Imperialist War for the Pacific:
The True Story of Pearl Harbor
Revolutionary Worker #1105, June 3, 2001, posted at http://rwor.org

On Sunday, December 7, 1941, the news passed quickly across the U.S.
and around the world that the Japanese navy had attacked part of the
U.S. fleet, anchored at its Pearl Harbor base in Hawai'i. In two
intense hours, Japanese aircraft sank four aging U.S. battleships and
other vessels.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt immediately called for the U.S. to
enter the second world war--and argued that this was an American war of
self defense against the treachery and expansionism of Japan. Roosevelt
said: "Our people, our territory and our interests are in grave
danger... I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and
dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, a state of war has
existed between the United States and the Japanese empire."

This myth--born within hours of those first bombs--is being retold this
week onscreen with the release of Pearl Harbor. In this new movie, the
U.S. is portrayed as a "sleeping giant"--where only a few military
"hawks" could see the real threat. According to this military parable,
the population of the U.S. was soft, passive, and dangerously
preoccupied in the diversions of their daily lives, while a ruthless
enemy plotted to take advantage of their lack of vigilance.

The message of this "summer blockbuster" is as subtle as an airborne
torpedo. The propaganda is crude and pro-imperialist: "Don't get too
self-absorbed in your little lives," this movie is saying, "because the
U.S. operates in a very dangerous world, and you, too, may be called
upon to kill for this flag."

And exactly because it would be so wrong to fight for U.S.
dominance--and make heroes out of airborne government killers--we need
to peel away this myth of Pearl Harbor and World War 2, and tell the
true story of what that battle and that war were all about.

Whose Territory?

"We have pacified some thousands of islanders and buried them;
destroyed their fields; burned their villages and turned their widows
and orphans out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens
of disagreeable patriots; subjugated the remaining tens of millions by
Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the
musket...and hoisted our protecting flag... And so, by these
Providences of God--and the phrase is the government's, not mine--we
are a World Power."

Mark Twain, after the 1901
U.S. conquest of the Philippines

"Our general diplomatic and strategic position would be considerably
weakened--by our loss of Chinese, Indian and South Seas markets (and by
our loss of much of the Japanese market for our goods, as Japan would
become more and more self-sufficient) as well as by insurmountable
restrictions upon our access to the rubber, tin, jute, and other vital
materials of the Asian and Oceanic regions."

State Department memorandum
on how Japan's moves affected
U.S. imperialist interests, 1940

The men who ruled the U.S. were not surprised when war broke out in
1941. They had prepared for it, even dreamed about it, for long years.

Over 40 years before Pearl Harbor, the U.S. had made its first massive
armed moves into the western Pacific. In 1899, the U.S. sent half its
military forces to conquer the Philippines and caused the deaths of
hundreds of thousands of Filipinos in three years of bloody warfare to
crush their resistance.

And before the U.S. imperialists could even start this colonial move,
they had set up forward military bases for themselves scattered across
the vast Pacific--to store the new steel navy that would carry out
their conquests. That is why they seized Hawai'i from the Hawaiian
people. The lands of Hawaiians were stolen and turned into plantations.
Their culture attacked and dissed by missionaries. Finally, in 1893,
their home government was overthrown and their islands annexed. In the
U.S. Congress, the argument was made: "In the possession of the United
States it will give us the command of the Pacific."

But the U.S. was not alone in its plans to seize the wealth and labor
of southeast Asia. The British, French and Dutch imperialists had
already invaded and carved out rich colonies for themselves--in
Indonesia, Indochina, and Malaysia. And everyone knew that Japan, which
was emerging as a newly industrial nation, would be working to seize
for itself secure sources of rubber, oil, and labor.

For decades, rivalry raged over which oppressor power would rule what
in east Asia. In 1922, the U.S. and Britain imposed restrictions on
Japanese navy building--fixing a 5/5/3 ratio for larger classes of
warships. This treaty, and the use of U.S. gunboats and troops against
Chinese people that same year, was a declaration that the U.S. intended
to seize a position of power in east Asia through military force, if
necessary.

The U.S. called for a joint imperialist rape of China (the so-called
"Open Door Policy"), so when Japan started to seize major chunks of
China as its exclusive colonial possessions, the hostility between the
U.S. and Japan escalated.

When Roosevelt said, after Pearl Harbor, that "our territory" was "in
great danger," this talk of defending "our territory" is really a
defense of U.S. imperialist interests. Hawai'i was not "sacred American
soil"--it had recently been seized (from its own people!) at gunpoint.
And those warships that lay at anchor in Pearl Harbor were an
aggressive imperialist navy--built, deployed and based in Hawai'i
precisely to threaten east Asia with U.S. military might.

After Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government deliberately inflamed fears of
invasion to rally a reluctant population by claiming the war and their
sacrifice were for self-defense. The authorities created coast watches
and blackouts. President Roosevelt fanned the hysteria, and signed
Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, putting 110,000
Japanese-Americans into concentration camps. In the movie Pearl Harbor
there is laughable talk about Japanese troops penetrating all the way
to Chicago. In fact, the Japanese were seeking to take and hold China
and southeast Asia, not Oklahoma, and everyone knew it.

The U.S. was also not waging a war about liberating anyone: Japan was
an imperialist power that carried out extreme and oppressive
acts--including the infamous Rape of Nanking and the colonial conquest
of neighboring countries. But when General MacArthur said "I shall
return"--he was talking about U.S. troops returning to the Philippines
and re-imposing U.S. domination there at any cost--a domination that
itself had been created through extreme and oppressive acts.

U.S. society had just gone through the Great Depression of the 1930s,
where the heartlessness and madness of capitalism had been displayed
for all to see. The U.S. military and navy were viciously Jim Crow--as
was the larger society they were defending. And the oppression of Black
people was there at every level, including to the point of mass murder
in Port Chicago.

Meanwhile, this U.S. war for the Pacific was a war about O.P.T.--Other
People's Territory. The U.S. prepared and waged a colonial war over who
would get to exploit the people of east Asia and the larger Pacific.
This was a war about whether the corrupt Marcos-type governments of
post-war Asia would speak English or Japanese.

Whose Surprise?

"Both groups of belligerent nations were systematically preparing the
very kind of war such as the present. The question of which group dealt
the first military blow or first declared war is immaterial in any
determination of the tactics of socialists. Both sides' phrases on the
defense of the fatherland, resistance to enemy invasion, a war of
defense, etc., are nothing but deception of the people."

V.I. Lenin

Lenin's point about World War 1 describes the conflict shaping up
between the U.S. and Japan 20 years later in the 1930s.

The U.S. imperialists knew war was coming and, by the late 1930s, the
problem for the U.S. ruling class was how the inevitable war should
break out. There was deep-seated opposition to the war within the U.S.
population--who were not interested in dying in distant war in Europe.
And there were powerful forces within the ruling class who felt that
the U.S. should stay with the policy that served it so well through the
first two years of the world war--what Mao called "sitting on the
mountain and watching the tigers fight."

But by 1941, the Roosevelt government was convinced that the time had
come to step in. The various other great powers were badly bloodied.
Nazi Germany had just invaded the socialist Soviet Union, and faced a
long bitter battle there. Britain was on the ropes. France was
conquered and partitioned. Japan was bogged down trying to hold large
chunks of China--and facing a growing resistance headed by Mao Tsetung
and the Chinese Communist Party. And there was an opening for the U.S.
to weigh in and eventually take over much of the world.

And by 1941, the Japanese imperialists were starting to encroach on
areas that the U.S. considered its vital interests--including
threatening the key U.S. sources of rubber and tin in southeast Asia.
On July 26, 1941, Japan began occupying the strategic rubber-growing
area of southern Vietnam. The next day the U.S. froze all Japanese
assets in the U.S. and forced Britain and Holland to follow suit.

The U.S. imposed embargoes of scrap iron and oil--key resources that
Japan needed from overseas to maintain its industry and military. And
it meant war was certain unless Japan capitulated to all U.S. demands
to withdraw from the area. Howard Zinn writes in A People's History of
the United States, "The records show that a White House conference two
weeks before Pearl Harbor anticipated a war and discussed how it should
be justified."

On November 25, 1941, U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull gave the
Japanese an ultimatum demanding that they evacuate Indochina and China
and recognize U.S. ally General Chiang Kai-shek as the only legitimate
government in China. They knew the Japanese would not comply.

That evening Secretary of War Stimson recorded in his diary: "[The
President] brought up the event that we were likely to be attacked
perhaps next Monday, for the Japanese were notorious for making an
attack without warning, and the question was what we should do. The
question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing
the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves. This was
a difficult proposition."

The next day, the army chief of staff, George C. Marshall, sent the
following cable to the commanding general in Hawai'i: "Negotiations
with Japan appear to be terminated to all practical purposes with only
the barest possibilities that the Japanese government might come back
and offer to continue. Japanese future action unpredictable but hostile
action possible at any moment. If hostilities cannot, repeat cannot, be
avoided, the United States desires that Japan commit the first overt
act. This policy should not, repeat not, be construed as restricting
you to a course of action that might jeopardize your defense. Prior to
hostile Japanese action you are directed to undertake such
reconnaissance and other measures as you deem necessary but these
measures should be carried out so as not, repeat not, to alarm civil
population or disclose intent. Report measures taken. Should
hostilities occur you will carry out the task assigned in Rainbow Five
so far as they pertain to Japan. Limit dissemination this highly secret
information to minimum essential officers."

In other words, they were saying: This is it! We are going to war
against Japan. Make sure they strike the first blow so they can be
branded as the aggressor. And, whatever you do, don't let the masses of
people find out our plan!

Meanwhile, the U.S. had broken the code for secret Japanese diplomatic
transmissions in August of 1940. Every day, top U.S. officials read
cables between Tokyo and its embassies. They knew on December 7 that an
attack was coming, somewhere, though they didn't know where.

Japan's militarist government, facing war against a much bigger and
economically stronger rival, decided to go for a decisive
strike--hoping to put the U.S. on the defensive while Japan's military
consolidated their gains in Asia. And one thing that can be said for
watching the air raid in the movie Pearl Harbor, it does remind you of
the usefulness of surprise when seeking to defeat an enemy like U.S.
imperialism.

Still, overall, the U.S. ruling class saw the Japanese raid on Hawaii
as a opportunity to enter the war, despite the fact that they suffered
some initial losses (mainly in aging warships, and not in the aircraft
carrier core of their fleet).

In his diary, Secretary Henry Stimson wrote: "When the news first came
that Japan had attacked us, my first feeling was of relief that the
indecision was over and that a crisis had come in a way which would
unite all our people. This continued to be my dominant feeling in spite
of the news of catastrophes which quickly developed. For I feel that
this country united has practically nothing to fear; while the apathy
and divisions stirred up by unpatriotic men have been hitherto very
discouraging.'

The ones really surprised when the attack finally came on December 7
were the masses of people in the U.S. As for the FDR government, the
war they wanted and expected had come in a way that politically allowed
them to mask their real motives and goals. A colonial war could be
portrayed as a war of defense. A new stage of U.S. aggression could be
portrayed as a war against aggression.

Bourgeois historians can and do argue over which act started the war,
and which side hit first. But for class conscious proletarians and
oppressed peoples, these controversies of who provoked the war are
irrelevant next to the important fact about the basic class nature of
this conflict: The war between Japan and the U.S. was an unjust
imperialist war on both sides.

The U.S. war campaign that followed was waged in a notoriously
genocidal and reactionary way. Japanese people were openly portrayed in
the U.S.--and to the U.S. soldiers--as fanatical and vicious subhumans
who deserved to be extinguished to the last person. The glorification
of a U.S. revenge raid on Japan that happens in the movie Pearl Harbor
is particularly disturbing since it completely ignores how such raids
eventually built up to the 1945 firebombing of Tokyo and the criminal
nuclear attack on the two civilian cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

General Curtis LeMay, commander of the Tokyo attack, later said: "I
suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war
criminal. Fortunately, we were on the winning side."

Whose Interests?

"War is the continuation of politics by other means."

Karl von Clauswitz, On War, 1832

"A revolutionary class cannot but wish for the defeat of its government
in a reactionary war, cannot fail to see that its military reverses
facilitate its overthrow."

V.I. Lenin, Socialism and War, 1915

"If you were going to make a case about how much more terrible the
fascist states were than the democracies, you'd make it better in
Europe where there was more democracy than you would if you went in
some of the colonial countries and started arguing about how great
British imperialism was for India, for example, as compared with
Japanese imperialism and its colonies."

Bob Avakian, Conquer the World? The International
Proletariat Must and Will, 1981

World War 2 has often been portrayed as "the good war"--as the time
when the U.S. was involved in some great anti-fascist crusade, where
progressive people could fight for the red-white-and-blue and yet still
(somehow) serve the interests of the people of the world.

This is a deeply mistaken view that badly damaged the class
consciousness of a whole generation of communists and working people in
the U.S. Its lingering influence supports deep illusions about the
capitalist system and the nature of U.S. government and military today.
The idea that there was some "good war" in the past, where U.S.
imperialism played some "progressive anti-fascist role," is used by
some as proof that it could happen once again--that the U.S. could
become what it says it is, a defender of democracy and human rights in
the world.

A world war is (obviously) a vast and complex event--where people of
many countries and of opposing classes are drawn into conflict,
fighting for their interests and for their vision of the future. There
were revolutionary struggles taking place during that war, struggles
that deserved support and great sacrifice from the masses of people.
The Soviet Union fought one of history's most bitter wars against
powerful forces of Nazi Germany, in defense of its then-socialist
society. The people of many countries waged resistance during World War
2 against imperialism--including in China, Vietnam, Korea, and the
Philippines. And these were national liberation struggles that, under
the leadership of communists like Mao Tsetung, were part of the larger
worldwide revolutionary struggle to overthrow imperialism.

But the war that the U.S. waged in the Pacific was of a fundamentally
different kind: that war was an extension of imperialist politics and
rivalry that had grown over decades. And the second world war arose,
overall and fundamentally, from such inter-imperialist rivalry--waged
throughout the world, including in Europe, North Africa, and in the
Pacific Basin. The second world war reached its resolution in a new
imperialist redivision of the world--despite the fact that
revolutionary struggles played a much bigger role in this war than in
World War 1.

In fact, it is possible to see, with hindsight, what the U.S. forces
were fighting for by seeing what emerged from that new redivision.

As early as 1940, study groups set up by the U.S. Council on Foreign
Relations mapped out plans for a new global order they intended to
create after a victory in the world war (which they had not even yet
joined). The U.S. emerged out of World War 2 proclaiming "the American
Century"--it established over 400 military bases around the world, and
set about bullying everyone in sight. From its defeated Japanese rival,
it took over half of Korea, occupied Japan itself, seized Okinawa,
maneuvered unsuccessfully to dominate China, retook the Philippines and
seized the many island chains of the Pacific. Not content with that, it
also seized many areas previously dominated by its allies. In the
post-war world, the U.S. emerged as the main oppressor in the former
French colony in Indochina, with its hand deep in formerly Dutch
Indonesia and formerly British Malaysia. Hundreds of millions of people
got a new oppressor and were slated for a future of sweatshops,
occupation, sex trade and financial domination. Meanwhile, some of the
Pacific islands that the marines "liberated" became ground zero for
French and American nuclear tests.

As for the talk of "anti-fascist war"--the U.S. saw continuing use for
fascist dictatorships after World War 2, and backed them all over the
world--including Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in China (and then
Taiwan), Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Diem and then Thieu in
southern Vietnam, plus a string of torturers in southern Korea and
elsewhere. U.S. generals went on to wage brutal counterrevolutionary
wars against the people of Asia--General Douglas MacArthur tried to
conquer the Korean peninsula for U.S. imperialism, and even dreamed of
invading China to overthrow the victorious 1949 Maoist revolution.
General Curtis LeMay went on to direct the U.S. bombing of
Vietnam--where he coined the phrase "Bomb them back to the Stone Age."

Now, 60 years after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. cause in World War 2 is
portrayed as nobl