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David McElroy

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Pearl Harbor: Simple sneak attack or culmination of FDR’s plan for war?

By David McElroy · December 7, 2011

When I was growing up, I learned the standard Pearl Harbor attack story. The peaceful United States was minding its own business and staying out of the war raging in Europe when Japan suddenly attacked Pearl Harbor without any provocation. The Japanese were motivated simply by imperialist plans for conquest, we were assured.

I loved military history back then, and the war in the Pacific during World War II was my favorite. (If you ever want me to bore you with a detailed account of the Battle of Midway, I’ll be happy to do so, because it’s my favorite battle.) I have tremendous admiration for the people who fought that war and who sacrificed greatly in order to win it. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same thing about the political leaders whose actions led to the war.

When I was 12, I learned Franklin Roosevelt’s rousing speech on Dec. 8, 1941, asking Congress to declare war on Japan. (I can still do large parts of it, and I’m sure it’s funny to hear me emulate FDR’s accent.) I believed that Roosevelt was a great wartime leader.

Over the years, there have been suggestions — sometimes closer to conspiracy theories — that FDR knew of the attack and deliberately didn’t warn American military and naval officials, because he wanted the attack to bring the United States into the war. I don’t think there’s any serious debate that Roosevelt wanted the United States in the war against Germany, and it seems that there might be credible evidence that he provoked Germany’s ally into a confrontation because he knew it would force the American people to support a war — something they hadn’t been willing to do up until then.

John Denson has an interesting article/book review looking at this point of view. He’s reviewing “The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable.” I haven’t read the book, but I’d at least recommend the article, because it lays out a credible case for the notion that FDR wanted some reason to go to war, but he simply wasn’t expecting the Japanese attack to Pearl Harbor to be as effective as it was.

Roosevelt worked with Britain’s Winston Churchill and the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin, right, in pursuing the war against Germany, Japan and Italy. How much of his pre-war actions were motivated by his desire to join those men in pursuing a war that he believed should be fought?

I can’t say what the truth is. I doubt anyone will ever know the complete facts at this point. Almost everyone involved is now dead, so whatever secrets they had were taken to their graves. We won the war and our historians wrote accounts that flatter us and that are in line with our national myths. To question those myths is to be “unpatriotic.”

But I do question the myths. The very fact that I suspect Roosevelt was willing to sacrifice lives of innocent people in exchange for pursuing his political objectives in the big pictures tells you what I assume to be true of the character of political leaders. After working in politics for more than 20 years, I honestly don’t see any other conclusion to come to. There are a few politicians I’ve known along the way who I don’t think are cold-blooded enough to do something like that, but very few.

Why do so many people willingly trust their futures to this kind of person? There was a time when those men had my trust. They don’t anymore.

For the many people who died 70 years ago today at Pearl Harbor, I doubt those people would trust their leaders, either, if they knew all the facts. I admire those men who fought and died believing they were fighting for their homes and families. I don’t admire the men who used them as political pawns.

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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