Re: [Marxism] Pearl Harbor, etc.

["bob" <bobo926@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis

Let's start with Zinn and Stinnett.

You wrote "Stinnett's contribution is ostensibly new findings on how the USA 
cracked  the Japanese codes and as a result discovered secret plans about the 
attack on Pearl Harbor. " That may be one of his contributions, it is clearly 
not the most important one. After decades of trying, Stinnett was finally able 
to get a copy of the memo McCollum sent to Roosevelt in answer to Roosevelt's 
request for the US Navy to develop a plan to get Japan to attack. (This was of 
course unknown to Zinn in the 1970s.) When the memo is put together with the 
information about code-breaking by the US, the case regarding Roosevelt  is 
stronger. There is, of course, evidence provided by others that must also be 
added.

Regarding Zinn's writing on Pearl Harbor and Roosevelt: you seem to have quoted 
rather selectively. Your quote: "Putting aside the wild accusations against 
Roosevelt (that he knew about  Pearl Harbor and didn't tell, or that he 
deliberately provoked the Pearl  Harbor raid--these are without evidence), it 
does seem clear that he did as  James Polk had done before him in the Mexican 
war and Lyndon Johnson after  him in the Vietnam war--he lied to the public for 
what he thought was a  right cause." 

But after a short aside in which he uses the voice of Thomas A. Bailey to call 
Roosevelt a liar, Zinn continues on the same page: "One of the judges in the 
Tokyo War crimes trial after World War II, Radhabinod Pal, dissented from the 
general verdicts against Japanese officials and argued that the United States 
had clearly provoked the war with Japan and expected Japan to act. Richard 
Minear (Victor's Justice) sums up Pal's view of the embargoes on scrap iron and 
oil, that "these measures were a clear and potent threat to Japan's very 
existence." The records show that a White House conference two weeks before 
Pearl Harbor anticipated a war and discussed how it should be justified."

Well, that happens to agree with what Stinnett wrote.

Lacking proof at the time he was writing (20 years before Stinnett provided the 
proof), Zinn uses the voices of Thomas A. Bailey, Richard Minear and Radhabinod 
Pal (rather than his own) to get across the point that the US got Japan to 
attack Pearl Harbor. (But while Zinn realizes the importance of the blockades 
in goading Japan into a war, he's unaware of the provocation of the US fleet 
entering the Sea of Japan and the infamous McCollum memo. )

As far as I can tell, Zinn began writing A People's History in the mid to late 
1970s. The original copyright is for 1980. Stinnett's book didn't provide the 
proof that was lacking to Zinn until 1999. That may explain the difference 
between Zinn's perception that the US was guilty of initiating the war with 
Japan with his statement regarding the lack of proof for Roosevelt's actions to 
bring about a war with Japan. The proof was hidden in the Pentagon's files 
until Stinnett got it released.

The sequence of events goes like this. WWII begins with Germany's attack on 
Poland. Germany conquers most of Europe. The people of the US still wanted no 
part of the war. Roosevelt gets his chance when Germany made a strategic error  
with her Axis partner, Italy, and signed the mutual assistance treaty with 
Japan, the Tripartite Pact, on September 27, 1940. Ten days later, Lieutenant 
Commander Arthur McCollum, a U.S. Naval officer in the Office of Naval 
Intelligence (ONI), produces the memo to counter the U.S. isolationist movement 
by provoking Japan into a state of war with the U.S., triggering the mutual 
assistance provisions of the Tripartite Pact, and bringing America into World 
War II. The very next day the plan was put into effect.

The key sentence from the McCollum memo is: "9. It is not believed that in the 
present state of political opinion the United States government is capable of 
declaring war against Japan without more ado;"

You wrote "The problem with all the conspiracy  theorists who have cropped up 
since 9/11 is that they really have nothing interesting to say about politics 
or economics" I agree. But the point is how do we deal with attempting to 
change the perceptions and consciousness of people in the US working class. 
What information is helpful, useful? Simply stating one's belief in a class 
analysis is clearly not enough. When an economic analysis is put together with 
concrete historical facts, I think that a more convincing argument is possible. 
The issue is not what is or is not a purer form of Marxism. The issue is how do 
we work politically? What information is helpful? Evidently, contrary to what 
you presented, Zinn thought that raising the issue of US provocations against 
Japan and their relationship to Roosevelt accomplishing a US entry into WWII 
was a meaningful way to write a book that one would assume he saw as having a 
mass market through its use in colleges and universities. Zinn wrote in a 
manner that protected himself from criticism during the period when proof was 
lacking for the issues he was clearly raising. What is striking in Zinn's book 
is not that he says that Roosevelt goading Japan into an attack lacked proof 
(at the time he wrote) but that he mentioned it at all and then reinforced it 
with the statements from Thomas A. Bailey, Richard Minear and Radhabinod Pal.

On the other hand, Zinn seems to be unaware of either the wartime 
correspondence between Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt as well as Karski's 
memoir or the controversies regarding moving the fleet from the safe haven of 
the US Pacific coast to an unprotected Pearl Harbor.  Any of these would have 
added depth to an analysis of war aims vs. the creation of public perceptions. 
That deeper and more comprehensive history is still to be written.

In general, your criticisms of Stinnet are off the mark. It's not true as you 
say that most scholars disagree with him. In fact, his work led to a change in 
the US government's official version of the events of the fall of 1941. It is 
however true that some government supporters disagreed with him. Regarding his 
previous work, he didn't do a biography of Bush I, he actually wrote a piece 
restricted to Bush's actions in WWII. In addition, that wasn't his only other 
work, nor his main work.  He wrote one other book as well as numerous articles 
during a long career in journalism as a reporter in California.

Code-breaking before WWII against both the Germans and the Japanese was a 
significant contribution to the US victory. During the 1930s Polish 
cryptographers broke the German codes. That information was given to the 
British who were then able to both spy on the Germans (who thought they had 
secure communication channels), understand what they were saying, and then 
manipulate the Germans sense of what was gong on. The US was privy to the 
information. Same happened in the Pacific.

Admiral Kimmel gave a speech in 1958 saying "My belief is that General Short 
and I were not given the information available in Washington and were not 
informed of the impending attack because it was feared that action in Hawaii 
might deter the Japanese from making the attack. Our president had repeatedly 
assured the American people that the United States would not enter the war 
unless we were attacked. The Japanese attack on the fleet would put the United 
States in the war with the full support of the American public."

One problem faced by Stinnett was that some previous writers taking a similar 
position regarding Roosevelt, were deemed to be too sympathetic towards the 
Japanese. Stinnett is not. He merely describes the actions Roosevelt took to 
get a population that opposed the war by a large margin to change their opinion 
and volunteer for service in the military. Another is that many of the people 
who agree with Stinnett are right-wing nationalists like Pat Buchanan.

Now, let's take another crack at exactly what a 'conspiracy theory' is or is 
not. Is it by definition a conspiracy of limited to a few people? If so, then 
probably neither Pearl Harbor, the Maine incident nor 911 qualifies? Is it a 
theory vs. a proven fact? If that's the case then just about anything written 
in a history book qualifies since facts in an absolute sense are a concept more 
appropriate to science than to history. For example, is it a historical fact 
that the US dropped atom bombs on Japan to intimidate the Soviet Union? Or were 
the bombs dropped to save American lives?  About the only thing we can conclude 
was that 2 bombs were dropped. But that's not why people write history books.

If we look to the history of the phrase or its common usage as a guide, we 
would conclude that it's an attack phrase used in arguments to try to 
deligitimize one's adversary. Lawyer's make use of it rather frequently.

Does the phrase have a common application in any given set of circumstances, as 
I mentioned previously, at this point disagreement with the Social Security 
Crisis Theory will get one labeled by some as a conspiracy theorist and just 
about any mention of class conflict as a motive force in history would get the 
same response.

It appears from our interchange that we have agreement regarding whether  the 
King assassination and the roots of the Vietnam war were a conspiracy theory 
(not), but disagreement about the Spanish American War, Pearl Harbor and 911.

Does the McCollum memo move Pearl Harbor from the second group to the first? 
Perhaps for some. It did for me. While a confluence of factors usually are 
present in forming an opinion, there's often also a well-defined tipping point.

In political discourse,  I've usually found the phrase hurled at people who say 
or write something that involves the ruling class planning something that 
results in either an accumulation of money or an attempt to manipulate the 
beliefs and thereby the actions of working class people.

For example, most people assume that when a Congressional Bill is written that 
it is somehow neutral in effect. When one points out the disproportionate 
affect on one class vs. another, ruling class defenders call it a conspiracy 
theory. Likewise, anything that touches on actions by the ruling class to get 
working class people to agree to a war, or the continued obscene level of 
military spending will get a similar response from many.

Our interchange also raises the question of how should debate take place. Do 
cheap shots have a place? Are they a substitute for reasoned argument. Or are 
the victims just too thin-skinned for the contest? For example, does the fact 
that Stinnett wrote about Bush the elder mean that we don't take what he writes 
seriously, as you suggest? If so, does that mean that anything a Stalinist 
wrote about the Soviet Union must be thrown out the window? Or are we a bit 
more sophisticated than that?

Finally, I realize the fun you have at trying to poke holes in what people say, 
interspersing your comments in a line-by-line or paragraph-by-paragraph manner 
like a professor grading a paper. If you're going to do it with me why not 
stick to what I actually wrote. I said nothing about holes in the Pentagon or 
about the CIA contacting Mohammad Atta. I did not quote from Rense either. You 
seem to want to divert attention by pointing out that there are conspiracy 
theorists (like Rense) who are very easily criticized. It's similar to the 
other side pulling Pol Pot out of a hat to 'prove' the evils of socialism.

bob



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Louis Proyect" <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
To: "Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition" <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, April 09, 2005 10:36 AM
Subject: Re: [Marxism] Pearl Harbor, etc.


> Bob:
>>The main thesis of Stinnett's book is that Roosevelt (and the sector of 
>>the ruling class he represented) wanted the US to get into WWII, while the 
>>people of the US opposed the war by a huge margin (roughly 90% to 10%), so 
>>he asked the navy for a plan to force the Japanese into a war. The plan 
>>was produced more than a year before Pearl Harbor in Oct. 1940.
> 
> I know that is the thesis but it is one that is not unique to Stinnett. You 
> get basically the same argument from Charles Beard and John Toland. 
> Stinnett's contribution is ostensibly new findings on how the USA cracked 
> the Japanese codes and as a result discovered secret plans about the attack 
> on Pearl Harbor. This is not accepted by other scholars. Stinnett's main 
> work prior to this, by the way, was a biography of George Bush the elder.
> 
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