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Economic Sanctions Cause War, Not Peace: Some Lessons From FDR's Embargo Against Japan
Submitted by Roberts Higgs of The indepedent Institute via Contra Corner blog,
Ask a typical American how the United States got into World War II, and he will almost certainly tell you that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the Americans fought back. Ask him why the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and he will probably need some time to gather his thoughts. He might say that the Japanese were aggressive militarists who wanted to take over the world, or at least the Asia-Pacific part of it. Ask him what the United States did to provoke the Japanese, and he will probably say that the Americans did nothing: we were just minding our own business when the crazy Japanese, completely without justification, mounted a sneak attack on us, catching us totally by surprise in Hawaii on December 7, 1941.
You can’t blame him much. For more than 60 years such beliefs have constituted the generally accepted view among Americans, the one taught in schools and depicted in movies—what “every schoolboy knows.” Unfortunately, this orthodox view is a tissue of misconceptions. Don’t bother to ask the typical American what U.S. economic warfare had to do with provoking the Japanese to mount their attack, because he won’t know. Indeed, he will have no idea what you are talking about.
In the late nineteenth century, Japan’s economy began to grow and to industrialize rapidly. Because Japan has few natural resources, many of the burgeoning industries had to rely on imported raw materials, such as coal, iron ore or steel scrap, tin, copper, bauxite, rubber, and petroleum. Without access to such imports, many of which came from the United States or from European colonies in southeast Asia, Japan’s industrial economy would have ground to a halt. By engaging in international trade, however, the Japanese had built a moderately advanced industrial economy by 1941.
At the same time, they also built a military-industrial complex to support an increasingly powerful army and navy. These armed forces allowed Japan to project its power into various places in the Pacific and east Asia, including Korea and northern China, much as the United States used its growing industrial might to equip armed forces that projected U.S. power into the Caribbean and Latin America, and even as far away as the Philippine Islands.
When Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in 1933, the U.S. government fell under the control of a man who disliked the Japanese and harbored a romantic affection for the Chinese because, some writers have speculated, Roosevelt’s ancestors had made money in the China trade. Roosevelt also disliked the Germans (and of course Adolf Hitler), and he tended to favor the British in his personal relations and in world affairs. He did not pay much attention to foreign policy, however, until his New Deal began to peter out in 1937. Afterward, he relied heavily on foreign policy to fulfill his political ambitions, including his desire for reelection to an unprecedented third term.
When Germany began to rearm and to seek Lebensraum aggressively in the late 1930s, the Roosevelt administration cooperated closely with the British and the French in measures to oppose German expansion. After World War II commenced in 1939, this U.S. assistance grew ever greater and included such measures as the so-called destroyer deal and the deceptively named Lend-Lease program. In anticipation of U.S. entry into the war, British and U.S. military staffs secretly formulated plans for joint operations. U.S. forces sought to create a war-justifying incident by cooperating with the British navy in attacks on German U-boats in the north Atlantic, but Hitler refused to take the bait, thus denying Roosevelt the pretext he craved for making the United States a full-fledged, declared belligerent—an end that the great majority of Americans opposed.
In June 1940, Henry L. Stimson, who had been secretary of war under Taft and secretary of state under Hoover, became secretary of war again. Stimson was a lion of the Anglophile, northeastern upper crust and no friend of the Japanese. In support of the so-called Open Door Policy for China, Stimson favored the use of economic sanctions to obstruct Japan’s advance in Asia. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes vigorously endorsed this policy. Roosevelt hoped that such sanctions would goad the Japanese into making a rash mistake by launching a war against the United States, which would bring in Germany because Japan and Germany were allied.
Accordingly, the Roosevelt administration, while curtly dismissing Japanese diplomatic overtures to harmonize relations, imposed a series of increasingly stringent economic sanctions on Japan. In 1939 the United States terminated the 1911 commercial treaty with Japan. “On July 2, 1940, Roosevelt signed the Export Control Act, authorizing the President to license or prohibit the export of essential defense materials.” Under this authority, “[o]n July 31, exports of aviation motor fuels and lubricants and No. 1 heavy melting iron and steel scrap were restricted.” Next, in a move aimed at Japan, Roosevelt slapped an embargo, effective October 16, “on all exports of scrap iron and steel to destinations other than Britain and the nations of the Western Hemisphere.” Finally, on July 26, 1941, Roosevelt “froze Japanese assets in the United States, thus bringing commercial relations between the nations to an effective end. One week later Roosevelt embargoed the export of such grades of oil as still were in commercial flow to Japan.” The British and the Dutch followed suit, embargoing exports to Japan from their colonies in southeast Asia.
An Untenable Position
Roosevelt and his subordinates knew they were putting Japan in an untenable position and that the Japanese government might well try to escape the stranglehold by going to war. Having broken the Japanese diplomatic code, the Americans knew, among many other things, what Foreign Minister Teijiro Toyoda had communicated to Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura on July 31: “Commercial and economic relations between Japan and third countries, led by England and the United States, are gradually becoming so horribly strained that we cannot endure it much longer. Consequently, our Empire, to save its very life, must take measures to secure the raw materials of the South Seas.”
Because American cryptographers had also broken the Japanese naval code, the leaders in Washington knew as well that Japan’s “measures” would include an attack on Pearl Harbor. Yet they withheld this critical information from the commanders in Hawaii, who might have headed off the attack or prepared themselves to defend against it. That Roosevelt and his chieftains did not ring the tocsin makes perfect sense: after all, the impending attack constituted precisely what they had been seeking for a long time. As Stimson confided to his diary after a meeting of the war cabinet on November 25, “The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.” After the attack, Stimson confessed that “my first feeling was of relief … that a crisis had come in a way which would unite all our people."
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Screw the Nuke Deal! Iran should join the BRICS and enjoy a fruitful future EAST.
Ya but FDR lied us into war, at least we know today's leaders would never do that.
Oh, wait....
This is another poorly researched article. By the time of the embargo Imperial Japan had ruthlessly slaughtered millions, subjugated tens of millions, and was intent on conquering the Pacific basin. Documents show that Japan was setting its sight on Hawaii, the Aleutians, and Eastern Siberia. Should have have continued to send them war making materials?
Roosevelt had been trying to enter WWII for years by the time of these sanctions. Hitler wouldn't bite, so the U.S. started bullying Japan. This included moving the U.S. Fleet from ports in Southern California to Pearl Harbor in 1940. The oil embargo was merely the last straw.
If you think the U.S. gave a flying fuck about Japan killing millions of people in China, think again. Roosevelt wanted to enter WWII to join England in the fight against Hitler, and bullying Japan was his way of making that happen. He moved the fleet to Pearl Harbor for the sole purpose of giving Japan an inviting target to hit. When he cut off oil supplies to Japan, they struck. He didn't need code breakers to tell him that would happen. It was his plan all along.
when the united states did it in the phillipines it was applauded, nation building, manifest destiny, etc. etc. when the japanese followed the example on a larger scale it was barbaric, horrid, see what owning the media and public perceptions gets you.
and the united states picked the fight that ignited the attack on pearl harbor, even set it up so the japanese could get a good hard lick in on us.
In the end, Japan will be successful with Operation Fukushima killing off many more Hawaiians, with zero family history of cancer, in the prime of their life, but are unfortunate enough to ingest a single hot particle while swimming in the Pacific Ocean. Colon cancer is a terrible way to die. I'd much rather be bombed by a Nip Zero.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc
Yes they will, with all the shitty made GE nuclear reactors that were foisted on the Japanese and installed there decades ago, so now the US legacy of completely destroying Japan can continue into perpetuity until no one is left and Japan becomes a dead zone similiar to the area surrounding Chernobyl.
Hawaii is south of the ocean currents from Japan -- the west coast of North America is getting the worst of it...
Um, the US, even its imperialism phase you mention here, didn't slaughter rape and enslave on the scale the Japanese empire did in the 20's and 30's. Orders of magnitude gulf between the two. Multiple.
TBT or not TBT
Ignoring any differences in the "magnitude" of the "slaughters" due to relative population size past and modern,
and aside from slavery and the slave trade,
the ethnic cleansing of the native population,
the Civil War and its many war crimes on both sides,
the war of annexation against Mexico,
the many US military interventions and harsh occupations in Latin America,
...
then I suppose one might argue that the US did nothing comparable
until Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and
the establishment of a global network for assassinations, droning, renditions,
and torture.
Deleted
Yeah, embargoing them was really the least we could do.
Yeah there was an embargo, but the japs had a choice. There is the little thing of maybe pulling troops out of ALL of asia.
But, yeah, fdr knew how they would react, I'm sure.
No mention in the article that Japan had invaded China and had overrun a large swath, committing horrendous atrocities on the way, disembowelling pregnant women was one of their favourite past times.
As for Americans not knowing the cause of the attack on Pearl harbour it is pretty much common knowledge in Europe. If has been said Winston Churchill knew that Pearl Harbour was the target but said nothing because he needed the US in the war. This is believable because old Winston sacrificed Coventry to German carpet bombing rather than give away the fact that British Intelligence had broken the Luftwaffe Enigma codes.
The biggest tell that the US administration knew what was coming was the fact the US navy flat tops were missing on the day of the attack, the battleships left behind in the harbour were made obsolete by the new technique of naval air warfare so were expendable. But the sacrifice of US military personnel is hard to swallow.
No mention either that
the US was an officially apartheid nation at the time,
with a culture of approved racism (hardly concerned about deaths of "chinks").
Nor was there mention that past and then present US conduct served as inspiration and model for Hitler and Japan.
"Germanization through the introduction of Germans [to the area] and to treat the original inhabitants like Indians. … I intend to stay this course with ice-cold determination. I feel myself to be the executor of the will of History. What people think of me at present is all of no consequence. Never have I heard a German who has bread to eat express concern that the ground where the grain was grown had to be conquered by the sword. We eat Canadian wheat and never think of the Indians.”
- Adolf Hitler October 1941, speaking about conquest of Soviet Union.
http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/GPO/gpo%20sources.htm#C...
Yes, Japanese and German conduct was horrendous. The problem lies in whitewashing US history, conduct, and motives.
Such whitewashing creates the arrogance and hubris that the US has done no wrong, can do no wrong, does no wrong, and will do no wrong.
Such false history, false superiority, and false exceptionalism only provides false excuse to base motives
and ignorantly and arrogantly promotes more bad conduct and more wrongs.
….disembowelling [sic] pregnant women ……
Sounds so horrendous as to be not even be humanly possible … just like yanking babies out of the incubators and tossing them on the floor – a hoax.
Sand Creek Massacre:
"THEY WERE SCALPED, THEIR BRAINS KNOCKED OUT; THE MEN USED THEIR KNIVES, RIPPED OPEN WOMEN, CLUBBED LITTLE CHILDREN, KNOCKED THEM IN THE HEAD WITH THEIR RIFLE BUTTS, BEAT THEIR BRAINS OUT, MUTILATED THEIR BODIES IN EVERY SENSE OF THE WORD."
By the end of the one-sided battle as many as 200 Indians, more than half women and children, had been killed and mutilated.
http://www.lastoftheindependents.com/sandcreek.htm
Mai Lai Massacre
When they arrived, the soldiers found no Viet Cong, but rounded up and murdered hundreds of civilians–mostly women, children and old men–in an extremely brutal fashion, including rape and torture.
http://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/my-lai-massacre
not an isolated incident, read:
Kill Anything That Moves
http://www.amazon.com/Kill-Anything-That-Moves-American/dp/1250045061
Hey you forgot the School of the Americas, at Ft. Benning, Georgia whose Torture Manual, funded by the ???? used to commit other horrendous atrocities in Nicaragua and other choice spots in South America.....
Listing everything worthy of mention in a ZH comment is impossible.
But to answer your question, I did not "forget"
the horrors spread by the School of Americas, which continue:
http://www.soaw.org/
nor did I "forget" the 5 year long invasion of US Marines in Nicaragua
to suppress Sandino and install the brutal dictator Somoza.
america is so fullvof hubris that it wont notice iran getting both
All American aircraft carriers were put out to sea since they knew the attack was coming. The Red Cross was asked to prepare relief supplies for Pearl Harbor several days before the attack.
The about 1800 US servicemen killed in the Japanese attack were sacrificial lambs to get the war started.
In Day of Deceit, Robert Stinnett delivers the definitive final chapter on America's greatest secret and our worst military disaster.
Drawing on twenty years of research and access to scores of previously classified documents, Stinnett proves that Pearl Harbor was not an accident, a mere failure of American intelligence, or a brilliant Japanese military coup. By showing that ample warning of the attack was on FDR's desk and, furthermore, that a plan to push Japan into war was initiated at the highest levels of the U.S. government, he ends up profoundly altering our understanding of one of the most significant events in American history.
http://www.amazon.com/Day-Of-Deceit-Truth-Harbor/dp/0743201299
Although I already knew about this, it is just sickening to be reminded.
What's even more sickening are all the stupid fucks that believe that was then, and this is now and nothing like that would ever happen again because we are too civilized. WMD's, over a 1 million dead innocent?
How can you EVER trust these motherfuckers again? You can't. They are the most dangerous people in the history of the planet in terms of the death and destruction they have brought, which sadly, is nothing compared to what they are capable of.
Here are more facts:
"Day of Deceit" provides compelling evidence that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt deliberately provoked Japan to attack the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor so that America could enter the war on the allied side. Stinnett, a distinguished World War II navy veteran who researched his subject for over sixteen years, provides the following evidence:
1. A naval intelligence officer named Arthur McCollum developed an eight-point plan to provoke Japanese hostilities. This plan reached Roosevelt who implemented all eight points.
2. Contrary to popular belief, the Japanese navy broke radio silence on multiple occasions prior to December 7, 1941.
3. More than 94% of all secret Japanese naval messages (including some with direct reference to the impending attack on Pearl Harbor) were successfully decoded by American intelligence units prior to December 7, 1941
4. Roosevelt implemented a change of naval command that placed proponents of the eight-point-provocation plan in key positions of power. However, the newly promoted commander of Pearl Harbor, Admiral Husband Kimmel was consistently denied access to vital decoded translations of Japanese naval communications.
5. Naval Intelligence and the FBI successfully monitored the communication of Japanese intelligence agents in Hawaii for months. These communications, which included a bombing grid map of Pearl Harbor, revealed Japan's intent.
8. Most of the critical U.S. Pacific Fleet components such as heavy cruisers and aircraft carriers were not in Pearl Harbor during the bombing. In fact the only ships that were sunk were WW I relics.
more at
http://www.amazon.com/Day-Of-Deceit-Truth-Harbor/dp/0743201299
The commanders in Pear Harbor, Kimmel and Short were warned by the war department that an attck could come at any time
Yeah, but that's kind of SOP, now isn't it.
it wasn't a general warning, they were told there were reason to believe an attack could come. They concluded that the japanese would use sabotage to attack not an areal attack, but they were warned
The Red Cross Connection:
Shortly before the attack in 1941 President Roosevelt called him [Smith - directed the War Service for the Red Cross before World War II] to the White House for a meeting concerning a Top Secret matter. At this meeting the President advised my father that his intelligence staff had informed him of a pending attack on Pearl Harbor, by the Japanese. He anticipated many casualties and much loss, he instructed my father to send workers and supplies to a holding area at a P.O.E. [port of entry] on the West Coast where they would await further orders to ship out, no destination was to be revealed. He left no doubt in my father's mind that none of the Naval and Military officials in Hawaii were to be informed and he was not to advise the Red Cross officers who were already stationed in the area. When he protested to the President, President Roosevelt told him that the American people would never agree to enter the war in Europe unless they were attack [sic] within their own borders.
http://www.usni.org/magazines/navalhistory/1999-06/advance-warning-red-c...
RE: The Red Cross. It has turned into a less than sterling example of an organization that is supposed to help people. I'm afraid Emperor Palpatine would approve.
"What's even more sickening are all the stupid fucks that believe that was then, and this is now and nothing like that would ever happen again because we are too civilized."
Many of the dumb fucks I know even today still won't believe that this is the way it really happened.
Wasn't the first time and won't be the last. Good luck to those tiny 400 man units of U.S. "advisors and trainers" over in the Baltic states and Ukraine!!
Tethered goats!
I still don't understand why Russia just doesn't launch its entire nuclear arsenal at the US.
War is about destroying money. Sometimes people get in the way.
"Good luck to those tiny 400 man units of U.S. "advisors and trainers" over in the Baltic states and Ukraine!!"
Because they too are sacrifical lambs that will be used to keep the brainwashed American population beating the patriotic war drumbs, and cheering as their kids go off to fight and maybe die for the lie!
Deeper still are the DC US fascist and Zionist connections to the fostering of war in the two theaters. These connections are centered on the interests of the DuPonts in Asia, and the Rockefellers in Europe.
And then their are the Rothschilds...
Liberty is a demand. Tyranny is submission..
Zion is plunder. Zion is blood, not theirs.
Douglas Reed covered this at length in his book "The Controversy of Zion".
From Chapter 37...
Amid jubilant scenes in Washington and Berlin on two successive days (March 4 and 5, 1933) the two twelve-year reigns began which were to end at almost the same instant in 1945. Today an impartial historian could hardly compute which reign produced the greater sum of human suffering. At the start the two men who appeared on the central scene were both hailed as Messiahs. In America a Rabbi Rosenblum described President Roosevelt as “a Godlike messenger, the darling of destiny, the Messiah of America's tomorrow”; there spoke a political flatterer in words intended to “persuade the multitude.” In 1937, in Prague menaced by Hitler, a Jewish acquaintance told me his rabbi was preaching in the synagogue that Hitler was “the Jewish Messiah” (a pious elder who sought to interpret events in terms of Levitical prophecy). All through these years the masses in both countries (and for that matter in Russia too) had their particular “premier-dictator” depicted to them in such terms, or in those of “Big Brother,” “Papa,” “Uncle,” “Beloved Leader” or the fireside-loving “Friend.” The apparent antagonists, Mr. Roosevelt and Herr Hitler, both in different ways promoted “the destructive principle” in its three recognizable forms: revolutionary-Communism, revolutionary-Zionism and the ensuing “world government to enforce peace.”
Mr. Roosevelt's reign began with a significant deception. He used a wheeled chair but the public masses were never allowed to see him, in flesh or picture, until he had been helped to an upright position. His infirmity was known; nevertheless, some directing intelligence decreed that the false picture of a robust man must to his last day be presented to the multitude (and even afterwards, for the sculptor who later made his London monument had to depict him in this sturdy pose).
Mr. Roosevelt created precedent by having his cabinet sworn in by the hand of a distinguished Jew, Mr. Justice Cardozo, who was a committed Zionist, having yielded in 1918 to Mr. Brandeis and Rabbi Stephen Wise, with the despondent-sounding words, “Do what you please with my name”; he then received his Supreme Court judgeships, Rabbi Wise requesting them for him, first from Governor Al Smith of New York State and then from President Herbert Hoover. Thus the shadow of “dual allegiance” fell on Mr. Roosevelt's administration at its start (as on Mr. Wilson's, from the figure of Mr. Brandeis).
Mr. Roosevelt, after the Republican interregnum of 1921-1933, resumed the Wilson policies and in that spirit approached the major problem of America's future at that moment: namely, whether the forces represented by the great Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe, which had occurred in the six decades following the Civil War, should or should not govern America. All competent authorities had observed, usually with foreboding, the rapid rise of this new problem in American life, and had depicted the effects of the transplantation to American soil of a large population-mass which, under its religious directors, rejected the concept of “the melting-pot” and of “assimilation.” Mr. James Truslow Adams referred to it in his Epic of America, and Rudyard Kipling, who lived in New England in the 1890's, wrote:
“The land was denuding itself of its accustomed inhabitants and their places had not yet been taken by the wreckage of Eastern Europe … Immigrants were coming into the States at about a million head a year … Somewhere in the background, though he did not know it, was the ‘representative' American, who traced his blood through three or four generations and who, controlling nothing and affecting less, protested that … all foreign elements could and would soon be assimilated into ‘good Americans.' And not a soul cared what he said … What struck me … was the apparent waste and ineffectiveness, in the face of the foreign inrush, of all the indigenous effort of the past generation. It was then that I first began to wonder whether Abraham Lincoln had not killed too many autochthonous ‘Americans' in the Civil War, for the benefit of their hastily imported Continental supporters. This is black heresy, but I have since met men and women who have breathed it. The weakest of the old-type immigrants had been sifted and salted by the long sailing-voyage of those days. But steam began in the later sixties and early seventies, when human cargoes could be delivered with all their imperfections in a fortnight or so. And one million more-or-less acclimatized Americans had been killed.”
This problem was only new to America; it was the oldest problem in recorded history and, as this narrative has shown, had recurred in country after country, down the ages, whenever Jewish immigration reached flood levels. Dr. Weizmann is a witness to it, for he discusses it in relating his beleaguerment of a British official, Sir William Evans Gordon, who grappled with it in England twenty years before it excited the alarm of United States Congresses. In 1906 Sir William sought to solve it through an Aliens Bill (as the 67th and 68th United States Congresses by quota laws). Dr. Weizmann says that in performing his duty Sir William (like Senator Pat McCarran and Representative Francis E. Walter in America in the 1950's) came to be “generally regarded as responsible for all the difficulties placed in the way of Jewish immigrants into England.” Dr. Weizmann then continues:
“Whenever the quantity of Jews in any country reaches the saturation point, that country reacts against them … England had reached the point where she could or would absorb so many Jews and no more … The reaction against this cannot be looked upon as anti-semitism in the ordinary or vulgar sense of that word; it is a universal social and economic concomitant of Jewish immigration and we cannot shake it off. Sir William had no particular anti-Jewish prejudice. He acted … in the most kindly way, in the interests of his country… In his opinion it was physically impossible for England to make good the wrongs which Russia had inflicted on its Jewish population … .I am fairly sure he would equally have opposed mass influx of any foreign element; but, as it happened, no other foreign element pressed for admission in such numbers.” (Forty years later Dr. Weizmann spoke similarly to Jews in America: “Certain countries can digest a certain number of Jews; once that number has been passed, something drastic must happen; the Jews must go”).
Dr. Weizmann thus soberly presented the valid argument against unrestricted Jewish immigration only because he was speaking chiefly to Jews and was drumming into them the Talmudic argument that Jews cannot be assimilated; this argument is essential to Zionism, but is not inherently true. The quoted passages show that in 1906 a man in authority was still able to state that his country could not make good “wrongs” supposed to have been inflicted on Jews in another country, and to let “the interests of his country” govern his duty. In the ensuing decades all the premier-dictators of the West made it State policy to remedy alleged wrongs, done by a third party, at the expense of an innocent fourth party. The absurdity is shown by Dr. Weizmann's own last-quoted remark, that when the number of digestible Jews is exceeded in any country “something drastic must happen; the Jews must go.” He and his associates for half a century had been using all their power in America to gain unrestricted access for Jews, so that, according to his own words, they were deliberately leading the Jews there to disaster; the time must come, if what he said was true, when governments elsewhere in the world will be under pressure to admit large numbers of Jews from America because of “the wrongs” done them there.
Such was the background of the dominant issue in American life when Mr. Roosevelt became president. Between 1881 and 1920 over three million legally-recorded immigrants entered the United States from Russia, most of them Jews. According to the United States Census Bureau the country contained 230,000 Jews in 1877 and about 4,500,000 in 1926. Only “estimates” are at any time obtainable in matters of Jewish population, as the “elders” oppose head-counting by others, and these figures are generally held to have been largely under-estimated. In the ensuing decade the figures eluded all verification, chiefly owing to changes in immigrant-classification ordered by President Roosevelt, and even the competent authorities will not attempt to estimate the extent of unrecorded and illegal immigration (competent observers judge that the total number of Jews in the United States now may be around ten million). In any case, the greatest single community of Jews in the world today is in the American Republic, having been transplanted thither during the last two generations.
In proportion to the total American population even the highest estimate would not reach one-tenth. In itself this is a relatively small group; politically organized to tip the balance of power it is of decisive importance. This problem was recognized and the Congressional Committee on Immigration in 1921 declared:
“The processes of assimilation and amalgamation are slow and difficult. With the population of the broken parts of Europe headed this way in ever-increasing numbers, why not peremptorily check the stream with this temporary measure, and in the meantime try the unique and novel experiment of enforcing all the immigration laws on our statutes?”
A quota law then passed limited the number of any nationality entering the United States to three percent of the foreign-born of that nationality resident in the United States in 1910. The next Congress went much further than the general statement above quoted; it was specific about the danger, the same Committee reporting:
“If the principle of individual liberty, guarded by a constitutional government, created on this continent nearly a century and half ago is to endure, the basic strain of our population must be maintained and our economic standards preserved … The American people do not concede the right of any foreign group … to dictate the character of our legislation.”
The years which then followed showed that the effect of Mr. Roosevelt's presidency would be further to break down the principle stated, to alter “the basic strain,” and to enable “a foreign group” to dictate State policy.
Mr. Roosevelt (like Mr. Wilson, Mr. Lloyd George and General Smuts) evidently was selected before he was elected. Mr. Howden says that Mr. House “picked Roosevelt as a natural candidate for the presidency long before any other responsible politician,” chose him as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1913, and then through the years groomed him for the presidency, expecting to govern through him, as through President Wilson. Then something went wrong. Mr. House was confident that President Roosevelt would call on him but then realized that “certain people don't want the president to listen to me.” These people were evidently too strong, for Mr. House was dropped without any courtesy and at this point (1933) disappears from the story.
One can only offer a reasonable surmise about the reasons. Mr. House, at seventy-five, regretted young Philip Dru of 1912, who had thought the American Constitution “outmoded and grotesque,” had seized power by force and then governed by emergency decree. He had a new set of more sober and responsible ideas ready for Mr. Roosevelt and, from relegation, then “watched with forbidding” the concentration of irresponsible power in Mr. Roosevelt's hands. Mr. House had caused President Wilson, as his first major act, to write into the American Constitution (as the Sixteenth Amendment) the chief destructive measure proposed in Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto of 1848, the “progressive income tax,” but in the 1930's Mr. House was alarmed by the completely untrammelled control of the public purse which his second “Rockland” obtained.
Presumably, then, Mr. House was discarded because he had retreated from his earlier ideas, for those original ideas governed Mr. Roosevelt's policy throughout his twelve years. He supported the world-revolution; his first major act of State policy was to recognize the Communist Government and in the ensuing war he resumed the House-Wilson policy of “all support.” He supported revolutionary-Zionism. Finally, he took up the old “league to enforce peace” idea and re-foisted it on the West under a new name, that of the “United Nations.”
Thus Mr. Roosevelt put “Philip Dru's” ideas into further practice. Of Mr. Wilson in the earlier generation his Secretary of the Interior, Mr. Franklin K. Lane, had said, “All Philip Dru had said should be comes about; the President comes to Philip Dru in the end.” As to Mr. Roosevelt, twenty years later, Mr. House's biographer (Mr. Howden) says, “It is impossible to compare Dru's suggested legislation with Mr. Roosevelt's and not be impressed by their similarity”.
This is an illustrative example of the transmission of ideas from generation to generation, among a governing group. Mr. House's ideas were those of “the revolutionaries of 1848,” which in turn derived from Weishaupt and the revolutionaries of 1789, who had them from some earlier source. When Mr. House abandoned them they were transmitted without a hitch to the ruling group around another president, and the one man who had modified these ideas was left behind.
Mr. House was the only casualty in the inner circle. Mr. Bernard Baruch was adviser to Mr. Roosevelt even before he became president. Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt records that “Mr. Baruch was a trusted adviser to my husband both in Albany and in Washington,” that is, during Mr. Roosevelt's four-year term as Governor of New York State, before his presidential nomination. During this pre-presidential period Mr. Roosevelt (according to one of Mr. Baruch's biographers, Mr. Morris V. Rosenbloom), although America had repudiated the League of Nations, drafted the plan for a new body to be called the United Nations. Rabbi Stephen Wise and Mr. Brandeis, of the earlier group around President Wilson, regrouped themselves around President Roosevelt (Hitler's anti-Jewish measures in Germany at this time revived Mr. Brandeis's desire to drive Arabs out of Palestine).
Right at the start of Mr. Roosevelt's twelve years some doubt may have arisen about his docility, and means have been found to ensure it (the reader will recall “Rockland's” attempt to assert independence in 1912 and the “exultant conspirators” mirth about his capitulation). That would explain the curious fact that Rabbi Stephen Wise, who had campaigned for Mr. Roosevelt as senator in 1914 and as governor of New York State in 1928, did not support him for the presidency in 1932. Then something happened to reassure the rabbi, for immediately after Mr. Roosevelt's election he proclaimed that the new president had “rewon my unstinted admiration,” and by 1935 was again an intimate of the White House.
In the light of earlier experience, the identity of the men surrounding President Roosevelt plainly pointed to the policies he would pursue. He made this clearer by widening the circle of his Jewish advisers. In 1933 this had a new significance. In 1913 President Wilson's Jewish advisers were publicly accepted as Americans like any other Americans, and simply of the Jewish faith. In 1933 the question of their allegiance had been raised by the Zionist adventure in Palestine. In addition, the issues of the world-revolution and of world-government had arisen since 1913, and both of these also threw up the question of American national interest, so that the feelings entertained about them in the president's immediate circle became a matter of first importance.
All this lent a specific significance to the earlier Congressional pronouncement (1924), denying the right of “any foreign group” to “dictate the character of our legislation.” Among the president's “advisers” many were of foreign birth or in effect became “foreign” by their devotion to Zionism or their attitude towards the world-revolution and world-government. In this sense a “foreign group,” embodying the mass-immigration of the preceding hundred years, formed itself around the American president and “steered” the course of events. The twelve years which followed showed that any “advice” acted on by the president must have been to the benefit of the destructive principle in its three interrelated forms: Communism, Zionism, world-government.
Prominent among his advisers (in addition to the three powerful men above named) was the Viennese-born Professor Felix Frankfurter. Mr. House's biographer Mr. Howden, who expresses Mr. House's opinion, thinks he was the most powerful of all: “Professor Frankfurter duplicated with Mr. Roosevelt, more than anyone else … the part played by Mr. House with President Wilson.” The part played by unofficial advisers is always difficult to determine and this opinion may place Professor Frankfurter too high in the hierarchy. However, he was undoubtedly important (he, too, first came into the advisory circle under Mr. Wilson).
Like Mr. Brandeis and Mr. Cardozo, he became a Supreme Court Justice and never openly appeared in American politics; yet the effects of his influence are plainer to trace than those of other men, which have to be deeply delved for. He was head of the Harvard Law School during the 1930's and in that capacity trained an entire generation of young men who were to give a definite shape to the events of the 1940's and 1950's. They received marked preference for high employment in their later careers.
They include in particular Mr. Alger Hiss, who by trial and conviction was revealed as a Communist agent, though he was a high “adviser” of President Roosevelt, (Mr. Justice Frankfurter voluntarily appeared at the trial to testify to Mr. Hiss's character), and Mr. Dean Acheson, who as American Secretary of State at that time declared he would not “turn his back” on Mr. Hiss, and others. Mr. Hiss played an important part at the Yalta Conference, where the abandonment of half Europe to the revolution was agreed; Mr. Acheson's period of office coincided with the abandonment of China to the revolution.
Apart from this distinct group of young men apparently trained during President Roosevelt's early years in office to take over the State Department, the president was accompanied by a group of Jewish advisers at the highest level. Mr. Henry Morgenthau Junior (a leading Zionist, whose “Morgenthau Plan” of 1944 was the original basis for the bisection of Europe in 1945) was his Secretary of the Treasury for eleven of the twelve years. Other intimate associates were Senator Herbert Lehman (another leading Zionist who took great part in promoting the “second exodus” from Europe in 1945-1946, which led to the war in Palestine), Judge Samuel Rosenmann (a resident inmate of the White House, who helped write Mr. Roosevelt's speeches), Mr. David Niles (of Russian-born parentage, and for many years “adviser on Jewish affairs” to Mr. Roosevelt and his successor), Mr. Benjamin Cohen (a drafter of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and another important Zionist), and three Jews from Russia, Messrs. Sidney Hillman, Isador Lubin and Leo Pasvolsky.
These leading names, from the personal entourage of the president, represent only the pinnacle of an edifice that was set around all American political life. This sudden growth of Jewish influence, behind the scenes of power, obviously was not a spontaneous natural phenomenon. The selection was discriminatory; anti-Zionist, anti-revolutionary and anti-world-government Jews were excluded from it. The formation of this “palace guard” was unpopular, but unofficial advisers are difficult to attack on specific grounds and Mr. Roosevelt ignored all protests, and so escorted began his thrice-renewed presidency. Hitler simultaneously appeared as the symbol, at that moment, of the mathematically-recurrent Jewish persecution, and in the calculations of President Roosevelt's advisers took the place occupied by “the Czar” twenty years before in those of Mr. Wilson's.
Mr. Roosevelt's long continuance in office was chiefly due to Mr. House's master-plan for winning elections. Under this strategy of the intensive appeal to the “fluctuating” vote “discrimination” became the chief slogan. It was raised on behalf of the Negroes, who were used as a stalking-horse[6]; and in fact was used to crush objection to the excessive influence of the “foreign group” represented by “the palace guard.” Coupled with it was the appeal to the poor in the form of promises to soak the rich. This strategy proved so effective that the Republicans beat a retreat and began to compete with the Democrats for the favour of “the foreign group,” who were held to be the arbiters of elections. In this way the secret grip on power was made secure, and the American elector was in fact deprived of true choice between parties. Mr. Roosevelt fortified himself by his policy of “deficit-spending,” the basic theory of which was that the amount of public debt was unimportant, as the State only owed it to itself. At that point the American people lost and have never since regained control of the public purse, and the occupant of the White House became able by a stroke of the pen to command expenditures which in earlier times would have covered the annual budgets of half-a-dozen thrifty States. Mr. Roosevelt gained these powers by invoking the need to beat “The Crisis,” and he produced The Permanent Emergency in which his country still lives.
His presidency followed a design obviously predetermined and the course of events in the world might have been entirely different if it had been shorter. However, the hidden mechanism was so efficient, and the hold of his mentors on it so secure, that he was maintained in office through three re-elections. Only once was his tenure threatened with unexpected interruption, dangerous to these plans.
In a Southern State, Louisiana, arose a politico of Mr. Roosevelt's type. Mr. Huey Long, a young demagogue with a fleshy face and curly hair from a poor hillbilly home, grew popular (like Mr. Wilson and Mr. Roosevelt) by attacking “the interests” (in his particular countryside, the oil interests in general and Standard Oil in particular). The idol of the poor whites, he was elected governor in 1928 and at once tried to raise money for building schoolhouses by putting a tax on oil, whereon at the opening of the Louisiana Legislature one Rabbi Walter Peiser refused to invoke a blessing, calling him “an unworthy governor.”
Mr. Long grew more popular and was elected to the United States Senate where (March 1935) he devoted “a large part” of a speech to “an attack on Mr. Bernard Baruch,” in whom he apparently saw the supreme representative of the “interests” (about the only charge never made against Mr. Long, who had many Jewish associates, was that he was “anti-semitic”). Mr. Long was becoming a force in the land and wrote a book called My First Week in the White House, containing illustrations which showed Mr. Roosevelt, looking much like the Roosevelt of Yalta, listening humbly to the wisdom of a hale and ebullient Huey Long.
He set out to undo Mr. Roosevelt by outdoing him in Mr. Roosevelt's especial skill: lavish spending and lavish promises. He did this in an ingenious way (he was possibly trickier than even Mr. Roosevelt). Mr. Long, with his “Share the Wealth” and “Every Man a King” programme, controlled the political machine in Louisiana. When the Roosevelt money began to flow into the States (for expenditure on all manner of crisis “projects,” and incidentally on votes) Mr. Long calmly diverted it to his own similar ends. He forced through the Louisiana Legislature a law prohibiting local authorities from receiving any Washington money without the consent of a Louisiana State Board. As he controlled this board, he intercepted the cornucopian stream and the money was spent to enhance his, not Mr. Roosevelt's voting strength. He did with public money what Mr. Roosevelt was doing, but for his own political account.
In 1935 Mr. Roosevelt's second election campaign loomed ahead. Suddenly his advisers became aware that Mr. Long was popular far beyond his native Louisiana; he was a national figure. The Democratic National Committee “was astonished when a secret poll revealed that Long on a third-party ticket could poll between three and four million votes and that his Share The Wealth plan had eaten deeply into the Democratic strength in the industrial and farm States” (Mr. John T. Flynn).
Therefore Mr. Long, although he could not have become president at that time, certainly could have prevented Mr. Roosevelt's re-election, and the ruling few suddenly beheld a disturber of their regime. However, as Mr. Flynn says, “Fate had gone Democratic and remained so”; on September 8, 1935 Mr. Long was shot in the Louisiana State Capitol by a young Jew, Dr. Carl Austin Weiss. The motive will never be known because Dr. Weiss, who might have explained it, was shot by Mr. Long's tardy bodyguard.
The political effect was clear; Mr. Roosevelt's re-election was ensured. The usual suggestion of “a madman” was conveyed to the public mind and various other motives, not entailing insanity, also were suggested. No public investigation was made, as in the cases of other political assassinations of the last hundred years, in respect of which investigation was denied or curtailed. Such investigations as have been made (for instance, in the cases of President Lincoln, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and King Alexander of Yugoslavia) have never supported the theory (always put forward) of the lonely “madman,” but have revealed thorough organization with powerful support. The removal of Mr. Long determined the pattern of events for a decade, so that it was as important in its effects as the murders of more highly-placed men.
Mr. Roosevelt was re-elected in 1936. His allotted task evidently was to re-involve his country in the “foreign entanglements” of Mr. House and Mr. Wilson, and, like Mr. Wilson, he promised from election to election to keep it out of these. Meanwhile, the uproar about Hitler grew and, as I have shown, his persecution of men was subtly transformed into a “persecution of Jews.” Mr. Roosevelt, just two years before the Second War, made public, through cryptic statement which to the initiated was an undertaking to involve his country in war and to wage it primarily for the cause represented by his palace guard. Mr. Wilson made his public statement, with its menace to Russia, in December 1911, about three years before the First World War; Mr. Roosevelt made his, with its menace to Germany, in October 1937, about two years before the Second World War. The two statements are implicitly identical in identifying the American cause with the Jewish cause as misrepresented by the Zionists.
Mr. Roosevelt said (October 5, 1937), “Let no one imagine that America will escape … that this Western hemisphere will not be attacked … When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disaster.”
The president's speech-writers on this occasion were not cryptic enough. The allusion to “joining in a quarantine” was instantly understood by the public masses also as a threat of war. This caused such consternation that Mr. Roosevelt was obliged up to the very moment, four years later, when America was actually involved in war to promise “again and again and again” that “your sons will not be sent into any foreign war.” (In October 1937 he certainly knew that war was coming in the autumn of 1939; at that very moment I had informed The Times from Vienna that Hitler and Goering had said so, and the American president would not have been less accurately informed).
By 1937 the falsification of the news-picture from Germany, which was described in the last chapter, had been going on for four years. I gave several instances, and here adduce another. Rabbi Stephen Wise relates that the American Jewish Congress immediately after Hitler's advent to power started the boycott-Germany movements on the basis of “cable reports” from Germany that “a nationwide pogrom” of Jews was being “planned.” He then mentions, casually, that the “reported” pogrom “did not come off,” but the boycott did.
Starting with this imaginary pogrom in Berlin, the propagandist campaign in America formed the basis on which Mr. Roosevelt rested his “quarantine” speech. The Zionists around the president were not truly concerned about the suffering of Jews at all; on the contrary, it was necessary to their politics in America and to the entire undertaking, and they feared its alleviation. In this they continued the policy of the Talmudic revolutionaries in Czarist Russia, who went to the length of assassination to prevent the emancipation of Jews, as has been shown.
Thus Rabbi Wise records that he and his fellow Zionists were not deterred by urgent protests and appeals from the Jews in Germany to stop the boycott. The prospect of an accommodation between Hitler and the Jews of Germany, indeed, appalled them and Rabbi Wise informed his associates of his “two fears” in this respect: “… that our Jewish brothers in Germany might feel moved or compelled to accept a peace agreement or pact that might mean some slight amelioration or mitigation of their wrongs … that the Nazi regime might decide to prevent some of the evil consequences of its regime by such palliative treatment of the Jews as would disarm worldwide Jewish protest.” (He describes the second possibility as the “graver” danger).
Thus they feared that “the persecution” would collapse; the words are specific. Rabbi Wise, in New York, preferred that Jews in Germany should suffer rather than this should happen: “To die at the hands of Nazism is cruel; to survive by its grace were ten thousand times worse. We will survive Nazism unless we commit the inexpiable sin of bartering or trafficking with it in order to save some Jewish victims” (1934, to the world Jewish Conference). “We reject out of hand with scorn and contempt any and every proposal which would ensure the security of some Jews through the shame of all Jews” (1936). Mr. Brandeis, in Washington, was equally resolute for martyrdom in Germany: “Any arrangement which results in making a market abroad for German goods strengthens Hitler.... ...To thus relieve Hitler's economic distress in order to save by emigration some of Germany's Jews would be .... deplorable statesmanship.”
For the Zionists in America the spectral danger of a reconciliation between Hitler and the Jews became most acute in 1938. General Smuts then sent his Defence Minister, Mr. Oswald Pirow, to Germany to ease tension in the Jewish question, if he could. The British prime minister, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, welcomed the attempt; he told Mr. Pirow that the pressure of international Jewry was one of the principal obstacles to an Anglo-German understanding and said he would be helped in resisting this pressure (Leon Pinsker's “irresistible pressure”) if Hitler could be induced to moderate his spleen.
Mr. Pirow then went to Germany. He says that he made a specific proposal, that Hitler responded favourably, and that agreement was in sight.
At that very instant fate again intervened, as in the case of Mr. Huey Long, Count Stolypin, Czar Alexander II and others; whenever a chance of pacification appeared fate intervened. A young Jew shot a German diplomat, Herr von Rath, in Paris. Riots followed in Germany, synagogues were burned, and Mr. Pirow's mission abruptly ended. No investigation into the murder, or any organization that might have been behind it, was held, or if one was begun it never produced any informative result; Rabbi Wise presents the familiar picture (found also in Mr. House's novel) of the “half-crazed youth,” maddened beyond endurance.
Mr. Roosevelt responded immediately: “The news of the past few days from Germany has deeply shocked public opinion in the United States … I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth century civilization … I asked our Ambassador in Berlin to return at once for report and consultation”.
The words referred to the synagogue-burning. (Mr. Roosevelt did not comment on the murder) and the central sentence is demonstrably untrue, because Mr. Roosevelt, and all his contemporaries, had earlier seen the wanton destruction of religious edifices. True, they had not been synagogues, but Mr. Roosevelt had “seen” the dynamiting of Christian churches and cathedrals in Communized Russia, and on becoming president had rushed to recognize the government that did it. Moreover, when he made this declaration he had just sent a telegram cordially approving the enforced capitulation of Czechoslavakia to Hitler and in that deed had found nothing incongruous with 20th Century civilization. This was the moment when I threw up my post, feeling unable to continue in journalism at a time when untruth was master of “the news.”
The United States in effect became involved in the Second War when President Roosevelt made these declarations in 1937 and 1938, not on the day of Pearl Harbour, and a straight line led from them to his later statement of July 17, 1942, when he implicitly promised vengeance on Germany solely on account of its treatment of Jews; the men who prompted him to that public threat had from the start vehemently opposed any mitigation of Jewish suffering in Germany.
The murder of von Rath in Paris was the shot of Serajevo which in effect opened the second war, as the developing fluid, time, now reveals. Unlike Mr. Wilson, Mr. Roosevelt never privately believed that he would keep his country neutral; in 1938 his mentor, Mr. Bernard Baruch, declared “We are going to lick that fellow Hitler; he isn't going to get away with it” (General George C. Marshall). Unless some change occurs, and none is foreseeable yet, the American president in any third war would find himself held in the same coils as his predecessors of 1914-1918 and 1939-1945.
During these six years when “the unnecessary war” was brewed I watched the turbulent, darkening scene from Berlin and Vienna and all the great cities on which the long night was soon to fall: Prague and Budapest, Belgrade and Bucharest, Sofia and Warsaw. I saw as much as any man, I suppose, of the stoking of the furnace from which the ingot, war, was produced; and more than most, because I was not confined to any one country or faction, but had the run of them all. I knew the noise of the bravoes in the Storm Troopers' Stammkneipen,the furtive, bitter talk of their adversaries in private dwellings, and the nervous murmur of men on the run, who glanced ever over their shoulders. I saw the face of the mob, that dinosaur without a cerebral cavity, in both its moods: the inflamed one of illusory hope (in Berlin) and the hollow-cheeked, sunken-eyed one of hopeless disillusionment (in Moscow). I met fear at every level, from the street-cleaner to the head of state or of government; I saw the terror in both its headquarter cities.
I knew or met many of the men who appeared to be powerful and to uphold opposing causes, and yet by their acts all brought “the unnecessary war” nearer and nearer. I talked with Hitler, Goering and Goebbels; I lunched quietly by the Geneva lakeside with chubby Maxim Litvinoff, a typical figure of the Café des Exiles, and wondered what he knew of Russia who so little Russia knew, though he was Foreign Minister of that communized land. I saw Mussolini, and Ramsay Macdonald, one of the British prime ministers who passed shadow-like across the blind during these years. I talked for long hours with Edouard Benesh in the old castle at Prague, with Austrian chancellors and Hungarian prime ministers, with Balkan kings and politicians. I went to watch the League of Nations, with high expectations then (for I was still callow) and was repelled by the manner of its proceedings, which was without dignity, by the lobbying and canvassing behind the scenes, and by the throng of hangers-on and intriguers which enfringed it; I think few enthusiasts for the “United Nations” would be found among those who knew the League of Nations. I went to Moscow, in the journalistic bodyguard of a rising young minister named Anthony Eden, and there saw a regime which was the facsimile of the National Socialist one in Germany in every major respect save the status of the Jews, who appeared to me to be predominant in the key-positions of the Soviet state.
It was all a whirling confusion, at the centre of which was one plain fact: that Hitler would make war unless he were prevented and that this war was coming, because he would not be prevented. There was another British prime minister, Mr. Stanley Baldwin (a source of grief to the newspaper correspondents in Germany) who withheld the truth of Hitler's warlike intentions from his countrymen because, as he later said, he would have “lost the election” if he had told it. If his successor, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, thought that by continuing the policy of encouragement to Hitler he could “steer” Hitler to direct his war against the Soviet (I have no proof of this, but it may have been Mr. Chamberlain's calculation) that was at least a policy, where before was no policy at all. But it was a mistaken policy, for all qualified observers in Germany foresaw that when he struck Hitler would join hands with Stalin in waging war, not wage war against him (I wrote this in my pre-war books).
When I experienced Hitler's first two invasions, of Austria and Czechoslovakia, I realized that the last hope of averting the unnecessary war was gone. I felt that I lived in a mad world and this explains the title, Insanity Fair, which I gave to the book I wrote at that time. I could see only a lunatic lack of policy then. Eighteen years later, in the light of all that has come about and been made known, the possibility that the unnecessary war was not in all quarters held to be unnecessary obviously cannot be written off.
http://controversyofzion.info/Controversybook/reeedcontrov_chap.pdf
Holy fuck Batman!!!!!!!!
Joooos! Did I get that about right. TLDR and all that.
See, that's why things are completely fucked up...people don't want to take the time to understand the history and the details behind events. Apparently TLDR *also* stands for "too lazy, didn't read".
or :too stupid; can't comprehend big words:
Bigger picture, Roosevelt moved the fleet to Pearl Harbor in 1940 so Japan would attack it and allow the U.S. To enter the war. On May 13, 1940, the Commander of the U.S. fleet Admiral Richardson wrote his superior, Admiral Stark, asking why President Roosevelt ordered him to keep his fleet so far west after spring maneuvers? Why couldn't his ships return as usual to their bases along the California coast, in San Diego, San Pedro and Long Beach?
He wrote, "I feel that any move west [to Pearl Harbor] means hostilities." "I feel at this time it would be a grave mistake to become involved in the west, where our interests, although important, are not vital."
He sent a memo to the Secretary of the Navy on September 15 and told Roosevelt on October 8, 1940 that Pearl Harbor was the wrong place for his ships. He flat out asked Roosevelt if the U.S. was going to war. Roosevelt said when Japan makes a mistake, we will go to war.
Richardson was relieved of his command by Roosevelt in December of 1940.
Well actually the squidz had an Admiral with BALLS who discerned a potential threat and had the freedom of action to get his "non-essential" carriers out of Dodge.
No one knew that shit was going to happen, Stinnet and Prange are pussies and not definitive at all, I'm a guessin' that u be a shill for the next conspiracy theory.
- Ned
No one knew? Why do you say that? Is that what you learned in HS american history class? If so, that's what I learned in HS too.
But then when I got to college, I decided to explore my university's massive library. And what do you know, on the 4th floor were stacks of books and PhD dissertations on the subject of Pearl Harbor. Such was the volume of evidence proving that 'they knew' that at first I couldn't digest it. Many memos discussing the attack were sent back and forth between the WH and Naval intelligence. They had the Japanese diplomatic and military codes in 1940. Then knew the Japanese were massing that attack force in November. Day of Deciet is not the only source. But what I found is that these facts are obscured by patriotic propaganda PH books that were on the first floor and much more accessible than the old dusty texts in the back room. That in and of itself is a red flag in my mind.
It took a while for me to come to understand that the government we live under is not benevolent and will gladly sacrifice you or me, or thousands of us, to accomplish an agenda. An agenda that prior to the event in question would have been politically impossible. This pattern has been repeated so many times in this country it's become a bore. Remember the Maine! A Day that will live in infamy! Gulf of Tonkin! Babies being thrown from incubators! 911! Sandy Hook! (D's have a different false flag menu than R's but both use these events to push their agendas).
If you would like to believe that our government is a force for good, that taxes are voluntary, that our troops protect our freedom, that the terrorists hate us for our freedom, and that Pearl Harbor was a 'surprise' attack, then go ahead.
What you say is so true. It's not hard to see that what is being taught as history in US education really can be reduced to plain old propaganda. As a first generation Japanese/American it galls me to listen to the way people talk about Pearl Harbor without not even a scintilla of curiousity of the history behind it. A good book to look at for some background, which I am just starting to read is "The Imperial Cruise".
My grandfather was the Japanese ambassador first to Manchuria and then to Irag during WW2 and my mother related to me the many stories of what happened during these times and about their travels. I can tell you it's not what I was taught in school here in the US. From my recollections of conversations with my mother, which I hope to put into a book one day, at one such event my grandfather represented Japan during some very tense negotiations at a League of Nations meeting in Switzerland leading up to what I think was the eventual embargo against Japan. My mother's recollection was that he was furious at the conclusion of that meeting.
My grandfather's very good friend was Cordell Hull, who I believe wrote the Charter to the United Nations. My grandparents were married in the National Cathedral in Washington DC, with Mr. Hull as best man, with my grandmother wearing Martha Washingtons veil (something old). They were well connected to DC. So when I look at all the pictures I have of the US military taking over my grandparents estate in Tokyo and making nice with my mother and her sisters while screwing them over at the same time, it is very difficult to reconcile in my mind. Add to that the carpet bombing of every (wooden) city in Japan, leaving them burning to the ground before even dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and listening to stories of my mother, during the bombings, waiting on the roof of their mansion at midnight every night with blankets at the ready to put out fires in case an incendiary bomb was dropped on their rooftop and started a fire. My mother and her sisters could see all of Tokyo on fire from their rooftop as they waited.
I know horrible war crimes were committed by all. I also believe it's still all about who has control of the world's resources. The big question is what will it take to wake people up to the brainwashing they are being subjected to.
The meekness and servility of the citizenry encourages despotism.
If those pesky Japs had bowed and swore to be our vassals in the 1930's, we wouldn't have had to nuke them to show the Soviets we meant business.
That's one way of looking at it.
Accurately portrayed in the book "War without Mercy" I might add.
As one US Marine answered when asked "no, you're right. I don't recall us ever taking any prisoners."
Now obviously "who knew about nukes in the 1930's."
Where the Author is Full Retard here though is in "speculating" why the US went to war with Japan.
That's an easy one: "the only War Plan (Plan Orange) on the books at the outbreak of War in Europe for the Americans was a War with Japan."
Son, soldiers don't go to war without a Plan.
And that Plan was Teddy Roosevelt's doing I might add. "Very old" to say the least.
I highly doubt the USA has ANY plan for War with Russia.
Be an interesting question to ask the President of the United States actually...
careful there ... there still might be OpPlans that center on the Fulda Gap.
It takes two to tango - the Japanese weren't exactly looking to surrender - ever.
And of course what was occurring in China by the Japanese should have been encouraged by the Roosevelt administration by selling them the raw materials to continue the pillage, plunder and rape, right?
yep, by 1941 the Japs had been pretty mighty bad boys invading how much territory including Nankin. Thia article is all wrong in my humble opinion
Don't forget Korea. My father was part of the team who helped the rebuilding of Seoul after WWII. He would barely speak of the atrocities he saw.
DVet, your comments are usually close to good, but here, well, ya gotta' reverse your anal-cranial inversion.
What flavour of a "vet" are you? Just wonderin'
Gotta' go back to the 'Canal, "that fucking island", and Goetche's (sp?) attempt to be a hero and "rescue" "stranded" japs. As fubar an unplanned op as there was. So it became the situation that neither side asked for, nor granted, quarter unless under the most unusual circumstances. "War without mercy" indeed, do you have any examples of a "kinder, gentler, war"?
"Who knew about nukes in the '30s?" That would be up to Art Bell to give the definitive answer.
- Ned
Troll?
:-?
Try going back earlier to the late 1800's which is when the first US incursion's into Japan occurred.
Is every SOB that gets in power in the US a complete fucking criminal mastermind?
Pretty much!!
No, just a easily directed figurehead. The complete fucking criminal masterminds are the same as they ever were - the bankers.
No but they are all financed by complete fucking criminal masterminds.
The next election Bush v's Clinton is actually the Houston mob v's the Chicago mob.
You have dropped an extra word on the end of your sentence.
I think you give them too much credit. Sociopath will do.
- Ned
The American history taught in public schools today is a travesty. They would never allow kids to read this kind of information.
We must teach them
We must teach them. We must rile them. We must unleash them.
Liberty is a demand. Tyranny is submission..
BoP History is like 'Moore's Law'... The bullshit and obfuscation doubles every (2) years.
History is whatever the current ruling flavor depicts it to be.
12-13-37, Rape of Nanking, guess your author left that piece of context out but you keep sucking that Jap ass fuckface.
Because America cares about the lives of others so much? Please.
Perhaps you don't know how America's government rejected a shipload of Hungarian Jews request for asylum here in 1944 (and was aware of the camps), then sent them back to be ground up in the camps?
Rape of Nanking was a horrible atrocity to be sure. But if you think the American government gives two shits about Chinese people, or the American people for that matter, then I suggest you give up drinking, smoking meth, smoking crack, and watching TV for a month; then do some real research and re=evaluate your beliefs with a head clear of drugs and lies.
Or, as Steve Perry once lovingly wailed "Don't Stop Believin', Hold on to that feeling!"
Has this been the game plan with Iran,Russia and or China I wonder
I know I can hardly wait to rush off to Kiev to fight a war on behalf of the IMF.
To President LaGarde!
Victory or Death!
Don't think so, pussy weasels don't pick on any animal with lethal teeth, claws, and exploding plutonium toys, besides, they would lose their ride to the space station. They build underground bunkers just to protect themselves but they are shaking like a dog shitting a peachseed that the penetrating shaped nuke will reach down and vaporize them too. Hell yeah! Say uh-huh.
Strange times are these in which we live
when old and young are taught in falsehoods school.
And the one man that dares to tell the truth
is called at once a lunatic and fool
http://www.sweetliberty.org/issues/wars/fdr.html
"Economic Sanctions Cause War"
Economic sanctions are war--World economic war. Sanctions ostensibly target one nation, but in reality target those that would trade their wares for that of the targeted nation--the entire world.
Economic war is a racket all the same as kinetic war, and government, the banksters, and their owners, Zion, are the same racketeers.
Liberty is a demand. Tyranny is submission..
Different tree, same fruit.
And the end result was a bomb droped on the fine peoples of Japan that killed millions and kills them to this day. However worse than that they became a US state and are now subject to the sikening US exports of homosexuality and all manner of public sponsered porno and corruption.
Actually, there were hundreds of bombs dropped on the fine peoples of Japan that killed millions. They were fire-bombs that killed civilians in all but Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
So, the end outcome of Bu-shido was as one would expect--an absolute resolution of the East Winds Rain initiative.
- Ned
Yes, that is my reddie.
The atom bombs were intended to bring a quick end to the war, save both American and Japanese lives, and as a warning to Russia, not to try anything with the U.S. when the war was over.
Of course Oppenheimer and the German/Asyrian/Babylonian/Joos quickly passed our atomic secrets to the Russians right after the war. Creating a Cold War that made trillions of $$ for the International Jooish banksters......who are still making trillions off the ongoing current permawars.
I wonder what the world would be like if one country holds all the A-bombs/H-bombs in the world...
Death. Gift wrapped in patriotism, submission, compliance and flag.
“They hate us for our freedoms”
Same BS, different day.
This is disingenuous in the extreme. Japan began making war on their neighbors in 1934 after years of military buildup. There was no doubt what they were up to. If the US hoped to put some restraint on them, short of declaring war, good for them.
Too bad they did not take similar steps to curb Hitler who also began German expansion in 1934. In fact the US did not declare war until the Axis powers (Germany, Italy, Japan) declared war on the US.
What you say is true but since Hirohito wasn't killed and hundreds of thousands were nuked by the psychopath Truman, it's safe to say that the nukes were used on the wrong innocents. They could have blockaded and they would have been starving and frothing to overthrow the evil pricks.
They were blockaded and they were starving and the Imperial Japanese civilians were armed and willing to die by the millions to oppose invasion of the Home Islands. Also, the millions of Imperial Japanese Army soldiers in China were largely self-sufficient and undefeated. They only surrendered because Emperor Hirohito ordered them to do so.
This is true....my mother told me they had to survive on silk worms and sweet potatoes and rice and she was from a wealthy japanese family. I can't imagine what the less well to do folks did to survive. And the civilians were making spears out of bamboo to defend themselves.
mmm I am not sure how long they could last ---- the Soviets crushed them in Manchuria in a matter of days.....
The same interests that were unwilling to share global hegemony with Germany and Japan are the ones today who are unwilling to share hegemony with the BRICS. For these evil sociopaths and their unsatiable lust for power and control, 99% is not enough. All or nothing. They're scarry crazy!
In Brazil, it is taught in high school.
Era Meijy.
Any Brazilian student who has not missed the history class and know, know more!
Geography and History taught in public schools in Brazil, know what I mean.
It is in the books!
Nationalism south of the Panama Canal is latent.
Do not think the US that countries co-opted with color revolutions remain subdued.
: - /
It's just Americans who do not know this story. The USA's school system has the many dumbed down.
And some wonder why the World has a hatred toward them. Even those who know the pasts truths DO NOTHING.
The Pendulum is slowing down and will swing back and crush the Assholes, Yet those who really created this trouble have their wealth off shore and will just change locations leaving a mess.
Take Back Your Country, Punish those who have abused their Power, Control and Wealth to become KINGS and lets call it a Humanitarian Reset. Get Some Pride and opportunities for future generations.
I am a Public School educated American and I have known this(real reasons for the war) since sometime around 1984-1985(Junior and Senior years of HS). We are not all asleep. You all may end up surprised by the strength and knowledge that is out there in this country. True, lots of my fellow countrymen are clueless and asleep, but not all of us.
Most regular Americans don't even know who we fought against or why. Much less pertinent geopolitical facts of that time. Or today even.
And they vote.
That is a good portion of why we are so fucked.
The so-called "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" had nothing whatsoever to do with the Imperial attack on Pearl Harbour.
The embargo would have left Japan, and more importantly the Imperial Japanese Navy, with out oil in six months.
And Yamamoto truly fucked up by bombing/torpedoing/attacking the sitting battlefleet anchored at Pearl vs. wiping out the storage bunkers of that nasty oil.
Of course, the political "sanctions" could have changed certain behaviours among the Imperial Staffs (plural), but, well, arrogance narrowly understood well and truly fucked up the Japz.
- Ned
After the attack, Stimson confessed that “my first feeling was of relief … that a crisis had come in a way which would unite all our people."
The way you destroy your economic adversary when he's kicking your ass in "his own back yard" refusing to buy your shit over his own?!!!
And he probably slept like a baby in his fart sack a "drool cup" in diapers dying of natural causes (of course) unlike the millions of Japanese that perished when he made those lies into a war before that statement.
Pure fucking evil! Same as it ever was in the land of "stars and stripes"...
Brazil has 90% of niobium in the world, without which there is no stainless steel.
Russia is one of the largest deposits of oil and gas, China 90% of "rare earth".
South Africa, gold and diamond.
India, software, atomic military technology.
Five countries, three with missiles and bombs, with nuclear technology without the other (South Africa).
On the other hand, South Africa has supported for Israel to test its warheads in southern South Atlantic.
hehe.
If, hypothetically, these five countries close their borders and relate only and only among themselves: - Europe die of hunger, cold, breakage economy. - United States would not send more satellites, close to NASA. - Uranium and titanium only found in Russia, will make a tremendous lack the United States. - Quartz explored in Brazil as well. Make no mistake, a higher embargo Russia and China will also involve these other three countries. We are at a very interesting time. I pray to God not to die before watching on TV Americans soldiers leaving their bases around the world hitchhiking. Swimming or in fishing boats, asking "please take me back home ..." : - |
"On the other hand, South Africa has supported for Israel to test its warheads in southern South Atlantic.
hehe."...
But what good is the "hehe" when your dead along with everyone else just because you could even though you still didn't get your way?!!!
Even the psychopath understands that there is no consolation prize in this round!
Nemo:
You know what happened.
It was another time, South Africa was under Apartaid, today it is different.
the "hehe" is, rather, to show that South African intelligence is important within the BRICS.
See the Kfir copies manufactured in South Africa, training and other things related to the military.
Today the government is another but the structures are the same.
It hit?
South Africa is indeed very important for precisely this ancient collusion with the armed forces of Israel.
Never just think about what is happening today, go back at least twenty years or thirty in the past to understand a military logic.
Big hug.
??????
:-)
Actually K you raise some interesting perspectives here. Like South Africa I've always believed India could and has many times pivoted towards the Anglo-American Zionist project either through outright blackmail and because after 9/11 the jobs and infrastructure spigot just kept on flooding towards them along with the H1B1 visas and refabricated steel from "Ground Zero"...
India like South Africa is the silent partner within the BRICS that will always need to be watched by the other partner(s).
All that said I'll say it again which is to the point of this read. When you've always gotten your way with everything for 70 years and now are about to lose all of it to the worst hand of poker you've ever played called QE infinity and the "button" is all that you have left to show your dominance -then you might be a lunatic!!!
Gospel according to Foxworthy
Nemo:
The largest number of Japanese outside Japan is in Brazil.
Before IIWW there was colonization exodus of poor Japanese.
Kaigai Kogyo Kabushiki Kaisa (KKKK - Japanese Colonization Company) bought land in Brazil and implanted settlers.
The Registry city in São Paulo was one.
In the north of Paraná and the State of São Paulo are two colonies.
Japanese culture is in symbiosis with the Brazilian.
Strong internal ties keep (like the Poles, Germans, Italians, Lithuanians, Russians etc.).
Migration after 1870 forged Brazil.
The only North American colony was established in the city of Americana, in the state of São Paulo.
People who fled the Civil War.
You should know a little more history to understand how Brazilians are.
A country that received a lot of suffering people worldwide has created an interesting nationalist sentiment.
First, being Brazilian, second, where it came from my family.
This creates global affinity ties ranging from Iran (veterinary of my cats is Iranian and her husband Indian) to Japan (the owner of the market close to home is descended from Japanese), to Germany (the owners of the bakery) etc. ..
All living in harmony without ghettos or exclusive neighborhoods.
The thing is very interesting when you look at the sociological side
:-)
Nemo:
"- 3" to me.
The Troll's not like my comment, it came as supusitório.
I told you Troll walks herd wallowing comments on sites like this and to break a line of thought, insert huge texts.
As for KKKK (Kaigai Kogyo Kabushiki Kaisha - Japanese Colonization Company in Brazil), the latter is "Kaisha", he lacked the "h" in the comment.
As for the Indians, it's complicated to talk, they are multilingual indoors.
Imagine out!
Talking in a meeting!
They are good people but there are several varieties, India itself is a planet with languages, castes, beliefs and customs inherent only to them.
Hegemony is not the default.
In Brazil you go from north to south, 4,500 km, from east to west, some 4,500 km and speaks the same language!
Try this in India!
The thing is complicated ...
But as I said, the Indians are great people, with incredible stamina to work with, very intelligent, an ancient culture like the Chinese and Russians.
:-)
... er ... the German rearmament was going on throughout he '30s, the aggressive behaviours were allowed by Chamberlain, and the operations to gain living space were not started until after the aborted invasion to the South East
- Ned
Once again, someone who takes a historical event and tears it entirely out of all context.
Go find a historical world map and find all the countries that ever escaped European colonization entirely. There aren't many, and Japan is one of them.
Japan was under threat of colonization for hundreds of years, narrowly escaped that fate, fought for equal status with the colonial powers for a century, attempted to earn it in precisely the same way all of the colonial powers had done so, was refused equal status, betrayed by the colonial powers, then sanctioned by the US for doing something the US had already done a dozen times. One of the most isolationist societies in human history is suddenly sanctioned for militant expansionism by the very country that is directly responsible for said expansionism as a direct consequence of the end of its nearly flawless record of isolationism for its entire history up to that point - which was entirely the fault, in reality the goal, of the US.
This is not rocket science! They hate us for our freedoms!
Oh good sir, you are quite mistaken, Japan did not get away. Granted,it tried like hell. But today it is a USA vassal state. A radioactive souless one at that.
The article was interesting. It is pretty accurate for most info. But, I decided to research two of the quotes that Higgs used and found they came from questionable sources. Like .org organizations that may be funded from other than what I consider "can be trusted".
Things have changed. The NSA does not have the entire set of cryptographic keys to the internet and never will. The Snowden revelations were nothing new to the sigint community but confirmed what many already expected, the NSA has its nose up everybody's ass. The Russians and Chinese are already using their own private proprietary keys, as is our own military. The common PGP/gnuGPG style key is not mil grade. So don't expect the NSA is getting everything they want. Keep in mind the lowly FBI is whining about its need for manufactures to build software & hardware back-doors just for them and I will promise you that won't happen. There is a entire new push on cryptographic techniques that are proprietary and private key based systems that won't be broken easily. Yes, the NSA will try, it is what they do, but the new style of keys are fluid, changing and adapting to new conditions, the Internet is growing dark and more encrypted by the day, this trend will continue. Expect to be surprised.
Japan attacked us in Pearl Harbor because they and Germany knew we would be at war with each other eventually and they decided to strike first-Period. Japan was, was meaning past tense, a very expansionist and brutal country bent on taking over Asia. I supposed if we had no problem with that and would stand by and watch things like the massacre of Nanking over and over again, they might not have attacked us until we went to war with Germany but then again to the original point, why not attack first if you know you are going to war?
I noticed that the article refrained from mentioning that the US embargo was mostly to stop US oil shipments to Japan, who at the time was decimating occupied China. The writer made it sound like Roosevelt only did it for nostaglia for China...Roosevelt did it because it was the right thing to do. Call me naive, but supporting regimes that murder people is considered unethical.
One sided article really. There was scant mention of Japan's emperialistic intentions, after feeling they did not get their share out of WW1 reparations.
I disagree. He did it because he wanted to fight Hitler and the American people would not support another expeditionary force to Europe circa 1940. All of his attempts to provoke the Germans failed (armed USNAVY escort ships outside US waters escorting transports carrying war materials to Britain through international waters, giving a fleet of WWI destroyers to Britain, etc).
Once Germany and Japan signed their alliance, Roosevelt and his cronies knew what they had to do. Provoke Japan to attack the US, then they could have their pet war with Germany to defend bankster interests, err I mean protect our freedom and democracy, because the statue of democracy demands that we fight, and because I pledge allegiance to the democracy for which it stands or something.
Roosevelt knew after Japan and Germany won the war that America would be the next target. There would be no Russian front...no Britain to launch D-Day. No Australia, no India allies. No Zero Hedge.
In a few years the standard history in schools around the world will be that Britain started the war in Europe and the US in the Pacific....because English speaking countries are on a path of self flagellation... I notice this trend increased under Obama's idiots.
People seem to forget the #1 rule in war...be on the winning side. Fuck ideology, fuck ethics...make sure you win.
Can anyone on ZH honestly say they wish they lived in a world where Japan and Germany won?
I thought the sanctions on Japan were supposed to provike a military response from Japan.
The US got Pearl Harbor, FDR's 911. Blank Cheque.
The US forced Japan to attack?!
Poppycock!
The Japanese had been murdering the Chinese for over 4 years by then - not counting all of the deliberate individual border incidents since 1931. That's ten years of military aggression.
They murdered over 300,000 in Nanking alone in12/37 - 01/38.
Do your own independent research.
The U.S. response after 10 years of military aggression? Economic sanctions?! OK; do economic sanctions ABSOLUTELY FORCE the militarily aggressive reaction?
Nope.
Even this article admits: "Stimson favored the use of economic sanctions to obstruct Japan’s advance in Asia."
Get it? The sanctions are a way to obstruct Japan's murder (25,000,000 total Chinese casualties in WWII).
And the alternative? Help the Japanese by selling them the war matériel needed to conquer and murder? That would have been better for the Japanese war machine. That's what the U.S. should have done? Only a fool would argue that.
I've been hearing this revisionist, blame the US first carp for 40 years.
Makes no sense, but it never goes away.
The down-voting morons here have no knowledge of the atrocities that the Imperial Japanese routinely committed prior to World War II in China and during World War II. The Japanese teach a very sanitized version of Imperial Japanese military history eliminating all mention of "unpleasantness" such as the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, Imperial Japanese Army soldiers competing to behead the most Chinese civilians which were gloriously chronicled in contemporary Japanese newspaper articles, etc. They are most likely the down-voters.
Since when is a massacre of Chinese a new thing? Millions of Chinese die all the time. From flood, famine, earthquakes, starvation, at the hands of their own government, and yes, one time at the hands of the Japanese.
Since when is mass death in China a US security concern? If it was, why did we not attack when Mao was in power massacring up to 30 million of his own subjects during the Cultural Revolution? Or during the Tianenmen Square incident? Because our government doesn't give a shit. That's why.
Put down the crack pipe and put the lid on that whiskey bottle.
Our government, or any government for that matter, cares not for its people beyond what those people can provide them. Humanitarians do not exist within the bureaucratic confines of government.
Everything they do is about money and power, or control if you wish. This is why propaganda exists. That is why false flag attacks happened, happen, and will continue to happen as long as there are governments.
I admit that opening one's eyes to this truth can be a painful experience. After all, it goes against everything we were taught as American kids and every message we receive from the MSM, past and present.
And once you see that lie, you start to see them all. Like the sunglasses in "They Live".
Forewarned is forearmed.
Pivot to Asia, bitchez. We're going to liberate us some artificial sandbars, yearning to be free, in the South China sea.
darteaus:
"The US forced Japan to attack?!
Poppycock!
The Japanese had been murdering the Chinese for over 4 years by then - not counting all of the deliberate individual border incidents since 1931. That's ten years of military aggression.
They murdered over 300,000 in Nanking alone in12/37 - 01/38.
Do your own independent research.
The U.S. response after 10 years of military aggression? Economic sanctions?! OK; do economic sanctions ABSOLUTELY FORCE the militarily aggressive reaction?
Nope.
Even this article admits: "Stimson favored the use of economic sanctions to obstruct Japan’s advance in Asia."
Get it? The sanctions are a way to obstruct Japan's murder (25,000,000 total Chinese casualties in WWII).
And the alternative? Help the Japanese by selling them the war matériel needed to conquer and murder? That would have been better for the Japanese war machine. That's what the U.S. should have done? Only a fool would argue that.
I've been hearing this revisionist, blame the US first carp for 40 years.
Makes no sense, but it never goes away."
My comments:
It´s true that Japan had killed lot´s of people in China before WWII and conquered land in China.
But that was probably not the reason for the sanctions. The sanctions were not launched right after the massacre in Nanking 1937 or when Japan had begun to conquer more land in China in the 1930s. The sanctions were not launched for humanitarian or moral reasons.
Roosevelt and his buddies did not care more about Chinese casualties than they cared about the mass executions in the Soviet Union in the 1930s or the extermination of the Kulaks in Ukraine in the early 1930s. And in the Soviet case we are talking about killing millions of people. Nor did Roosevelt (or Britain) care about the fact that the Soviet Union conquered one half of Poland in 1939 (Germany took the other half and that was the official French and British reason for declaring war on Germany), the Baltic states and parts of Romania.
Furthermore, the US did not complain about British ethnic cleansing in Kenya in the 1930s when they created the "White Highlands", for instance.
The reason for the British and American sanctions against Japan was probably that they were afraid that Japan could attack the Soviet Union together with Germany. If they had done that, the prospects for winning the war would have been far better for the Nazis. The American and British leaders were, unlike the Japanese leaders, smart enough to understand that. The reason for that is probably that political string pullers that have evolved in a democratic or non-authoritarian environment need to be smarter and better strategists than those who control politics in a country by brute force and have never faced any other domestic competition than brute force or potential brute force.
Also keep in mind that the Japanese could have extracted diesel from coal and wood by using the Fischer-Trops process. Germany did that on a large scale during WWII since the Romanian oil was far from sufficient. The Germans also extracted lots of methanol from wood during WWII. Methanol can be used as fuel in modified gasoline engines. I doubt that the Japanese explored other options than conquering oil fields in South East Asia. Of course, Fischer-Trops diesel was very expensive. But it was probably a more realistic option than trying to defeat the US.
My impression is also that the current Chinese leaders are not as smart as Americian neo-conservative lobbyists and neo-conservatives in American think tanks. From an IQ point of view they may be as smart as the American string pullers. Many Chinese leaders are economists and engineers. That usually takes more intelligence than a degree in law or politics, for instance. The problem seems to be that the Chinese leaders either do not understand how politicial power is created (especially outside the Chinese communist party) or don´t care. They don´t seem to have a plan or a strategy. They don´t even seem have figured out a sustainable strategy for a political and economical core power structure in China which is not controlled or heavily influenced by the same people who rule the US.
I wonder what would happen if the US all of a sudden would impose 30 % tariffs on consumer electronics imported from China and produce such things in the US or Mexico. Have the Chinese leaders planned for such events? Or do they think that the West can´t survive without their rare earth minerals?
My impression is that rulers (and their string pullers) which at least to some extent have faced domestic competition tend to be better strategists in some respects. Competition makes them learn how to compete. Those who haven´t evolved in a competitive environment in the past tend to be poor strategists in some respects. That is why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941 and that is why the US and Britain imposed sanctions on Japan in 1940 and 1941.
This doof author doesn't seem to have the slightest idea what Jap-land was up to in the ten years prior to Pearl Harbor.
If you lived in Nanking, the Japper's Greater East Asia-Co-prosperity Sphere meant getting raped until you were dead. And that's if you were lucky.
Fucking moron.
There are quite a few down-voting morons here with no knowledge of the atrocities that the Imperial Japanese routinely committed prior to World War II in China and during World War II. The Japanese teach a very sanitized version of Imperial Japanese military history eliminating all mention of "unpleasantness" such as the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, etc.
"down-voting morons here with no knowledge of the atrocities that the Imperial Japanese routinely committed prior to World War II in China and during World War II"
Your ad hominem attack and appeal to emotions won't work here like they do on Facebook and Huffpo.
If Chinese are being massacred by Japanese, why is it our responsibilty to save them? They outnumbered the Japanse significantly but were still defeated. That's on the men of China, not me.
And do you think that Americans at war never killed civilians en masse? Ever heard of Atlanta? Natchez? Wounded Knee? Dresden? Tokyo? Incindiary bombs dropped on civilian targets? Nuclear weapons dropped on civilian targets? Napalm? White phosphorous?
War is hell and all's fair. Humans are as brutal as any species if not moreso; and when we convice ourselves that our enemy is less than human, then we open the gates of hell and do whatever we want to them. The 'untermensch', the 'japs', the 'huns', the 'red devils', the 'gooks', the 'slopes', 'charlie', 'tojo', 'slants', et al. The Japanese don't have an exclusive hold on this sort of behavior. All humans can and will act this way. It's hard wired into us as a survival mechanism.
I know that feel good liberal social justice warriors don't like sciency stuff and facts that contradict their fantasy world views, but this is Zero hedge and welcome to fight club, bitch.
Since I'm not a neo-con or a liberal do-gooder, I don't believe it is the responsibilty of the United States to solve every problem and right every wrong in the world. The :Team America World Police: schtick is getting old and most people can see through it now.
Most, but apparently not all. The red arrow is mine and you're welcome.
Sanctions have never worked as a tool to change the policies of another country, this is true. But, that said, the reasons for the sanctions against Japan in the period before WW2 was the Japanese aggression against China. The Japanese had attacked US patrol boats in China, as well as many other aggressive acts, and made no secret of their desire to make Asia their own private Fifedom under the New Order in East Asia and later Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere programs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_East_Asia_Co-Prosperity_Sphere
Japan had a plan, and was carrying it out. This would have left it as the Master of Asia, and would have joined with Hitler's 3rd Reich in dividing up the World. Both Germany and Japan had follow on plans to finish the conquest of the World at a later date.
The fact is, yes - the embargo caused Japan to lash out at the US... but they would have done so at a later date anyway, and at that point the US would have been weakened and easier to take on in a large war. In most cases, delaying a war that is going to happen only allows the enemy to be better prepared for the war when it finally starts. Unless your country is growing stronger economically and the adversary country weaker over time, then waiting does not make sense, and it is better to force the start of the war.
The US had not "broken" the Imperial Japanese Naval Code as stated by the author. There were various iterations of the Imperial Japanese Naval Codes during the 1930's and the war years. Each iteration mostly erased whatever gains had been made in extracting information. US cryptographers were able to extract some usable information from the codes but never "broke" them producing plaintext.
The Imperial Japanese Navy strenuously disguised the locations and activities of the individual ships that would comprise the fleet assembled to attack Pearl Harbor for most of 1941. The Imperial Japanese Navy's attack fleet approached Hawaii operating under strict radio silence in late-November and early December 1941.
The Imperial Japanese Empire decided to steal what they needed using brutally cruel military force. The United States and other nations diplomatically opposed their aggressive war in China. The Imperial Japanese Empire refused to be deterred by American and international diplomacy. After many years of increasingly shocking Imperial Japanese Army atrocities in China the USA and allies responded by embargoing the export of raw materials and petroleum, oil and lubricants.
The Imperial Japanese Empire, with about 4% of the worlds industrial capacity*, decided to attack the United States, with its 50% of the worlds industrial capacity*, the British Empire in Singapore, Malaysia, etc., French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies. That was their choice. No one twisted their arms into starting a war against the heavily industrialized Allied powers.
The Japanese Plan A envisioned that the Allies would surrender within 6-months and allow them to pursue their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere unimpeded. They had no Plan B in case Plan A failed. The Imperial Japanese Empire was not all prepared for the resulting war of attrition. The Imperial Japanese Empire relied on seaborne imports of all raw materials and POL and shipment of finished war materials to the combat theaters by ship. The Imperial Japanese Navy was ill-prepared to the resulting task of protecting sea lines of communications.
In glaring contrast to their behavior in 1905-07 versus Imperial Russia and during World War I, the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy were brutally cruel during their war and occupation of China and World War II. On a personal note, a colleague endured World War II as a prisoner of the Imperial Japanese Empire in the Dutch East Indies. His matter of fact recitation of routine Imperial Japanese atrocities against Dutch civilians, military and natives were "memorable" and that's all I'll say. It's a good thing that the USA and Allies decisively defeated them.
* World industrial capacity as of ~1937.
A morse radio operator develops their own style know as a "hand" that is recognized by other experienced operators. The Japanese fleet left many of their experienced operators at home producing fake normal traffic. Thus their "hands" were recognized in the US intercepts and their location traced back to Japan thus fooling the US into believing the fleet was still in home waters. The Japanese were very big on discipline, going so far as to routinely beat it into you even at their naval academy, and very professional so the claim that the fleet broke radio silence many times and was tracked across the Pacific lacks credibility. Reports say that the higher ups knew an attack was coming but they expected the Phillipines to be the target. One would think that after the Pearl Harbor attack all units would have been on high alert but when the Phillipines were attacked the next day practically all of the US planes were destroyed on the ground.
Admiral Yamamoto was a very smart man and spent time in the US so he knew there was no way Japan could win a war against the US. He wasn't a polititician or policy maker and obeyed his orders and went to war. For all his smarts and personal insights of the American people he went totally stupid by attacking Pearl Harbor thus giving Roosevelt the unity he needed for war. If he had stayed in his part of the Pacific and conquered everything in sight, except for Australia and New Zealand, the American populace wouldn't have cared. If the US eventually moved against Japan militarily, which is doubtful for political reasons, and got it's butt kicked the populace would turn on the US government demanding the US mind it's own business.
12-13-1937, Nanking massacre, fuckhead Jap bastard lover who wrote this shit, those sanctions were fully justified for Tojo butchery in other countries, go learn some sequential history you fuck, you sound like the niggers who claim they invented air conditioning or the Whops who claim they invented the phone.
It was the devestating attack on the US autombile industry that made me name my Acura, "Infamy".
Machiavellian diplomacy at its best. Richelieu could not have played it otherwise.
He used Gustavus Adolphus to fight for the Huguenots--a creed that Richelieu detested at home, as proven by his siege of La Rochelle, inspite the Edit of Nantes which gave the Huguenots spiritual rights on equal terms with Catholics--against France's DIRE enemy the Catholic Habsurg Empire in the 30 year war that destroyed North Europe and made France #1 on the Continent. (Richelieu was FDR's political ancestor.)
So religion was not the issue when "the enemy of my enemy", although a heretic became a political ally!
Hitler's ally was FDR's enemy, period ! And to be quite fair to History, Japan had been on a rampage in China since 1905 (Just like the West and the Boxer revolt). SO it was a mad colonial scramble to eviscerate China.
And who cares about collateral inflicted on the American and Japanese people in the awesome fall out of this diplomatic sleight of hand.
Bottom line : America became #1 in the world. So FDR entered into history as the good guy and winner and Yamamoto as a broken Honda motor bike.
Nobody wants the NWO bug filled junk anyhow and they are too broke to pay for anything. Got to be able to buy or sell to have an embargo.
Nothing like telling only a small part of the entire story in order to revise history to make those evil US white guys the racist wrongdoers against the poor misunderstood Japanese.
You certainly missed the part where those evil white guys oppressed the black man by not paying reparations for the "war crimes" committed against them during slavery and the civil war, and while you are at it how the Japanese were merely freeing all the colonial regimes that oppressed Asians by attacking Korea and Japan all during the 30's and killing millions.
FUCK YEAH! And while we're at it, where's my reparations for Sherman's march? For my great great grandfather who died from his wounds received during the seige of Atlanta, for the property my family in Missouri lost as a result of the Civil war (after kicking the Union's ass in Lexington 1861)?
What about the compensation from the French government for chasing off my ancestors from the Palatinate in Germany and forcing them to migrate here in the 1740's to fight in the Revolution, help settle the west, and fight Indians, all while suffereing horrendous infant mortality rates, indian attacks, occupation by foreign (federal troops), picking cotton, and working like dogs just to survive? What about what they lost?
Or my Scottish ancestors who came here as indententured servants? Were they paid a fair wage? Were they given equal opportunity employment or affirmative action?No, they were dirt fucking poor.
Goddammit where's my fucking check? All these racists oppressing my German and Scottish ancestors, chasing them from their homelands (genocide), putting them in danger, and working them like dogs?
Where does it end?
Social Justice Warriors should all migrate to NY, IL, an CA. There they can form their own mutlicultural countries and keep their toxic and society destroying beliefs the hell away from me. Then we can deport all the urban blacks and illegal immigrants to those new countries and the social justice there will make everything awesome.
The new governments will even genetically engineer flying unicorns that shit skittles so their new citizens taste the rainbow every day.
The US could not sit idly by while the Japanese consolidated their hold on SE Asia and the Germans created a European empire. We did what we could using every tool except war. That it lead to war anyway does not mean that is what the US wanted.
Why not? Germany and Japan won their battles and earned their places at the dinner table. They didn't call on the United States to bail out their sorry asses like France, England and half of the rest of the world did.
Yeah, FDR declared economic war long before the whole "not a surprise" Pearl Harbor event.
More MORONIC anti-war propaganda from simple-minded liberal IDIOTS !!!
Without WWII we would all be living under the brutal domination of the Samurai of Japan and the Nazis of Germany.
The one war that world REALLY REALLY REALLY needs NOW is to eradicate all the socialists and liberals.
What a ridiculous, poorly researched article. You should be ashamed of yourselves for staging such crap Tylers.
For one, everyone knows it "was the Germans who bombed Pearl Harbor"...........
Icarus
You need to kill a million Chinese to realize that they are at war.
But when they realize, you're fucked!
You will have 1,257 BILLION Chinese on his trail ...
That inflate the price of lead, copper, cordite etc .....
hehe.
game theory man, game theory, implemented by USA. the 8 point plan to make Japan attack USA, you can google it in 2 secs flat.
Problem is these articles are on ZH and other fringe sites, the Average American Moron's main areas of interests are the kardashians, football and beer. WHo cares about ancient history man, what are you, an intellectual or someping? "When I hear the word culture, I automatically reach for my Gun" ~Gobbels.
Quote: Stimson favored the use of economic sanctions to obstruct Japan’s advance in Asia.
Failure to embargo Japan making inroads into pre-Communist China would have constituted aiding and abeting Japan's aggression.
What a horrible Administration, FDR's turned out to be...
I'm half Japanese; and grew up with Parents from either side of the Pacific (who each participated in the War as young adults) make their comments every time a War Documentary was aired on the TV. My Late Father told me that he was out on Patrol (Sub) when Pearl Harbor Happened.
The POTUS could have EASILY set up a trap to force the Imperial JPNese Fleet to explain itself after they crossed the halfway point to Pearl, or just trapped into a counterstrike by land based bombers, torpedo planes, and a Submarine Screen a few days before they reached their Striking Distance. With the Troops on alert and Fighters in the Air, they could have given the Troops a fighting chance.
That I find unforgiveable.