How Pearl Harbor Day Threatens Venezuela
David Swanson / World BEYOND War

(December 1, 2025) — Trump is openly threatening war on Venezuela in blatant violation of the United Nations Charter, and has already for nearly three months been openly murdering everyone aboard numerous boats — a crime whether it’s murder or whether it’s war.

The utter absence of the most basic morality from U.S. journalism is to be found in the worries over whether these murders are war, whether the possible war is approved by Congress, and whether a double-tap murder of two out of eleven people who survived a first strike on a boat is especially illegal.

The most successful U.S. war propaganda has always involved some claim of a threat or attack from the desired enemy. But sometimes the U.S. government launches wars without bothering with that, relying instead on the lingering mythologies surrounding the very most successful story it has ever told, that of Pearl Harbor.

The notion that international law only applies to others and that Congress could therefore legalize or criminalize a war, the notion that Venezuela is not a separate nation but simply part of the territory of the Southern Command, and the idea that immigration or drug dealing could transform aggression into defense: these all find their roots in the sacred scripture of Pearl Harbor.

Stephen Dedalus believed the cracked looking-glass of a servant made a good symbol of Ireland. If you had to name a symbol of the United States, what would it be? The Statue of Liberty? Men in underwear on crosses in front of McDonald’s? I think it would be this: the oil leaking from the battleship in Pearl Harbor.

This ship, The Arizona, one of two still leaking oil in Pearl Harbor, is left there as war propaganda, as proof that the world’s top weapons dealer, top base builder, top military spender, and top warmaker is an innocent victim. And the oil is allowed to go on leaking for the same reason. It’s evidence of the evil of U.S. enemies, even if the enemies keep changing. People shed tears and feel flags waving in their stomachs at the beautiful sight of the oil, allowed to go on polluting the Pacific Ocean as evidence of how seriously and solemnly we take our war propaganda. That war is a major way in which we destroy the habitability of the planet may or may not be lost on pilgrims to the site. Here’s a tourism website on how to visit the sacred oil leak:

“It’s easily one of the most sacred places in the US. . . . Think of it this way: you are seeing oil that may have been refilled the day before the attack and there is just something surreal about that experience. It’s also hard not to feel the symbolism from the glistening black tears when standing quietly on the memorial — it’s as if the ship is still mourning from the attack.”

“People talk about how beautiful it is to see the oil glisten on the top of the water and how it reminds them of the lives lost,” says another website.

“People call it the ‘black tears of the Arizona.’ You can see oil rise to the surface, making rainbows on the water. You can even smell the stuff. At the current rate, oil will go on trickling out of the Arizona for another 500 years, if the ship doesn’t totally disintegrate before that.” —another report.

If you live near Pearl Harbor, there’s delicious U.S. Navy jet fuel in your drinking water. It doesn’t come from the battleships, but it does suggest that perhaps polluting water is viewed as a desirable end in itself by the U.S. military, or at least that human health is of little interest.

Some of the same people who have been warning about that particular jet fuel threat for a long time have also been warning about the vastly larger deadly threat posed by the stories that people tell each other on Pearl Harbor Day and when visiting the shrine of the black tears of war consecration.

If you live near a television or a computer, anywhere on Earth, you’re at risk.

One of the holiest days of the year is fast approaching. Are you ready for December 7th? Will you remember the true meaning of Pearl Harbor Day?

The U.S. government planned, prepared for, and provoked a war with Japan for years, and was in many ways at war already, waiting for Japan to fire the first shot, when Japan attacked the Philippines and Pearl Harbor. What gets lost in the questions of exactly who knew what when in the days before those attacks, and what combination of incompetence and cynicism allowed them to happen, is the fact that major steps had indisputably been taken toward war but none had been taken toward peace. And simple easy steps to make peace were possible.

The Asia pivot of the Obama-Trump-Biden-Trump era had a precedent in the years leading up to WWII, as the United States and Japan built up their military presence in the Pacific. The United States was aiding China in the war against Japan and blockading Japan to deprive it of critical resources prior to Japan’s attack on U.S. troops and imperial territories. The militarism of the United States does not free Japan of responsibility for its own militarism, or vice versa, but the myth of the innocent bystander shockingly assaulted out of the blue is no more real than the myth of the war to save the Jews.

Prior to Pearl Harbor, the U.S. created the draft, and saw major draft resistance, and locked draft resisters up in prisons where they immediately began nonviolent campaigns to desegregate them — developing leaders, organizations, and tactics that would later become the Civil Rights Movement, a movement born before Pearl Harbor.

When I ask people to justify WWII, they always say “Hitler,” but if the European war was so easily justifiable, why shouldn’t the United States have joined it earlier? Why was the U.S. public so overwhelmingly against U.S. entry into the war until after December 7, 1941? Why does a war with Germany that supposedly should have been entered have to be depicted as a defensive battle through the convoluted logic that Japan fired the first shot, thereby (somehow) making the (mythical) crusade to end the Holocaust in Europe a question of self-defense? Germany declared war on the United States, hoping that Japan would assist Germany in the struggle against the Soviet Union. But Germany did not attack the United States.

Winston Churchill wanted the United States to enter WWII, just as he had wanted the United States to enter WWI. The Lusitania was attacked by Germany without warning, during WWI, we’re told in U.S. text books, despite Germany literally having published warnings in New York newspapers and newspapers around the United States. These warnings were printed right next to ads for sailing on the Lusitania and were signed by the German embassy. [i] Newspapers wrote articles about the warnings. The Cunard company was asked about the warnings. The former captain of the Lusitania had already quit — reportedly due to the stress of sailing through what Germany had publicly declared a war zone. Meanwhile Winston Churchill wrote to the President of Britain’s Board of Trade, “It is most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores in the hope especially of embroiling the United States with Germany.” [ii] It was under his command that the usual British military protection was not provided to the Lusitania, despite Cunard having stated that it was counting on that protection. That the Lusitania was carrying weapons and troops to aid the British in the war against Germany was asserted by Germany and by other observers, and was true. Sinking the Lusitania was a horrible act of mass-murder, but it wasn’t a surprise assault by evil against pure goodness.

 

The 1930s

In September of 1932, Colonel Jack Jouett, a veteran U.S. pilot, began teaching 80 cadets at a new military flying school in China. [iii] Already, war was in the air. On January 17, 1934, Eleanor Roosevelt made a speech: “Any one who thinks, must think of the next war as suicide. How deadly stupid we are that we can study history and live through what we live through, and complacently allow the same causes to put us through the same thing again.” [iv] When President Franklin Roosevelt visited Pearl Harbor on July 28, 1934, General Kunishiga Tanaka wrote in the Japan Advertiser, objecting to the build-up of the U.S. fleet and the creation of additional bases in Alaska and the Aleutian Islands: “Such insolent behavior makes us most suspicious. It makes us think a major disturbance is purposely being encouraged in the Pacific. This is greatly regretted.” [v]

In October 1934, George Seldes wrote in Harper’s Magazine: “It is an axiom that nations do not arm for war but for a war.” Seldes asked an official at the Navy League:
“Do you accept the naval axiom that you prepare to fight a specific navy?”
The man replied “Yes.”
“Do you contemplate a fight with the British navy?”
“Absolutely, no.”
“Do you contemplate war with Japan?”
“Yes.” [vi]

In 1935 Smedley Butler, two years after foiling a coup against Roosevelt, and four years after being court martialed for recounting an incident in which Benito Mussolini ran over a girl with his car [vii], published to enormous success a short book called War Is a Racket. [viii] He wrote:

“At each session of Congress the question of further naval appropriations comes up. The swivel-chair admirals don’t shout that ‘We need lots of battleships to war on this nation or that nation.’ Oh, no. First of all, they let it be known that America is menaced by a great naval power.
“Almost any day, these admirals will tell you, the great fleet of this supposed enemy will strike suddenly and annihilate our 125,000,000 people. Just like that. Then they begin to cry for a larger navy. For what? To fight the enemy? Oh my, no. Oh, no. For defense purposes only. Then, incidentally, they announce maneuvers in the Pacific. For defense. Uh, huh.

“The Pacific is a great big ocean. We have a tremendous coastline in the Pacific. Will the maneuvers be off the coast, two or three hundred miles? Oh, no. The maneuvers will be two thousand, yes, perhaps even thirty-five hundred miles, off the coast.
“The Japanese, a proud people, of course will be pleased beyond expression to see the United States fleet so close to Nippon’s shores. Even as pleased as would be the residents of California were they to dimly discern, through the morning mist, the Japanese fleet playing at war games off Los Angeles.”

In March 1935, Roosevelt bestowed Wake Island on the U.S. Navy and gave Pan Am Airways a permit to build runways on Wake Island, Midway Island, and Guam. Japanese military commanders announced that they were disturbed and viewed these runways as a threat. So did peace activists in the United States.

By the next month, Roosevelt had planned war games and maneuvers near the Aleutian Islands and Midway Island. By the following month, peace activists were marching in New York advocating friendship with Japan. Norman Thomas wrote in 1935: “The Man from Mars who saw how men suffered in the last war and how frantically they are preparing for the next war, which they know will be worse, would come to the conclusion that he was looking at the denizens of a lunatic asylum.”

On May 18, 1935, ten thousand marched up Fifth Avenue in New York with posters and signs opposing the build-up to war with Japan. Similar scenes were repeated numerous times in this period. [ix] People made the case for peace, while the government armed for war, built bases for war, rehearsed for war in the Pacific, and practiced blackouts and sheltering from air raids to prepare people for war.

The U.S. Navy developed its plans for a war on Japan. The March 8, 1939, version of these plans described “an offensive war of long duration” that would destroy the military and disrupt the economic life of Japan.

The U.S. military even planned for a Japanese attack on Hawaii, which it thought might begin with conquering the island of Ni’ihau, from which flights would take off to assault the other islands. U.S. Army Air Corp. Lt. Col. Gerald Brant approached the Robinson family, which owned Ni’ihau and still does. He asked them to plow furrows across the island in a grid, to render it useless for airplanes.

Between 1933 and 1937, three Ni’ihau men cut the furrows with plows pulled by mules or draft horses. As it turned out, the Japanese had no plans to use Ni’ihau, but when a Japanese plane that had just been part of the attack on Pearl Harbor had to make an emergency landing, it landed on Ni’ihau despite all the efforts of the mules and horses.

On July 21, 1936, all the newspapers in Tokyo had the same headline: the U.S. government was loaning China 100 million yuan with which to buy U.S. weapons. [x]On August 5, 1937, the Japanese government announced that it was disturbed that 182 U.S. airmen, each accompanied by two mechanics, would be flying airplanes in China. [xi]

Some U.S. and Japanese officials, as well as many peace activists, worked for peace and friendship during these years, pushing back against the buildup toward war. Some examples are at this link.

Read the entire article online at World BEYOND War.