Pearl Harbour Day

[mickeyobe]

What's going on Yanks?

Today is the anniversary of the cowardly attack on Pearl Harbour, a tragic but major event in American history.

Yet nary a mention of it.

Surely you have not forgotten?

Mickey

[Randy]

I think everyone is preoccupied with surviving this economy right now. Nobody I know has a job.

[Deleted]

The sad thing is that there are young people in our country with so bad a grasp of history that if they even know about the attack, they think Hawaii was bombed by the Germans!

It's not politically correct today to claim that when we do not learn from historical mistakes we will repeat them. Those of us who have been around for awhile are still having problems with the idea that all the world's problems can be solved by everyong hugging.

But I digress.

Wayne

[drako]

Mickey,

It's not *exactly* forgotten ... my operations manager mentioned it today. She's 41, for what it's worth. But you know, I think the world is moving so fast now that all of 70 years ago now feels like ancient history to many Americans. One author wrote that anything pre-Kennedy -- when television was still black-and-white, feels like a whole other time, one to which we have little specific connection.

Sad but, I fear, with a ring of truth.

[herron]

It isn't forgotten. But, as Wayne and Drako said, it seems like ancient history to many people younger than the Kennedy era. Hell, even the whole Kennedy assasination seems ancient to a thirty-something these days!

I was thinking about it (Pearl Harbor) more than usual this year, because it was the act that drew my father into WWII ... and he just passed away this summer.

[mickeyobe]

George Santayana:

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Mickey

[photax]

In my opinion, everyone has a different point of view about when history starts. I think this will depend on the fact, if you have experienced that time. My parents told me, that I have watched the moon-landing on television. But i can not remember, I was about 4 years old, so this event became ( black and white ) history to me. In 1989, as the iron curtain fell, i watched hundreds of east german cars passing by in the night on the freeway from Hungary to Vienna. For my kids this is abstract ancient history, for me this incidence became a memory, and I became part of history .The kids here in Austria are not very well versed in the history of the second world war, because they have not learned much details about it in school. I guess, the only thing they know about Pearl Harbor is the 2001 Hollywood action-movie and the actors.
Showing them old pictures and explaining, how the own family was involved that time, will keep the history alive, and hopefully prevent them from repeating such fatal political errors.
A relative of mine, who was Austrias federal president in 1938, refused to sign the german occupation agreement and was arrested for this purpose. Fortunately he survived the WWII being under house detention. I still admire this man for that act.

MIK

[pompiere]

When I was in the Navy in the early 1980's, I was at Pearl Harbor during a naval exercise with several other Pacific Rim nations. It was ironic to see the Japanese ships tied up across from the USS Arizona memorial.

[Deleted]

MIK

You have a right to be proud of your relative. It took a very brave person to stand up to the agressors in those days.

For me, as an individual "modern" history began with World War II (I was born as it was ending. But as an editor of book on the history of the Western U.S. "modern" history dates back to at least the beginning of the 20th century. And I have read so much about the settlement of the West that even events in the 1840s seem fairly modern.

Wayne

[nikonbob]

Things change so fast these days and people are dazzled by the latest and greatest that they give little thought to history. A situation that is not helped in most countries by education systems that seem to relegate history and geography to the status of also ran subjects. If you don't know where you came from it is pretty hard to get a grip on where you might be going to.

Bob

[mickeyobe]

Dec 8, 2009 6:06:07 GMT -5 photax said:

In my opinion, everyone has a different point of view about when history starts.
MIK

History started when mankind began to tell stories about what happened yesterday and recorded history started when he began to make charcoal drawings on cave walls.

That too many people choose to ignore what has gone on before out of shame or guilt or embarrassment does not alter their history one iota.

If it happened and was recorded either orally or in writing or pictures it is historical fact and can not be truthfully altered, denigrated nor improved.
It may look differently from different perspectives but it happened. It is history.

Mickey

[SidW]

We were in Honolulu first week of December 15 years ago and were moved by the veterans parading on the 6th. Then a few years later there was an item on the telly news here, the last veteran parade at Pearl Harbor, there were so few now and it was getting harder to make the trip.

Right now I'm trying to research my grandfather's participation in the Boer War (or Great South African war, depending on who you are). The Burgher who put a bullet through grandfather's foot and into the horse he was riding knew what he was doing and why. I'm not sure my grandfather knew what or why, although he probably thought he did while the bands were playing and the flags were waving when he volunteered.

The East Kent regiment has a memorial book in the cathedral at Canterbury (Kent, UK), and every morning a soldier goes in and turns a page. The page that comes up might be something recent, or South Africa in 1900, or sometime else. Or at least they used to do it, maybe they still do. I hear they've been amalgamated with the West Kent regiment, and I don't know where they're based now.

Nothing's for ever. I read that memorials have turned up on rubbish dumps because bulldozer drivers didn't know what they were when they cleared some urban district for redevelopment.

Nothing's for ever, ever, but there's always a dwindling number who wonder why.

[John Parry]

Well done to your relative Mik. Not easy to hold out for an ideal when people around you are urging you to take the easy way out.

History depends who's writing it and their background. We can't understand the mindset of people who committed such a perfidious act as the attack on Pearl Harbour, but they thought it was a good strategic move. Much has been made of the fact that "they didn't get the carriers", but to be honest I don't think it would have made much difference. Once you've woken a sleeping tiger....

Sid - Just been reading a book that covered the Boer War period. When they asked for volunteers, 12,000 tried to join up from Manchester and Salford alone. 8,000 of them were rejected as unfit for duty. Until then they didn't realise there was anything wrong with people living in slums!

Regards - John

[drako]

A hopeful speculation: With multi-media technology becoming more immersive all the time, perhaps -- just perhaps -- there will come a day when all of us can truly experience war firsthand. Technology is moving so quickly it may be that the "war experience for everyone" may be just a few years away. If this is the case (again, perhaps) we will have a lot more pacifists inhabiting our small globe.

I'm an optimist.