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Source link: http://archive.mises.org/19752/epub-pearl-harbor-the-story-of-the-secret-war/
ePub: Pearl Harbor: The Story of the Secret War
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{ 17 comments }
Uh huh. So if the U.S. started the war then the U.S. should be immediately made to pay all sorts of reparations to Japan and so forth. Then again I s’pose the people of China (esp. Nanking) provoked the Japanese too and had it coming to them.
What Nanking massacre? The one not even the Nationalists could remember right after the event?
Not the only time where revisionists win with logic over mythology.
http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL02_1/64_S4.pdf
Gee, how could you prove the Holocaust happened either as all the “facts” came out after WW2?
We didn’t ‘start the war’ per say. We just provoked the crap out of the Japanese. FDR and friends wanted the Japanese to attack.
I would say any moral person would view someone who provoked someone else to the point they felt they had no choice but retaliate as an aggressor and deserved what they got.
In all cases, Libertarians can find all sorts of historical examples where the West (esp. the Allies, in particular but excluding the Axis) as always being the aggressors.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWS-FoXbjVI
In other words, if the U.S. were really “provoking the crap” out of Japan then, yes, the U.S. started the war and the Japanese reasonably retaliated assuming the Japanese were innocent on the Chinese front.
Nobody was innocent. Nobody was a good guy. There is only ‘our side’ and people in charge of the winning side that benefited while everybody else lost massively, including the citizens of the winning side. Which is kinda the point people need to understand.
It was just a huge waste of life and wealth. The world wars were avoidable.
“Nobody was a good guy.”
Your obliviousness to what America — or, indeed, the world — would look like if Imperial Japan had won is embarrassing.
I think it’s embarrassing that you are so blind and ignorant that you think that the Japanese would of been capable of taking over the Pacific arena, period.
They already lost the war before it ever started. They already had their hand full dealing with the Chinese and their incursions into Indo-China and they were scared shitless of the Russians. Our embargo of oil already had them crippled. Yeah sure the Chinese were getting their asses kicked, but China is a very large company and Japan is a very small one.
They were desperately trying form a land buffer between Japan and Russia, which they have had very poor relations with in the past and defeated them in previous attempts in 1904 to take over what Japanese considered part of Japan and several armed conflicts all through the 1930′s.
FDR and friends repeatedly and purposely humiliated the pro-Western factions of the Japanese government lead by Prince Fumimaro Konoe leaking secret letters pleading with the USA for a peace deal. This contributed to the loss of face of that government, loss of influence in the Navy, and increased the influence of the Army, which had much stronger imperialistic tendencies.
Don’t forget that these Navy guys were the same group of folks that fought along the USA and Great Britain in WW1. Unlike China, which only was allowed to provide supporting rolls in combat, the Japanese Navy actually fought against the Germans.
But, no, I don’t think that FDR knew of the attack on Pearl Harbor. I don’t think that the Federal government at the high levels understood the role that Aircraft carriers were going to have and the weaknesses of the United States Navy as a result of this new technology. They probably expected just to continuously ramping up of hostilities as the Japanese grew more and more desperate due to the continued war in Asia with a dwindling supply of oil and continuous goading from the Germans. They expected some sort of attack, just not one that successful. Probably expected the sort of Navy actions that were typical from the beginning of the 1900′s up through the 1930s.
Maybe they were just hoping for another happy accident like the boiler explosion of the USS Maine.
There’s a good case for advance warning. Circumstantial evidence, naturally, as befits the aggressor/arbiter rôle of government.
http://www.american-buddha.com/democ.advancewarningredcrosspearlhar.htm
There is no excuse for what the Japanese did to Nanjing and the rest of China. However it is clear that the Chinese resistance against the Japanese was utterly incompetent. One possible reason for this is that the more badly Chiang Kai-Shek managed the war, the more money and other assistance he got from the USA. It literally paid the KMD to fight the war badly – just as it pays Pakistani politicians and generals to have a country that is crawling with “extremists”. And many other countries.
When any crime is committed it is usual to ask the question “cui bono” (who benefited)? The Nanjing Massacre benefited not only the Japanese government who appeared to be winning their war and conquering territory, but the Chinese government who got more financial assistance (and undoubtedly pocketed large amounts of it) and the US government who got the Asian war that they wanted so badly. That doesn’t mean that the KMD and the US govt conspired to allow this incident to happen, or intended it to happen, but in the broader sense they created the conditions that allowed it to happen because they benefited from it.
This Nanking massacre is a nonsense. The KMT had hundreds of press conferences after the Japanese withdrew, and they *forgot* somehow to mention once this event.
http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL02_1/result.php?word=ZQ
I assume that you understand that you are citing from a Japanese neo-nationalist WWII revisionist website. Just because somebody has a website doesn’t mean you should cite from it.
Numerous academic studies have been done by eminently credible historians detailing the massacre, not to mention that a post-war war crimes trial was held not only by the Allies in Tokyo but also by *Communist* China in 1949 — Communist China has since itself found that the 300,000 killed is correct.
Kangaroo courts like these produce victors’ justice. Check out Nuremberg, the altar at which all must now bow down.
Interesting that the communists would discover the tragedy suffered by their enemy, the KMT, when the latter was oblivious to same. LOL.
Whether or not the Nankiing massacre was real or exaggerated, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden were equally egregious terrorist attacks against innocent civilian populations. War is the health of the State, whether it be imperialist Japan, fascist Germany, communist China or Russia, or hegemonic U.S., and people are the fodder upon which the State feeds.
Roosevelt was a committed Keynesian. Keynes’ overarching concern was nebulous “full employment” (nebulous because full employment cannot be defined) at any cost. Both Hitler and Roosevelt adopted Keynesian economic policies, which, if they do not embrace war, clearly salute its jobs-creating, unemployment-reducing features. No one can say for sure what Roosevelt’s motives were in provoking Japan, but certainly Hitler’s more militaristic Keynesianism had shown itself to be much more effective in moving towards Keynes’ employment nirvana than had Roosevelt’s New Deal.
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