Dec 7, a date which will forever live in infamy:
However, for me it’s not quite that bad, in that it’s also my dear friend Trevor’s birthday:
…as well as that of my New Daughter-In-Law Kerryn:
Happy Birthday to both of you, and never mind the sound of exploding battleships in the background.
(I should point out that Trevor lives in Hawaii — but nowhere near Pearl Harbor, and Kerryn in Johannesburg, also nowhere near Pearl Harbor…)
The gurl in red seems rather fetching.
Trevor’s wife is even prettier in real life.
Ah yes December 7th.
“…the day White Supremacists attacked an “ethnic” resort on the brutally colonized Sandwich Island of Oahu, on a Friday morning, while the crippled, blind, orphaned, children of color were kneeling for prayer…”
Possibly excerpted from one of those 1600 projects study guides, or maybe “White racist Colonial American History” as written by Howard Zinn (who has, fortunately, been dead now for almost 12 years.)
It’s good that you have a positive thoughts for the day…keep it that way, don’t read today’s news.
Now, don’t get me wrong; the Japanese surely deserved a thrashing. And the rhetoric at the time was probably needed to jolt Americans out of their isolationism (of course if Woodrow ‘Progressive Toad’ Wilson hadn’t gotten us into WWI we might not have been isolationist). And I have no patience whatsoever with the perpetual whimpering about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But could we please drop the pretense that the attack on Pearl Harbor was ‘unprovoked’? We were being plenty provoking. And we should have been, with the way the Japanese were behaving. But let’s not pretend that ‘unprovoked’ means ‘we’d frozen their bank accounts, stopped their trade, blockaded their shipping, and called their mothers goat-screwing whores, but we hadn’t punch them. Yet.’.
do you have any proof of the United States blockading Japanese ports prior to 7 December 1941? How about stopping their trade? How about freezing their bank accounts?
The fact is that Japan had invaded Manchuria and China in the 1930s. As a nation, we have a right to decide who we will trade with and who we will not trade with. Our country decided that these unprovoked invasions by Japan would best be handled peacefully through ending our trade with Japan. Japan attacked us without declaring war. That’s about as cowardly of an act as can be executed.
Sorry dude, Japan was the aggressor on the world stage, did not declare war on the United States and then sucker punched us at Pearl Harbor and the Phillipines. Imperial Japan provoked us into war and they got what the deserved.
JQ
I agree, JQ. I don’t know where he got all that “…we’d frozen their bank accounts, stopped their trade, blockaded their shipping…” We did nothing of the sort. We did however, initiate economic sanctions because of their war on China; sanctions that consisted mostly of an oil and steel embargo. Japanese ships were, right up until Dec 7 able to ply the seas without interference.
Nope. The whole thing is yet another miserable “America is always wrong” screed.
No. We should have been doing all those things. Japan’s behavior in China and Korea was bestial. The Japanese murdered more people in Nanking than died in both atom bomb attacks. We were in the right. But we were also being provoking. In fact, FDRs administration and much of the military command structure EXPECTED an attack by Japan. But they expected that attack to be on, say, the Philippines.
Hell, I believe that the two atom bomb attacks were entirely justified, for that matter.
This isn’t a case of ‘America, always wrong’ , it’s a case of ‘we were doing the right thing, we shouldn’t pretend it didn’t have consequences.’
Happy birthday Trevor and Kim’s Daughter in Law. I hope you both have wonderful days with friends and family.
JQ
The Pearl Harbor strike is my go to example of pure strategic incompetence in action. The Japanese made Alfred Thayer Mahan into a messiah, and yet singularly failed to comprehend the fundamentals of his ideas.