watto
10.12.03, 19:28
www.nybooks.com/articles/14238
"Charles A. Beard, our leading historian in those far-off days, wrote
President Roosevelt and the Coming of War, 1941 (1948), in which he made the
case that the Japanese attack was the result of a series of deliberate
provocations by FDR, he promptly underwent erasure at the hands of the court
historians in place, as always, to demonstrate that what ought not to be true
is not true.
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Our first provocation against Japan began with FDR's famous Chicago address
(October 5, 1937), asking for a quarantine against aggressor nations.
Certainly, Japan in Manchuria and north China qualified as an aggressor just
as we had been one when we conquered the Philippines and moved into the
Japanese neighborhood at the start of the twentieth century. In December 1937,
the Japanese sank the Panay, an American gunboat in Chinese waters, on duty so
far from home as the Monroe Doctrine sternly requires. Japan promptly, humbly
paid for the damage mistakenly done our ship. Meanwhile, FDR— something of a
Sinophile—was aiding and abetting the Chinese warlord Chiang Kai-shek.
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Pointedly, FDR refused to meet Konoye, whose government was then replaced by
that of General Hideki Tojo. The military, so feared by Mr. Buruma, were now
in power. But though they lusted for the blood of everyone on earth, they more
modestly wanted to get on with the conquest of China and Southeast Asia.
Certainly, they did not want a simultaneous war with a great continental power
thousands of miles away. In November 1941 they made a final attempt at peace.
We now know—thanks to our having broken the Japanese diplomatic code—the
contents of Hirohito's in-box. Japan looked for a compromise. We looked for
war. The Japanese ambassadors to the US, Kurusu and Nomura, were treated to a
series of American ultimatums that concluded, November 26, with the following
order: "The government of Japan will withdraw all military, naval, air and
police forces from China and Indo-China" as well as renounce the tripartite
Axis agreement. It was then, as Lincoln once said on a nobler occasion, the
war came. Churchill's anxieties were at last allayed. On November 29 Germany
assured Japan that should they go to war with the US, Germany would join them.
In April 1945, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, in a memorial address
at Harvard, praised the late President Roosevelt, "while engaged in this
series of complicated moves, he so skillfully conducted affairs as to avoid
even the appearance of an act of aggression on our part." There it is.
Question to those in denial about the US as provocateur: Why is it, if we were
not on the offensive, that so small and faraway an island as Japan attacked
what was so clearly, already, a vast imperial continental power? You have now
had over sixty years to come up with a plausible answer. Do tell.
