<DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #1010ff 2px solid">
<DIV>Who is it who can't read? I wrote "you're wrong that "Pearl Harbor"</DIV>
<DIV>made WW II in the Pacific anything but an imperialist</DIV>
<DIV>slaughter on both sides. " in reply to your claim that the imperialist</DIV>
<DIV>war was "justified by just war theory" </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>* * * <BR>A point I carefully described as independent of internationalism.</DIV>
<DIV>* * * </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>and that you regarded</DIV>
<DIV>US victory as "preferable."</DIV>
<DIV>* * * </DIV>
<DIV> That from an internationalist point of view, yes. I said (I repeat for the nth time) that liberal democratic imperialism was preferable to Japanese quasi fascism.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>****</DIV>
<DIV> My point was that a deliberately</DIV>
<DIV>provoked attack is no sort of justification and that the two</DIV>
<DIV>imperialist rivals were *equally* engaged in slaughter.</DIV>
<DIV>* * *</DIV>
<DIV>From the point of view of just war theory, provocation mitogates but does not excuse. A reasonable nation is supposed to be able to remain grownup in the face of provocation. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> I also reject your Gore Vidal derived fantasy story about the Day of Infamy being a setup; I love Vidal, but he's not a hiistorian. Charles Beard, whose work on this I do not know, is apparantly out of his deoth; he's also not a military/dipolomatic historian. The consenus of the experts is against you. The idea that Japan did no real damage at PH is absurd.</DIV>
<DIV>* * </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>to</DIV>
<DIV>your claim that "virtually all" socialists supported the</DIV>
<DIV>imperialist slaughter in the Pacific, I can assure you that</DIV>
<DIV>*no* socialist in the tradition of the Third International</DIV>
<DIV>(I exclude Stalinists, of course) supported the war against</DIV>
<DIV>Japan whether or not they supported defense of the</DIV>
<DIV>Stalinized "Soviet Union" against Hitler. </DIV>
<DIV>* * *</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>So who the hell are you talkinga bout? Not Stalinists and not Trotskyists -- wasn't that virtually all socialists at the time? There weren't any (western) Maoists, and if there has been any they surea s hell would have supposed a war against Japan (any help you can get!). </DIV>
<DIV>****</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>I might add that many bourgeois Asian nationalists, from the</DIV>
<DIV>great Subhas Chandra Bose, to the Burmese Thakins, to</DIV>
<DIV>the great Aguinaldo, to many Indonesians, and even to</DIV>
<DIV>such a significant Chinese nationalist as Wang Chin-wei,</DIV>
<DIV>supported Japanese imperialism against its Anglo-French-</DIV>
<DIV>Netherlandic-American imperialist rivals.</DIV>
<DIV>* * * </DIV>
<DIV> Yah, the Japanese got a certain amount of milage out of that "We are Asiatics" line. But I said the Reds didn't buy it. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>jks</DIV></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><p><br><hr size=1>Do you Yahoo!?<br>
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