OMNI
“PEARL HARBOR DAY,”
COLONIAL PACIFIC WORLD WAR II NEWSLETTER #7, (resumed) December 7, 2019.
Compiled by Dick
Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology.
Another
in OMNI’s NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL DAYS
series for a Culture of Nonviolent, Positive Peace (for more information see
below).
My blog: War Department/Peace Department
My Newsletters:
Index:
OMNI
is part of the international peace, justice, and ecology movement. These newsletters contribute to the
movement’s efforts to understand the causes of wars in order to prevent them. A close study of the origins of WWII in the
Pacific, uncontaminated by the myths and propaganda generated by jingoism,
ignorance, racism, and fear, strengthens enormously our critical thinking and
skepticism toward all US leaders’ calls to war.
For example, in AETN’s “Globe Trekker Special: WWII in the Pacific,”
Feb. 23, 2014, one of the guides declared Pearl Harbor
to have been an “unprovoked attack.”
This is false, as the scholarship of these Pearl Harbor Day newsletters
explain. The official righteousness of
that merciless war is just one more stratagem in US imperial propaganda. See the Newsletters “US Imperialism,
Continental Westward Expansion” and “US Westward Imperialism, Pacific/E. Asia”
and a dozen related newsletters.
Table
of Contents
Pearl Harbor Day, Colonial Pacific WWII
Newsletter #7, December 7, 2019
Dick,
Pearl Harbor Day, Fayetteville, AR,
Bruce Russett, No Clear and Present Danger: A Skeptical View of the
U.S. Entry into World War Two
Anthony Flood, Z Magazine
Google Search
Anthony Flood, Z Magazine
Google Search
Francis A. Boyle. “The Unlimited Imperialists.” Z
Magazine (June 2018). 6-7.
Dick’s 6 Pearl Harbor Newsletters 2008-2013
TEXTS
Pearl
Harbor Day, Fayetteville, AR, 2019
Enthusiasm for this Day of imperial
setback is quieting down, with apparently no local observance, no notice in the
NADG the preceding day, only one on
12-7, and 2 on 12-8. Audrey McAvoy, “Ex-sailor’s
Ashes to Be Interred in USS Arizona” (12-7), told the interesting story of 98
years-old Lauren Bruner. “Where War Met
Its Match,” photo with caption reported on a dozen PH survivors gathered for
the 78th anniversary, and Audrey McAvoy, photo with article, “Survivors
Return to Pearl Harbor“ (12-8). The
reporter gives us bits of history (esp. the USS Arizona) and individual bios of
some of the 30 surviving veterans (Bruner, Herb Elfring, Lou Conter). The USAF provided F-22 fighters flying in “missing
man” formation. Retired Navy Adm. Harris
and Interior Sec’t. Bernhardt delivered remarks. Still nothing reported regarding the true
cause of the attack.
Perhaps in a few years the remembrance will
end, for it commemorates an enormous military defeat, and both Parties have
reason to forget it, particularly the Democrats. Like President Johnson, whose shining domestic--economic
and political--reforms were subverted by the Vietnam War he promulgated,
President Roosevelt’s New Deal was cut short by the WWII he helped to enlarge,
both presidents employing deceit in commencing his war --Dick
BRUCE RUSSETT
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BRUCE RUSSETT
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Bruce
M. Russett
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“Participation in the war
against Hitler remains almost wholly sacrosanct, nearly in the realm of
theology.” -- Bruce M. Russett
I post this solely in support
of Professor Russett’s political heresy, not because I share any of the
statist presuppositions underpinning his expression of it. I do understand,
however, that few will even attempt to swallow such a pill unless many
conventional reassurances coat it; many coat his. This essay is a fine
example of moderate rather than radical revisionism, a halfway house on the
road to the stable-cleaning the American mind must undergo if it is to
embrace wholeheartedly the goal of a free society.
For a 2006 interview with
Professor Russett, go here.
Anthony
Flood
Posted
March 21, 2008
No Clear and Present Danger
A Skeptical View of the U.S. Entry into World War II
Harper & Row, 1972
Bruce
M. Russett
http://www.anthonyflood.com/russettnoclearandpresentdanger0.htm
Preface (on this page)
There is no guarantee
whatsoever that there would be any better history written should we
participate again to bring complete victory to one side . . . Great as is the
power of America, we cannot police Europe, much less Asia, and in addition
protect the whole Western Hemisphere . . . Nor can we expect that a nation
having as many unsolved problems as we have, and as little understanding of
some of the problems that lie beyond our borders, would be given, under the
all-embracing hysteria of war, wisdom for the perfect solution of all the
world’s ills.
Norman
Thomas, 1940
The one great danger
we face is that we may overcommit ourselves in this battle against Russia . .
. An unwise and overambitious foreign policy, and particularly the effort to
do more than we are able to do, is the one thing which might in the end
destroy our armies and prove a real threat to the liberty of the people of
the United States.
Robert
A. Taft, 1951
Preface
It has been a long
trip, and is not yet complete. Nevertheless I have come far enough to
want to give a report on the vivid scenery to be viewed from this
prospect. I began, as a child in World War II, with a firm hatred of
the Axis powers and conviction that American was fighting for its very
existence. After the war, Stalinist Russia merely replaced Hitlerite
Germany as the insatiable aggressor. With most Americans I accepted
without much question the need for active resistance to Communism, and the
necessity that such resistance would often have to be military in
character. Though as a young scholar I did become very concerned about
arms control and the risks of nuclear war, my faith in the requirement for
military assistance to threatened members of the Free World remained
essentially unshaken. I was fairly hawkish on Vietnam, and saw only in
early 1967 that the war had been a mistake. In retrospect, I am not
proud of having taken so long. Even then, I considered that the sole
mistake was having chosen a conflict where the essential conditions of
victory were absent.
In the past few
years, however, I have slowly begun to question my earlier easy
assumptions. Once some began to fall, others became far less
tenable. Here really was a row of intellectual dominoes. If
Vietnam was unnecessary or wrong, then where else? How distorted were
our images of the origins of the cold war? What has been the role of
economic interests in promoting foreign involvements by the United States
government?
This is an exciting
time in which to be a scholar. Some of these questions were forced on
me directly by observing events; others were in substantial part impelled by
the questioning of students who had been less thoroughly indoctrinated in the
cold war myths than I, and thus rejected them more easily. In this
reexamination I am, of course not alone. Many Americans of all
generations have come to question their former assumptions. Still, the
results differ among us. I find the New Left’s emphasis on foreign
investment and trade interests to be stimulating and overdue; in the
anti-Communist hysteria of the first cold war decades such matters were all
too thoroughly ignored. Nevertheless I am still unconvinced that such
influences should be elevated to the role of a primary explanation, and while
in this book I sometimes suggest their relevance to pre-World War II policy
preferences I do not emphasize them. But I am interested in the work of
others on these questions, and consider them with a mind more open than before.
And although there
are finally some rumblings on the New Left, and occasionally elsewhere, about
the propriety of American participation in World War II, they have yet to
surface much in public. The situation is curious. A few writers,
I among them,1 challenged
the prevailing interpretation about war with Japan some time ago, but with
little impact beyond a small circle of professional scholars. Participation
in the war against Hitler remains almost wholly sacrosanct, nearly in the
realm of theology. Yet it seems to me that many of the arguments against
other wars can also be applied, with somewhat less force, to this one too.
Hence I came to rethink, and to write while still in the process of
rethinking.
For the opportunity
to reconsider my old myths I am grateful to a year in Brussels, made possible
by a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and a
Fulbright-Hays award. I neither expected nor intended to spend much time on
these matters when the awards were made, but such things will happen when a
scholar is given time for reflection. A decision-maker and a scholar helped
unintentionally. The process surfaced on the night President Nixon announced
the American foray into Cambodia, which I absorbed under the influence of
just having read the late Richard Hofstadter’s essay on Charles A. Beard’s
attitudes toward the war that was approaching over a generation ago.
Many colleagues,
friends, and students made more deliberate contributions by giving their
reactions to my early thoughts. Notably helpful were John Morton Blum,
Robert H. Ferrell, Glenn May, Paul Hammond, Douglas Rae, James Patrick
Sewell, Fred Sondermann, Gaddis Smith, John Sullivan, and H. Bradford
Westerfield. My wife, Cynthia Eagle Russett, as so often, played a crucial
role in the initial stages by providing both insights and stimulating
criticism. Wendell Bell urged me to rescue the first version of this
essay from the obscurity of a scholarly journal. Even more carefully
than is customary, however, I want to absolve anyone from responsibility for
the opinions I express here.
B.M.R.
Hamden, Connecticut
May 1971
Notes
1 See my article,
“Pearl Harbor: Deterrence Theory and Decision Theory,” Journal of
Peace Research I (1967): 89-105, parts of which are reproduced here. Parts of Chapter 5
are taken from my “A Macroscopic View of International Politics,” in Vincent
Davis, Maurice East and James Rosenau, eds., The Analysis of
International Politics (New York: Free Press, 1971). All materials
are reprinted with permission.
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Google
Search, Bruce M. Russett. No Clear and Present Danger. A Skeptical View of the U.S. Entry into
World War II. Harper & Row, 1972. www.anthonyflood.com/russettnoclearandpresentdanger1.htm
https://www.amazon.com/No-Clear-Present-Danger-Skeptical/dp/0813331951
Amazon.com: No Clear And Present
Danger: A
Skeptical View Of The UNited States Entry Into World War II (9780813331959):
Bruce M Russett: Books.
www.anthonyflood.com/russettnoclearandpresentdanger1.htm
No Clear and Present
Danger. A
Skeptical View of the U.S. Entry into World War II. Harper & Row, 1972.
Bruce M. Russett. Chapter 1. Isolationism
Old and New.
www.anthonyflood.com/russettnoclearandpresentdanger0.htm
Mar 21, 2008 - “Participation in the war
against Hitler remains almost wholly sacrosanct, nearly in the realm of
theology.” -- Bruce M. Russett. I post this solely ...
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03612759.1972.9954939
ref. by WF Kimball - 1972
Jul 9, 2012 - No Clear and Present
Danger: A
Skeptical View of the U.S. Entry into World ... Russett, Bruce M.: New York:
Harper & Row, 111 pp., Publication ...
Volume 1,
1972 - Issue 1
https://www.cambridge.org/.../no-clear-and-present-danger/90B889776C187DDBC835B...
by BM Russett - 1977 - Cited by 28 -
Related articles
Aug 1, 2014 - No Clear and Present
Danger -
Volume 71 Issue 1 - Bruce M. Russett.
https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/79/2/608/70247
by TA Bailey - 1974
Apr 1, 1974 - Bruce M. Russett. No Clear and Present
Danger: A
Skeptical View of the United States Entry into World War II. New York: Harper
and Row.
Francis A. Boyle. “The Unlimited Imperialists.” Z
Magazine(June 2018). 6-7.
The 20th century opened
with the “U.S.-instigated Spanish-American War in 1898,”
when the US “stole their colonial empire from Spain in Cuba, Puerto
Rico, Guam, and the Philippines; inflicted a near-genocidal war
against the Filipino people; while at the same time
illegally annexing the Kingdom of Hawaii and
subjecting the Native Hawaiian people (who call
themselves the Kanaka Maoli) to genocidal conditions. . . .
over the next four decades America’s aggressive presence,
policies, and practices in the so-called ‘Pacific’ Ocean would implacably
pave the way for Japan’s attack at Pearl Harbor on December
7, 1941.” Today, US bipartisan “serial imperial aggressions”
“threaten to set off World War
III.” Francis A. Boyle is a professor of law
at the U of Illinois-Champaign.
Pearl Harbor Newsletters Nos. 1-6 at end
Contents of #1 2008
Dick: US
Contents of #2 2010
Dick: Review of David Swanson’s War Is a Lie
Contents #3 2011
Dick: US Empire
and WWII in Pacific
Wikianswers
Wiest and
Mattson
Chomsky: Backgrounds
Revolutionary
Work
Contents #4 2012
Dick: No Choice But War
Maslin Reviews
Bradley
TomDispatch/Klare: It Wasn’t Al-Qaeda, It’s China
Cyber Pearl Harbor ?
Climate Pearl Harbor ?
Contents #5 March 23, 2013
Conroy, et al.,
West Across the Pacific, Revisionist Account
Contents #6 December 7, 2013
Ienaga, Pacific War, 1931-1945 (2010, 2 Reviews)
George Victor, Pearl Harbor Myth (2007)
Robert Higgs,
US Economic Warfare Provoked Attack
(essay 2012)
Greaves, Seeds.
. .of Infamy
Tansill, Back Door to War
Morgenstern, Secret War
END PEARL HARBOR NEWSLETTER #7, Dec. 7, 2019
