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posted by takyon on Thursday December 08 2016, @05:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the gears-of-war dept.

David Swanson, author of "War is a Lie", writes via CounterPunch:

The facts [of the Pearl Harbor story] do not support the mythology. The United States government did not need to make Japan a junior partner in imperialism, did not need to fuel an arms race, did not need to support Nazism and fascism (as some of the biggest U.S. corporations did right through the war), did not need to provoke Japan, did not need to join the war in Asia or Europe, and was not surprised by the attack on Pearl Harbor. For support of each of these statements, keep reading.

[...] Churchill's fervent hope for years before the U.S. entry into the war was that Japan would attack the United States. This would permit the United States (not legally, but politically) to fully enter World War II in Europe, as its president wanted to do, as opposed to merely providing weaponry and assisting in the targeting of submarines as it had been doing. On December 7, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt drew up a declaration of war on both Japan and Germany, but decided it wouldn't work and went with Japan alone. Germany quickly declared war on the United States, possibly in hopes that Japan would declare war on the Soviet Union.

Getting into the war was not a new idea in the Roosevelt White House. FDR had tried lying to the U.S. public about U.S. ships including the Greer and the Kerny, which had been helping British planes track German submarines, but which Roosevelt pretended had been innocently attacked. Roosevelt also lied that he had in his possession a secret Nazi map planning the conquest of South America, as well as a secret Nazi plan for replacing all religions with Nazism. The map was of the quality of Karl Rove's "proof" that Iraq was buying uranium in Niger.

And yet, the people of the United States didn't buy the idea of going into another war until Pearl Harbor, by which point Roosevelt had already instituted the draft, activated the National Guard, created a huge Navy in two oceans, traded old destroyers to England in exchange for the lease of its bases in the Caribbean and Bermuda, and--just 11 days before the "unexpected" attack, and five days before FDR expected it--he had secretly ordered the creation (by Henry Field) of a list of every Japanese and Japanese-American person in the United States.

[...] On November 15th, Army Chief of Staff George Marshall briefed the media on something we do not remember as "the Marshall Plan". In fact we don't remember it at all. "We are preparing an offensive war against Japan", Marshall said, asking the journalists to keep it a secret, which as far as I know they dutifully did.

[...] Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin (R-MT), the first woman ever elected to Congress, and who had voted against World War I, stood alone in opposing World War II [...] found that the Economic Defense Board had gotten economic sanctions under way less than a week after the Atlantic Conference [of August 1941]. On December 2, 1941, the New York Times had reported, in fact, that Japan had been "cut off from about 75 percent of her normal trade by the Allied blockade". Rankin also cited the statement of Lieutenant Clarence E. Dickinson, U.S.N., in the Saturday Evening Post of October 10, 1942, that on November 28, 1941, nine days before the attack, Vice Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr., (he of the catchy slogan "Kill Japs! Kill Japs!") had given instructions to him and others to "shoot down anything we saw in the sky and to bomb anything we saw on the sea".

The article is very detailed and shows repeatedly the duplicity of those who have claimed that the strike on Pearl Harbor was a "surprise".


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by jdavidb on Thursday December 08 2016, @06:09PM

    by jdavidb (5690) on Thursday December 08 2016, @06:09PM (#438782) Homepage Journal

    Wars are always started by lies. Always. Always! There are no exceptions. Stop believing your government.

    Richard Maybury's books WWI and WWII The Rest of the Story, along with his book The Thousand Year War in the Middle East, contain a lot more information and insight about this.

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  • (Score: 2) by jdavidb on Thursday December 08 2016, @06:10PM

    by jdavidb (5690) on Thursday December 08 2016, @06:10PM (#438784) Homepage Journal
    And why is this news for nerds? Because nerds are some of the people smart enough to actually question the government and received government wisdom.
    --
    ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
    • (Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday December 08 2016, @06:16PM

      by Rosco P. Coltrane (4757) on Thursday December 08 2016, @06:16PM (#438790)

      You don't need to be smart to question the government - or any form of authority for that matter. You just need to have the reflex of wondering who has what to win when they you something, and be a bit of a cynic.

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 08 2016, @06:19PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 08 2016, @06:19PM (#438791)

      Nerd is also more than just a subset of tech culture, it's a mentality. There are history nerds, political nerds, music nerds, computer nerds, literature nerds, car nerds, space nerds, and a million others. The defining feature is curiosity and near-obsession levels of information intake and thought. Consuming and processing info at high levels gives a perspective that makes many niche viewpoints worth looking at.

    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday December 08 2016, @07:56PM

      by bob_super (1357) on Thursday December 08 2016, @07:56PM (#438831)

      > Because nerds are some of the people smart enough to actually question the government and received government wisdom.

      Drunks too. Does that tell you anything?

      • (Score: 3, Touché) by jdavidb on Thursday December 08 2016, @09:15PM

        by jdavidb (5690) on Thursday December 08 2016, @09:15PM (#438872) Homepage Journal
        We should all drink more beer?
        --
        ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
        • (Score: 2) by JeanCroix on Friday December 09 2016, @05:42PM

          by JeanCroix (573) on Friday December 09 2016, @05:42PM (#439261)
          Everybody knows that beer ain't drinkin'.
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by requerdanos on Thursday December 08 2016, @10:41PM

      by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Thursday December 08 2016, @10:41PM (#438899) Journal

      And why is this news for nerds? Because nerds are some of the people smart enough to actually question

      It's not just that, there is a definite nerd component here.

      The Japanese intended Pearl Harbor to be a surprise attack, but the (nerds in the [slate.com]) American military had largely broken their codebook encryption and some historians believe that the Americans were therefore intercepting Japanese transmissions at the time, making the surprise attack planned by the Japanese not as much of a surprise. This is referred to as "simply what happened" by some, and referred to as The Pearl Harbor Advance Knowledge Conspiracy Theory [wikipedia.org] by others.

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Thursday December 08 2016, @07:13PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Thursday December 08 2016, @07:13PM (#438808)

    Wars are always started by lies. Always. Always! There are no exceptions.

    I'm not so sure of that. Back in ancient times, there were plenty of wars that amounted to some guy saying "Hey, we're desperately poor, there are those other guys over there that are quite rich, so why don't we go to their place, take all their stuff, and beat them up if they try to stop us?" Heck, there are still wars that are pretty honest about that motive. It's those weird "democracies" with their whole "consent of the governed" thing that they really get into lying about what they're trying to accomplish.

    Take, for instance, the Gallic Wars of Julius Caesar: He was quite clear that the reason he started it was to loot as much as he could from Gaul. If he didn't do that, the people he owed a lot of money to back in Rome were going to kill him off. And he told his troops, that if they won, he was going to give them land in the newly conquered provinces and part of the booty, which he did. The Gauls, for their part, fought back because some strangers just showed up and were taking all their stuff.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: 2) by art guerrilla on Friday December 09 2016, @12:18AM

      by art guerrilla (3082) on Friday December 09 2016, @12:18AM (#438941)

      yeah, but...
      wasn't it more often than not, that a 'tribe'/city/state was ruled by a person claiming divine right of some sort, if not a literal god/demi-god ? ? ?
      um, doesn't that make their wars -whether for wheat or booty or conversions or land or whatever- based on a gigantic lie of divine right ? ? ?

      • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday December 09 2016, @01:35AM

        by Thexalon (636) on Friday December 09 2016, @01:35AM (#438957)

        Julius Caesar definitely wasn't claiming anything resembling divine right of kings, more like "I'm the boss, I'm paying the bills here, how would you guys like a raise?" He'd served as a priest a couple of times, but most politicians did that at some point or another. The divine descent thing was mostly Augustus' idea, doing things like commissioning Virgil to write the Aeneid so the Caesar family could claim descent from Venus via Aeneas.

        The Gaulish leader, Vercingetorix, is much harder to pin down, because the only writings we have about him were his Roman opponents, but if he was like most Celtic warriors they typically didn't claim any kind of divinity, just skill in combat. The druids were really the guys who did the religion stuff in that society.

        --
        The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.