Has the U.S. ever been blamed for the start of WW2, despite the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, (as the U.S. seems to get the blame for everything anyway?)
Feeling put upon this morning are we?
I am sure somebody somewhere has blamed the U.S. for starting WW2. It’s not the consensus opinion of serious historians or people with common sense, though.
Actually, serious historians generally do not “blame” countries for events.
Well, I don’t see how since many nations were involved in the war long before the United States entered it.
Not blamed for starting it.
Blamed for not stopping it earlier, possibly!
I have seen (right here on this board in some cases) the United States “blamed” for starting the war with Japan; the argument focuses upon the fact that the United States made continued threats of embargoes and actual embargoes against Japan for their actions in China, and that Japan’s attack upon Pearl Harbor was therefore because the United States “forced the Japanese to do it”.
This, of course, is either an extremely patronizing argument, or an extremely bigoted one: it assumes that either the Japanese really had no choice in trying to conquer China and create an empire; and/or that the United States, being generally the cause of all bad things in the world, had no right to try and prevent Japan from being as evil a tyrant and bully as the U.S. was.
Though I don’t believe this… if one wants to stretch things they could make a case.
For example an amateur historian with a grudge against the US (or a piss poor alternate history writer) could use the fact that the US congress did not ratify Wilson’s 14 points or the Treaty of Versailles as cause for the Second World war in Europe. By not backing Wilson and his ideals they allowed France to increase the harsher penalties on Germany setting up for the grudge which would led to the rise of the Nazi party.
It also allowed for England to later see the treaty as too restrictive and too much a punishment by France rather than a sensible Allied reaction to prevent further German agression. So much so, that when it came time to enforce the important restrictions, such as the increase in Germany’s army and the crossing of the Rhine by the army, England was reluctant to stop such violations.
In the Pacific theatre one could argue that US restrictions on Japan going back to Perry’s gunboat diplomacy in the 1850’s forced Japan to become more Militaristic and outward looking nation. To prevent such violations by the Western powers Japan needed a greater sphere of influence and resources. Those included China and the Pacific islands.
With the later US embargoes on Oil they threatened to strangle the Japanese economy and military forcing Japan to proactively defend themselves by a premptive strike on the US Pacific Naval forces.
This, of course is a load of feted dingo kidneys.
The causes for the War are much more complicated and involved than a simple summary. To say any one individual or nation is at fault glosses over the realities of the times.
Well would you say the US has no blame whatesoever for the events leading up to WW2 ? That is certainly a hard claim to make for any country.
Are the British and the Russian also blameless for what happened ? I doubt it. Still I doubt that by denying the Japs petroleum or by helping the failure of the League of Nations the US was asking for war… but like other modern disasters there are always unintended consequences.
Sure, but the problem with “assigning blame” is that what you’re assigning is, in fact, blame- that it was a certain party’s fault for such an event occuring, or that a certain party had some part in the fault for such an event occuring.
I can’t say whether it truly is or not- I’m no expert in ethics or philosophy- but “responsibility” tends to be treated as a zero-sum game. If one can give valid reasons why a certain party deserves “blame”, it takes blame off of the other parties. And even if it isn’t directly zero-sum, it becomes easier to write it off as “well, everyone was at fault” or to compare amounts of evidence poorly and declare moral equivalence.
It’s also a matter of the general condition to interpret “blame” as as “responsibility for awful/unfortunate events”. After all, we don’t blame Clint Eastwood’s direction for getting Million Dollar Baby a Best Picture Oscar; we credit him, or some other benign synonym.
Therefore, it can cause controversy when someone attempts to figure out the roots of a conflict or an event and refers to it as “assigning blame” or “assigning responsiblity”, whether that be World War II, or 9/11, or personal events. Could the events of 9/11 have occurred without eight decades of Britain and the United States playing power politics in the Middle East? Extremely doubtful. Do Britain or America carry some blame for those 3000 who died on 9/11? There’s a loaded question that will send people into paroxyms of fury on both sides of the answer, especially as we either distinguish (or muddy) the differences between the circumstances in which the terrorists found themselves vs. the actual actions of hijacking planes and ramming them into buildings.
Likewise, the Pacific War would not have happened without FDR deciding to stand up to Japan. But to say “the U.S. deserves part of the blame” is a poor sentence. While we all think that war is a bad thing, most of us agree that working to stop the Japanese from conquering East Asia was a good thing. But by using the term “blame”, which implies a “bad thing”, one therefore seems to be saying that “a horrible tragedy of war would have been averted had the U.S. done the right thing.”
Given that Japan was perfectly happy to use war to conquer its neighbors, and that the U.S.'s actions were done in an effort to stop the war that was currently raging, it therefore seems, well, wrong to many listeners to hear that the U.S. deserves “blame” for the war. Even if technically true, the actual meaning conveyed is very different.
An amusing comment coming from a country that contributed nothing to the WWII effort.
In fact Ireland didn’t even recognize that a World War was in progress. They maintained their neutrality and insisted on calling it a State of Emergency, from September 2, 1939 to September 2, 1946. Perhaps we could have ended WWII a little faster if you guys helped out.
Note: Ireland’s behavior in this matter was not out of cowardice. I think they simply hated England so much they refused to join the fray.
Oh yeah. Here’s a cite:
Some poeple have made that argument, but it’s a poor. One japan actually became a pretty successful and peaceful democracy before it fell into militarism. More to the point, the generals running the show weren’t so much concerned with Japanese glory as their own power.
Exactly correct. The Irish were so virulently opposed to the British (and what had the Germans ever done to Eire?) that they refused to allow anyone, even Americans, to use Ireland as a base of air watchers. The Battle of the Atlantic would have gone vastly quicker and safer had there been no hole in the defenses near Ireland.
I don’t blame the Irish for not allowing the British another toe-hold. I would, were I alive then, have been angered by their actions toward the U.S., especially given our bonds of blood.
Well, since the Russian non-aggression pact with Germany gave Hitler a green light to invade Poland, I’d hardly hold them blameless. (They took a bite also, remember.) Chamberlain’s actions at Munich might be assigned some blame.
As for the Pacific, does attempting to stop or reduce aggression by peaceful means make you blameworthy when a war begins? That seems rather debatable.
Apart from 40,000+ men including my Grandfather who volunteered for the British Army.
Oh and you weren’t to know this but although her current locale is Dublin irishgirl is actually from Northern Ireland which as part of the UK was part of the war and was bombed as was Dublin once but this was an apparent error on behalf of the German pilot.
The wiki link is a very good look at that period of history.
Helped put guns into the hands of the men who fought for and won a Republic many of whom where the country’s leaders during the WWII period. Albeit a Germany under a very different leadership at the time.
There’s lots of Polish, French, Dutch and British bonds of blood in the US but you entered the war for your own reasons not theirs. Ireland made political decisions for it’s own reasons as well. It would have been political suicide to join in the war with Britain, the internal ramifications would have been potentially disastrous up to and including a 2nd civil war IMO, our first happened approx. only a decade before and that was sparked off by a argument about an Oath to the King of the Great Britain
Back to the original question; of course the U.S. has been blamed for WW2. The Japanese blamed the U.S. for WW2. I imagine every country who starts a war blames the other country - it is rather unusual in the modern era for countries to use as an excuse for starting a war, “We’re just badasses, and we want to fuck you up.”
Japan complained about U.S./British/Dutch curtailments of Japan’s natural need to expand and take a leadership in Asia and the Pacific. We were cutting them off from their natural destiny, and trying to strangle them as a nation.
Really, a lot of the same blather that you got from Germany; basically, other countries were trying to hold them down, and keep them from their place in the sun (although it was not necessarily phrased that way). The only way the nation could survive, for heaven’s sake, was to slaughter people in response.
Japan remained a functioning democracy during the war. Japan held national elections in 1942 and the incumbent “war party” was generally re-elected.
And we were glad of them, to be fair. Assorted war stuff I’ve read over the last few decades persuades me that the Irish were well thought of as men to have about you in a fight.
The contrasting attitude of Ireland, up to and including the famous letter of condolence on the death of Hitler, still rankles a little, though. But this thread alone does a fair bit to explain what that was all about; and Ireland had not much to fear from the Nazis.
True, but considering that they were the only party running (the parties had been dissolved in 1940 when the “war party” was created), that shouldn’t come as a surprise.
I don’t know about that: Japan had some trappings of a democracy, but I’d hardly call a nation where:
[ul]Non-elected military leaders don’t answer to the civilian (and sometimes military - IIRC Tojo was a general) elected leaders.[/ul]
[ul]Cadres of overzealous junior officers would visit violence upon and sometimes assassinate leaders considered insufficiently militaristic[/ul]
…a “functioning” democracy.
:dubious:
There are bigger problems with calling Japan a democracy at all. The people were not sovereign, and the prime minister was appointed by the Emperor (sometimes the head of the leading party in the Diet was appointed, but that was in a minority of cases). Even without subversion of the government structure by the military, the Diet was not particularly powerful under the Meiji Constitution.