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A Date That Will Live Forever in Infamy

Naval Base Bombed, Shinto Worshipers Fear Backlash - New York Times - December 8 1941

A day after planes passed over their peaceful village on the way to attack the Naval Station at Pearl Harbor, local fishermen are still picking up the pieces.

"I don't know what any of this is about," a man who would only give his name as Paji said, holding the remains of a net which he had used to earn a living. "All I know is that the killing has to stop."

In Washington, government officials urged the public to stay calm and not to jump to any conclusions warning that such reactions might play into the hands of the militant extremists responsible for the attack.

Early copies of President Roosevelt's upcoming speech to Congress likewise warn the American public of the dangers of overreaction.

"We are not at war with Japan," it says. "We are at war with a tiny handful of extremists who are attempting to drag the Japanese people into a conflict. But we must keep a cool head and not allow them to win by provoking a war. We will defeat this enemy, but we will do it by not fighting them."

A profile has emerged of at least one of these attackers. Hideki Nakamura, a graduate of Harvard and a talented oboe player, was shot down and captured. Nothing in his background, which included playing for the Harvard squash team, would have caused anyone to conclude that he was capable of such a thing.

KATANA, a local civil rights organization partly funded by Japan's war propaganda office, has warned that American foreign policy is responsible for the radicalization of such young men like Nakamura.

"What made this man hate America so much that he wanted to bomb it?" a spokeswoman for KATANA asked. "How did America fail him? And how can we win him back?"

Nakamura's guards have said that the pilot is soft-spoken and has pleasant manners, but that he becomes vocally exercised over the American embargo of Japan and the refusal of many universities to install rice paper doors in dormitories.

"Detaining Nakamura only inspires others to imitate him," KATANA said, suggesting that he instead be released back to Japan where the government is running an anti-extremism program at the Strategic Institute of War that claims to be able to deprogram extremists with a 97% success rate.

Unfortunately the program, dubbed KAMIKAZE, is unable to accommodate all potential extremists without additional foreign aid funding from the United States government.

"It's cheap for us to spend 3 million dollars fighting Japanese extremism by funding Kamikaze instead of spending 30 million on national defense," Senator Earl Hawkins said. "Studies show that one of the leading causes of anti-American sentiments is unemployment. KAMIKAZE is tackling that."

Foreign policy experts at the Center for American Progress warned that the so-called Pearl Harbor event was the product of decades of American expansionism.

"It's easy for the flag-waving jingoist in the stockyards to rave about the Japs, but this attack did not occur in a vacuum," Lester Gore-Vinton said. "Look at Commodore Perry's globalization venture and the Philippines War and our ill-advised intervention in the Russian Revolution. This is blowback."

At impromptu peace rallies in New York City's Union Square and San Francisco's Union Square, speakers called for the government to explore all options for peace. Many pointed out that more Americans die every year of shingles than were killed at Pearl Harbor.

"The United States is allied with Great Britain. We have been aiding the Western occupation of Asia," Earl Gorber of Working People Want Peace and a Living Wage Now said. "The only amazing thing is that it took this long to happen. As long as the United States continues propping up the reactionary imperialists of Great Britain against the progressive movements of the German and Japanese vanguard of the working class, attacks like these will come again and again." 

Some were skeptical that Japan had even been behind the attack.

"Anyone can paint insignia on a plane and drop some smoke bombs. That's all we've seen on these photos," Martha Gabbitz exclaimed. "There hasn't even been a declaration of war.  We don't have a single piece of undeniable proof that there was even an attack. All it takes is a week in a photo lab and the government can produce a picture of anything."

Meanwhile at Shinto temples in Los Angeles, the mood was fearful and subdued. Worshipers refused to give their names worried about the consequences to their families.

"This is madness," an older gentleman studying detailed charts of the California coastline said. "One day you're an All-American entrepreneur studying submarine trade routes to America and the next day everyone is glaring at you no matter how many American flags you stick on your aerial poison gas balloon."

In San Francisco, the 109-year-old Rev. Francis Wheatley-Simpson, famous for protesting every war, including the Civil War, had already declared a hunger strike, even though no American forces were engaged in fighting.

"War is never the answer," Wheatley-Simpson said, as he had said about WW1, the Spanish-
American War, the Civil War and the French and Indian War. "Love is the answer. Violence never solves anything. America was not built on war. It will not survive through war."

"It doesn't matter what Japan did. There will be war," predicted Mason Johnson, author of War is a Farce That Forces Us to Fear. "We love war. We are obsessed with war. That's why we have a society with such rampant criminality. Our idea of masculinity is to use force on everything. Even our national symbols represent violation and patriarchy. If it isn't Japan, it will be someone else."

Meanwhile on a Topeka street, Barnard Stevenson, an 18-year-old lad blinked in confusion when asked about Pearl Harbor. He likewise could not name Hitler or Mussolini and had no idea where Europe was. He was however able to name the stars of Rocket Assault, the latest big film in which a dashing reporter must team up with the enemy to stop his own government from provoking a war with a false flag attack.

"Is this anything kind of like that?" he wondered when the Pearl Harbor attack was explained to him.

Comments

  1. Stunning. Stunning commentary on today's status. Thank you.

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  2. Infidel7/12/16

    Ok, that's pretty funny, and good timing. Why didn't I think of that :)

    Lots of stuff in the news and on the internet about Pearl Harbor, just a couple of points from direct experience: In Marin County, they were required to put blackout curtains over the windows to prevent enemy planes from seeing the light inside and using it for guidance. The people expected a Japanese invasion at any time, the logic of the logistical difficulties of an invasion apparently didn't enter their heads, just their own vulnerabilities. In Point Richmond, telephone poles were painted to look like artillery barrels and fake gun emplacements were dug on top of the hills to fool Japanese spies into thinking they were real, to deter the Japanese invasion fleet which was expected to come steaming through the Golden Gate at any time (that would have been well-sighted artillery, perfect spot to shoot at ships coming through the Golden Gate, but we didn't have any artillery to spare).

    That hill would have been the most likely spot for Sir Frances Drake to climb for scouting out the rest of the bay, if he actually did find SF Bay, which I suspect he did, but apparently all the relevant secret papers were lost in a London fire.

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  3. Anonymous7/12/16

    It's funny that Mr. Greenfield referred to the Russian Revolution in this piece because I've read the Japanese defeat of Russian naval forces at Tsushima led directly to the Russian sailor mutinies.

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  4. An heavy contributory explanation to the nightmare world you describe in this post, is something I came upon yesterday, Dan. Perhaps it is central to this world of a bad movie playing in a nightmare’s theatre. Below in the excerpts from the book, addressing both evil and islam, the one Dan Triplett correctly portrayed yesterday, in the 5 principles, and the nihilistic thought of the liberal left radical west, as you will note, are helpful facts of knowledge, that will help all of us to better understand the brainwash conditioning of the collective minds of the modern west, as Beck was working heroically on while at Fox.

    To the issue of how did we get into these slumbers, the ‘slow warming of the cooking frog’, lulled into the hare’s sleep of unicorn dreams, and snail’s winning, and frogs ready for serving, I just ran across a treatise, a book, just recently out on kindle, with a bunch of excerpts I herewith enclose that suggest much perspective on answers on the history of miseducation, evil education, aka brainwashing, and unicorn dreams, that all should know, as to how America, and Europe have found themselves in this giant mess of 60 plus years, actually a hundred or so, of increasingly not very capable of wise thought, and so much more of failure to grasp reality, by both leaders and follower sheep. Following will give you the gist of what I’m speaking of. This book, clearly speaks to deeper details of what Glenn Beck, while at Fox was working to educate the enquiring public about a few years ago, who needs to know this information of evil, in the Garden of Good and Evil, which is this Earthship we voyage on, at a bit more than a million mph (http://www.askamathematician.com/2014/02/q-how-fast-are-we-moving-through-space-has-anyone-calculated-it/) toward ‘the great attractor’, addressed in other ways, in our Biblical Word.

    I hope this helps many, during our voyage…..
    “For Satan, as for Marx, religion was an impediment to the grand design of transforming humanity from a collection of free-willed, autonomous individuals into a mass of self-corralling slaves who mistake security for liberty and try to keep the cognitive dissonance to a minimum in order to function.” – by Michael Walsh, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West https://kindle.amazon.com/work/devils-pleasure-palace-critical-subversion-ebook/B00TNTSKOC/B00PSSEIXE

    “THE DEVIL’S PLEASURE PALACE TELLS THE STORY OF A GROUP OF EUROPEAN INTELLECTUALS DECAMPING TO THE UNITED STATES FROM GERMANY DURING AND AFTER THE WAR. It follows how they became influential university professors and how pretty much every single awful thing you see happening at the University of Missouri and Yale and every other cultural center came from these wicked men.

    ‘More than anything, the book is about storytelling, how the “Unholy Left” — radicals, not run-of-the-mill liberals — have changed mankind’s story, our narrative, THAT IS, BY OUR NATURE, HEROIC….’

    Walsh writes, “MAKE NO MISTAKE: THE CRISIS IN WHICH THE UNITES STATES OF AMERICA CURRENTLY FINDS ITSELF ENMESHED IS A MORAL CRISIS, WHICH HAS ENGENDERED A CRISIS OF CULTURAL CONFIDENCE, WHICH IN TURN HAS BEGOTTEN A FISCAL CRISIS THAT THREATENS — NO GUARANTEES — THE DESTRUCTION OF THE NATION SHOULD WE FAIL TO ADDRESS IT.”
    IT WAS THE BERLIN-BORN MARCUSE—WHO TAUGHT AT COLUMBIA, HARVARD, BRANDEIS, AND THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO—WHOSE POLITICAL INFLUENCE WAS, ON BALANCE, THE GREATEST OF THEM ALL, OWING TO HIS VOGUISH POPULARITY AMONG COLLEGE STUDENTS IN THE 1960S (he was the flip side of Eric Hoffer, the “longshoreman philosopher,” who had nearly as great an influence on young conservatives of the period). Marcuse came up with the particularly nasty concept of “repressive tolerance,” a notion that has guided the Unholy Left since the publication of his essay by the same name in 1965 in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, by Marcuse,

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  5. ROFL! Excellent!

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  6. Harvey7/12/16

    Daniel, if I didn't know you better, I'd have thought this was "fake." When it is said that history repeats ... Thank you so much. There is much to be learned here, by many.

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  7. Anonymous8/12/16

    Daniel, a scarey thought that today's youth would not recognize your story of December Seventh and Franklin Hussein Roosevelt as grim satire. We have been so purposefully blind these past decades that they would find it consistent. Yes, it could and has happened here.

    ABSJ1136

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  8. Anonymous8/12/16

    I have to save this page, it's so good....and I just heard the Milwaukee Co. Sheriff tell Stuart Varney "Colin Kaepernick probably thinks Pearl Harbor is a jewelry store." ROFLMAO.....MAGA!!!
    -Fred

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  9. gwsmith8/12/16

    Great one, Daniel! This is exactly what our country needs is wake-up call that illuminates historical patterns of human nature. Maybe we really are doomed to repeat it. Maybe we're destined to be that ignorant. Maybe the intelligent thing to do is get out of the way. When George Washington ran towards the gunfire, Jefferson stayed home. Some things never change.

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  10. GW Smith8/12/16

    Great one, Daniel! This is exactly what our country needs is wake-up call that illuminates historical patterns of human nature. Maybe we really are doomed to repeat it. Maybe we're destined to be that ignorant. Maybe the intelligent thing to do is get out of the way. When George Washington ran towards the gunfire, Jefferson stayed home. Some things never change.

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  11. Priceless! Thanks Daniel.

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  12. Anonymous8/12/16

    On the day of Pearl Harbor, Europe had been at war for 18 months, yet there were still many voices in the USA advocating peace at any price.

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  13. Clearly the Japanese back then were a peace loving people. So the Japanese who took part in the attack (and subsequent hostilities) weren't 'real' Japs. They were distorting the true meaning of Bushido.

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  14. Anonymous8/12/16

    That goes right along with "Peace through surrender".

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  15. Daniel: You ought to be arrested for spreading "fake news"! Many SJWs might take this column as "real history"! (not having ever cracked open a real history book.)Or even some college professors might believe it! LOL? Well, the last scenario is not beyond credibility. I mean, how many modern professors still believe in the march of Dialetical Materialism?

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  16. Anonymous8/12/16

    Brilliant, as always Mr. Greenfield.

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  17. Anonymous11/12/16

    Indescribably good.

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  18. Anonymous11/12/16

    This is that rare satire in the realm of Swift's "A Modest Proposal." Bravo!

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  19. Anonymous11/12/16

    Kamikaze means peace. As in Kamikaze to you my brother.

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