Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day Update

[Jon Freise]

December 7th, 1941 the Japanese Imperial Government launched a surprise attack on the United States Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor.  The Japanese had joined the Axis Alliance and Germany and Italy declared war on the US very soon after.

So ended the rising Nazi supportive U.S. German American Bund and the America First Committee that sought to keep the United States out of World War II.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism_in_the_United_States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_First_Committee

The two great oceans that have long protected the US could not block enemy carrier groups.  The US had to face the reality that the Axis powers were not going to let the US remain independent.  The US had already refused to join its allies in 1939 in resisting Germany and Italy.  Without US support France and most of Europe was defeated and Britain driven back onto its island.  Now, the US would have to face all three, with its allies greatly weakened.

There is no running from fascism.  No appeasement works.  It consumes and grows stronger.

The movie "Tora, Tora, Tora" is an interesting view of the events leading up to and on December 7th.  I rewatched it and found it quite well done.

Sense Making is turning the seemingly random stream of events into a coherent picture of what is happening.  In the movie, the US forces are doing their Sunday morning routines when the bombs start to fall.  It is interesting to watch the people in the movie grapple with the discontinuity between understanding and real events and then start to form a new mental model and then take action.  I found the movie has a cathartic effect.

Right now some books I am finding useful for sense making are:

"How Democracies Die" and "The Tyranny of the Minority" by Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky.  There are also very good presentations by them online that summarize the book in an hour or so.  They do a good job of covering why political parties world wide turn against democracy and then why they believe the Republican party as a whole did so.

"The Big Myth" by Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway.  That traces the climate denial movement back over 100 years of anti regulation pro-profit / pro-monopoly / pro-wage suppression roots.  These are the ultra conservatives that never accepted the New Deal and have fought to over turn it ever since it became law.  Their 100 year plus agenda is becoming law today.

"The Changing World Order" by Ray Dalio.  An investment manager looking at what happens when one world order (and monetary system) is replaced by another.  He wrote it because most people have never experienced such a change and thus have no idea what typically happens.  Helpful because the need to buy food and shelter do not go away because things fall into chaos.  The potential collapse of the US dollar as the world reserve currency I found helpful to read about.

What is not getting good coverage is how the fossil fuel companies and fossil fuel autocracies are so clearly the national and international funders / backers of this takeover.  The US government is just a battleground in the fight to prevent the world from addressing climate change.  Circling back, to the start, like Pearl Harbor, the US government is being destroyed because it would be an effective power against climate change and fossil fuel production.  Our freedom being destroyed is just collateral damage.

Best wishes to everyone as this eventful 2025 comes to a close.