March 14, 2011 By Pat Muchanan
We can thank Providence that the earthquake was not 150 miles closer to Tokyo, or else Japan’s dead might number in the millions.
Prime Minister Naoto Kan calls it the worst crisis since World War II. Yet, horrendous as it is, it does not, thus far, compare with that. For the earthquake dead are not 1 percent of those who perished in World War II.
Between 1942 and 1945, Japan was stripped naked of an empire that embraced Formosa, Korea, Manchuria, the entire China coast, all of French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia), Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), the Philippines and the Western Pacific out to Guam and south to Guadalcanal.
She sustained 2 million military dead and 500,000 to a million civilian dead under U.S. carpet-bombing that reduced her great cities to smoldering rubble and Hiroshima and Nagasaki to atomic ash.
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