OMNI
“PEARL HARBOR
DAY,” IMPERIAL COLONIAL PACIFIC WORLD WAR II ANTHOLOGY #10, December 7, 2025.
Compiled by Dick
Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology.
What’s at Stake: The origins of WWII in the Pacific. Ultimately the conflict of American and Japanese imperial interests in
China led to war. Strictly speaking the USA got together with Britain and the
Netherlands to freeze Japanese financial assets so that Japan would not be able
to buy petroleum. The Japanese were thus forced to choose war or surrender.
They chose to attack and thus the shooting war began December 1941. From WikiAnswers.
[Note: I reported
my research on the Pearl Harbor attack 2006--2011 in a LTE to the ADG: DICK’S LETTER TO ADG
12-2-11, 221 words, pub. 12-11-11.]
TEXTS
Pearl Harbor
Anthologies Nos. 1-10
Contents of
#1 2008
http://omnicenter.org/newsletters/2008//2008_12_07.pdf
American Wars:
Illusions and Realities edited by Paul Buchheit examines nineteen
illusions leading the US to war, and Stephen Kinzer’s Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, a study of the toppling of fourteen
foreign governments. Earlier, two books
by William Blum surveyed all of the
http://omnicenter.org/newsletters/2010/2010-12-07.pdf
Dick: Review of David Swanson’s War Is a Lie.
Contents
#3 2011
http://omnicenter.org/newsletters/2011/2011-12-07.pdf
Read
more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_and_why_did_the_Pacific_War_start_in_World_War_2#ixzz1fKv3u9Il
The Pacific War: Campaigns of World War II By Andrew A. Wiest and Gregory Louis Mattson, 2001.
Contents #4 December 7, 2012
http://omnicenter.org/newsletters/2012/2012-12-07.pdf
Dick: No Choice But War
Maslin Reviews
Bradley
TomDispatch/Klare: It Wasn’t Al-Qaeda, It’s
Cyber
Climate
Contents #5 March 23, 2013
http://omnicenter.org/newsletters/2013/2013-03-23.pdf
Conroy, et al.,
West Across the Pacific, Revisionist Account
Contents #6 December 7, 2013
http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2013/12/pearl-harbor-daywwii-colonial-war-in.html
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
Contents #7, December 7, 2019
https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2019/12/pearl-harbor-day-omnis-colonial-pacific.html
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
Francis A. Boyle. “The Unlimited Imperialists.” Z
Magazine (June 2018). 6-7.
Contents #8 December 7, 2020
https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2020/12/pearl-harbor-day-colonial-pacific-world.html
Hamilton Fish. FDR, The Other Side of the Coin: How We Were Tricked into World War
II. 1976.
Robert C. Aldridge. December
7, 1941: The Attack On Pearl Harbor. 2010.
OMNI Pearl Harbor
Newsletters #1-8
Contents #9, December
7, 2021
Alfred
W. McCoy, To Govern the Globe. Imperial
and Colonial Background. 2021.
Robert
Fantina. Propaganda, Lies and False
Flags: How the U.S. Justifies Its Wars.
2020. Understanding a “war
without mercy.”
CHRISTOPHER MCKNIGHT NICHOLS
AND CAMERON GIVENS. “What
Happened After Pearl Harbor Is a Reminder of the Danger of Stereotypes and
Conspiracy Theories.” 2023.
Mark Harmon, Leon Carroll . . . .the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor. 2024.
AFSC Defended the persecuted
Japanese in California.
TEXTS: PEARL HARBOR ANTHOLOGY #10, December 7, 2025
Alfred W. McCoy, To Govern the Globe. World Orders and Catastrophic Change. Haymarket, 2021.
In
Chapter 5, “Pax Americana,” McCoy describes the long conflict by imperial
powers over the Pacific. Washington declared war on Spain in 1898, followed
soon by US Admiral Dewey’s Asiatic Squadron’s destruction of the Spanish fleet
in Manila Bay, and subsequent US. occupation of Hawaii, Wake, Guam, Samoa, and
the Philippines, which “made it the dominant imperial power.” The occupations seemed to be “a sensible
response to the rise of Japanese naval power.”
“In the continuing struggle to control
this strategic frontier, Washington has been at war somewhere in the
Asia-Pacific region for 50 of the past 80 years.” In 1900 a major battle fleet was assigned to the
new fortified base in the Philippines.
But after Japan’s two naval victories over Russia, Hawaii was chosen as
the chief base. A Japanese attack on the Philippines continued
to seem inevitable.
The
Versailles peace settlement following WWI granted Japan “a colonial mandate
over much of Micronesia…that suddenly placed the Japanese navy astride the
central Pacific sea-lanes between Pearl Harbor and Manila Bay.” If Japan attacked the Philippines the US Army
would have to hold the forces back until reinforced from Hawaii. The new B-17 Flying Fortress squadrons
stationed in the Philippines, consider to be a weapon “that would at long last
bring those islands securely inside America’s defensive perimeter,” seemed to
make this strategy feasible. Secretary
Stimson argued that the bombers “not only defended the Philippines,” but “they
would…make America master of the entire Pacific and thus “remove Japan from the
Axis powers.” The Japanese main
strategic objective was the oil fields in Indonesian Borneo and Sumatra
The
bombers also gave muscle to the “Allied oil embargo strangling the fuel
supplies that powered its army and navy.”
Their base stood in the path of the Japanese imperial supply escalator
running from Tokyo south along China, where more than half of Japan’s army was
bogged down, then through the S. China Sea, and onward to the oil. Their presence also explains why the
Japanese did not drive “due south for the oil fields,” instead striking first at
“Allied bases on their flanks that might threaten later lines of
communication—the British bastion at Singapore in the west and US bases at
Manila Bay and Pearl Harbor in the east.”
That is, December 7 marked two attacks on key US military power in the
Pacific. Most of those bombers were
destroyed on the ground. and ten ships, including four battleships were sunk at Pearl Harbor (but, ultimately disastrously
for the Japanese, not the aircraft carriers)
Dec. 7
revealed the naivete of the US planning.
“In the first one hundred days
of WWII,” the Japanese crushed the armed forces of the British, Dutch, and US
empires.
Sidney
Lens. The Forging of the American
Empire. Crowell, 1971.
[I
overlooked this excellent history. See
esp. pp.321ff.]
“. . .Almost everyone
believed that the Japanese had perpetrated a ‘sneak’ assault, without warning,
and many were convinced that had it not been for this treachery war might have
been avoided.
Pearl Harbor, however, was merely the
exclamation point to a very long sentence. In July 1940, Roosevelt cut off the
supply of oil, scrap iron, and aviation gasoline to Japan—all vital to its
economy. The Nipponese responded by
moving into Indochina. . . .Washington
countered. . . . There was no
reconciling these two approaches. . . .
Both governments knew, weeks or months before Pearl Harbor, that they
were headed for war.” At a meeting at
the White House, according to Stimson’s notes, Roosevelt discussed with close
advisors “’how we should maneuver [the Japanese] into the position of firing
the first shot.”
Lens then spends considerably more space
discussing the radical increase of presidential power during WWII, which given
the steady increase of that power since then, culminating in Donald Trump,
might have been the most significant result of WWII for the USA, and perhaps
for the world.
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