“Yesterday, Decembuh seventh, nineteen fawty-one, a date which will live in infamy…”
I first heard that speech on television in the 1970s during a special promoting the
official myth. You couldn’t pull it up on your phone whenever you wanted as I did just prior to this writing. My father remembered first hearing the news Pearl Harbor had been bombed and either hearing the speech live on radio or shortly after in a movie theater newsreel.
Like most people, no one in my family had any reason to question FDR’s assessment of the attack as “dastardly and unprovoked.”
It was
certainly dastardly, but not unprovoked. Nor was its provocation unprecedented. FDR had employed a strategy with a long tradition among American presidential administrations seeking a casus belli while not wanting to appear the aggressor. Roosevelt wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last to execute this strategy.
President James Polk was the first to achieve a war of choice in this manner. Beginning with the previous administration, the U.S. first
tried to purchase California and other Mexican possessions. When that effort failed, Polk decided to take the coveted Mexican lands by force.
Polk took advantage of Mexican political instability and its claim over a small strip of disputed land between what is now known as the Rio Grande and the Nueces River. Mexico claimed the Nueces was the river referred to in the treaty establishing Texan independence (which Mexico also did not recognize) while
the United States clamed it was the Rio Grande. Polk sent troops into the disputed territory for the express purpose of provoking a Mexican attack. When the Mexicans obliged, Polk asked for and received a declaration of war against Mexico from Congress.
President Lincoln employed a nearly identical tactic in provoking the Confederacy into firing the first shot in the American Civil War. This time, the disputed territory was South Carolina, and
more specifically Fort Sumpter in Charleston’s harbor. South Carolina had seceded from the United States the previous December, placing the U.S.-owned fort in an ambiguous status.
Read the rest on Tom's Substack...
Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?
Tom