Pearl Harbor at 75: What Has the Empire Wrought? - The Libertarian Institute:
the-american-spartan:
anna-stronk:
sadoeconomist:
anna-stronk:
sadoeconomist:
anna-stronk:
libertariantaoist:
For those of us interested in US foreign
policy, anniversaries of significant events serve multiple purposes. As
libertarians, putting opposition to war at
the forefront of our outreach is paramount, both for the sake of
ideological consistency and because the permanent warfare state is the
primary obstacle to peace and freedom for all. Our history as a
movement, however, is full of lapses when it comes to promoting
non-intervention.
The circumstances surrounding the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl
Harbor cannot be given a pass, nor can they be blamed on
non-intervention. The unjustness of the war must not be left out of the
conversation either. Enough individuals were murdered by governments
during World War II, an estimated 60 million or more,
that preventing such a disaster from transpiring again is the least we
owe the dead. We also owe them — and ourselves — the truth.
That day, seventy-five years ago, sparked a turning point in military
mobilization, central economic planning, and the supposed triumph of
benevolent government forces over belligerent foreign monsters. But the reality is that there were multiple aggressors, all of them responsible for various war crimes. War is never an occasion to celebrate.
On this date, like so many others, the government and its choir of
media mouthpieces propagate information unreasonably deferential to the
well-established power structures in America. The glorifiers of empire
seize upon the anniversaries of previous failures as opportunities to
reinforce the prevailing government narrative.
As libertarians, it is up to us to refute government propaganda from
the left and the right, especially on the days the State holds sacred,
like the Day of Deceit.
Scott Horton, managing director of the Libertarian Institute, has
interviewed Robert Stinnett, World War II Navy veteran and the author of
that very book, on numerous occasions since 2003.
On the fifty-ninth anniversary of the attack, Horton and Stinnett discussed
a number of controversial and important points related to Pearl Harbor,
including FDR’s provocations of the Japanese to gain the support of
Americans for US entry in WWII; the McCollum memo’s 8-part strategy to
isolate and weaken Japan; the possibility that Admiral Kimmel was indeed
privy to FDR’s war plans; and the US cracking Japanese naval and
diplomatic codes before the Pearl Harbor attack.
Horton and Stinnett continued along this line of inquiry on the sixtieth anniversary, discussing
Stinnett’s discovery of the McCollum memo in the National Archives, and
the US interception of Japanese coded transmissions. Stinnett also
commented:
“…when the cryptographers located the
fleet in the North Pacific on November 26th, a priority message was sent
to Washington asking what we should do, and it was sent by Admiral
Kimmel, the commander of the Pacific fleet. ‘These Japanese warships
have been located – what should we do?’ And the Navy Department waited
two days and then told him to stand aside and let Japan commit the first
overt act. Don’t jeopardize your defense, but let them strike first. I
found those documents. Those were just as revealing as that overt act of
war memo.”
All of Horton’s interviews of Stinnett can be found archived online.
Sheldon Richman, executive editor of the Libertarian Institute, authored
“Pearl Harbor: the Controversy Continues” in December 1991. Richman
explores many of the contentious points surrounding the incident long
before the publishing of Stinnett’s work, but the questions remain just
as relevant today:
“Pearl Harbor is actually a bundle of
controversial questions. In order of descending controversy, they
consist of: whether Roosevelt and his closest aides knew there would be
an attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7; whether they knew there would
be an attack against American or British targets somewhere in the
Pacific; and, finally, whether Roosevelt’s policies toward the Japanese
were intended to provoke the Japanese into sulking at American
interests, thereby providing a ‘back door to war’ and grounds for full
public support for the war effort.”
As I reported
a few months ago, the controversy over code-breaking arose again this
year after a panel of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals voted 2-1 to
unseal grand jury records related to the journalism of a Chicago
Tribune correspondent’s June 7, 1942 report that implied the government
had broken Japan’s secret naval code.
“The Tribune’s tacit revelation of the code-breaking coup infuriated
Washington. President Franklin Roosevelt wanted to have Marines occupy
Tribune Tower,” wrote
the Chicago Tribune’s Editorial Board the Friday following the court’s
decision to unseal the records due to high historical interest and the
negligible need for secrecy in 2016.
The Taxpayer Education Foundation has published several reports on this controversy over the years, most recently on the seventieth anniversary of the attack, much of it drawing from the work of Robert Stinnett and John Tolan.
The Independent Institute’s substantial Pearl Harbor Archive
is a wealth of information for both those familiar with and new to this
historical controversy, including resources by previously mentioned
authors Stinnett and Tolan, as well as Robert Higgs, John T. Flynn,
Anthony Gregory, and Alexander Cockburn, among others.
Those critical of our questioning of the government’s narrative and
its celebration of World War II should consider the question posed by
Angela Keaton, executive director of Antiwar.com and a member of the
board of the Libertarian Institute, during a debate at 2015’s Freedom Fest.
After an audience member brought up the subject of World War II
during Keaton’s engagement with historian and archaeologist Ian Morris
on his book, War! What is it Good For?, Keaton was prompted to channel the work of Bill Kauffman and respond thusly:
“Here’s a better question: Why is that
what actually happened – the roundup and murder of six million Jews,
tens of millions of Russians and Poles and Germans and Japanese and
others, a half a million American deaths, and an unprecedented uprooting
of our population, and the hypertrophic growth of the American state,
and the deliverance of half of Europe to Stalin and Soviet tyranny – why
is this the “Good War”? Why is this thought to be the best possible
outcome, that bloody-soaked hell? And why is it some horrible breach of
etiquette to ask if other paths and policies would’ve produced a better
outcome? Shouldn’t employing the largest military might on Earth – the
largest military might the world has ever seen – be the last resort?”
War is the culmination of all the worst aspects of government. War is
theft, property destruction, and rapacious taxation. War means
violating individual rights, enforcing collective punishment, and
destabilizing markets.
Is war the engine that drives government or is government the engine that drives war? As Randolph Bourne famously wrote, “War is the health of the State,” and to add a corollary, taxes are its sustenance.
If we wish to realign American politics and culture to reject
militarism at home and abroad, then libertarians must undertake a new
mission to implore both the left and the right to embrace liberty and
reject our enemy, the State, and the wars and taxes which maintain its power.
Nothing short of this will rollback Leviathan and free us from our government.
Abhorrent post.
What’s your issue with it? Seems pretty reasonable to me.
2,403 Americans died that day.
Today is not a day to discuss personal political opinions about the attack. Today is a day to remember and pay respects to the fallen. It is disgusting when people manipulate horrible events to further their political agenda, and this is no exception.
You’ve got to be kidding. Let’s respect the fallen by making it taboo to talk about why they died and how we can prevent it from happening again? What sense does that make?
Do you tell people attacking Nazis over the Holocaust that they’re disgusting for using horrible events to further their political agenda?
Where did I say we shouldn’t discuss why they died? I am saying not today. Today is a day for mourning, not for incendiary politics posted solely to garner views.
As I just told someone in another reblog, on this day we should put aside politics to remember the men and women who died. Any political opinions on it could have been posted yesterday, or tomorrow. Why else would someone post something like this today if not to shamelessly grab attention?
This post just smears “the State” to a ridiculous degree and uses the attack and speech dripping in buzzwords to say “all states are bad, evil warmongers and should be abolished.” It’s in incredibly poor taste and shamelessly manipulating a tragedy to further their own ends.
I agree with @anna-stronk On a day where we remember one of the greatest and most tragic attacks on our country in which over 2,000 people died and one of the greatest naval vessels in our country’s history sank with hundreds onboard, it is not appropriate to start pushing political ideas and agendas. Have some respect for the fallen veterans who died that day just so you can sit here and shit on their memory. As a military man with an extensive military family background, I find this to be absolutely disgusting
As a (separated) military man with an extensive military family background, calm your tits. It would take a lot more than this to constitute ”shitting” on the memory of fallen veterans, and your hyperbole serves no one.
As I said elsewhere on this post, this is a good a day as any. I for one have no interest in “remembering” anything in such a way that I could be replaced with a mournfully scored film-reel to no lost effect.