I want to know which things you’ve heard or seen that made you believe the United States government provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor. My best reason for doubting you is that I don’t recall hearing anything like this before from academics nor interested amateur historians nor conspiracy theorists.
My guess is that the biasing effects of being funneled through a country’s school system and subjected to its news are much weaker on those who would find LW interesting than the typical citizen.
For what it’s worth, I came across the theory before, in a pretty respectable setting: a popularization book by a historian, where many conspiracy theories (along with “mysteries” like Easter Island) where examined, usually with skeptical conclusions. The Pearl Harbor one was one of the few with a “possible, but unproven” verdict.
I read it long ago, in a Spanish translation from French. It seems the book has not been published in English. The original title is Dossiers secrets de l’histoire, by Alain Decaux.
That reduces the value of the example, IMO. Political conspiracy stuff relies on so much contextual material and government records that it’s hard for a foreigner to make a good appraisal of what went on. It would be like a monolingual American trying to make heads or tails of that incident decades ago (whose name escapes me at the moment) where a high-level Communist Party official died in a airplane crash with his family; was it a normal accident, or was he fleeing a failed coup attempt to Russia, as the conspiracy/coverup interpretations went? If you can’t even read Chinese, I have no idea how one could make a even half-decent attempt to judge the incident.
I want to know which things you’ve heard or seen that made you believe the United States government provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor. My best reason for doubting you is that I don’t recall hearing anything like this before from academics nor interested amateur historians nor conspiracy theorists.
I have never heard of the book Alejandro1 refers to, but I read a book from Togo Shigenori, the Japanese foreign minister during that time, and he makes a lot of good points how US diplomacy wasn’t focused on securing peace, but on forcing Japan into a war that could only benefit the USA in the long run. From his perspective, the oil embargo left Japan with no other reasonable option than to try to conquer the British and Dutch oil reserves in South East Asia; and I see as little reason to believe that the U.S. government wasn’t aware of this as he does.
Togo was an outspoken opponent of the war against the USA who made efforts towards more diplomatical exchange, which met little interest on part of the U.S. government. He was the thriving force behind Japan’s declaration it would uphold the Geneva Convention, which Japan did not sign. He was also the originator of a peace settlement with the USSR earlier. Lastly, he was also of Korean descent, originally having the surname Park. All this adds up to sufficient evidence for me to believe that he was not a nationalist warmonger, and therefore I take his analysis very serious.
My guess is that the biasing effects of being funneled through a country’s school system and subjected to its news are much weaker on those who would find LW interesting than the typical citizen.
LW readers seem to be better at evaluating arguments from different sides, but not necessarily at acquiring these arguments in the first place unless they are already interested in the topic. Also, the lack of history-related threads in the discussion area leads me to believe that there is no significant correlation between being interested in LW and being interested in history in general or historical accuracy in particular.
I want to know which things you’ve heard or seen that made you believe the United States government provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor. My best reason for doubting you is that I don’t recall hearing anything like this before from academics nor interested amateur historians nor conspiracy theorists.
My guess is that the biasing effects of being funneled through a country’s school system and subjected to its news are much weaker on those who would find LW interesting than the typical citizen.
For what it’s worth, I came across the theory before, in a pretty respectable setting: a popularization book by a historian, where many conspiracy theories (along with “mysteries” like Easter Island) where examined, usually with skeptical conclusions. The Pearl Harbor one was one of the few with a “possible, but unproven” verdict.
Do you remember the title of that book?
I read it long ago, in a Spanish translation from French. It seems the book has not been published in English. The original title is Dossiers secrets de l’histoire, by Alain Decaux.
That reduces the value of the example, IMO. Political conspiracy stuff relies on so much contextual material and government records that it’s hard for a foreigner to make a good appraisal of what went on. It would be like a monolingual American trying to make heads or tails of that incident decades ago (whose name escapes me at the moment) where a high-level Communist Party official died in a airplane crash with his family; was it a normal accident, or was he fleeing a failed coup attempt to Russia, as the conspiracy/coverup interpretations went? If you can’t even read Chinese, I have no idea how one could make a even half-decent attempt to judge the incident.
I have never heard of the book Alejandro1 refers to, but I read a book from Togo Shigenori, the Japanese foreign minister during that time, and he makes a lot of good points how US diplomacy wasn’t focused on securing peace, but on forcing Japan into a war that could only benefit the USA in the long run. From his perspective, the oil embargo left Japan with no other reasonable option than to try to conquer the British and Dutch oil reserves in South East Asia; and I see as little reason to believe that the U.S. government wasn’t aware of this as he does.
Togo was an outspoken opponent of the war against the USA who made efforts towards more diplomatical exchange, which met little interest on part of the U.S. government. He was the thriving force behind Japan’s declaration it would uphold the Geneva Convention, which Japan did not sign. He was also the originator of a peace settlement with the USSR earlier. Lastly, he was also of Korean descent, originally having the surname Park. All this adds up to sufficient evidence for me to believe that he was not a nationalist warmonger, and therefore I take his analysis very serious.
LW readers seem to be better at evaluating arguments from different sides, but not necessarily at acquiring these arguments in the first place unless they are already interested in the topic. Also, the lack of history-related threads in the discussion area leads me to believe that there is no significant correlation between being interested in LW and being interested in history in general or historical accuracy in particular.