June
5, 2001
News from Neptune
Pearl Harbor Revisited
By Carl Estabrook
In our state capitalist society, everything
becomes a commodity, even truth -- you can have as much of it
as you pay for. The Disney corporation's desire to market their
movie "Pearl Harbor" in Japan compelled them to suggest
in the movie that the Japanese attack on the US navy base in
Hawaii in 1941 was something other than purely evil and cowardly.
The commander of the attack, Admiral Yamamoto, is given a line
(in Japanese, with subtitles) in which he explains that Japan
was compelled to attack Pearl Harbor because of a US oil embargo.
Thus crass commercialism has slightly redressed the balance of
more than two generations of American concentration on the "infamy"
of the Japanese "sneak attack."
In the 1950s, comedian Zero
Mostel had a routine in which he portrayed a rather dim Senator
demanding to know, "What was Pearl Harbor _doing_ in the
Pacific?" The humor of fifty years ago contains an unintended
truth. Why was there a major military base in this US colony
in the mid-Pacific? The US had seized Hawaii by force, against
the will of its inhabitants, less than fifty years before the
Japanese attack. Then a few years later, the US slaughtered hundreds
of thousands of people in the Philippines in a Vietnam-style
war to bring those islands into the US Pacific empire. So the
US rejected as ludicrous the eventual Japanese claim that it
was establishing an equivalent to the Monroe Doctrine for East
Asia.
The opinion ascribed to Admiral
Yamamoto (a Catholic from a Nagasaki family converted by Jesuit
missionaries in the 16th century, he was eventually assassinated
on orders from President Roosevelt) has, as the well-known war
criminal Henry Kissinger was wont to say, "the extra, added
advantage of being true." Radhabinod Pal, one of the judges
in the post-war Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal (run exclusively by
the Americans, but meant to parallel the Nuremberg Trials of
Nazi leaders) said later that the US had started the war with
embargoes that were a "clear and potent threat to Japan's
very existence."
The Japanese home islands contain
little in the way of mineral resources and no oil, so after the
German conquest of France, Japan signed an agreement with the
puppet French government in the summer of 1941 that led to Japan's
assuming military control of Vietnam and its energy resources.
"Almost immediately, the U.S., Britain, and the Netherlands
instituted a total embargo on oil and scrap metal to Japan --
tantamount to a declaration of war," writes one historian.
"This was followed soon after by the United States and Great
Britain freezing all Japanese assets in their respective countries"
(as the US did more recently in regard to Iraq).
My grandfather, an Annapolis
man newly appointed captain the in the US Navy, became commandant
of the Navy yard at Pearl Harbor in 1932. In that year -- nine
years before the Japanese attack -- the US Pacific fleet carried
out a war-game that included a simulated attack by carriers and
planes on Pearl, an exercise adjudged a complete victory for
the attackers. So the US was hardly in doubt about the feasibility
of the attack that eventually took place. Ever since 1941 it
has been suggested that the Roosevelt administration purposely
left the fleet open to attack, in order to stampede the American
public into a war. Like Lincoln with the Confederates at Ft.
Sumter, every government launching a war wants to appear in an
aggrieved and defensive role. (Even Germany invading Poland in
1939 announced, "We're finally shooting back!")
By the time of the attack on
Pearl Harbor, the war in Europe had been under way for more than
two years with the US officially neutral, and there was strong
anti-war sentiment in the US. The US fought the Second World
War not to stop Fascism, much less to prevent the Holocaust.
When the US finally entered, the decisive events of the war in
Europe -- the fall of France, the battle of Britain, and the
invasion of Russia -- had already taken place. Nor did the US
go to war because of Japanese atrocities in Manchuria or the
rape of Nanking, but because Japan attacked military bases maintained
by the US on colonies that it had stolen in the Pacific.
Three days later Japan's ally
Germany declared war on the US. Whatever else it was, the death
of almost 2,400 Americans at Pearl Harbor was a propaganda triumph
for the pro-war US government. Sixty years later, that tradition
is maintained in different circumstances by a "cheesy melodrama
[with] a lot of sugary, unashamed American patriotism."
CP
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