Schilling throws heat at Obama over Japan visit

Former Red Sox pitcher and broadcaster Curt Schilling, known for his controversial remarks, said he was sickened by President Obama’s visit to Hiroshima to “apologize” for the 1945 atomic bombing of the city.

“It makes me sick. It makes me sick to my stomach that anybody would apologize for the things that we’ve done as a nation since the 1940s,” Schilling said yesterday on Boston Herald Radio’s “Morning Meeting” show.

“The fact of the matter is nobody in the world would take up the mantle. Nobody in the world could take up the mantle, unless you wanted to leave it to Russia, and we didn’t want to leave it to Russia because we knew exactly what communism was at the time,” he added.

In a historic trip to Hiroshima yesterday, the first for a sitting United States president, Obama did not apologize for the bombing, saying instead that he hoped Hiroshima would be remembered as the beginning of a “moral awakening” while calling for an end to nuclear weapons.

Schilling, who was fired in April by ESPN for a controversial post on social media about transgender bathrooms, was adamant that in light of Memorial Day, Americans should not forget what preceded the drop of the bomb.

“Listen, in 1945, the world was on the brink of speaking German or Japanese,” he said. “There was no alternative. Here’s the thing, I don’t want to say this lightly because tens of thousands of people were killed in a blink of an eye, but the fact of the matter is Japan attacked the United States. Japan wanted to turn the United States into an Asian-speaking imperial nation. We defended ourselves and we defended the rest of the world.”

Obama opened his address saying: “Seventyone years ago, on a bright, cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed. The flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself.

“Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima? We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in a notso-distant past. We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 Japanese men, women and children, thousands of Koreans, a dozen Americans held prisoner.”