ARIZONA, I REMEMBER YOU

"Tell me what Zero hour is?" The voice from Tokyo replied softly: "Zero hour is December 8" - December 7 in the United States - "at Pearl Harbor."

That US Signal Corps intercept of Nov 29, 1941 never quite reached ground zero at Pearl Harbor along with a precise warning. Many knew what was coming. Imperial Japan's diplomatic code - Purple - was already cracked and decoding machines called Magic were already sent to London, Philippines and Singapore. The conspicuous exception was Honolulu, where Tokyo, in fact, maintained a consulate.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt badly wanted to take his nation to war. According to the historian William Manchester, who served in the Pacific theatre, FDR wanted to spare the next generation of Americans of a "hopeless confrontation with a hostile, totalitarian world."

The totalitarian model, managed by Teutonic managers, was working well in Europe. Its metaphor was Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) and German workers were enjoying the fruits of Nazi industry. Fascists, from Britain to Hungary, and even in the United States, had the same vision, and one can find echoes of them in the Nation Europa, a Nazi publication many would like to forget. Even before the Nazis steamrolled over Europe, they were ready to give up their undesirables. Eventually they did, up the chimney, through the konzentrationslagers and Zyklon-Bs; the cumulative industrial genius of the Krupps, IG Farbens and Thyssens.

On the other side of the Atlantic, lay another model, the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It too was working, lumbering away for a dialectical future and a chaotic infosphere - the hallmarks of innovation and democracy.

Both the Fuhrer and President Rosenfeld were elected and both faced the same problem - major financiers and industrialists, who did not discriminate when it came to money. In fact, the Second World War would not have occurred if the Allied Control Commission, established by the Treaty of Versailles, had done its job of dismantling the German military-industrial complex. But that would have disrupted the profit flows of European fat cats, and US "isolationists" whom they were propping.

Hitler played his cards carefully. Roosevelt waited to bait. It is perhaps easier to take your nation to another "war to end all wars" than mess around with people who can elevate the science of murder into an industrial art. Six million deaths in concentration camps in six years? Gees, when you read too much of Chomsky and references to the (most) "genocidal nation," you might be tempted to think that GI Joe was the Buchenwald commander and the root cause of our global problems lies in the "usual two." Fact is, the usual two produces the finest - and most chaotic - infosphere.

If that was one of FDR's offshoot legacies, so be it.

For a while, though, the Fuhrer refused to take the bait, despite provocations like shoot-on-sight convoys, lend-lease, and the supply of munitions during the Battle of Britain.

Roosevelt persisted, and found another way to take the United States to war. Imperial Japan had signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy on Sept 27, 1940, and the road to Berlin could now be reached via Tokyo.

Provocations and counter-provocations followed in a classic Game Theory scenario. Each Japanese incursion further south was met with brinkmanship and sanctions from Washington. It is an axiom that military might and incursions are a sure hedge against a nasty surprise from the other side. For the Japanese, things were containable until the Dutch, who, still held Djakarta despite losing their own land to the Nazis, imposed oil sanctions.

As William Manchester writes:

Virtually every drum of gas and oil fueling the (Japanese) army's tanks and planes had to be imported. Worse, the Japanese navy, which, until now had counseled patience, but which consumed four hundred tons of oil an hour, joined the army in calling for war. Without Dutch petroleum the country could hold out for a few months, no more.

Article Source: http://www.articledestination.com

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