7 December 2005 - 7:17am
Commemoration
Sixty-four years ago, the US Navy's primary base in the Pacific, Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, was bombed by a large sneak attack. Many many service members died that day, and many more in the war that we joined the next day.
It was a different era. The Japanese had all but destroyed our ability to defend the Pacific coast. In Europe, Germany had everyone on the run, with only a very battered Britain standing its ground.
The Japanese were notorious for ill-treatment of prisoners. The Germans put on a show of doing the same, while running death camps that processed and killed over 12 million people.
And even then, even then, with the world full of so much darkness, death and destruction, the United States did not abandon its dignity, its humanity, its self-respect. The United States did not embrace torture. Our government's record was not without blemish, what with the Japanese internment camps locking up US citizens behind barbed wire right here in their own country.
But we were not monsters. And we did not justify monstrous behavior just because there were bad people in the world -- even bad people with a lot of power to hurt us.
When we won the war, and occupied what had been enemy territory, we were greeted as liberators. Insurgencies? None worth mentioning. We were the benevolent power back then.
Today, with a threat much more unpredictable, perhaps, but let's face it, much less threatening than how things looked in World War 2, our government leaders try to justify torture and secret interrogation camps, saying that times have changed, and we can't be bothered by silly, quaint things like morality or dignity or self-respect. They want us to respond with fear and fear alone.
And stubbornly, pig-headedly, "decisively" they continue to play right into al-Qaeda's hands, by driving the most powerful nation in the history of the world to depraved, inhumane behavior. And no longer are we liberators, we are oppressors, invaders, torturers. And it will be a long, long time before anyone can heal the mistrust of America that has been sown into the world.
Pearl Harbor led us into our shining hour in history. How times have changed. How our leaders have changed.
December 7, 1941. Remember.
media girl also blogs at other places.
Similar entries
store
Buy stuff here.
Comments
Yes, as these things go, it was the "good war." And the sacrifice was clearly worth it. And the liberated were truly liberated and truly grateful.
But let's not go overboard. The U.S. did engage in monstrous behavior during World War II. As Bob McNamara notes in Fog of War and elsewhere, if the U.S. had lost the war, its leaders would have been prosecuted as war criminals, and not with oodles of evidence: Dresden, for instance, being the worst of the European carpet-bombing since it was completely without a target other than civilians; the Tokyo firebombing, and, if not Hiroshima, certainly Nagasaki.
...although with the weapons of the era, that was how war was fought -- total war. The nuclear use was a horror. My cynical nature, however, tells me that if we hadn't used them then, we would have found some use for them later. I think seeing is believing, and the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki served as a warning to the world. May it never ever happen again.
Honestly, while the bombings were evil acts, I beleive that the were unfortunatly nessicary, as they allowed us to win the war without the invasion, which would have caused far more civilian deaths than the bombings, let alone military deaths. And yes, I think that if we haddn't used the nukes on Japan, we would have ended up using them on Russia and WW2 would have continued between the US and Russia to even greater world devistation.
No one, no matter how hard s/he tries can justify the dropping of the bombs on Japan to me.
Also, we knew that Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and the mentally ill were being gassed to death and we did nothing until millions and millions were dead. Ben Hecht even ran an ad in the New York Times trying to raise funds to get people to give money to get 70,000 Roumanian Jews out of Europe. For $50 apiece, they could have transportation. He didn't raise one dollar. All 70,000 went to their deaths.
After Vietnam, I think all bets were off. America, like any other country, doesn't learn from history. We will continue to torture people or send them to places where they will be tortured.
"The Japanese had all but destroyed our ability to defend the Pacific coast." Many people say things like this, but they miss a subtle point. All the American aircraft carriers were out at sea.
The success of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the destruction of the Italian fleet by the RAF the previous year, made it clear that battleships had become obsolete. WWII in the Pacific was going to be fought with aircraft carriers, and the US still had all its carriers. Losing some obsolete battleships was not a major blow. The biggest loss to the US at Pearl Harbor was the lives of so many sailors.
The Japanese had the world's biggest battleship, and they never dared to bring it into combat until the invasion of Okinawa, whereupon it was sunk by American planes without getting within 100 miles of the battle.