prison guard to death and stabbed another inmate. During his time in Leavenworth, a progressive warden allowed him to raise birds, and he became something of an authority on diseases of pet birds.

He was eventually moved to Alcatraz because he was so dangerous to inmates and prison workers, and because he used his lab equipment to distill alcohol. At Alcatraz, he wasn’t allowed to keep birds.

He was the subject of a ridiculous movie starring Burt Lancaster. In the movie, Stroud seems like a fine person who has repented. All he wants to do is keep his birds and continue studying, but the mean old prison system is against him because, well, it’s just bad!

Burt Lancaster was a very handsome man. He looked great in the movie. He seemed like a reasonable person. In short, he was very different from Robert Stroud.

Stroud’s first known victim was a bartender. Stroud was pimping his own girlfriend, and the bartender engaged her and paid her two dollars instead of the standard price of ten. He also gave her a beating. This is why Stroud beat him. Shooting the unconscious man–an execution–was just an added service.

In prison, Stroud shanked another inmate for telling the guards about a minor rule infraction. He stabbed another who was working with him in a scheme to get drugs. He attacked a hospital orderly who reported him for threatening violence in order to get morphine. He helped start a riot. He also murdered a guard, in front of over a thousand prisoners, for reporting a rule violation.

I just can’t see Burt Lancaster doing those things.

Stroud was filthy. He kept a huge number of birds in his two cells, and he never cleaned up. He was also something of a nudist. He refused to wear any clothes at all in warm weather. To make the picture even worse, he used to shave his entire body, head to toe, which is why he has such short hair in some photos.

Stroud was also a sexual predator. He wrote pornographic stories about kidnapping, raping, and murdering children. He received letters from children after he became famous, and he got in trouble for making sexually suggestive remarks in his responses. One of his prison friends, mobster Alvin Karpis, said Stroud talked constantly about raping and killing kids, and Karpis said Stroud intended to do it if he ever got out.

At Leavenworth, he was confined to the hospital because he was aggressive in his homosexual advances to others. In other words, they confined him to keep him from raping other men.

In the movies, sweet old criminals mumble and shuffle and plead at parole hearings. Stroud was different. He told the board he had a long list of people to kill, and he had a short time to do it.

When the movie came out, simple people screamed for Stroud’s release. Film historian Alan Royle put it this way: “What the public really wanted, of course, was to see Burt Lancaster released, not Robert Stroud.”

You can read more of Royle’s thoughts concerning Stroud here: The real ‘Birdman of Alcatraz.’

Here’s the obvious question: what if the movie had told the truth?

Let’s see. A naked Burt Lancaster, shaved from one end to the other, gets dressed and leaves his filthy cells to go have lunch. Along the way, he threatens to rape a few guys, and they duck into doorways. While standing in line, he talks to another prisoner. He grins and his eyes light up as he describes himself raping a child and cutting his throat. He is clearly aroused. Then he notices a guard who turned him in for a rule violation, and he shoves a sharpened spoon through the man’s heart.

Yay. Let’s have a protest. Free Bob! Free poor old Bob the bird lover!

I don’t think so.

Why on earth would anyone make a movie that made this psychopath look good? What was the point? Obviously, the people behind the film were agitating to get Stroud released and prisons reformed, but if you base your notions of reform on gigantic lies, how can they be anything but disastrous when implemented?

Conservatives and Christians are ostracized in the press and entertainment, so the world sees things through a very small and distorted lens. That’s not okay. It causes real harm.

Leftists can’t seem to understand that evil people exist. They think everyone is basically good, and that we can get our enemies to treat us well simply by hugging them and finding out what the world did to them to make them bad. How, then, do you explain people like Ted Bundy? He killed girls, dumped them in the woods, and then returned to their dead bodies over and over to have sex with them. When he was interviewed, he said his parents were fine and that he had a good childhood. According to Psychology Today, Jeffrey Dahmer and Dennis “BTK” Rader had good upbringings.

Many people simply enjoy evil. They prefer it. They’re not doing it because no one understands them. They’re not looking for a reason to avoid harming others. They’re looking for opportunities and excuses to harm us. Harming us isn’t the final result of a desperate search for relief from injustice. It’s their primary, most fundamental motivation.

Serial killers keep things like body parts, videos, and weapons so they can look at them when they pleasure themselves. Seeing a rock with hair and skin on it, or a tiny pair of bloody, torn panties excites them sexually. I don’t know if there is a leftist alive who understands that kind of depravity. For some people, life without parole and execution are the only logical solutions. Even God would admit that. He created hell, and he’s the one who puts people there every day. In Noah’s time, he killed the entire human race. Sometimes you have to give up on people.

Yesterday I read about a highly prolific killer named Carl Panzram. He claimed he had raped about a thousand men and boys. He talked about beating a 12-year-old victim until brains came out of his ears. He was happy about it. He killed people because he enjoyed it, the way a normal person might play the guitar or throw a frisbee. When he was sentenced to death, he threatened to kill people who tried to reform him. On death row, he wrote this:

In my lifetime I have murdered 21 human beings, I have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies, larcenies, arsons and, last but not least, I have committed sodomy on more than 1,000 male human beings. For all these things I am not in the least bit sorry.

After that, when he was hanged, he insulted the executioner. Wouldn’t you love to see Phil Donahue or Barbara Walters sit down with him? He’d have to be pried off of them with crowbars.

Revision of history to fit the naive notions of people who knowingly reject reality is not a good thing, even when people think they’re doing it with good intentions.

I am disgusted by what I’ve read. Unfortunately, the stories of Niihau and Robert Stroud are just part of a monumental smoke screen that covers the world. There is not much that can be done about it.

In the next world, truth will be all I see. I look forward to that, and until then, I will just have to put up with the nonsense I see here.