Another Attempt at Book Banning

ucbalumnus
Wed, 07 Dec 2016 22:48:49 +0000

mathmom:

One of my son’s was asked to read foreign websites about the history of Pearl Harbor before reading their textbook. The textbook completely glossed over the fact that we had been blockading Japan’s ports. There were reasons that the Japanese felt they had to strike at us.

Never heard that one before. And if there were an actual blockade, the Pearl Harbor strike force would not have gotten out of Japan without being detected.

However, it is well documented that the US had embargoed sales of oil to Japan (back then, the US was an oil exporter). Oil was something Japan did not have, so it either needed to buy it from someone or conquer places with oil. Japan wanted to do the latter by conquering Dutch and British colonies (now Indonesia and Malaysia), but did not like the idea of the Philippines (then a US territory) being controlled by an unfriendly power between Japan and the oil fields. So they decided that they “had to” get the first strike against the US since they believed that war with the US was inevitable.