Published: 9 August 2025 (upd.)
World War II deceptions from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In 1941, Japan and Germany did not seek war with the US, but the US government urgently sought war with Japan and Germany — to prevent being enclosed by emerging Japanese and German empires, and to expand its own empire into Asia and Europe. On December 7, Japan attacked multiple Asia-Pacific territories occupied by the US and UK — even Hawaii became a US state only in 1959 — in response to an Allied oil embargo: the main Japanese goal was to capture Dutch-occupied oil-rich Indonesia. The Japanese attack wasn’t a surprise — the US had already broken the relevant Japanese code —, and FDR privately was pleased the attack finally happened. (1)
The US atomic bombings of Japan in August 1945 did not end the Pacific War — the beginning Soviet invasion of Japanese territory did — and they were not even meant to end the war: they were meant to test this very expensive novel American weapon against an enemy population. Japan had been willing to surrender since spring 1945, but the US prevented a surrender by demanding the abdication and extradition of the Japanese Emperor (seen as a deity by the Japanese of the time). Overall, the US burned down over 60 Japanese cities (including Tokyo in March 1945), killing over half a million Japanese civilians — one of the worst war crimes in modern history. (2)
In the end, the US — whose own government was infiltrated by Communist agents (as revealed by the Venona decrypts) — destroyed the emerging Japanese and German empires but lost all of mainland China as well as half of Korea, Indochina and Europe to Communism. To prevent additional Communist takeovers, the US supported the mass killings of one million citizens in Indonesia, sent Muslim Jihadists into Afghanistan, installed Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran (who was flown in from France), and ran numerous proxy wars and regime changes in Africa and Latin America. The USSR and most of its client states ultimately collapsed, but the 1989 regime change in China failed. (3)
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(1) The Allied oil embargo against Japan was not the only reason for the Japanese attack on Asia-Pacific territories controlled by the US and UK. Britain and the US were already supporting Chinese forces in the ongoing Sino-Japanese war, and in early 1941 Japan learned of a secret US plan to launch a surprise attack against Japan by the end of the year (using the American “Flying Tigers” stationed in China). Given that Japan viewed the Nov. 26 Hull note as an “ultimatum” demanding its capitulation, Japan may have tried to preempt an expected Anglo-American attack by striking first. WWII military intelligence officer Revilo P. Oliver called this “the ultimate secret of Pearl Harbor”.
(2) Officially, Truman nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki to avoid a costly invasion of the Japanese main island, but most US generals believed that neither atomic bombs nor an invasion were required to achieve a Japanese surrender, as the ongoing naval blockade and firebombing of Japanese cities would achieve the same result. The US Strategic Bombing Survey later confirmed this view.
Some historians have proposed that the primary goal of the US atomic bombings was to intimidate the Soviets. However, if this had been the primary goal, a public nuclear test on an uninhabited island would have been sufficient. Thus, intimidation was at most a secondary goal. Truman had already informed Stalin about the first nuclear test during the Potsdam Conference in late July.
(3) The failed 1989 regime change in China gave rise to the Western myth of the “Tiananmen Square massacre” with up to 2,000 deaths; in reality, no massacre took place on Tiananmen Square.
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Articles
- Pearl Harbor: Eighty Years of Lies (CAM, 2021)
- Pearl Harbor: The Facts Behind the Fiction (TNA, 2001)
- The Case for Pearl Harbor Revisionism (Sniegoski, 2004)
- FDR’s Secret Pre-War Plan to Bomb Japan (Weber, 1992)
- The Atomic Bombing and Japan’s Surrender (APJJF, 2021)
- The Atomic Bomb Didn’t End the War (Peter Kuznick, 2016)
- How the US has hidden its empire (Immerwahr, 2019)
Video collections
- Japan in WWII
- Atomic Bomb
- Second World War
- Allied Crimes in WWII
- Cold War (1945-1991)
- American Empire Tales