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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: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday December 08 2016, @06:44PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Thursday December 08 2016, @06:44PM (#438801) Journal

    I don't agree with the author entirely. But, he makes a lot of good points. The fact is, the power brokers in Washington and New York really did want that war to happen. War with Japan could have been prevented right up until the last months before the war. And, Pearl Harbor could have been prevented entirely. There isn't much that is "new" in this article. But, most of it is "new" to Americans, individually. People mostly prefer to get their veiws of WW2 from Hollyweird, after all.

    I should cite this article the next time someone asks if I believe in conspiracy theories.

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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday December 08 2016, @08:57PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Thursday December 08 2016, @08:57PM (#438869) Journal

    There isn't much that is "new" in this article. But, most of it is "new" to Americans, individually.

    Meh. Most of anything is "new" to Americans individually, or the public anywhere really. That's not a criticism -- it's just the reality of the world.

    The sad thing is that ignorance is used in articles like this one to convince people of crazy stuff. You throw in a few things that people might vaguely have heard of, throw in a few kernels of truth and little-known factual events, then distort their meaning completely, and then you start packing in the outrageous and completely unsubstantiated crap once you've hooked the audience. Did FDR want to give aid to our allies and enter the war more actively? Yeah, but everybody knew we were giving strong support -- diplomatically, in terms of supplies, and lots of munitions -- to the Allies. Anyone who thought FDR might still give into isolationism saw that repudiated with his whole Arsenal of Democracy [wikipedia.org] thing a year before Pearl Harbor. And after basically committing all possible military support to the European allies already, he even extended it to the Soviet Union in June 1941 after the Nazi invasion. The draft had been going since summer of 1940.

    So, it doesn't take much "reading of the tea leaves" to figure out that the U.S. couldn't perpetually remain in this state of supplying the militaries of the world without being drawn into the conflict. But people don't tend to talk about all that stuff that went on in the years before Pearl Harbor, so the ignorant public reads a story like this and says, "Huh... I thought Pearl Harbor was a big surprise that got us involved in the war, but clearly FDR and others were doing stuff that pushed us into it." And yes they were -- very publicly, even though generally with a disclaimer about "no troops" (even if we were drafting them... I guess the conspiracists would say apparently for no reason).

    But it takes a lot of steps to get from "Huh, I didn't really how pro-war FDR was" to "FDR planned a massive conspiracy to destroy most of the Pacific fleet in order to get the American people to support his warmongering." And that's where this article starts chucking in the "half-truths" first. Just choosing one bit randomly from the summary -- the whole "Marshall plan" thing. See the rhetoric right there? Classic conspiracy theory. Tap into your subconscious -- ignorant public thinks, "Huh... I vaguely remember that phrase 'Marshall plan'... my teacher years ago once said something about that, but I don't remember what the heck it was." Except now the author co-opts that vague recognition and turns it on its head "You don't remember the Marshall plan... because that wasn't the REAL one... I'm going to tell you about that one, and it's so much more nefarious than you could imagine."

    Except here's a first-hand report [marshallfoundation.org] of that meeting with George Marshall and the press. Marshall made clear exactly what was going on -- they were planning strategies for an offensive war AND were leaking them to Japanese officials. Why? To try to convince Japan to stay out of war. It was the equivalent of later Cold War techniques to prevent escalation by making superior threats. Why the secrecy and involvement of journalists? Probably because he wanted to make sure these rumors did NOT go public (in case the diplomats leaked stuff), since they would have the opposite diplomatic effect from what was intended. As noted in the account I linked:

    But it must be allowed to leak privately, from the White House or the State Department directly to Japanese officials—presumably Kurusu. If it got out publicly, the Army fanatics in Japan would be in a position to demand war immediately, before we were better fortified. But if the leak is confined to Japanese officials, these officials can say to the cabinet: “Look here. These people really mean to bomb our cities, and they have the equipment with which to do it. We’d better go slow.” In that way, no public face-saving would be necessary, and war might be averted. The last thing the U. S. wants is a war with Japanese which would divide our strength.

    So, there's just ONE of the misleading claims from the summary in context. Yes, Marshall did hold a secret press briefing. Yes, he did outline the fact that the U.S. had made plans for an offensive war on Japan. (And the idea that the military would NOT have started planning at all for such a contingency at that point is preposterous, even if they had no intention of doing it... so the mere existence of an offensive war plan would have just been standard military planning.) But the actual reason for this secret briefing was actually pretty much the opposite of what's implied in the conspiracy theory version.

    I don't have time to get into the dozens of such holes in the linked article. What this demonstrates is how conspiracy theories play into public ignorance -- exploiting it by chaining together half-truths and occasional facts to imply an alternate narrative, then filling in the gaps with BS.