RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/05/misremembering-pearl-harbor/

Most Americans once were mostly in agreement about what happened on December 7, 1941, 80 years ago this year. But not so much now, given either the neglect of America’s past in the schools or woke revisionism at odds with the truth. 

The Pacific war that followed Pearl Harbor was not a result of America egging on the Japanese, not about starting a race war, and not about much other than a confident and cruel Japanese empire falsely assuming that its stronger American rival either would not or could not stop its transoceanic ambitions. 

On an early Sunday morning at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the Japanese Imperial Navy conducted a tactically successful, but strategically imbecilic, surprise attack on the U.S. 7th Fleet—while at peace and without a declaration of war. The assault—synchronized with subsequent bombing and invasions of the Philippines and British-controlled Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and some Pacific Islands—did not just ensure an existential Pacific theater war between Japan and America. It also prompted the entry of the United States on December 11 into the European theater of World War II, after both Italy and Nazi Germany first declared war on America. Had the latter not done so, it is arguable that the United States would have instead concentrated on Japan alone and might have knocked it out of the war even earlier.

Revisionists often cite conspiracy theories that the Roosevelt Administration lured Japan into the war by previously limiting oil exports to Tokyo (a mere five months before Pearl Harbor) or by foolishly moving the 7th Fleet from San Diego to a deliberately exposed and not so well defended Pearl Harbor. 

Such contrarian views fail to persuade because the one-sided source of tensions had been clear to all for a decade. Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931. It resumed its war with China by invading the mainland in 1937. In September 1940, it absorbed French colonial Indochina. The idea of a Japanese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was informally circulating by 1940, as a blueprint of consolidation of the planned Japanese imperial wartime acquisitions of China, and the former British, American, French, and Dutch colonial territories. 

The mercantile system was envisioned as a sort of Asian version of a would-be Napoleonic Europe but based on the supposed racial superiority of Japan and the propagandistic and cynical notion that even harsher Japanese imperialism would be less resented by Asians in the Pacific than then current nation-building colonialism of Western powers. Such crude propaganda was never taken too seriously outside of Tokyo, given the Japanese mass civilian killings of conquered Asians in Nanking, China and the massacres that followed from the takeover of Singapore. 

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/the-law/2021/12/lessons-from-the-totalitarian-past/
It is increasingly clear the principle of legality is no longer regarded as important by some elements of the judicial elite, at least insofar as governments can allege the ’emergencies’ they declare justify the enactment of measures that profoundly affect our fundamental rights and freedoms. There is an unsettling precedent for the law’s endorsement of the unacceptable.

Excerpts

Unfortunately, the Australian legal profession has generally accepted the use of emergency powers by the executive government, thus enabling authorities to issue executive orders that impose heavy fines and imprisonment for non-compliance with certain arbitrary measures. Apparently, even the principle of legality is no longer regarded as important by some elements within the judicial elite, at least insofar as the government can allege that an “emergency” justifies the enactment of measures that profoundly affect the enjoyment of our fundamental rights and freedoms.

When one looks at the German legal profession in the 1930s, leaving aside those who were committed to the Nazi ideology, it becomes apparent that legal positivism played a significant role in the failure of lawyers to stand up against the Nazi atrocities. As noted the late Charles Rice, when the Nazis moved against the Jews, most lawyers who personally opposed the Nazi regime were ‘disarmed’ by legal positivism.[8] This wouldn’t be so if those lawyers had responded to the early Nazi injustices with a sound and principled denunciation rooted in traditional principles of the natural law. However, embedded in the positivist dogma that ‘law is law’ regardless of its substantive nature, many German lawyers became defenceless against laws of arbitrary or criminal content.[9] Because such lawyers ‘argued that the evolution of law should be viewed as following purely positive patterns’, Seitzer and Thornhill explains, ‘they concluded that the validity of law depended on its status as an internally consistent set of rules, and it could not be reconstructed or interpreted on the basis of moral prescriptions’.[10]

However, the vast majority of lawyers in Germany were supportive of Hitler. These lawyers embraced the notion that Germany was an organic unity and the spectacle of a divided parliament was unnatural to them. The principal characteristic of German lawyers, including law professors, was illiberalism.[21] The German legal profession generally welcomed Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor.[22] In October 1933, in their annual convention at Leipzig, 10,000 lawyers raised their right arms in a Nazi salute and swore, ‘by the soul of the German people’, that they would ‘strive to follow the course of our Führer to the end of days’.[23] On that very day the official journal of the Ministry of Justice exhorted the German legal profession to ‘march as an army corps of the Führer’.[24]

The Reich Minister, Hans Frank, was the head of the German Bar Association (1933–42), the Elected President of the International Chamber of Law (1941–42), and also President of the Academy of German Lawyers. Frank
believed that ‘the basis for the interpretation of all legal sources is the National Socialist ideology that is particularly manifested in the party program and the Führer’s statements’.

https://bit.ly/3cHZFOl

Jewish national liberation holiday.  Chanukah (evening of November 28 – December 6, 2021) is the only Jewish holiday that commemorates an ancient national liberation struggle in the Land of Israel, unlike the national liberation holidays, Passover, Sukkot/Tabernacles and Shavu’ot/Pentecost, which commemorate the Exodus from slavery in Egypt to liberation in the land of Israel, and unlike Purim, which commemorates liberation from a Persian attempt to annihilate the Jewish people.   

Historical context  Chanukah is narrated in the four Books of the Maccabees, The Scroll of Antiochus and The Wars of the Jews.

In 323 BCE, the Greek Empire was split into three independent and rival mini-empires (Greece-Seleucid/Syria-Ptolemaic/Egypt), following the death of Alexander the Great (Alexander III) who held Judaism in high esteem.

In 175 BCE, the Seleucid/Syrian Emperor Antiochus (IV) Epiphanes claimed the Land of Israel, and suspected that the Jews were allies of his Ptolemaic/Egyptian enemy.  The Seleucid emperor was known for eccentric behavior, hence his name, Epiphanes, which means “divine manifestation.”  He aimed to exterminate Judaism and convert Jews to Hellenism. In 169 BCE, he devastated Jerusalem, attempted to massacre the Jewish population, and outlawed the practice of Judaism.

In 166/7 BCE, a Jewish rebellion was led by members of the non-establishment Hasmonean (Maccabee) family – from the rural town of Modi’in, half way between Jerusalem and the Mediterranean – headed by Mattityahu, the priest, and his five sons, Yochanan, Judah, Shimon, Yonatan and Eleazar. They fought the Seleucid occupier and established Jewish independence.  The Hasmonean dynasty was replete with external and internal wars and lasted until 37 BCE, when Herod the Great (a proxy of Rome) defeated Antigonus II Mattathias.    

The success of the Maccabees on the battlefield was consistent with the reputation of Jews as superb warriors, who were frequently hired as mercenaries by Egypt, Syria, Carthage, Rome and other global and regional powers.

When ordered by Emperor Antiochus IV Epiphanes of the Seleucid region to end the Jewish “occupation” of Jerusalem, Jaffa, Gaza, Gezer and Akron, Shimon the Maccabee responded: “We have not occupied a foreign land…. We have liberated the land of our forefathers from foreign occupation (Book of Maccabees A: 15:33).”

Chanukah and the Land of Israel.  Chanukah highlights the centrality of the Land of Israel in the formation of Jewish history, religion and culture. The mountain ridges of Judea and Southern Samaria (the West Bank) were the platform for the Maccabean military battles: Mitzpah (the burial site of the Prophet Samuel, overlooking Jerusalem), Beth El (the site of the Ark of the Covenant and Judah the Maccabee’s initial headquarters), Beth Horon (Judah’s victory over Seron), Hadashah (Judah’s victory over Nicanor), Beth Zur (Judah’s victory over Lysias), Ma’aleh Levona (Judah’s victory over Apolonius), Adora’yim (a Maccabean fortress), Eleazar (named after Mattityahu’s youngest Maccabee son), Beit Zachariya (Judah’s first defeat), Ba’al Hatzor (where Judah was defeated and killed), Te’qoah, Mikhmash and Gophnah (bases of Shimon and Yonatan), the Judean Desert, etc.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/hanukkah-celebrates-victory-in-struggle-to-maintain-judaism-opinion-686901

At the end of the Second Temple period, Jews struggled against the influence of Hellenism and the cultures and armies of Greece and Rome. They struggled to maintain Judaism and Jewish values and to preserve their independence as a nation-state in Eretz Yisrael – the Land of Israel. Their struggle was not only against external enemies but also internal divisions in a society divided among religious and political factions. They had a Temple, the focus of religious inspiration – at least for many – wise rabbinic authorities, a thriving economy and a powerful army. What happened?

As noted in the ArtScroll book, Chanukah: Its History, Observance, And Significance, “the famous ‘miracle of the lights,’ when a one-day supply of pure olive oil burned for eight days, took place three years after the beginning of the Hasmonean revolt. That is the only miracle that the Talmud (Shabbat 21b) mentions in its brief description of the Hanukkah events. The Al HaNissim liturgy, however, which recounts the festival’s origin and which is inserted into the Hanukkah prayers, tells a different story. There, the eight-day miracle of the oil is not even mentioned. There, the emphasis is on the miracles of the military triumph.”

Rabbi Dr. Shubert Spero, in his book Holocaust and Return to Zion, writes that Hanukkah is “about the condition of basic unity and fraternity of Jewish society during the first century CE. The rabbis were referring to the disintegration of the Jewish people in Judea into a cluster of warring and bickering sects, of which Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots and New Christians were only the major ones.

“These religious and political divisions were the background for the unjustified hatred that destroyed the national unity of the Jewish people. There no longer was a common purpose or a felt mutual responsibility to support a national Jewish polity. This was the underlying cause of the disaster.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17951/slavery

The “1619 Project” literature is characteristic of today’s neo-racist movement, which reduces the West to slavery and slavery to the West. In this nursery rhyme, everyone born with white skin is wrong, if not satanic.

The Republic of Venice (697-1797 AD) made a specialty of transporting shiploads of white slaves from Northern and Eastern Europe to Constantinople and from the Black Sea to North Africa.

The origins of slavery are white. It is just a timely reminder that slavery is an integral part of human history components and that the practice of slavery is not the prerogative of any particular group. “Slavery”, as Paul Louis reminds us, “is one of the few features that were common to all civilisations”.

Slavery is not a moral choice, it is a financial one. Large US companies and pension funds rush to invest in China despite its reported use of Uyghurs there as slaves.

Regrettably, there was no movement in the Muslim world comparable to Western abolitionism. The West, led by a fiercely abolitionist British state, was the one stopping and then breaking the millennia-old and perfectly-oiled slavery mechanism of the Arab-Turkish-Muslim world.

In short, there is nothing specifically Western about slavery; but everything specifically Western about abolitionism.

In August 2019, The New York Times initiated The 1619 Project, consisting of a collection of articles designed to illustrate that slavery was “one primary reason the colonists fought the American Revolution”. This project is directed by Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times staff reporter who is not a historian but an avowed “critical race theory” activist. [2]