by Lew Rockwell, Lew Rockwell:
In the Ukraine war, we have seen how the state uses lies and propaganda to get us into war. It will stop at nothing to pursue its nefarious schemes. To understand fully how the state operates, it’s essential to understand what happened at Pearl Harbor.
Why is this important? Murray Rothbard explains: “Some readers might ask: why? What’s the point? Isn’t this just a raking up of old coals? Aren’t we merely pursuing an antiquarian interest when we examine in such detail what happened over a quarter-century ago? The answer is that this subject, far from being antiquarian, is crucial to the understanding of where we are now and how we got that way. For America’s entry into World War II was the crucial act in expanding the United States from a republic into an Empire, and in spreading that Empire throughout the world, replacing the sagging British Empire in the process.
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Our entry into World War II was the crucial act in foisting a permanent militarization upon the economy and society, in bringing to the country a permanent garrison state, an overweening military-industrial complex, a permanent system of conscription. It was the crucial act in creating a Mixed Economy run by Big Government, a system of State-Monopoly-Capitalism run by the central government in collaboration with Big Business and Big Unionism. It was the crucial act in elevating Presidential power, particularly in foreign affairs, to the role of single most despotic person in the history of the world. And, finally, World War II is the last war-myth left, the myth that the Old Left clings to in pure desperation: the myth that here, at least, was a good war, here was a war in which America was in the right. World War II is the war thrown into our faces by the war-making Establishment, as it tries, in each war that we face, to wrap itself in the mantle of good and righteous World War II.”
Murray’s comment about Pearl Harbor introduced a book-length article by the revisionist historian Harry Elmer Barnes that was published in 1968 in the journal Left and Right: Here are a few of Barnes’s vital findings: “The essential facts and details explaining why and how Pearl Harbor was surprised on Sunday, December 7, 1941, have now been presented. There remains the question of the responsibility for the overall trends and developments which led to the attack itself. Here, I believe that fundamental responsibility can also be overwhelmingly—almost solely—attributed to Roosevelt and his policies, in which there was far more deliberation than inadvertence.
Our entering the second World War was mainly the product of a political program: Roosevelt’s turning to armament and war to bail himself out of the difficulties created by the failure of his domestic program. The surprise attack was a political rather than a military scandal. It may, of course, be open to argument as to whether Roosevelt’s New Deal was not ideologically and morally superior to the program and methods of his conservative political opponents at home and that the latter must share the responsibility for his shift to armament and war because of their stupid hostility and often malicious resistance to domestic reforms.
Secretary of State Hull has been vigorously criticized for his arrogant and pharisaical diplomacy, based on unrealistic platitudes, beatitudes, and banalities, and designed to make it impossible to arrive at a fair and decent understanding with Japan over Far Eastern problems. But for all this Roosevelt was primarily responsible. He had no hesitation whatever in being his own Secretary of State when Hull’s policies did not coincide with his own, even to the extent of insulting Hull by relying heavily on Raymond Moley, Stimson and Henry Morgenthau in such matters. Roosevelt permitted Hull to carry on diplomatic relations with Japan in the manner which he did because Hull’s policies, strongly influenced by his principal advisor on Far Eastern matters, the Japanophobe scholar, Stanley K. Hornbeck, agreed perfectly with Roosevelt’s program. There has rarely been a greater meeting of minds between a president and his secretary of state than in the accord between Roosevelt and Hull over our negotiations with Japan in 1941. If Hull had entertained contrary views Roosevelt would no more have hesitated to push Hull aside over Japan than he did in the case of the Morgenthau Plan dealt with at the Quebec Conference in September, 1944.
So far as the economic background of Pearl Harbor is concerned, the responsibility was almost solely that of Roosevelt, whether we consider the effort to save and prolong his political career by creating a military economy to replace the New Deal or his use of economic and financial methods to produce the economic strangulation of Japan and force her into war. In the latter, he was vigorously opposed, at least when instituted, by the top army and navy officials. Even Admiral Turner strongly criticized this move.
Roosevelt’s militant program was thoroughly in accord with his personal attitudes and aims. His hostility to Japan went back to a deep-seated boyhood affection for China and antipathy to Japan that were closely related to his China-oriented family financial history, and to the alleged bad impression of the traits, behavior and political ambitions of the Japanese people made on him by a “Japanese schoolboy,” who was a fellow student with Roosevelt at Harvard. Months before he was inaugurated, he had a long conference on January 9, 1933, with Stimson, the most eminent and passionate Japanophobe among the prominent American statesmen of the present century. They were brought together by Roosevelt’s close adviser, Felix Frankfurter, who had been a subordinate of Stimson in Frankfurter’s early legal career. Stimson’s hatred of Japan and his erratic ideas about “aggressor nations” appealed to Roosevelt, and these became the basis of the latter’s Japanese policy from January 9, 1933, when he met Stimson, to the attack on Pearl Harbor. When Raymond Moley and Rexford G. Tugwell vigorously urged Roosevelt not to accept Stimson’s bellicose attitude toward Japan, he answered that he could not very well help doing so in the light of very satisfactory personal and financial relations that his maternal grandfather had enjoyed with China.
Roosevelt’s first striking gesture in revealing his aggressive foreign policy, the Quarantine formula enunciated in the Chicago Bridge speech of October 5, 1937, was straight Stimson political and diplomatic ideology, and Stimson almost immediately released an approving statement. It would be unfair, however, to attribute to Stimson full responsibility for Roosevelt’s hostile behavior toward Japan. He did not have to accept Stimson’s position, and he did so only because it was in full agreement with his own personal attitude and public policy. Late in 1937, as noted earlier, Roosevelt sent the very able American naval officer, Captain Royal E. Ingersoll, to London, and in January, 1938, Ingersoll discussed the possible relations and operations of the United States and Great Britain in case they “were involved in a war with Japan in the Pacific which would include the Dutch, the Chinese, and possibly, the Russians.” From this time onward Ingersoll had no doubt that Roosevelt had war with Japan in the back of his mind and made no bones of this fact in his confidential discussions with his professional associates.
In the summer of 1941, when Roosevelt felt ready really to put the screws on Japan, he logically summoned Stimson, already made Secretary of War, to come forth and actively implement the Stimson doctrine, while Hull proceeded with his evasive and procrastinating diplomatic homilies. When Roosevelt allowed or directed Hull to kick over the modus vivendi on November 26th, he did this in direct opposition to the policy of Marshall and Stark, who wished more time to get ready for war with Japan.
