[blind-democracy] Re: 75 Years Of Pearl Harbor Lies

From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2016 22:13:20 -0500

Carl,

See? It didn't turn your world upside down because you refuse to consider
what he wrote. But what he wrote was his conceptualization, based on
historical factds, and he explained the parallels between how our government
knew that there would be an attack by Bin Ladin in advance of the attack and
of how, back in the 30's, the US was playing war games in the pacific, very
close to Japan, and preventing Japan from functioning on an equal basis
financially, preventing them from getting oil, and setting things up so that
Japan would be primed to attack. And he's saying that, in fact, there was
advance notice, and there is documentation to that effect, although they
weren't sure of the date, that Japan would attack Pearl Harbor. And he has
quotes from British and American politicians about this.  It's precisely the
kind of story that Amy Goodman would do on Democracy Now, if she were
interested. He says that The Golden Age by Gore Vidal, is a novel based on
historical documentation and that it got very positive reviews from the
mainstream media back in 2000. Well, I found it on BARD and downloaded it,
after reading the article, and at some point, I'll get to it on the
cartridge where I put it. There's certainly a lot of documentation of the
American corporations who supported the Nazi war machine up to the point
where the decision was made to go to war with Germany. There's a whole lot
of nonfiction books, as well as some fiction, about how Nazi scientists were
brought to the US and incorporated into our science projects at the end of
the war.  There's that book about Alan Dulles, which describes how chummy he
was with the Nazis.  Having seen how blatantly our government lies to us
about foreign relations, certainly during the Bush and Obama administrations
when I've had the time and resources to pay attention, I can absolutely
believe that arrangements were made so that the Japanese would feel impelled
by national pride to attack us. That was necessary because there was a lot
of resistance, at the time, to fighting another world war. Whenever a
decision is made to go to war, the people have to be sold on the plan. They
have to feel threatened.
And think about it. That naval post at Pearl Harbor was susch a wonderfully
convenient target for our country because it was nowhere near the mainland.
Those two or three thousand men were collateral damage. But everyone back on
the mainland felt the attack personally. They were our boys, out there
defending our country, and for no reason at all, those nasty Japanese
murdered them. That's also how we felt about 9/11 when Bush explained that
the attack happened because, "they hate us for our freedom". But we know
that's not why the attack happened. We know that it had to do with what our
government had been doing in the Middle East and because of what Israel had
been doing. So isn't it just possible that back in the 30's, there was the
government story which everyone learned from the radio and newspapers and
newsreels at the movie theaters, and then there was the real, story that no
one knew except the heads of governments and corporations?

Miriam

-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, December 03, 2016 8:59 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: 75 Years Of Pearl Harbor Lies

Well, it didn't turn my world upside down.  As my dad was fond of
saying, "History is written by the victor".  So who is to know the
true facts from those tumultuous days.  FDR certainly was not the Fair
Haired Boy the Liberals painted him to be, but he did make some bold
moves that saved Capitalism from certain destruction.  Much to the
chagrin of the greed driven capitalists.  FDR was a member of the
Ruling Class, and was intent on the well being of the Eastern
Industrialists.  But I do not believe that he had advance knowledge of
the invasion of Pearl Harbor, anymore than I believe George Bush knew
of the pending attack on the twin towers.

Carl Jarvis

On 12/3/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Very long, but wortwhile reading. It may turn your world upside down.
Miriam
75 Years Of Pearl Harbor Lies

EDUCATE! PROPAGANDA, US HISTORY
By David Swanson, www.davidswanson.org
December 2nd, 2016

Powered by Translate
17Share

Above Photo: Japan's surrender ceremony aboard the U.S. battleship USS
Missouri in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2, 1945. (Xinhua via Getty Images)
Pearl Harbor Day today is like Columbus Day 50 years ago. That is to say:
most people still believe the hype. The myths are still maintained in

their

blissful unquestioned state. "New Pearl Harbors" are longed for by war
makers, claimed, and exploited. Yet the original Pearl Harbor remains the
most popular U.S. argument for all things military, including the
long-delayed remilitarization of Japan - not to mention the WWII

internment

of Japanese Americans as a model for targeting other groups today.
Believers
in Pearl Harbor imagine for their mythical event, in contrast to today, a
greater U.S. innocence, a purer victimhood, a higher contrast of good and
evil, and a total necessity of defensive war making.
The facts 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

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.
This week I'm testifying at an Iraq Tribunal about the Downing Street
Minutes. In U.S. thinking the 2003-2008 period of the decades-long war on
Iraq is somehow worse than World War II. But when it comes to lies, bad
decisions, and levels of death and destruction, there is just no
comparison:
World War II stands unchallenged as the worst thing humanity in general

and

the U.S. government in particular (as well as numerous other governments)
have ever done. There's even a parallel to the Downing Street Minutes.
On August 18, 1941, Prime Minister Winston Churchill met with his cabinet
at
10 Downing Street. The meeting had some similarity to the July 23, 2002,
meeting at the same address, the minutes of which became known as the
Downing Street Minutes. Both meetings revealed secret U.S. intentions to

to war. In the 1941 meeting, Churchill told his cabinet, according to the
minutes: "The President had said he would wage war but not declare it." In
addition, "Everything was to be done to force an incident."
Indeed, everything was done to force an incident, and the incident was
Pearl
Harbor.
Recent Memories
In May 2005 some friends and I launched AfterDowningStreet.org (now called
WarIsACrime.org) to promote awareness of the Downing Street Minutes or
Downing Street Memo and related documents.
This was a very useful document that was released in a moment when it

could

have an important impact.
Like every war ever launched by anyone before or since (at least up until
the age of openly blurting out "steal their oil" and "kill their
families"),
the 2003 stage in the Iraq war had been launched on the basis of lies and
had been and still is continued on the basis of other lies.
We ought not to have needed any evidence. It is illegal to attack another
country under the UN Charter and under the Kellogg Briand Pact (and
arguably
under the Hague Convention of 1899). And in this case, as with Afghanistan
two years earlier, the UN had specifically rejected war. Launching a war

illegal and immoral no matter what weapons may be in the nation attacked
and
no matter what crimes that nation has committed. Launching a total assault
on civilians to supposedly shock and awe them is illegal even in the
understanding of lawyers who ignore the illegality of war. Morally it is
one
of the worst things ever done. Practically it has never worked.
Even if we accepted that weapons in Iraq or Iraqi crimes could justify a
war, the evidence was clear that these were lies. The Iraqi government was
opposed to the group it had supposedly collaborated with. In 1995 Saddam
Hussein's son-in-law had informed the U.S. and the British that all
biological, chemical, missile, and nuclear weapons had been destroyed

under

his direct supervision. After U.N. inspectors left Iraq in 1998, the lead
inspector said they'd come to the same conclusion. In 1999 at a primary
debate in New Hampshire, Bush said he'd "take out" Saddam Hussein. "I'm
surprised he's still there," he said. In 2001, Condoleezza Rice, Colin
Powell, and others in the Bush Administration were telling the media that
Saddam Hussein had no weapons. They transparently switched their views on
command.
So, when the Downing Street Minutes came out on May 1, 2005, we jumped on
it, not as new information but as evidence we could use, both to persuade
others and to make a case in court or in Congress. These were the minutes
of
a meeting at Prime Minister Tony Blair's office on July 23, 2002, at which
his head of so-called intelligence, just back from Washington, reported

(as

summarized in the minutes):
"Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam,
through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and

WMD.

But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
And so they were, as has been documented in extensive detail. The White
House war schemers and their collaborators forged documents, solicited
desired claims rejected by their own experts, relied on non-credible
witnesses, fed fake evidence to complicit so-called journalists, and
tortured desired statements out of victims they'd kidnapped. Bush

concocted

harebrained schemes to start a war that he publicly claimed to be trying

avoid. See, for example, the White House Memo.
But just the fact that the British had been informed that war was
inevitable
by July 23, 2002, ought to have been a big story in May 2005. We worked
hard
to make it such, pressuring a resistant corporate media that claimed

either

that it couldn't verify a memo that was clearly authentic and not even
disputed, or arguing that what it revealed was "old news," even though it
was brand new to anyone informed by those media outlets.
We made it into big news through public protests, reenactments in the
lobbies of media outlets, floods of letters to editors, and a wide variety
of creative actions. But we had an advantage. Democrats in Congress were

the minority and many of them were claiming they would take actions to end
the war if given the majority. Key Congress members were supporting our
efforts. I believe that we turned many of their encouraging claims into
lies
by shrinking rather than enlarging and intensifying our movement in

January

2007.
When Diane Sawyer asked Bush why he had made the claims he had about

Iraq's

supposed weapons of mass destruction, he replied: "What's the difference?"
Perhaps very little now, as we've been through eight years with a

president

who launches wars without bothering to lie to Congress. Or perhaps very
much
now, as we showed our power to resist lies about Syria in 2013 as a decade
of activism against a war on Iraq backed Congress away from supporting a
new
war.
We have to make the answer matter. We have to tell the story properly, as
half the United States still doesn't know it. The biggest lie now,

believed

by many Americans, is that Iraq benefitted and the U.S. suffered (that
second part is true) from the war that destroyed Iraq.
Toward correcting that false belief I submit into evidence a paper I wrote
three years ago called Iraq War Among World's Worst Events.
My biggest fear is that drone wars and proxy wars and secretive wars will
continue to be launched without being preceded by public campaigns of
lying.
Or even worse: wars will be launched with honest proclamations that
somebody's oil needs to be stolen or some population needs to be
slaughtered
- and we won't resist or succeed in stopping these crimes. One of the best
tools we have in this struggle is awareness of every lie used to support
every past war. We must increase that awareness at every opportunity.
Most importantly, we must dismantle the myths of Pearl Harbor.
Unsurprising
Many Japanese are better able to recognize their government's crimes,
crimes
before and after Pearl Harbor, as well as the crime of Pearl Harbor. The
United States is almost entirely blind to its role. From the U.S. side,
Pearl Harbor had roots in Germany.
Nazi Germany, we actually tend to overlook sometimes, could not have
existed
or waged war without the support for decades past and ongoing through the
war of U.S. corporations like GM, Ford, IBM, and ITT. U.S. corporate
interests preferred Nazi Germany to the communist Soviet Union, were happy
to see those two nations' peoples slaughter each other, and favored the
United States entering the oh-so-good-and-necessary World War II on the
side
of England only once the U.S. government had made that very profitable.

The

U.S. delayed D-Day for years while Germany bled Russia dry, and within
hours
of Germany's defeat, Churchill proposed a new war on Russia using German
troops.
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 Greerand
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 April 28, 1941, Churchill wrote a secret directive to his war cabinet:
"It may be taken as almost certain that the entry of Japan into the war
would be followed by the immediate entry of the United States on our

side."

On May 11, 1941, Robert Menzies, the prime minister of Australia, met with
Roosevelt and found him "a little jealous" of Churchill's place in the
center of the war. While Roosevelt's cabinet all wanted the United States
to
enter the war, Menzies found that Roosevelt,
" . . . trained under Woodrow Wilson in the last war, waits for an
incident,
which would in one blow get the USA into war and get R. out of his foolish
election pledges that 'I will keep you out of war.'"
On August 18, 1941, Churchill held that meeting with his cabinet at 10
Downing Street.
An incident was forced.
Japan was certainly not averse to attacking others and had been busy
creating an Asian empire. And the United States and Japan were certainly
not
living in harmonious friendship. But what could bring the Japanese to
attack?
When President Franklin Roosevelt visited Pearl Harbor on July 28, 1934,
seven years before the Japanese attack, the Japanese military expressed
apprehension. General Kunishiga Tanaka wrote in the Japan Advertiser,
objecting to the build-up of the American fleet and the creation of
additional bases in Alaska and the Aleutian Islands:
"Such insolent behavior makes us most suspicious. It makes us think a

major

disturbance is purposely being encouraged in the Pacific. This is greatly
regretted."
Whether it was actually regretted or not is a separate question from
whether
this was a typical and predictable response to military expansionism, even
when done in the name of "defense." The great unembedded (as we would

today

call him) journalist George Seldes was suspicious as well. In October 1934
he wrote in Harper's Magazine: "It is an axiom that nations do not arm for
war but for a war." Seldes asked an official at the Navy League:
"Do you accept the naval axiom that you prepare to fight a specific navy?"
The man replied "Yes."
"Do you contemplate a fight with the British navy?"
"Absolutely, no."
"Do you contemplate war with Japan?"
"Yes."
In 1935 the most decorated U.S. Marine in history at the time, Brigadier
General Smedley D. Butler, published to enormous success a short book
called
War Is a Racket. He saw perfectly well what was coming and warned the
nation:
"At each session of Congress the question of further naval appropriations
comes up. The swivel-chair admirals don't shout that 'We need lots of
battleships to war on this nation or that nation.' Oh, no. First of all,
they let it be known that America is menaced by a great naval power.

Almost

any day, these admirals will tell you, the great fleet of this supposed
enemy will strike suddenly and annihilate our 125,000,000 people. Just

that. Then they begin to cry for a larger navy. For what? To fight the
enemy? Oh my, no. Oh, no. For defense purposes only. Then, incidentally,
they announce maneuvers in the Pacific. For defense. Uh, huh.
"The Pacific is a great big ocean. We have a tremendous coastline in the
Pacific. Will the maneuvers be off the coast, two or three hundred miles?
Oh, no. The maneuvers will be two thousand, yes, perhaps even thirty-five
hundred miles, off the coast.
"The Japanese, a proud people, of course will be pleased beyond expression
to see the United States fleet so close to Nippon's shores. Even as

pleased

as would be the residents of California were they to dimly discern,

through

the morning mist, the Japanese fleet playing at war games off Los

Angeles."

In March 1935, Roosevelt bestowed Wake Island on the U.S. Navy and gave

Pan

Am Airways a permit to build runways on Wake Island, Midway Island, and
Guam. Japanese military commanders announced that they were disturbed and
viewed these runways as a threat. So did peace activists in the United
States. By the next month, Roosevelt had planned war games and maneuvers
near the Aleutian Islands and Midway Island. By the following month, peace
activists were marching in New York advocating friendship with Japan.
Norman
Thomas wrote in 1935:
"The Man from Mars who saw how men suffered in the last war and how
frantically they are preparing for the next war, which they know will be
worse, would come to the conclusion that he was looking at the denizens of
a
lunatic asylum."
The U.S. Navy spent the next few years working up plans for war with

Japan,

the March 8, 1939, version of which described "an offensive war of long
duration" that would destroy the military and disrupt the economic life of
Japan. In January 1941, eleven months before the attack, the Japan
Advertiser expressed its outrage over Pearl Harbor in an editorial, and

the

U.S. ambassador to Japan wrote in his diary:
"There is a lot of talk around town to the effect that the Japanese, in
case
of a break with the United States, are planning to go all out in a

surprise

mass attack on Pearl Harbor. Of course I informed my government."
On February 5, 1941, Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner wrote to Secretary
of War Henry Stimson to warn of the possibility of a surprise attack at
Pearl Harbor.
As early as 1932 the United States had been talking with China about
providing airplanes, pilots, and training for its war with Japan. In
November 1940, Roosevelt loaned China one hundred million dollars for war
with Japan, and after consulting with the British, U.S. Secretary of the
Treasury Henry Morgenthau made plans to send the Chinese bombers with U.S.
crews to use in bombing Tokyo and other Japanese cities. On December 21,
1940, two weeks shy of a year before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,
China's Minister of Finance T.V. Soong and Colonel Claire Chennault, a
retired U.S. Army flier who was working for the Chinese and had been

urging

them to use American pilots to bomb Tokyo since at least 1937, met in

Henry

Morgenthau's dining room to plan the firebombing of Japan. Morgenthau said
he could get men released from duty in the U.S. Army Air Corps if the
Chinese could pay them $1,000 per month. Soong agreed.
On May 24, 1941, the New York Times reported on U.S. training of the
Chinese
air force, and the provision of "numerous fighting and bombing planes" to
China by the United States. "Bombing of Japanese Cities is Expected" read
the subheadline. By July, the Joint Army-Navy Board had approved a plan
called JB 355 to firebomb Japan. A front corporation would buy American
planes to be flown by American volunteers trained by Chennault and paid by
another front group. Roosevelt approved, and his China expert Lauchlin
Currie, in the words of Nicholson Baker, "wired Madame Chaing Kai-Shek and
Claire Chennault a letter that fairly begged for interception by Japanese
spies." Whether or not that was the entire point, this was the letter:
"I am very happy to be able to report today the President directed that
sixty-six bombers be made available to China this year with twenty-four to
be delivered immediately. He also approved a Chinese pilot training

program

here. Details through normal channels. Warm regards."
The U.S. ambassador had said "in case of a break with the United States"
the
Japanese would bomb Pearl Harbor. I wonder if this qualified!
The 1st American Volunteer Group (AVG) of the Chinese Air Force, also

known

as the Flying Tigers, moved ahead with recruitment and training
immediately,
were provided to China prior to Pearl Harbor, and first saw combat on
December 20, 1941, twelve days (local time) after the Japanese attacked
Pearl Harbor.
On May 31, 1941, at the Keep America Out of War Congress, William Henry
Chamberlin gave a dire warning: "A total economic boycott of Japan, the
stoppage of oil shipments for instance, would push Japan into the arms of
the Axis. Economic war would be a prelude to naval and military war." The
worst thing about peace advocates is how many times they turn out to be
right.
On July 24, 1941, President Roosevelt remarked, "If we cut the oil off ,
[the Japanese] probably would have gone down to the Dutch East Indies a
year
ago, and you would have had a war. It was very essential from our own
selfish point of view of defense to prevent a war from starting in the
South
Pacific. So our foreign policy was trying to stop a war from breaking out
there."
Reporters noticed that Roosevelt said "was" rather than "is." The next

day,

Roosevelt issued an executive order freezing Japanese assets. The United
States and Britain cut off oil and scrap metal to Japan. Radhabinod Pal,

Indian jurist who served on the war crimes tribunal after the war, called
the embargoes a "clear and potent threat to Japan's very existence," and
concluded the United States had provoked Japan.
On August 7th, four months before the attack, the Japan Times Advertiser
wrote: "First there was the creation of a superbase at Singapore, heavily
reinforced by British and Empire troops. From this hub a great wheel was
built up and linked with American bases to form a great ring sweeping in a
great area southwards and westwards from the Philippines through Malaya

and

Burma, with the link broken only in the Thailand peninsula. Now it is
proposed to include the narrows in the encirclement, which proceeds to
Rangoon."
One cannot help being reminded here of Hillary Clinton's comments to
Goldman
Sachs bankers. Clinton claimed to have told the Chinese that the United
States could claim ownership of the entire Pacific as a result of having
"liberated it." She went on to claim to have told them that "We discovered
Japan for heaven's sake." And: "We have proof of having bought [Hawaii]."
By September 1941 the Japanese press was outraged that the United States
had
begun shipping oil right past Japan to reach Russia. Japan, its newspapers
said, was dying a slow death from "economic war."
What might the United States have been hoping to gain by shipping oil past
a
nation in desperate need of it?
In late October, U.S. spy Edgar Mower was doing work for Colonel William
Donovan who spied for Roosevelt. Mower spoke with a man in Manila named
Ernest Johnson, a member of the Maritime Commission, who said he expected
"The Japs will take Manila before I can get out." When Mower expressed
surprise, Johnson replied "Didn't you know the Jap fleet has moved
eastward,
presumably to attack our fleet at Pearl Harbor?"
On November 3, 1941, the U.S. ambassador tried again to get something
through his government's thick skull, sending a lengthy telegram to the
State Department warning that the economic sanctions might force Japan to
commit "national hara-kiri." He wrote: "An armed conflict with the United
States may come with dangerous and dramatic suddenness."
Why do I keep recalling the headline of the memo given to President George
W. Bush prior to the September 11, 2001, attacks? "Bin Laden Determined To
Strike in U.S." Apparently nobody in Washington wanted to hear it in 1941
either.
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.
Ten days later Secretary of War Henry Stimson wrote in his diary that he'd
met in the Oval Office with Marshall, President Roosevelt, Secretary of

the

Navy Frank Knox, Admiral Harold Stark, and Secretary of State Cordell

Hull.

Roosevelt had told them the Japanese were likely to attack soon, possibly
next Monday. It has been well documented that the United States had broken
the Japanese' codes and that Roosevelt had access to them. It was through
intercept of a so-called Purple code message that Roosevelt had discovered
Germany's plans to invade Russia. It was Hull who leaked a Japanese
intercept to the press, resulting in the November 30, 1941, headline
"Japanese May Strike Over Weekend."
That next Monday would have been December 1st, six days before the attack
actually came. "The question," Stimson wrote, "was how we should maneuver
them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much
danger to ourselves. It was a difficult proposition." Was it? One obvious
answer was to keep the fleet in Pearl Harbor and keep the sailors

stationed

there in the dark while fretting about them from comfortable offices in
Washington, D.C. In fact, that was the solution our suit-and-tied heroes
went with.
The day after the attack, Congress voted for war. Congresswoman Jeannette
Rankin (R., Mont.), the first woman ever elected to Congress, and who had
voted against World War I, stood alone in opposing World War II (just as
Congresswoman Barbara Lee [D., Calif.] would stand alone against attacking
Afghanistan 60 years later).
One year after the vote, on December 8, 1942, Rankin put extended remarks
into the Congressional Record explaining her opposition. She cited the

work

of a British propagandist who had argued in 1938 for using Japan to bring
the United States into the war. She cited Henry Luce's reference in Life
magazine on July 20, 1942, to "the Chinese for whom the U.S. had delivered
the ultimatum that brought on Pearl Harbor." She introduced evidence that
at
the Atlantic Conference on August 12, 1941, Roosevelt had assured

Churchill

that the United States would bring economic pressure to bear on Japan. "I
cited," Rankin later wrote, " the State Department Bulletin of December

20,

1941, which revealed that on September 3 a communication had been sent to
Japan demanding that it accept the principle of 'nondisturbance of the
status quo in the Pacific,' which amounted to demanding guarantees of the
inviolateness of the white empires in the Orient."
Rankin found that the Economic Defense Board had gotten economic sanctions
under way less than a week after the Atlantic Conference. 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."
General George Marshall admitted as much to Congress in 1945: that the
codes
had been broken, that the United States had initiated Anglo-Dutch-American
agreements for unified action against Japan and put them into effect

before

Pearl Harbor, and that the United States had provided officers of its
military to China for combat duty before Pearl Harbor. It is hardly a
secret
that it takes two war powers to wage a war (unlike when one war power
attacks an unarmed state) or that this case was no exception to that rule.
An October 1940 memorandum by Lieutenant Commander Arthur H. McCollum was
acted on by President Roosevelt and his chief subordinates. It called for
eight actions that McCollum predicted would lead the Japanese to attack,
including arranging for the use of British bases in Singapore and for the
use of Dutch bases in what is now Indonesia, aiding the Chinese

government,

sending a division of long-range heavy cruisers to the Philippines or
Singapore, sending two divisions of submarines to "the Orient," keeping

the

main strength of the fleet in Hawaii, insisting that the Dutch refuse the
Japanese oil, and embargoing all trade with Japan in collaboration with

the

British Empire.
The day after McCollum's memo, the State Department told Americans to
evacuate far eastern nations, and Roosevelt ordered the fleet kept in
Hawaii
over the strenuous objection of Admiral James O. Richardson who quoted the
President as saying "Sooner or later the Japanese would commit an overt

act

against the United States and the nation would be willing to enter the
war."
The message that Admiral Harold Stark sent to Admiral Husband Kimmel on
November 28, 1941, read, "IF HOSTILITIES CANNOT REPEAT CANNOT BE AVOIDED
THE
UNITED STATES DESIRES THAT JAPAN COMMIT THE FIRST OVERT ACT." Joseph
Rochefort, cofounder of the Navy's communication intelligence section, who
was instrumental in failing to communicate to Pearl Harbor what was

coming,

would later comment: "It was a pretty cheap price to pay for unifying the
country."
The night after the attack, President Roosevelt had CBS News's Edward R.
Murrow and Roosevelt's Coordinator of Information William Donovan over for
dinner at the White House, and all the President wanted to know was

whether

the American people would now accept war. Donovan and Murrow assured him
the
people would indeed accept war now. Donovan later told his assistant that
Roosevelt's surprise was not that of others around him, and that he,
Roosevelt, welcomed the attack. Murrow was unable to sleep that night and
was plagued for the rest of his life by what he called "the biggest story
of
my life" which he never told, but which he did not need to. The next day,
the President spoke of a day of infamy, the United States Congress

declared

the last Constitutional war in the history of the republic, and the
President of the Federal Council of Churches, Dr. George A. Buttrick,
became
a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation committing to resist the war.
Why does it matter? Because the legend of Pearl Harbor, re-used on 9-11,

responsible not for the destructive pro-war policies of the 1920s and the
1930s that brought World War II into being, but responsible for the
permanent war mentality of the past 75 years, as well as for how World War
II was escalated, prolonged, and completed.
"Disturbed in 1942," wrote Lawrence S. Wittner, "by rumors of Nazi
extermination plans, Jessie Wallace Hughan worried that such a policy,
which
appeared 'natural, from their pathological point of view,' might be

carried

out if World War II continued. 'It seems that the only way to save
thousands
and perhaps millions of European Jews from destruction,' she wrote, 'would
be for our government to broadcast the promise' of an 'armistice on
condition that the European minorities are not molested any further. . . .
It would be very terrible if six months from now we should find that this
threat has literally come to pass without our making even a gesture to
prevent it.' When her predictions were fulfilled only too well by 1943,

she

wrote to the State Department and the New York Times, decrying the fact
that
'two million [Jews] have already died' and that 'two million more will be
killed by the end of the war.' Once again she pleaded for the cessation of
hostilities, arguing that German military defeats would in turn exact
reprisals upon the Jewish scapegoat. 'Victory will not save them,' she
insisted, 'for dead men cannot be liberated.'"
Hitler killed millions of Germans, but the allies killed as many or more,
Germans ordered into battle by Hitler or Germans in the wrong place when
allied bombs fell. And, as Hughan pointed out at the time, the war drove
the
genocide, just as the vengeful settlement of the previous war a quarter
century before had fueled the hostility, the scapegoating, and the rise of
Hitlerism.
Out of the resistance to war by U.S. conscientious objectors would come,
finally, the development of civil resistance to racial segregation in U.S.
prisons that later spread to the nation outside the prisons as activists
sought to duplicate their victories on a larger scale. But also out of

that

very worst thing our species has ever done to itself, World War II, would
come the permanent military industrial complex. We would extend the power
to
vote to more and more Americans while, in the cruelest of jokes,
transforming voting into an ever more meaningless enterprise. We would
paint
a fresh coat of glossy pretense on our democracy while hollowing it out
from
the inside, replacing it with a war machine the likes of which the planet
had never seen and may not be able to survive.
Spreading the Myth
The United States is indisputably the world's most frequent and extensive
wager of aggressive war, largest occupier of foreign lands, and biggest
weapons dealer to the world. But when the United States peeps out from
under
the blankets where it lies shivering with fear, it sees itself as an
innocent victim. It has no holiday to keep any victorious battle in
everyone's mind. It has a holiday to remember the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor - and now also one, perhaps holier still, to recall, not the "shock
and awe" destruction of Baghdad, but the crimes of September 11, 2001, the
"new Pearl Harbor."
Similar to Israel, but with a variation, the United States is deeply
obsessed with World War II, overlaid of course on a Southern obsession

with

the U.S. Civil War. The Southern U.S. love for the Civil War is love for a
war lost, but also for victimhood and the righteousness of the vengeance
wreaked on the world year after year by the U.S. military.
The U.S. love for World War II is also, fundamentally, love for a war

lost.

That may seem odd to say, because it is simultaneously very much love for

war won. World War II remains the U.S. model for potentially some day
winning a war again, as it's been losing them all over the world for the

years since World War II. But the U.S. view of WWII is also strangely
similar to the Russian view.
Russia was brutally attacked by the Nazis, but persevered and won the war.
The United States believes itself to have been "imminently" attacked by

the

Nazis. That, after all, was the propaganda that took the United States to
war. There was not one word about rescuing Jews or anything half that
noble.
Rather, President Franklin Roosevelt claimed to have a map of the Nazis'
plans for carving up the Americas.
Hollywood has made relatively few movies and television shows about all
other wars combined, in comparison with dramas about World War II, which
may
in fact be its most popular topic ever. We're really not drowning in

movies

glorifying the theft of northern Mexico or the occupation of the
Philippines. The Korean War gets little play. Even the Vietnam War and all
the more recent wars fail to inspire U.S. storytellers like World War II,
and some 90% of those stories relate to the war in Europe, not Asia.
The European story is much preferred because of the particular evils of

the

German enemy. That the U.S. prevented a peace without victor in World War

by crushing Germany, and then punished it viciously, and then aided the
Nazis - all of that is far more easily forgotten than the nuclear bombs
that
the United States dropped on Japan. But it is the Japanese attack of
December 7, 1941, together with the fantasized Nazi invasion, that
persuades
the U.S. public that waging war in Europe was defensive. So the history of
the United States training Japan in imperialism and then antagonizing and
provoking Japan must be forgotten as well.
Amazon.com, a corporation with a huge CIA contract, and whose owner also
owns the Washington Post, has launched a television series called theMan

the High Castle. The story is set in the 1960s with the Nazis occupying
three-quarters of the United States and the Japanese the rest. In this
alternative universe, the ultimate redemption is found in Germany being

the

nation to have dropped nuclear bombs.
The Axis victors, and their aging leaders, have created and maintained an
old-fashioned empire - not like U.S. bases in proxy states, but a
full-blown
occupation, like the United States in Iraq. It doesn't really matter how
implausible this sounds. It is the most plausible scenario that can embody
the U.S. fantasy of someone else doing to it what it does to others. Thus
U.S. crimes here in the real 2000s become "defensive," as it is doing unto
others before they can do unto it.
Nonviolent resistance does not exist in Season One Episode One of this
soothing victim adventure, and apparently hasn't for years at that point

the tale. But how could it? A force stoppable through nonviolence - even

imaginary one - cannot serve to justify the violence of the actual U.S.
military. The German and Japanese occupiers have to be confrontable only
through violence, even anachronistically in an age in which nonviolent
techniques were known, in which the civil rights movement was resisting
U.S.
fascism to great effect.
"Before the war . every man was free," says one of the attractive young
white people who constitute all the heroes and some of the villains in

this

drama. Instead of race riots, McCarthyism, Vietnam, and the sterilizing

and

experimenting on the powerless that actually happened, this alternative
United States includes the burning of Jews, the disabled, and the
terminally
ill. The contrast to the imagined pre-Nazi past in which "every man [but
not
woman?] was free" is stark. One almost wishes to make America great again.
Amazon also shows us Nazis behaving much like the actual United States
behaves: torturing and murdering enemies. Rikers Island is a brutal prison
in this TV show and in reality. In this fantasy, the symbols of U.S. and
Nazi patriotism have been merged seamlessly. In reality, the U.S. military
incorporated much Nazi thinking along with the many Nazis it recruited
through Operation Paperclip - another way in which the U.S. actually lost
WWII if we imagine victory as democracy defeating the sort of society in
which someone like Donald Trump could thrive.
The United States today manages to view refugees from the wars it wages in
distant lands as dangerous enemies, as new Nazis, just as leading U.S.
politicians refer to foreign leaders as new Hitlers. With U.S. citizens
shooting up public places on an almost daily basis, when one such killing
is
alleged to have been done by a Muslim, especially a Muslim with any
sympathy
for foreign fighters, well, then that's not just a shooting. That means
that
the United States has been invaded. And that means that anything it does

"defensive."
Does Venezuela elect leaders the U.S. disapproves of? That's a threat to
"national security" - a somewhat magical threat to invade and occupy the
United States and compel it to torture and kill wearing a different flag.
This paranoia doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from programs like The
Man
in the High Castle.
Pearl Harbor mythologizing is not just a field for entertainment. Here's a
newspaper article:
"Pearl Harbor and World War II brought us together as a nation. We

believed

we could not be beaten. And we prevailed. But why is Congress now so

intent

on destroying our feelings of patriotism and decimating our national
defense? Many Congress members want to cut our national defense spending

an effort to compensate for their ineptness, for not fulfilling their
responsibilities as our representatives and for catering to other groups
and
politicians for the sake of their pet (pork) projects and the next
election.
They forget (or don't know) that their No. 1 priority is the defense of

our

country, and related to that, the protection of our veterans' benefits. .

.
"Could the fact that America forgot about what happened at Pearl Harbor

and

let down its guard have helped allow the attacks of 9/11 to happen? And
will
this forgetfulness and ignorance stoke terrorists' ambitions to expand
their
attacks? Because Congress' 'supercommittee' failed to meet its deadline
last
month to identify $1.2 trillion in savings, spending cut triggers are now
set to take effect in 2013, including $600 billion for defense. If

Congress

is allowed to cut the military budget, another attack becomes more likely.
"We must call the president, our congressional leaders, our two state
senators and our representatives in the House to tell them to stop their
foolishness, renew the military and Veterans Affairs budgets, and even
increase them so that we may both strengthen our programs for research and
development in order to remain the largest and best-equipped military in
the
world and to respect and honor our past veteran heroes.
"If we allow them to make defense cuts all in the name of getting out of
Iraq, and eventually Afghanistan (which is probably a mistake, but that
discussion will be for another day), there will be no more research funds
to
remain No. 1, no upgrades, no new tanks, planes, ships and drones, neither
more nor better body armor and vehicles."
Regardless of whether you believe the legend of Pearl Harbor, it is very
difficult to deny that this is a different world. The United States does
not
just have the most expensive military in the world, but one the size of

the

rest of the world's put together. The United States has bases or troops in
most of the world's other countries. The United States dominates the

oceans

and outerspace. The United States has sliced the planet up into command
zones. Congress is dumping over half of discretionary spending into the
military. While they've roughly doubled this spending, both in real

dollars

and as a percentage of the federal budget since 9-11, the fact is that the
nuclear arsenal and the empire of bases and all the endless spending had
nothing to do with 9-11 other than serving to provoke it. Your newspaper

asking you to live in a dream world, and to destroy this one in the
process.
No new tanks? No new planes? $600 billion sounds big, but over 10 years
it's
$60 billion out of an annual "security" budget of a trillion - meaning 6%.
All that's required to turn that into an increase instead of a cut is to
take it out of a "projected" budget that increases by more than 6%. If any
actual cutting happens, you can rest assured our misrepresentatives will

everything in their power to take the money out of non-military areas, or
at
least to cut troop benefits rather than the sacred and profitable tanks

and

planes etc., almost none of which has anything to do with "defense."
Countering the Myth
As we read Ulysses on Bloomsday every June 16th (or we should if we don't)
I
think that every December 7th should not only commemorate the Great Law of
1682 that banned war in Pennsylvania but also mark Pearl Harbor, not by
celebrating the state of permawar that has existed for 75 years, but by
reading The Golden Age by Gore Vidal and marking with a certain Joycean
irony the golden age of anti-isolationist imperial mass-killing that has
encompassed the lives of every U.S. citizen under the age of 75.
Golden Age Day should include public readings of Vidal's novel and the
glowing endorsements of it by the Washington Post, New York Times Book
Review, and every other corporate paper in the year 2000, also known as

the

year 1 BWT (before the war on terra). Not a single one of those newspapers
has ever, to my knowledge, printed a serious straightforward analysis of
how
President Franklin D. Roosevelt maneuvered the United States into World

War

II. Yet Vidal's novel - presented as fiction, yet resting entirely on
documented facts - recounts the story with total honesty, and somehow the
genre used or the author's pedigree or his literary skill or the length of
the book (too many pages for senior editors to be bothered with) grants

him

a license to tell the truth.
Sure, some people have read The Golden Age and protested its impropriety,
but it remains a respectable high-brow volume. I may be hurting the cause
by
openly writing about its content. The trick, which I highly recommend to
all, is to give or recommend the book to others without telling them

what's

in it.
Despite a filmmaker being a main character in the book, it's not been made
into a film, as far as I know - but a widespread phenomenon of public
readings could conceivably make that happen.
In The Golden Age, we follow along inside all the closed doors, as the
British push for U.S. involvement in World War II, as President Roosevelt
makes a commitment to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, as the warmongers
manipulate the Republican convention to make sure that both parties
nominate
candidates in 1940 ready to campaign on peace while planning war, as FDR
longs to run for an unprecedented third term as a wartime president but
must
content himself with beginning a draft and campaigning as a drafttime
president in a time of supposed national danger, and as FDR works to
provoke
Japan into attacking on his desired schedule.
The echoes are eerie. Roosevelt campaigns on peace ("except in case of
attack"), like Wilson, like Johnson, like Nixon, like Obama. Roosevelt,
pre-election, puts in Henry Stimson as a war-eager Secretary of War not
altogether unlike Donald Trump nominees.
World War Two Was Not a Just War
World War II is often called "the good war," and has been since the U.S.
war
on Vietnam to which it was then contrasted. World War II so dominates U.S.
and therefore Western entertainment and education, that "good" often comes
to mean something more than "just."
The winner of the 2016 "Miss Italy" beauty pageant got herself into a bit
of
a scandal by declaring that she would have liked to live through World War
II. While she was mocked, she was clearly not alone. Many would like to be
part of something widely depicted as noble, heroic, and exciting. Should
they actually find a time machine, I recommend they read the statements of
some actual WWII veterans and survivors before they head back to join the
fun.
No matter how many years one writes books, does interviews, publishes
columns, and speaks at events, it remains virtually impossible to make it
out the door of an event in the United States at which you've advocated
abolishing war without somebody hitting you with the
what-about-the-good-war
question. This belief that there was a good war 75 years ago is a large
part
of what moves the U.S. public to tolerate dumping a trillion dollars a

year

into preparing in case there's a good war next year, even in the face of

many dozens of wars during the past 71 years on which there's general
consensus that they were not good. Without rich, well-established myths
about World War II, current propaganda about Russia or Syria or Iraq or
China would sound as crazy to most people as it sounds to me. And of

course

the funding generated by the Good War legend leads to more bad wars,

rather

than preventing them. I've written on this topic at great length in many
articles and books, especially War Is A Lie. But I'll offer here a few key
points that ought to at least place a few seeds of doubt in the minds of
most U.S. supporters of WWII as a Just War.
World War II could not have happened without World War I, without the
stupid
manner of starting World War I and the even stupider manner of ending

World

War I which led numerous wise people to predict World War II on the spot,
or
without Wall Street's funding of Nazi Germany for decades (as preferable

communists), or without the arms race and numerous bad decisions that do
not
need to be repeated in the future.
The war was not humanitarian and was not even marketed as such until after
it was over. There was no poster asking you to help Uncle Sam save the
Jews.
A ship of Jewish refugees from Germany was chased away from Miami by the
Coast Guard. The U.S. and other nations refused to accept Jewish refugees,
and the majority of the U.S. public supported that position. Peace groups
that questioned Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his foreign secretary
about shipping Jews out of Germany to save them were told that, while
Hitler
might very well agree to the plan, it would be too much trouble and

require

too many ships. The U.S. engaged in no diplomatic or military effort to
save
the victims in the Nazi concentration camps. Anne Frank was denied a U.S.
visa.
Although this point has nothing to do with a serious historian's case for
WWII as a Just War, it is so central to U.S. mythology that I'll include
here a key passage from Nicholson Baker:
"Anthony Eden, Britain's foreign secretary, who'd been tasked by Churchill
with handling queries about refugees, dealt coldly with one of many
important delegations, saying that any diplomatic effort to obtain the
release of the Jews from Hitler was 'fantastically impossible.' On a trip
to
the United States, Eden candidly told Cordell Hull, the secretary of

state,

that the real difficulty with asking Hitler for the Jews was that 'Hitler
might well take us up on any such offer, and there simply are not enough
ships and means of transportation in the world to handle them.' Churchill
agreed. 'Even were we to obtain permission to withdraw all the Jews,' he
wrote in reply to one pleading letter, 'transport alone presents a problem
which will be difficult of solution.' Not enough shipping and transport?
Two
years earlier, the British had evacuated nearly 340,000 men from the
beaches
of Dunkirk in just nine days. The U.S. Air Force had many thousands of new
planes. During even a brief armistice, the Allies could have airlifted and
transported refugees in very large numbers out of the German sphere."
The "good" side of the war simply did not give a damn about what would
become the central example of the badness of the "bad" side of the war.
The war was not defensive. A case can be made that the U.S. needed to

enter

the war in Europe to defend other nations, which had entered to defend yet
other nations, but a case could also be made that the U.S. escalated the
targeting of civilians, extended the war, and inflicted more damage than
might have occurred, had the U.S. done nothing, attempted diplomacy, or
invested in nonviolence. To claim that a Nazi empire could have grown to
someday include an occupation of the United States is wildly far fetched
and
not borne out by any earlier or later examples from other wars.
We now know much more widely and with much more data that nonviolent
resistance to occupation and injustice is more likely to succeed-and that
success more likely to last-than violent resistance. With this knowledge,
we
can look back at the stunning successes of nonviolent actions against the
Nazis that were not well organized or built on beyond their initial
successes.
The Good War was not good for the troops. Lacking intense modern training
and psychological conditioning to prepare soldiers to engage in the
unnatural act of murder, some 80 percent of U.S. and other troops in World
War II did not fire their weapons at "the enemy." The fact that veterans

WWII were treated better after the war than other soldiers before or

since,

was the result of the pressure created by the Bonus Army after the

war. That veterans were given free college, healthcare, and pensions was
not
due to the merits of the war or in some way a result of the war. Without
the
war, everyone could have been given free college for many years. If we
provided free college to everyone today, it would then require much more
than Hollywoodized World War II stories to get many people into military
recruiting stations.
Several times the number of people killed in German camps were killed
outside of them in the war. The majority of those people were civilians.
The
scale of the killing, wounding, and destroying made WWII the single worst
thing humanity has ever done to itself in a short space of time. We

imagine

the allies were somehow "opposed" to the far lesser killing in the camps.
But that can't justify the cure that was worse than the disease.
Escalating the war to include the all-out destruction of civilians and
cities, culminating in the completely indefensible nuking of cities took
WWII out of the realm of defensible projects for many who had defended its
initiation. Demanding unconditional surrender and seeking to maximize

death

and suffering did immense damage and left a grim and foreboding legacy.
Killing huge numbers of people is supposedly defensible for the "good"

side

in a war, but not for the "bad" side. The distinction between the two is
never as stark as fantasized. The United States had a long history as an
apartheid state. U.S. traditions of oppressing African Americans,
practicing
genocide against Native Americans, and now interning Japanese Americans
also
gave rise to specific programs that inspired Germany's Nazis-these

included

camps for Native Americans, and programs of eugenics and human
experimentation that existed before, during, and after the war.
One of these programs included giving syphilis to people in Guatemala at
the
same time the Nuremberg trials were taking place. The U.S. military hired
hundreds of top Nazis at the end of the war; they fit right in. The U.S.
aimed for a wider world empire, before the war, during it, and ever since.
German neo- Nazis today, forbidden to wave the Nazi flag, sometimes wave
the
flag of the Confederate States of America instead.
The "good" side of the "good war," the party that did most of the killing
and dying for the winning side, was the communist Soviet Union. That
doesn't
make the war a triumph for communism, but it does tarnish Washington's and
Hollywood's tales of triumph for "democracy."
World War II still hasn't ended. Ordinary people in the United States
didn't
have their incomes taxed until World War II and that's never stopped. It
was
supposed to be temporary. WWII-era bases built around the world have never
closed. U.S. troops have never left Germany or Japan. There are more than
100,000 U.S. and British bombs still in the ground in Germany, still
killing.
Going back 75 years to a nuclear-free, colonial world of completely
different structures, laws, and habits to justify what has been the
greatest
expense of the United States in each of the years since is a bizarre feat
of
self-deception that isn't attempted in the justification of any lesser
enterprise. Assume I've got everything else totally wrong, and you've

still

got to explain how an event from the early 1940s justifies dumping a
trillion 2017 dollars into war funding that could have been spent to feed,
clothe, cure, and shelter millions of people, and to environmentally
protect
the earth.

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75 Years Of Pearl Harbor Lies

Educate! Propaganda, US history
By David Swanson, www.davidswanson.org
December 2nd, 2016
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Above Photo: Japan's surrender ceremony aboard the U.S. battleship USS
Missouri in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2, 1945. (Xinhua via Getty Images)
Pearl Harbor Day today is like Columbus Day 50 years ago. That is to say:
most people still believe the hype. The myths are still maintained in

their

blissful unquestioned state. "New Pearl Harbors" are longed for by war
makers, claimed, and exploited. Yet the original Pearl Harbor remains the
most popular U.S. argument for all things military, including the
long-delayed remilitarization of Japan - not to mention the WWII

internment

of Japanese Americans as a model for targeting other groups today.
Believers
in Pearl Harbor imagine for their mythical event, in contrast to today, a
greater U.S. innocence, a purer victimhood, a higher contrast of good and
evil, and a total necessity of defensive war making.
The facts 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

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.
This week I'm testifying at an Iraq Tribunal about the Downing Street
Minutes. In U.S. thinking the 2003-2008 period of the decades-long war on
Iraq is somehow worse than World War II. But when it comes to lies, bad
decisions, and levels of death and destruction, there is just no
comparison:
World War II stands unchallenged as the worst thing humanity in general

and

the U.S. government in particular (as well as numerous other governments)
have ever done. There's even a parallel to the Downing Street Minutes.
On August 18, 1941, Prime Minister Winston Churchill met with his cabinet
at
10 Downing Street. The meeting had some similarity to the July 23, 2002,
meeting at the same address, the minutes of which became known as the
Downing Street Minutes. Both meetings revealed secret U.S. intentions to

to war. In the 1941 meeting, Churchill told his cabinet, according to the
minutes: "The President had said he would wage war but not declare it." In
addition, "Everything was to be done to force an incident."
Indeed, everything was done to force an incident, and the incident was
Pearl
Harbor.
Recent Memories
In May 2005 some friends and I launched AfterDowningStreet.org (now called
WarIsACrime.org) to promote awareness of the Downing Street Minutes or
Downing Street Memo and related documents.
This was a very useful document that was released in a moment when it

could

have an important impact.
Like every war ever launched by anyone before or since (at least up until
the age of openly blurting out "steal their oil" and "kill their
families"),
the 2003 stage in the Iraq war had been launched on the basis of lies and
had been and still is continued on the basis of other lies.
We ought not to have needed any evidence. It is illegal to attack another
country under the UN Charter and under the Kellogg Briand Pact (and
arguably
under the Hague Convention of 1899). And in this case, as with Afghanistan
two years earlier, the UN had specifically rejected war. Launching a war

illegal and immoral no matter what weapons may be in the nation attacked
and
no matter what crimes that nation has committed. Launching a total assault
on civilians to supposedly shock and awe them is illegal even in the
understanding of lawyers who ignore the illegality of war. Morally it is
one
of the worst things ever done. Practically it has never worked.
Even if we accepted that weapons in Iraq or Iraqi crimes could justify a
war, the evidence was clear that these were lies. The Iraqi government was
opposed to the group it had supposedly collaborated with. In 1995 Saddam
Hussein's son-in-law had informed the U.S. and the British that all
biological, chemical, missile, and nuclear weapons had been destroyed

under

his direct supervision. After U.N. inspectors left Iraq in 1998, the lead
inspector said they'd come to the same conclusion. In 1999 at a primary
debate in New Hampshire, Bush said he'd "take out" Saddam Hussein. "I'm
surprised he's still there," he said. In 2001, Condoleezza Rice, Colin
Powell, and others in the Bush Administration were telling the media that
Saddam Hussein had no weapons. They transparently switched their views on
command.
So, when the Downing Street Minutes came out on May 1, 2005, we jumped on
it, not as new information but as evidence we could use, both to persuade
others and to make a case in court or in Congress. These were the minutes
of
a meeting at Prime Minister Tony Blair's office on July 23, 2002, at which
his head of so-called intelligence, just back from Washington, reported

(as

summarized in the minutes):
"Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam,
through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and

WMD.

But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
And so they were, as has been documented in extensive detail. The White
House war schemers and their collaborators forged documents, solicited
desired claims rejected by their own experts, relied on non-credible
witnesses, fed fake evidence to complicit so-called journalists, and
tortured desired statements out of victims they'd kidnapped. Bush

concocted

harebrained schemes to start a war that he publicly claimed to be trying

avoid. See, for example, the White House Memo.
But just the fact that the British had been informed that war was
inevitable
by July 23, 2002, ought to have been a big story in May 2005. We worked
hard
to make it such, pressuring a resistant corporate media that claimed

either

that it couldn't verify a memo that was clearly authentic and not even
disputed, or arguing that what it revealed was "old news," even though it
was brand new to anyone informed by those media outlets.
We made it into big news through public protests, reenactments in the
lobbies of media outlets, floods of letters to editors, and a wide variety
of creative actions. But we had an advantage. Democrats in Congress were

the minority and many of them were claiming they would take actions to end
the war if given the majority. Key Congress members were supporting our
efforts. I believe that we turned many of their encouraging claims into
lies
by shrinking rather than enlarging and intensifying our movement in

January

2007.
When Diane Sawyer asked Bush why he had made the claims he had about

Iraq's

supposed weapons of mass destruction, he replied: "What's the difference?"
Perhaps very little now, as we've been through eight years with a

president

who launches wars without bothering to lie to Congress. Or perhaps very
much
now, as we showed our power to resist lies about Syria in 2013 as a decade
of activism against a war on Iraq backed Congress away from supporting a
new
war.
We have to make the answer matter. We have to tell the story properly, as
half the United States still doesn't know it. The biggest lie now,

believed

by many Americans, is that Iraq benefitted and the U.S. suffered (that
second part is true) from the war that destroyed Iraq.
Toward correcting that false belief I submit into evidence a paper I wrote
three years ago called Iraq War Among World's Worst Events.
My biggest fear is that drone wars and proxy wars and secretive wars will
continue to be launched without being preceded by public campaigns of
lying.
Or even worse: wars will be launched with honest proclamations that
somebody's oil needs to be stolen or some population needs to be
slaughtered
- and we won't resist or succeed in stopping these crimes. One of the best
tools we have in this struggle is awareness of every lie used to support
every past war. We must increase that awareness at every opportunity.
Most importantly, we must dismantle the myths of Pearl Harbor.
Unsurprising
Many Japanese are better able to recognize their government's crimes,
crimes
before and after Pearl Harbor, as well as the crime of Pearl Harbor. The
United States is almost entirely blind to its role. From the U.S. side,
Pearl Harbor had roots in Germany.
Nazi Germany, we actually tend to overlook sometimes, could not have
existed
or waged war without the support for decades past and ongoing through the
war of U.S. corporations like GM, Ford, IBM, and ITT. U.S. corporate
interests preferred Nazi Germany to the communist Soviet Union, were happy
to see those two nations' peoples slaughter each other, and favored the
United States entering the oh-so-good-and-necessary World War II on the
side
of England only once the U.S. government had made that very profitable.

The

U.S. delayed D-Day for years while Germany bled Russia dry, and within
hours
of Germany's defeat, Churchill proposed a new war on Russia using German
troops.
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 Greerand
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 April 28, 1941, Churchill wrote a secret directive to his war cabinet:
"It may be taken as almost certain that the entry of Japan into the war
would be followed by the immediate entry of the United States on our

side."

On May 11, 1941, Robert Menzies, the prime minister of Australia, met with
Roosevelt and found him "a little jealous" of Churchill's place in the
center of the war. While Roosevelt's cabinet all wanted the United States
to
enter the war, Menzies found that Roosevelt,
" . . . trained under Woodrow Wilson in the last war, waits for an
incident,
which would in one blow get the USA into war and get R. out of his foolish
election pledges that 'I will keep you out of war.'"
On August 18, 1941, Churchill held that meeting with his cabinet at 10
Downing Street.
An incident was forced.
Japan was certainly not averse to attacking others and had been busy
creating an Asian empire. And the United States and Japan were certainly
not
living in harmonious friendship. But what could bring the Japanese to
attack?
When President Franklin Roosevelt visited Pearl Harbor on July 28, 1934,
seven years before the Japanese attack, the Japanese military expressed
apprehension. General Kunishiga Tanaka wrote in the Japan Advertiser,
objecting to the build-up of the American fleet and the creation of
additional bases in Alaska and the Aleutian Islands:
"Such insolent behavior makes us most suspicious. It makes us think a

major

disturbance is purposely being encouraged in the Pacific. This is greatly
regretted."
Whether it was actually regretted or not is a separate question from
whether
this was a typical and predictable response to military expansionism, even
when done in the name of "defense." The great unembedded (as we would

today

call him) journalist George Seldes was suspicious as well. In October 1934
he wrote in Harper's Magazine: "It is an axiom that nations do not arm for
war but for a war." Seldes asked an official at the Navy League:
"Do you accept the naval axiom that you prepare to fight a specific navy?"
The man replied "Yes."
"Do you contemplate a fight with the British navy?"
"Absolutely, no."
"Do you contemplate war with Japan?"
"Yes."
In 1935 the most decorated U.S. Marine in history at the time, Brigadier
General Smedley D. Butler, published to enormous success a short book
called
War Is a Racket. He saw perfectly well what was coming and warned the
nation:
"At each session of Congress the question of further naval appropriations
comes up. The swivel-chair admirals don't shout that 'We need lots of
battleships to war on this nation or that nation.' Oh, no. First of all,
they let it be known that America is menaced by a great naval power.

Almost

any day, these admirals will tell you, the great fleet of this supposed
enemy will strike suddenly and annihilate our 125,000,000 people. Just

that. Then they begin to cry for a larger navy. For what? To fight the
enemy? Oh my, no. Oh, no. For defense purposes only. Then, incidentally,
they announce maneuvers in the Pacific. For defense. Uh, huh.
"The Pacific is a great big ocean. We have a tremendous coastline in the
Pacific. Will the maneuvers be off the coast, two or three hundred miles?
Oh, no. The maneuvers will be two thousand, yes, perhaps even thirty-five
hundred miles, off the coast.
"The Japanese, a proud people, of course will be pleased beyond expression
to see the United States fleet so close to Nippon's shores. Even as

pleased

as would be the residents of California were they to dimly discern,

through

the morning mist, the Japanese fleet playing at war games off Los

Angeles."

In March 1935, Roosevelt bestowed Wake Island on the U.S. Navy and gave

Pan

Am Airways a permit to build runways on Wake Island, Midway Island, and
Guam. Japanese military commanders announced that they were disturbed and
viewed these runways as a threat. So did peace activists in the United
States. By the next month, Roosevelt had planned war games and maneuvers
near the Aleutian Islands and Midway Island. By the following month, peace
activists were marching in New York advocating friendship with Japan.
Norman
Thomas wrote in 1935:
"The Man from Mars who saw how men suffered in the last war and how
frantically they are preparing for the next war, which they know will be
worse, would come to the conclusion that he was looking at the denizens of
a
lunatic asylum."
The U.S. Navy spent the next few years working up plans for war with

Japan,

the March 8, 1939, version of which described "an offensive war of long
duration" that would destroy the military and disrupt the economic life of
Japan. In January 1941, eleven months before the attack, the Japan
Advertiser expressed its outrage over Pearl Harbor in an editorial, and

the

U.S. ambassador to Japan wrote in his diary:
"There is a lot of talk around town to the effect that the Japanese, in
case
of a break with the United States, are planning to go all out in a

surprise

mass attack on Pearl Harbor. Of course I informed my government."
On February 5, 1941, Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner wrote to Secretary
of War Henry Stimson to warn of the possibility of a surprise attack at
Pearl Harbor.
As early as 1932 the United States had been talking with China about
providing airplanes, pilots, and training for its war with Japan. In
November 1940, Roosevelt loaned China one hundred million dollars for war
with Japan, and after consulting with the British, U.S. Secretary of the
Treasury Henry Morgenthau made plans to send the Chinese bombers with U.S.
crews to use in bombing Tokyo and other Japanese cities. On December 21,
1940, two weeks shy of a year before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,
China's Minister of Finance T.V. Soong and Colonel Claire Chennault, a
retired U.S. Army flier who was working for the Chinese and had been

urging

them to use American pilots to bomb Tokyo since at least 1937, met in

Henry

Morgenthau's dining room to plan the firebombing of Japan. Morgenthau said
he could get men released from duty in the U.S. Army Air Corps if the
Chinese could pay them $1,000 per month. Soong agreed.
On May 24, 1941, the New York Times reported on U.S. training of the
Chinese
air force, and the provision of "numerous fighting and bombing planes" to
China by the United States. "Bombing of Japanese Cities is Expected" read
the subheadline. By July, the Joint Army-Navy Board had approved a plan
called JB 355 to firebomb Japan. A front corporation would buy American
planes to be flown by American volunteers trained by Chennault and paid by
another front group. Roosevelt approved, and his China expert Lauchlin
Currie, in the words of Nicholson Baker, "wired Madame Chaing Kai-Shek and
Claire Chennault a letter that fairly begged for interception by Japanese
spies." Whether or not that was the entire point, this was the letter:
"I am very happy to be able to report today the President directed that
sixty-six bombers be made available to China this year with twenty-four to
be delivered immediately. He also approved a Chinese pilot training

program

here. Details through normal channels. Warm regards."
The U.S. ambassador had said "in case of a break with the United States"
the
Japanese would bomb Pearl Harbor. I wonder if this qualified!
The 1st American Volunteer Group (AVG) of the Chinese Air Force, also

known

as the Flying Tigers, moved ahead with recruitment and training
immediately,
were provided to China prior to Pearl Harbor, and first saw combat on
December 20, 1941, twelve days (local time) after the Japanese attacked
Pearl Harbor.
On May 31, 1941, at the Keep America Out of War Congress, William Henry
Chamberlin gave a dire warning: "A total economic boycott of Japan, the
stoppage of oil shipments for instance, would push Japan into the arms of
the Axis. Economic war would be a prelude to naval and military war." The
worst thing about peace advocates is how many times they turn out to be
right.
On July 24, 1941, President Roosevelt remarked, "If we cut the oil off ,
[the Japanese] probably would have gone down to the Dutch East Indies a
year
ago, and you would have had a war. It was very essential from our own
selfish point of view of defense to prevent a war from starting in the
South
Pacific. So our foreign policy was trying to stop a war from breaking out
there."
Reporters noticed that Roosevelt said "was" rather than "is." The next

day,

Roosevelt issued an executive order freezing Japanese assets. The United
States and Britain cut off oil and scrap metal to Japan. Radhabinod Pal,

Indian jurist who served on the war crimes tribunal after the war, called
the embargoes a "clear and potent threat to Japan's very existence," and
concluded the United States had provoked Japan.
On August 7th, four months before the attack, the Japan Times Advertiser
wrote: "First there was the creation of a superbase at Singapore, heavily
reinforced by British and Empire troops. From this hub a great wheel was
built up and linked with American bases to form a great ring sweeping in a
great area southwards and westwards from the Philippines through Malaya

and

Burma, with the link broken only in the Thailand peninsula. Now it is
proposed to include the narrows in the encirclement, which proceeds to
Rangoon."
One cannot help being reminded here of Hillary Clinton's comments to
Goldman
Sachs bankers. Clinton claimed to have told the Chinese that the United
States could claim ownership of the entire Pacific as a result of having
"liberated it." She went on to claim to have told them that "We discovered
Japan for heaven's sake." And: "We have proof of having bought [Hawaii]."
By September 1941 the Japanese press was outraged that the United States
had
begun shipping oil right past Japan to reach Russia. Japan, its newspapers
said, was dying a slow death from "economic war."
What might the United States have been hoping to gain by shipping oil past
a
nation in desperate need of it?
In late October, U.S. spy Edgar Mower was doing work for Colonel William
Donovan who spied for Roosevelt. Mower spoke with a man in Manila named
Ernest Johnson, a member of the Maritime Commission, who said he expected
"The Japs will take Manila before I can get out." When Mower expressed
surprise, Johnson replied "Didn't you know the Jap fleet has moved
eastward,
presumably to attack our fleet at Pearl Harbor?"
On November 3, 1941, the U.S. ambassador tried again to get something
through his government's thick skull, sending a lengthy telegram to the
State Department warning that the economic sanctions might force Japan to
commit "national hara-kiri." He wrote: "An armed conflict with the United
States may come with dangerous and dramatic suddenness."
Why do I keep recalling the headline of the memo given to President George
W. Bush prior to the September 11, 2001, attacks? "Bin Laden Determined To
Strike in U.S." Apparently nobody in Washington wanted to hear it in 1941
either.
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.
Ten days later Secretary of War Henry Stimson wrote in his diary that he'd
met in the Oval Office with Marshall, President Roosevelt, Secretary of

the

Navy Frank Knox, Admiral Harold Stark, and Secretary of State Cordell

Hull.

Roosevelt had told them the Japanese were likely to attack soon, possibly
next Monday. It has been well documented that the United States had broken
the Japanese' codes and that Roosevelt had access to them. It was through
intercept of a so-called Purple code message that Roosevelt had discovered
Germany's plans to invade Russia. It was Hull who leaked a Japanese
intercept to the press, resulting in the November 30, 1941, headline
"Japanese May Strike Over Weekend."
That next Monday would have been December 1st, six days before the attack
actually came. "The question," Stimson wrote, "was how we should maneuver
them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much
danger to ourselves. It was a difficult proposition." Was it? One obvious
answer was to keep the fleet in Pearl Harbor and keep the sailors

stationed

there in the dark while fretting about them from comfortable offices in
Washington, D.C. In fact, that was the solution our suit-and-tied heroes
went with.
The day after the attack, Congress voted for war. Congresswoman Jeannette
Rankin (R., Mont.), the first woman ever elected to Congress, and who had
voted against World War I, stood alone in opposing World War II (just as
Congresswoman Barbara Lee [D., Calif.] would stand alone against attacking
Afghanistan 60 years later).
One year after the vote, on December 8, 1942, Rankin put extended remarks
into the Congressional Record explaining her opposition. She cited the

work

of a British propagandist who had argued in 1938 for using Japan to bring
the United States into the war. She cited Henry Luce's reference in Life
magazine on July 20, 1942, to "the Chinese for whom the U.S. had delivered
the ultimatum that brought on Pearl Harbor." She introduced evidence that
at
the Atlantic Conference on August 12, 1941, Roosevelt had assured

Churchill

that the United States would bring economic pressure to bear on Japan. "I
cited," Rankin later wrote, " the State Department Bulletin of December

20,

1941, which revealed that on September 3 a communication had been sent to
Japan demanding that it accept the principle of 'nondisturbance of the
status quo in the Pacific,' which amounted to demanding guarantees of the
inviolateness of the white empires in the Orient."
Rankin found that the Economic Defense Board had gotten economic sanctions
under way less than a week after the Atlantic Conference. 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."
General George Marshall admitted as much to Congress in 1945: that the
codes
had been broken, that the United States had initiated Anglo-Dutch-American
agreements for unified action against Japan and put them into effect

before

Pearl Harbor, and that the United States had provided officers of its
military to China for combat duty before Pearl Harbor. It is hardly a
secret
that it takes two war powers to wage a war (unlike when one war power
attacks an unarmed state) or that this case was no exception to that rule.
An October 1940 memorandum by Lieutenant Commander Arthur H. McCollum was
acted on by President Roosevelt and his chief subordinates. It called for
eight actions that McCollum predicted would lead the Japanese to attack,
including arranging for the use of British bases in Singapore and for the
use of Dutch bases in what is now Indonesia, aiding the Chinese

government,

sending a division of long-range heavy cruisers to the Philippines or
Singapore, sending two divisions of submarines to "the Orient," keeping

the

main strength of the fleet in Hawaii, insisting that the Dutch refuse the
Japanese oil, and embargoing all trade with Japan in collaboration with

the

British Empire.
The day after McCollum's memo, the State Department told Americans to
evacuate far eastern nations, and Roosevelt ordered the fleet kept in
Hawaii
over the strenuous objection of Admiral James O. Richardson who quoted the
President as saying "Sooner or later the Japanese would commit an overt

act

against the United States and the nation would be willing to enter the
war."
The message that Admiral Harold Stark sent to Admiral Husband Kimmel on
November 28, 1941, read, "IF HOSTILITIES CANNOT REPEAT CANNOT BE AVOIDED
THE
UNITED STATES DESIRES THAT JAPAN COMMIT THE FIRST OVERT ACT." Joseph
Rochefort, cofounder of the Navy's communication intelligence section, who
was instrumental in failing to communicate to Pearl Harbor what was

coming,

would later comment: "It was a pretty cheap price to pay for unifying the
country."
The night after the attack, President Roosevelt had CBS News's Edward R.
Murrow and Roosevelt's Coordinator of Information William Donovan over for
dinner at the White House, and all the President wanted to know was

whether

the American people would now accept war. Donovan and Murrow assured him
the
people would indeed accept war now. Donovan later told his assistant that
Roosevelt's surprise was not that of others around him, and that he,
Roosevelt, welcomed the attack. Murrow was unable to sleep that night and
was plagued for the rest of his life by what he called "the biggest story
of
my life" which he never told, but which he did not need to. The next day,
the President spoke of a day of infamy, the United States Congress

declared

the last Constitutional war in the history of the republic, and the
President of the Federal Council of Churches, Dr. George A. Buttrick,
became
a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation committing to resist the war.
Why does it matter? Because the legend of Pearl Harbor, re-used on 9-11,

responsible not for the destructive pro-war policies of the 1920s and the
1930s that brought World War II into being, but responsible for the
permanent war mentality of the past 75 years, as well as for how World War
II was escalated, prolonged, and completed.
"Disturbed in 1942," wrote Lawrence S. Wittner, "by rumors of Nazi
extermination plans, Jessie Wallace Hughan worried that such a policy,
which
appeared 'natural, from their pathological point of view,' might be

carried

out if World War II continued. 'It seems that the only way to save
thousands
and perhaps millions of European Jews from destruction,' she wrote, 'would
be for our government to broadcast the promise' of an 'armistice on
condition that the European minorities are not molested any further. . . .
It would be very terrible if six months from now we should find that this
threat has literally come to pass without our making even a gesture to
prevent it.' When her predictions were fulfilled only too well by 1943,

she

wrote to the State Department and the New York Times, decrying the fact
that
'two million [Jews] have already died' and that 'two million more will be
killed by the end of the war.' Once again she pleaded for the cessation of
hostilities, arguing that German military defeats would in turn exact
reprisals upon the Jewish scapegoat. 'Victory will not save them,' she
insisted, 'for dead men cannot be liberated.'"
Hitler killed millions of Germans, but the allies killed as many or more,
Germans ordered into battle by Hitler or Germans in the wrong place when
allied bombs fell. And, as Hughan pointed out at the time, the war drove
the
genocide, just as the vengeful settlement of the previous war a quarter
century before had fueled the hostility, the scapegoating, and the rise of
Hitlerism.
Out of the resistance to war by U.S. conscientious objectors would come,
finally, the development of civil resistance to racial segregation in U.S.
prisons that later spread to the nation outside the prisons as activists
sought to duplicate their victories on a larger scale. But also out of

that

very worst thing our species has ever done to itself, World War II, would
come the permanent military industrial complex. We would extend the power
to
vote to more and more Americans while, in the cruelest of jokes,
transforming voting into an ever more meaningless enterprise. We would
paint
a fresh coat of glossy pretense on our democracy while hollowing it out
from
the inside, replacing it with a war machine the likes of which the planet
had never seen and may not be able to survive.
Spreading the Myth
The United States is indisputably the world's most frequent and extensive
wager of aggressive war, largest occupier of foreign lands, and biggest
weapons dealer to the world. But when the United States peeps out from
under
the blankets where it lies shivering with fear, it sees itself as an
innocent victim. It has no holiday to keep any victorious battle in
everyone's mind. It has a holiday to remember the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor - and now also one, perhaps holier still, to recall, not the "shock
and awe" destruction of Baghdad, but the crimes of September 11, 2001, the
"new Pearl Harbor."
Similar to Israel, but with a variation, the United States is deeply
obsessed with World War II, overlaid of course on a Southern obsession

with

the U.S. Civil War. The Southern U.S. love for the Civil War is love for a
war lost, but also for victimhood and the righteousness of the vengeance
wreaked on the world year after year by the U.S. military.
The U.S. love for World War II is also, fundamentally, love for a war

lost.

That may seem odd to say, because it is simultaneously very much love for

war won. World War II remains the U.S. model for potentially some day
winning a war again, as it's been losing them all over the world for the

years since World War II. But the U.S. view of WWII is also strangely
similar to the Russian view.
Russia was brutally attacked by the Nazis, but persevered and won the war.
The United States believes itself to have been "imminently" attacked by

the

Nazis. That, after all, was the propaganda that took the United States to
war. There was not one word about rescuing Jews or anything half that
noble.
Rather, President Franklin Roosevelt claimed to have a map of the Nazis'
plans for carving up the Americas.
Hollywood has made relatively few movies and television shows about all
other wars combined, in comparison with dramas about World War II, which
may
in fact be its most popular topic ever. We're really not drowning in

movies

glorifying the theft of northern Mexico or the occupation of the
Philippines. The Korean War gets little play. Even the Vietnam War and all
the more recent wars fail to inspire U.S. storytellers like World War II,
and some 90% of those stories relate to the war in Europe, not Asia.
The European story is much preferred because of the particular evils of

the

German enemy. That the U.S. prevented a peace without victor in World War

by crushing Germany, and then punished it viciously, and then aided the
Nazis - all of that is far more easily forgotten than the nuclear bombs
that
the United States dropped on Japan. But it is the Japanese attack of
December 7, 1941, together with the fantasized Nazi invasion, that
persuades
the U.S. public that waging war in Europe was defensive. So the history of
the United States training Japan in imperialism and then antagonizing and
provoking Japan must be forgotten as well.
Amazon.com, a corporation with a huge CIA contract, and whose owner also
owns the Washington Post, has launched a television series called theMan

the High Castle. The story is set in the 1960s with the Nazis occupying
three-quarters of the United States and the Japanese the rest. In this
alternative universe, the ultimate redemption is found in Germany being

the

nation to have dropped nuclear bombs.
The Axis victors, and their aging leaders, have created and maintained an
old-fashioned empire - not like U.S. bases in proxy states, but a
full-blown
occupation, like the United States in Iraq. It doesn't really matter how
implausible this sounds. It is the most plausible scenario that can embody
the U.S. fantasy of someone else doing to it what it does to others. Thus
U.S. crimes here in the real 2000s become "defensive," as it is doing unto
others before they can do unto it.
Nonviolent resistance does not exist in Season One Episode One of this
soothing victim adventure, and apparently hasn't for years at that point

the tale. But how could it? A force stoppable through nonviolence - even

imaginary one - cannot serve to justify the violence of the actual U.S.
military. The German and Japanese occupiers have to be confrontable only
through violence, even anachronistically in an age in which nonviolent
techniques were known, in which the civil rights movement was resisting
U.S.
fascism to great effect.
"Before the war . every man was free," says one of the attractive young
white people who constitute all the heroes and some of the villains in

this

drama. Instead of race riots, McCarthyism, Vietnam, and the sterilizing

and

experimenting on the powerless that actually happened, this alternative
United States includes the burning of Jews, the disabled, and the
terminally
ill. The contrast to the imagined pre-Nazi past in which "every man [but
not
woman?] was free" is stark. One almost wishes to make America great again.
Amazon also shows us Nazis behaving much like the actual United States
behaves: torturing and murdering enemies. Rikers Island is a brutal prison
in this TV show and in reality. In this fantasy, the symbols of U.S. and
Nazi patriotism have been merged seamlessly. In reality, the U.S. military
incorporated much Nazi thinking along with the many Nazis it recruited
through Operation Paperclip - another way in which the U.S. actually lost
WWII if we imagine victory as democracy defeating the sort of society in
which someone like Donald Trump could thrive.
The United States today manages to view refugees from the wars it wages in
distant lands as dangerous enemies, as new Nazis, just as leading U.S.
politicians refer to foreign leaders as new Hitlers. With U.S. citizens
shooting up public places on an almost daily basis, when one such killing
is
alleged to have been done by a Muslim, especially a Muslim with any
sympathy
for foreign fighters, well, then that's not just a shooting. That means
that
the United States has been invaded. And that means that anything it does

"defensive."
Does Venezuela elect leaders the U.S. disapproves of? That's a threat to
"national security" - a somewhat magical threat to invade and occupy the
United States and compel it to torture and kill wearing a different flag.
This paranoia doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from programs like The
Man
in the High Castle.
Pearl Harbor mythologizing is not just a field for entertainment. Here's a
newspaper article:
"Pearl Harbor and World War II brought us together as a nation. We

believed

we could not be beaten. And we prevailed. But why is Congress now so

intent

on destroying our feelings of patriotism and decimating our national
defense? Many Congress members want to cut our national defense spending

an effort to compensate for their ineptness, for not fulfilling their
responsibilities as our representatives and for catering to other groups
and
politicians for the sake of their pet (pork) projects and the next
election.
They forget (or don't know) that their No. 1 priority is the defense of

our

country, and related to that, the protection of our veterans' benefits. .

.
"Could the fact that America forgot about what happened at Pearl Harbor

and

let down its guard have helped allow the attacks of 9/11 to happen? And
will
this forgetfulness and ignorance stoke terrorists' ambitions to expand
their
attacks? Because Congress' 'supercommittee' failed to meet its deadline
last
month to identify $1.2 trillion in savings, spending cut triggers are now
set to take effect in 2013, including $600 billion for defense. If

Congress

is allowed to cut the military budget, another attack becomes more likely.
"We must call the president, our congressional leaders, our two state
senators and our representatives in the House to tell them to stop their
foolishness, renew the military and Veterans Affairs budgets, and even
increase them so that we may both strengthen our programs for research and
development in order to remain the largest and best-equipped military in
the
world and to respect and honor our past veteran heroes.
"If we allow them to make defense cuts all in the name of getting out of
Iraq, and eventually Afghanistan (which is probably a mistake, but that
discussion will be for another day), there will be no more research funds
to
remain No. 1, no upgrades, no new tanks, planes, ships and drones, neither
more nor better body armor and vehicles."
Regardless of whether you believe the legend of Pearl Harbor, it is very
difficult to deny that this is a different world. The United States does
not
just have the most expensive military in the world, but one the size of

the

rest of the world's put together. The United States has bases or troops in
most of the world's other countries. The United States dominates the

oceans

and outerspace. The United States has sliced the planet up into command
zones. Congress is dumping over half of discretionary spending into the
military. While they've roughly doubled this spending, both in real

dollars

and as a percentage of the federal budget since 9-11, the fact is that the
nuclear arsenal and the empire of bases and all the endless spending had
nothing to do with 9-11 other than serving to provoke it. Your newspaper

asking you to live in a dream world, and to destroy this one in the
process.
No new tanks? No new planes? $600 billion sounds big, but over 10 years
it's
$60 billion out of an annual "security" budget of a trillion - meaning 6%.
All that's required to turn that into an increase instead of a cut is to
take it out of a "projected" budget that increases by more than 6%. If any
actual cutting happens, you can rest assured our misrepresentatives will

everything in their power to take the money out of non-military areas, or
at
least to cut troop benefits rather than the sacred and profitable tanks

and

planes etc., almost none of which has anything to do with "defense."
Countering the Myth
As we read Ulysses on Bloomsday every June 16th (or we should if we don't)
I
think that every December 7th should not only commemorate the Great Law of
1682 that banned war in Pennsylvania but also mark Pearl Harbor, not by
celebrating the state of permawar that has existed for 75 years, but by
reading The Golden Age by Gore Vidal and marking with a certain Joycean
irony the golden age of anti-isolationist imperial mass-killing that has
encompassed the lives of every U.S. citizen under the age of 75.
Golden Age Day should include public readings of Vidal's novel and the
glowing endorsements of it by the Washington Post, New York Times Book
Review, and every other corporate paper in the year 2000, also known as

the

year 1 BWT (before the war on terra). Not a single one of those newspapers
has ever, to my knowledge, printed a serious straightforward analysis of
how
President Franklin D. Roosevelt maneuvered the United States into World

War

II. Yet Vidal's novel - presented as fiction, yet resting entirely on
documented facts - recounts the story with total honesty, and somehow the
genre used or the author's pedigree or his literary skill or the length of
the book (too many pages for senior editors to be bothered with) grants

him

a license to tell the truth.
Sure, some people have read The Golden Age and protested its impropriety,
but it remains a respectable high-brow volume. I may be hurting the cause
by
openly writing about its content. The trick, which I highly recommend to
all, is to give or recommend the book to others without telling them

what's

in it.
Despite a filmmaker being a main character in the book, it's not been made
into a film, as far as I know - but a widespread phenomenon of public
readings could conceivably make that happen.
In The Golden Age, we follow along inside all the closed doors, as the
British push for U.S. involvement in World War II, as President Roosevelt
makes a commitment to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, as the warmongers
manipulate the Republican convention to make sure that both parties
nominate
candidates in 1940 ready to campaign on peace while planning war, as FDR
longs to run for an unprecedented third term as a wartime president but
must
content himself with beginning a draft and campaigning as a drafttime
president in a time of supposed national danger, and as FDR works to
provoke
Japan into attacking on his desired schedule.
The echoes are eerie. Roosevelt campaigns on peace ("except in case of
attack"), like Wilson, like Johnson, like Nixon, like Obama. Roosevelt,
pre-election, puts in Henry Stimson as a war-eager Secretary of War not
altogether unlike Donald Trump nominees.
World War Two Was Not a Just War
World War II is often called "the good war," and has been since the U.S.
war
on Vietnam to which it was then contrasted. World War II so dominates U.S.
and therefore Western entertainment and education, that "good" often comes
to mean something more than "just."
The winner of the 2016 "Miss Italy" beauty pageant got herself into a bit
of
a scandal by declaring that she would have liked to live through World War
II. While she was mocked, she was clearly not alone. Many would like to be
part of something widely depicted as noble, heroic, and exciting. Should
they actually find a time machine, I recommend they read the statements of
some actual WWII veterans and survivors before they head back to join the
fun.
No matter how many years one writes books, does interviews, publishes
columns, and speaks at events, it remains virtually impossible to make it
out the door of an event in the United States at which you've advocated
abolishing war without somebody hitting you with the
what-about-the-good-war
question. This belief that there was a good war 75 years ago is a large
part
of what moves the U.S. public to tolerate dumping a trillion dollars a

year

into preparing in case there's a good war next year, even in the face of

many dozens of wars during the past 71 years on which there's general
consensus that they were not good. Without rich, well-established myths
about World War II, current propaganda about Russia or Syria or Iraq or
China would sound as crazy to most people as it sounds to me. And of

course

the funding generated by the Good War legend leads to more bad wars,

rather

than preventing them. I've written on this topic at great length in many
articles and books, especially War Is A Lie. But I'll offer here a few key
points that ought to at least place a few seeds of doubt in the minds of
most U.S. supporters of WWII as a Just War.
World War II could not have happened without World War I, without the
stupid
manner of starting World War I and the even stupider manner of ending

World

War I which led numerous wise people to predict World War II on the spot,
or
without Wall Street's funding of Nazi Germany for decades (as preferable

communists), or without the arms race and numerous bad decisions that do
not
need to be repeated in the future.
The war was not humanitarian and was not even marketed as such until after
it was over. There was no poster asking you to help Uncle Sam save the
Jews.
A ship of Jewish refugees from Germany was chased away from Miami by the
Coast Guard. The U.S. and other nations refused to accept Jewish refugees,
and the majority of the U.S. public supported that position. Peace groups
that questioned Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his foreign secretary
about shipping Jews out of Germany to save them were told that, while
Hitler
might very well agree to the plan, it would be too much trouble and

require

too many ships. The U.S. engaged in no diplomatic or military effort to
save
the victims in the Nazi concentration camps. Anne Frank was denied a U.S.
visa.
Although this point has nothing to do with a serious historian's case for
WWII as a Just War, it is so central to U.S. mythology that I'll include
here a key passage from Nicholson Baker:
"Anthony Eden, Britain's foreign secretary, who'd been tasked by Churchill
with handling queries about refugees, dealt coldly with one of many
important delegations, saying that any diplomatic effort to obtain the
release of the Jews from Hitler was 'fantastically impossible.' On a trip
to
the United States, Eden candidly told Cordell Hull, the secretary of

state,

that the real difficulty with asking Hitler for the Jews was that 'Hitler
might well take us up on any such offer, and there simply are not enough
ships and means of transportation in the world to handle them.' Churchill
agreed. 'Even were we to obtain permission to withdraw all the Jews,' he
wrote in reply to one pleading letter, 'transport alone presents a problem
which will be difficult of solution.' Not enough shipping and transport?
Two
years earlier, the British had evacuated nearly 340,000 men from the
beaches
of Dunkirk in just nine days. The U.S. Air Force had many thousands of new
planes. During even a brief armistice, the Allies could have airlifted and
transported refugees in very large numbers out of the German sphere."
The "good" side of the war simply did not give a damn about what would
become the central example of the badness of the "bad" side of the war.
The war was not defensive. A case can be made that the U.S. needed to

enter

the war in Europe to defend other nations, which had entered to defend yet
other nations, but a case could also be made that the U.S. escalated the
targeting of civilians, extended the war, and inflicted more damage than
might have occurred, had the U.S. done nothing, attempted diplomacy, or
invested in nonviolence. To claim that a Nazi empire could have grown to
someday include an occupation of the United States is wildly far fetched
and
not borne out by any earlier or later examples from other wars.
We now know much more widely and with much more data that nonviolent
resistance to occupation and injustice is more likely to succeed-and that
success more likely to last-than violent resistance. With this knowledge,
we
can look back at the stunning successes of nonviolent actions against the
Nazis that were not well organized or built on beyond their initial
successes.
The Good War was not good for the troops. Lacking intense modern training
and psychological conditioning to prepare soldiers to engage in the
unnatural act of murder, some 80 percent of U.S. and other troops in World
War II did not fire their weapons at "the enemy." The fact that veterans

WWII were treated better after the war than other soldiers before or

since,

was the result of the pressure created by the Bonus Army after the

war. That veterans were given free college, healthcare, and pensions was
not
due to the merits of the war or in some way a result of the war. Without
the
war, everyone could have been given free college for many years. If we
provided free college to everyone today, it would then require much more
than Hollywoodized World War II stories to get many people into military
recruiting stations.
Several times the number of people killed in German camps were killed
outside of them in the war. The majority of those people were civilians.
The
scale of the killing, wounding, and destroying made WWII the single worst
thing humanity has ever done to itself in a short space of time. We

imagine

the allies were somehow "opposed" to the far lesser killing in the camps.
But that can't justify the cure that was worse than the disease.
Escalating the war to include the all-out destruction of civilians and
cities, culminating in the completely indefensible nuking of cities took
WWII out of the realm of defensible projects for many who had defended its
initiation. Demanding unconditional surrender and seeking to maximize

death

and suffering did immense damage and left a grim and foreboding legacy.
Killing huge numbers of people is supposedly defensible for the "good"

side

in a war, but not for the "bad" side. The distinction between the two is
never as stark as fantasized. The United States had a long history as an
apartheid state. U.S. traditions of oppressing African Americans,
practicing
genocide against Native Americans, and now interning Japanese Americans
also
gave rise to specific programs that inspired Germany's Nazis-these

included

camps for Native Americans, and programs of eugenics and human
experimentation that existed before, during, and after the war.
One of these programs included giving syphilis to people in Guatemala at
the
same time the Nuremberg trials were taking place. The U.S. military hired
hundreds of top Nazis at the end of the war; they fit right in. The U.S.
aimed for a wider world empire, before the war, during it, and ever since.
German neo- Nazis today, forbidden to wave the Nazi flag, sometimes wave
the
flag of the Confederate States of America instead.
The "good" side of the "good war," the party that did most of the killing
and dying for the winning side, was the communist Soviet Union. That
doesn't
make the war a triumph for communism, but it does tarnish Washington's and
Hollywood's tales of triumph for "democracy."
World War II still hasn't ended. Ordinary people in the United States
didn't
have their incomes taxed until World War II and that's never stopped. It
was
supposed to be temporary. WWII-era bases built around the world have never
closed. U.S. troops have never left Germany or Japan. There are more than
100,000 U.S. and British bombs still in the ground in Germany, still
killing.
Going back 75 years to a nuclear-free, colonial world of completely
different structures, laws, and habits to justify what has been the
greatest
expense of the United States in each of the years since is a bizarre feat
of
self-deception that isn't attempted in the justification of any lesser
enterprise. Assume I've got everything else totally wrong, and you've

still

got to explain how an event from the early 1940s justifies dumping a
trillion 2017 dollars into war funding that could have been spent to feed,
clothe, cure, and shelter millions of people, and to environmentally
protect
the earth.

Follow-Ups:
- [blind-democracy] Re: 75 Years Of Pearl Harbor Lies
  - From: Marsha Anderson

References:
- [blind-democracy] 75 Years Of Pearl Harbor Lies
  - From: Miriam Vieni
- [blind-democracy] Re: 75 Years Of Pearl Harbor Lies
  - From: Carl Jarvis

[blind-democracy] Re: 75 Years Of Pearl Harbor Lies

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