Infamy



This is Pearl Harbor Day, and President Roosevelt was right, 7 December 1941 - sixty-six years ago to the day - is a date that has continued to live in infamy, the date that air and naval forces of the Empire of Japan doomed their nation and their cause by provoking the wrath of the United States of America. We Americans are by nature of true believers and idealists, which makes us uniquely dangerous, because true believers and idealists know little restraint in the service of their greater good. It seems clear the Japanese, neither the command elites nor the common people, knew the doom they were calling down upon themselves.

And not to draw an inappropriate parallel, but the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor bears a resemblance to the betrayal by Judas, an act of gravest perfidy necessary to summon a greater act of justice. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were evil incarnate, one need look no further than their respectively treatment of European Jewry and the Koreans to know this, and both regimes might yet hold dominion over vast swaths of the earth had it not been for America's entrance into the Second World War. But do not surrender to the temptation of misty fatalism; none of it was "meant to be" and thus moral in the grander scheme of things. Think of the dead from the U.S.S. Arizona and her "Battleship Row" sisters and you'll never again doubt Pearl Harbor's infamy.