This is Joseph
This tweet needed to be seen to be believed:
I find that World War 2 is a fertile ground for this theory that everything bad comes from the United States. When I was younger there was a huge debate about whether the US knew about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in advance and that this somehow reduced Japanese culpability. Now, pre-knowledge of the attack might have had implications for the leadership being indifferent to casualties instead of setting an ambush, but it is common for intelligence to go astray. Look at the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union:
Stalin also ignored his own spies, who, from such locations as Germany, Japan, Romania and Switzerland, reported with increasing frequency that the Nazis were about to strike. In early 1941, for example, an undercover source in Berlin asserted that “war with Russia has definitely been decided on for this year,” whereas in Bucharest a German commander was quoted describing the upcoming clash as “something that goes without saying.” Border guards heard much the same from captured enemy saboteurs, and railroad workers observed huge numbers of Nazi soldiers moving east. Though not every report proved reliable, Soviet intelligence purportedly named the exact, or almost exact, date of the invasion no fewer than 47 times in the 10 days before “Operation Barbarossa” went into effect.
Now, to be clear, Japan attacked the United States and then Germany declared war on the United States. It is implausible in the extreme that (Read more…)