The 80th Anniversary of Pearl Harbor
The Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack on the American fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
It was a surprise to the general public. It was a surprise to Franklin Roosevelt. The Roosevelt administration had expected such an attack for at least a week, but had not thought that the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor.
The Roosevelt administration had adopted policies for a year that were calculated to force the Japanese into a military confrontation with United States.
Wikipedia's entry on Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War in 1941, reports this:
Ten days before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Stimson entered in his diary the following statement: "[Roosevelt] brought up the event that we are likely to be attacked perhaps next Monday, for the Japanese are notorious for making an attack without warning, and the question was what we should do. The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves."
This entry is known to historians, but not to the general public.
MILITARY MERCANTILISM
The Japanese, as was true of the Germans under Hitler, believed in military action as a way to establish control over raw materials located outside the home countries. They did not believe in the free market. They did not believe in free trade. They were mercantilist, and as mercantilist empires, they sought domination militarily rather than through free trade.
The Japanese were attempting to create what they called The Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. They had invaded Manchuria in 1931. The Chinese government, though in disarray, began a systematic resistance in September 1937. That led to the Japanese massacre of civilians in the city of Nanking in December 1937. The Roosevelt administration strongly opposed this action.
The United States government began a series of embargoes against the export of steel and oil to Japan in July 1940: the Export Control Act. That intensified foreign policy confrontation.
THE CASE OF THE MISSING DOCUMENTARY
Revisionists of America's entry into World War II argued that FDR deliberately pressured the Japanese to attack. They began arguing this in public as early as 1947. But almost no professional historians ever accepted this view. A few key historians did, including Georgetown University's Charles C. Tansill and the most influential American historian of the first half of the 20th century, Charles A. Beard. Their arguments were dismissed as nonsense by the historical profession.
There have been movies made about the attack on Pearl Harbor. There have been documentaries made. But there has never been a documentary that presents the revisionist case.
It is not that expensive to produce a documentary these days. The fact that no one has produced one indicates the extent of the problem. All of the original revisionist historians who maintained the position are dead. They have been dead for at least half a century. They did not produce a hard core of trained historians to develop their position.
So, even with YouTube, the general American public is still unaware of the background to the Japanese attack.
I write about this every decade or so, but this fact does not change: the revisionist arguments have never gotten into the textbooks.
The revisionist case was not only dropped down the establishment's memory hole. That hole was funded as early as 1946. I told the story at a Mises Institute conference in 2012.