It doesn’t matter what he knew or when he knew it.

Pearl Harbor: Roosevelt Knew

FDR had promised he would never send American boys to die in Europe.

Never.

Just like Wilson, before him.

Needless to say, Americans were not interested in a vast war effort in the Pacific to put paid to the Japanese, either, merely because they had begun building their empire beyond China – and they had been in China since forever – at the expense of the empires of the British, French, and Dutch.

But JR is perfectly right about “the court historians” – nearly all of them, whether liberal or conservative, after the war and up to this very day – celebrating FDR for dragging the American people, by hook and by crook, into a war – actually, two wars, one each across two oceans – they wanted no part of.

For the liberals it was “the Good War” because it avenged six million of Europe’s Jews and saved the rest, probably saved millions of Slavs from a programmed death, and probably saved millions of other Slavs from racial helotry under the Germans for however long the Third Reich might have lasted had Hitler won.

They are right about that much, I think.

And they are right, I think, in supposing what Hitler would have done to the Slavs is much worse than what Stalin actually did do to them.

The specific plan may well have been a secret, but the aspiration certainly was not, having been presented by Hitler quite frankly in his Mein Kampf.

Generalplan Ost

Blood-curdling.

But I am not aware much of this was actually known to the US by December, 1941.

And all the same, it in no way means we should have joined in the war even if, as I think is plainly contrary to fact, it would have been lost if we had not entered.

And this is all too true.

[T]he myth of the "sneak attack" on Pearl Harbor is a pillar of the "Greatest Generation" narrative that is the foundation of our interventionist foreign policy.

That storyline goes something like this: we "saved" the world from the Axis powers, overcoming our "isolationist" inclinations, and went on to create a "world order" in which we established, forevermore, our duty and destiny to police the four corners of the earth and stand up for Goodness, Justice, and Fair Play.

We have been paying for that myth, ever since.