What the Ukraine War and Pearl Harbor have in common

U.S. presidents have a long-established history of provoking the "first shot"

“Yesterday, Decembuh seventh, nineteen fawty-one, a date which will live in infamy…”

I first heard that speech on television in the 1970s during a special promoting the official myth. You couldn’t pull it up on your phone whenever you wanted as I did just prior to this writing. My father remembered first hearing the news Pearl Harbor had been bombed and either hearing the speech live on radio or shortly after in a movie theater newsreel.

Like most people, no one in my family had any reason to question FDR’s assessment of the attack as “dastardly and unprovoked.”

It was certainly dastardly, but not unprovoked. Nor was its provocation unprecedented. FDR had employed a strategy with a long tradition among American presidential administrations seeking a casus belli while not wanting to appear the aggressor. Roosevelt wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last to execute this strategy.