Posted on 04/01/2014 8:08:36 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The views in the video aren’t surprising.
They’re the views of Ron and Rand Paul and their intellectual milieu which believes that most wars are set up by banks. According to them, the US need not have gotten involved in WW2.
“There are times when sanctions have made it worse. I mean, there are times .. leading up to World War II we cut off trade with Japan. That probably caused Japan to react angrily. We also had a blockade on Germany after World War I, which may have encouraged them … some of their anger.” Paul says.
Paleocon revisionist historians go on to claim even that Japan exhausted every diplomatic outlet and that it had no choice left but to bomb Pearl Harbor.
Sanctions were never really the issue though. Japan wanted European powers out of Asia. And it considered America a European power.
The attack on Pearl Harbor was a flanking raid in support of the Japanese seizure of the Dutch East Indies. A major reason for Japan’s attack on the US was its assumption that FDR would not have let Japan attack the UK without a response. We no doubt could have abandoned the UK and the Dutch, watched the atrocities from a distance, the torture, mass murder and rape, and gone on selling Japan anything it wanted.
Would that have worked? Doubtfully.
The Japanese army and navy were poorly controlled and its officers were drunk with power and victory. Their understanding of their own limitations was often non-existent. Plans for war with the US had been in place for a while and there were historical grudges there long predating FDR.
A victorious Japan would have been even more difficult to co-exist with than an overcommitted one. Furthermore Hawaii had enough Japanese that the whole Volksdeutsche scenario would have reared its ugly head.
The US could no doubt have ceded Hawaii, but where exactly does all that end?
Japan, like Nazi Germany, was trying to compensate for a bad economic policy with war and conquest. Every victory fed military egos while piling up more problems that could only be dealt with through more war and conquest.
The idea that the US could have just stayed out of Japan’s way is like thinking that you can stay out of a mugger’s way. You can, a few times, but if you intend on being in the neighborhood, he will come for you.
He said FDR went on television when the stock market crashed. Rep. Keith Ellison said that the Nazis bombed Pearl Harbor (as did John Belushi's character in Animal House.
Somehow all this got mixed up on the Internet. Some of the Dan Quayle quotes that circulated are likewise not true.
I’m curious — why do you continue to make stupid and false claims about what the Constitution says?
I don't know if that's true -- who can say at this point -- but simply assuming that Japan was determined to attack all colonial possessions in Asia looks like bad history.
Dictatorships and other governments may have vague dreams of conquest and world domination, but what they actually do has a lot to do with changing circumstances -- the pressures and opportunities that arise in their environment, sometimes as a result of what other nations do.
We can't exclude the possibility that Japan would have lashed out at British, French, and Dutch possessions after Hitler conquered Western Europe -- maybe Japan would have found it hard to resist the temptation -- but we also can't assume that the Japanese (who had their hands full in China) would take on such a massive task if their flow of oil was secure.
Never mind I was just mildly interested in why you are so opposed to a small government, constitutional conservative. But go right away and keep bashing one of the most conservative senators in the US Senate.
Prior to WWII Japan had an extraordinary economic growth. It was overpopulated and starving for more resources to sustain improving living conditions for it’s people. They has two vectors to expand: Asia and Pacific. Asia was more favorable in the 1930s but as Japanese were on the roll Soviets interdicted them carving Mongolia from China, installed a puppet regime and drew a red line to keep them out of Russia there. Japanese tried to resolve it militarily but had their butts handed to them a couple times.
After that a Pacific vector, dominated by the US, became more favorable for the Japanese who thought America is all butter and no guns comparing to rival ‘white barbarians’ in Siberia.
The rest is history.
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