Pearl Harbor Day

Annually remembered is today 1941. Hollywood movie trailers like to say that this-or-that "changed the world... forever." Japan's decisions and actions on that day really did, just not in the way they had hoped for themselves.

I regard this sort of thing as a kind of divine justice. Herodotus gives other examples, such as the oracle of Delphi telling Croesus that if he attacked the Persians, "You will destroy a great empire." Yes, he did: his own. More recently, Hamas' October 7 operations were plainly a kind of prayer -- accompanied with human sacrifice on a large scale -- to bring about a final reconing with Israel. They're getting that now, good and hard.

4 comments:

james said...

Those come-ons: "XYZ changed the world forever" drive me nuts.

I don't doubt that some history writer in Sumer wrote that about a battle in one of their civil wars which is now only documented in a fragment of a stele of disputed translation in the basement of a Baghdad museum.

"Forever" turns out to be a long time.

Grim said...

I agree, it’s an annoyance. It’s both too much and too little. On the one hand, as you say; and on the other, it’s trivial. Every decision changes the future forever because it alters the set of material circumstances out of which future potentialities arise.

E Hines said...

Every decision changes the future forever....

Certainly, but some changes are relatively immediately momentous, and others are butterflies flapping. The latter may have longer-term and deeper changes, while the former draw more immediate attention, but don't necessarily change anything. Still, it's the immediate attention that supports ancilliary industries.

Eric Hines

Anonymous said...

Good and hard with our tax dollars!

And they should pay for their own damn war
..not us, we are bankrupt

Greg