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Just Another Essay



Reflections on Pearl Harbor Day

Essay Posted December 11, 2007 by James E. Nelson

Friday, Dec. 7, was the anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. We all know it as “a day of infamy,” but beyond the tragedy of the day itself, it was a transitional moment in U.S. history. As I read about attitudes and perceptions before and after that event, it was truly one of those days when the world changed for Americans. The United States had generally been isolated from world events by two oceans. We had the luxury of observing the passage of history from the safety of North America.

That sense of natural invulnerability shaped our politics and foreign policy It also shaped our sense of national identity. We seemed to have no natural enemies, and we were the place to which the displaced people of the world came. Rather than a target, we were a refuge. This sensibility is no doubt why Pearl Harbor was such a huge military blunder. We knew those planes were coming (we could see it on our radar), and we knew of the Japanese naval movement in the weeks prior to Dec. 7. But our military intelligence failed to interpret the facts correctly because the potential of an attack on America itself was simply unimaginable.

But let’s return to Pearl Harbor Day as a transitional moment. Prior to WWII, the United States was an agrarian/industrial society. The natural thing would have been to return to that life after the war. But WWII ushered in a perception of a new and ongoing threat, so after the war, the military industry did not shut down. Almost imperceptibly at first, America was being transformed. Increasingly the military industry was competing with agriculture, steel, and auto industries as the driver of the American economy. By the time of the Cuban missile crisis, America was ready to instantly respond to a foreign presence at our shores.

From the perspective of the 1960s and beyond, Pearl Harbor had become a world-changing event. Even though Hawaii was a long way from home, the fact that the Japanese had the ability to attack us and win on our home soil was a shock that fundamentally changed our society. Given the new sensibility about how the world worked, it was inevitable that we would become a militarized society. In a world where our enemies could quickly reach us, it was necessary for our formerly safe homeland to become militarized in order to protect us from attack.

Something very similar to Pearl Harbor happened in Sep. 2001. The World Trade Center attack, like Pearl Harbor, was an intelligence disaster that is almost unimaginable in its scope. There had been several pre-cursors to the attacks (Mogadishu, the USS Cole, the prior bombing at the World Trade Center), but nobody had grasped that the world had changed, so the American intelligence community didn't know how to interpret the information they had. (And both the CIA and FBI had a lot of intelligence.) That something of this magnitude was going to happen was every bit as clear as blips on the military radar screen in the early hours of Dec. 7, 1941. But in 2001, as it was sixty years earlier, no one could quite imagine that the blips on the screen were accurate. As a result just three months shy of the sixtieth anniversary of one of the greatest intelligence disasters in American military history, history repeated itself . . . with a vengeance.

And as the years have gone by, it is becoming clear that once again America is changing permanently in the face of the new perceptions. Our enemies have changed. Conventional war has been transformed into guerilla warfare. The traditional battlefield is gone, and in its place we are faced with the new urban warfare where combatants live and work amongst civilians. And in this new order of war, New York, Chicago, and Omaha are nearly as convenient places to do battle as Kirkuk, Kabul, and Baghdad.

In the face of this new perception America has moved beyond just being militarized. We are now securitized.

In the original order (before the world wars), the military was called up when necessary, before and after the immediate threat they mostly disappeared back into civilian life. In the old order (after WWII) the military was always among us, but the civilians were mostly left alone. Now in the new order, the new enemy is no longer formal military, they are essentially civilians who are trained to perform certain guerilla tactics. So, in turn, in the new order, all citizens have been called into duty.

In the old order it was understood that military personnel lost a measure of liberty and freedom. Having someone else control your life was part of the price of military life. In the new order, this same loss of liberty and freedom is imposed on all citizens and residents. We are not free to travel about as we wish. (We now—or will in Feb. 2008—have to have prior approval of Homeland Security before we fly, and eventually before we travel on a train or bus.) We are subjected to search (whether it's our bags at the airport, or our phone conversations in a secret wiretap). We are encouraged and expected to report our neighbors if they are involved in suspicious activity. It’s all our “patriotic” duty, our part in the process of ferreting out combatants in our midst.

The purpose of this essay is not to rail against this new order. It’s rather to recognize it for what it is. For those of us who are too young to remember the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the only way we can appreciate what happened on that morning and in the following years, is to put it into the context of a similar event, such as 9/11.

Such events are both personal and societal. We mourn the individuals who lose their lives or were injured on that day. But on a larger scale, we can take pride in the people who responded so heroically. But those feelings of pride are tempered by the changes such events bring about in society. It is a strange mix of pride and sorrow, patriotism and protest, shock and a commitment to a new diligence so that such disasters can be avoided in the future.

The generation that lived through WWII is quickly disappearing and when they are gone, the commemoration of Pearl Harbor Day will be different because the link between the event and us who are still living will be lost. We will then mark it as another significant moment in history but with no real access to the pathos of the event itself. The searing pain of history eventually becomes another heading in our children's history books. But even as the distance of time changes the old events from memories to history, just as certainly new atrocities and offenses occur for us to suffer, respond to, and remember. For American society as a whole, Pearl Harbor is now beyond a memory while the anniversary of 9/11 continues to bring about a visceral response.

Again, the manner of our commemoration of Pearl Harbor Day provides an apt illustration of what I’m talking about. Each successive year, Pearl Harbor Day is increasingly about a generation who is quickly passing and less about the event itself.

But if, perchance, we can remember that the world never stays the same, possibly, sixty years from now, another intelligence disaster of unimaginable scope can be avoided. But it’s doubtful, because the world is always changing and we humans always seem to be a step or two behind. So it is much more likely that in the summer of 2061 (or some such time) we will again have reason to be proud and sorrowful, conflicted with patriotism and protest, struggling between shock and a commitment to a new diligence to avoid our past mistakes. After all, it seems that this is how our world goes round.