Charles Burress - Biased History Helps Feed US Fascination With Pearl Harbor

 Originally published by The Japanese Times but it was behind a paywall, so I searched for it and found it at Rense.com. 

It's a parallel to how the US is treating China today. 

Pearl Harbor didn't just fall out of the sky. It followed a long chain of events that had filled many Japanese minds with resentment and hostility against the Western powers in general and the U.S. in particular. The first came in 1853 when U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry confronted Japan with a squadron of gunboats -- the "Black Ships" -- that eventually forced Japan to open its ports and accept unequal treaties.

 

Japan deeply feared being colonized and was shocked by this gunboat diplomacy into rapid industrialization and a desire to join the club of imperial powers, including their feast on China and other weak, resource-rich territories. Japan modeled its rebirth after the Western mold, and joined with Western powers in suppressing the anticolonialist Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900.

 

But the Western powers ultimately didn't want to grant what Japan felt it deserved. When Japan asked for a racial equality clause for the new League of Nations at the end of World War I, the white nations refused. America's sanctions against Japan were prompted not only by a desire to evict Japan from China and release Japan's grip on the vital raw materials of Southeast Asia. Americans were horrified also at the large-scale atrocities inflicted on Chinese citizens by the Japanese Imperial Army.

 

Subsequent Japanese horror at American atrocities -- the firebombing and atomic bombing of Japanese cities, estimated by MIT historian John Dower to have killed 400,000 civilians -- is often rationalized in the American mind by the conviction, as one American veteran vehemently told me, "Japan started the war!"

 

But is that entirely true? Japan did launch the attack on Pearl Harbor before American "Flying Tigers" were able to fire their first shots at Japanese planes in China, but both sides were already on the road to war. Before the attack, the U.S. was making contingency war plans for razing Japanese cities with firebombs.

Charles Burress - Biased History Helps Feed US Fascination With Pearl Harbor