EDITORIAL

Pearl Harbor: Twenty-fifth Anniversary

Read this in .pdf format

This editorial can be cited as “Pearl Harbor: Twenty-fifth Anniversary,” Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought 2, no. 3 (Autumn, 1966): 17–18.

Page numbers appear in blue: 17, 18

The cataclysm of Pearl Harbor occurred twenty-five years ago, and yet the average American, bemused by official propaganda, still thinks of Pearl as an unprovoked act of Japanese aggression that took the United States and the Roosevelt Administration unawares.  Yet the “revisionist” insight: that the attack was sought and welcomed, and known of in advance, by the Roosevelt Administration in order to get the U. S. into World War II, has managed, despite overwhelming odds, to make a bit of headway.  For a few years after the war, the courageous and perceptive revisionist works by such historians as Beard, Sanborn, Morgenstern, and Tansill were published and won a partial hearing against the massive attempts at Establishment blackout.  But these hooks were largely published and financed by conservatives, who in those days were doughty champions of peace and “isolationism”.  As the conservatives increasingly joined in and led the hoopla for a Third Great Global Crusade, however, they began to realize that a revisionist view of Pearl Harbor would prove highly embarrassing for U. S. imperialism’s latest exercise in global warfare.  For if revisionism teaches us anything, it teaches us the duplicity and the needlessness of the foreign wars promoted by U. S. imperialism.  A new look at the myth of Pearl Harbor could not help but inspire a new look at the myths of the Cold War.

Our forthcoming, Winter, issue is devoted to taking a comprehensive new look at the Pearl Harbor catastrophe [18] and at the responsibility of the American leaders.  We are proud to be presenting the definitive discussion of Pearl Harbor to date, based on all the most recent findings of revisionist scholarship.  As yet, there has been no one book to present the definitive history of Pearl Harbor, and until such a book is written, we believe that the forthcoming Winter issue of LEFT AND RIGHT will be able to serve as the most up-to-date presentation of historical scholarship.

Previous

Next