Just Imagine

Eighty-four years ago today, Japanese forces came out of nowhere to attack the United States at Pearl Harbor and other bases on Oahu, Hawaii. (They also struck American forces in the Philippines on that day.) It was, as Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “a day that will live in infamy.” The cost was horrendous. Four U.S. battleships were sunk, four more were damaged. Three cruisers and three destroyers were damaged, and more than 2,300 American sailors, soldiers and Marines were killed, along with 68 civilians who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Hardly anyone viewing the smoking hulks and destroyed shore facilities and flying fields left after the attackers departed would have believed that within six months the tide of the war in the Pacific would have turned and that the Empire of Japan would be on its way to utter ruin. Yet that was what happened, as the United States assembled the mightiest force ever, supported by economic and industrial development that dwarfed anything the world had known. One example: In 1940, FDR said the United States would build 50,000 aircraft. People in the know said he was crazy. And they were right. In 1944 alone, the United States produced more than 50,000 airplanes. (Of the battleships sunk and damaged at Pearl Harbor, all but two would be refloated, repaired and returned to duty.)

Now, imagine that the 1940 election had turned out differently. Imagine, if you can, that instead of Franklin Roosevelt being re-elected to an unprecedented third term, Americans had elected Donald Trump. (I know it is difficult.)

For one thing, in the 11 months leading up to Pearl Harbor, the United States would not have been the “Arsenal of Democracy” that FDR proclaimed her to be. The Lend-Lease program, which provided immense amounts of aid to those fighting fascism, would never have been. The act establishing Lend-Lease was signed on March 11, 1941, and Trump would never have approved such generosity, even if it was self-interested as it plainly was. The rearmament program that Roosevelt had begun tentatively in 1940 would have been starved or diverted to profit the First Crime Family.

Having overrun most of western Europe in 1940, in the spring of 1941 Hitler turned south, invading Yugoslavia in May, followed by Greece. All of that was prologue to his attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. During the ensuing six months, German forces ran rampant across White Russia (now Byelorussia), Ukraine and western Russia. Indeed, although it was not recognized at the time, the Germans got their closest to Moscow on December 4th, three days before Pearl Harbor.

Would Trump have stood with Britain and her dominions (virtually the only organized forces fighting Hitler in the first half of 1941), as Roosevelt did? Would he have given aid and comfort to the Free French and the governments-in-exile established for most of the countries the Nazis had overrun? Not likely. This is the man, after all, who said there were “some very fine people on both sides,” after a Neo-Nazi rally that led to death of a protester. In the context of the time, he would much more likely have advocated the isolationism that led Sen. Burton K. Wheeler to proclaim that war would mean plowing under every fourth American boy, which FDR rightly labeled rotten and dastardly. Rather than calling on the world to resist Hitler, Trump would likely have explored an alliance with the Nazis and Italian fascists against the Communists of the USSR.

As I have noted before, the first meeting of ANTIFA (more familiarly known as the Atlantic Charter) took place on August 14, 1941. With Trump in the White House, the chances of something like that would have been miniscule. Much more likely, Trump would have looked for a way to sell out Britain. Indeed, it should be no surprise that Russia has applauded Trump’s new “national (in)security strategy,” best described as Trump to Europe: Drop Dead. (For etymology, see this.)

All of this is a very long-winded say of saying what we have heard so many times in the past twelve months: Elections have consequences. The consequences we see today, and a comparison of what history could have been like, urge us to ever more vigorous efforts to deprive Trump and his co-conspirators of the power to harm us, and the rest of the world. We all should ask ourselves what more we can do and then go out and do it. We owe it to those who were at Pearl Harbor 84 years ago today.

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