A Date Which Will Live in Infamy (Even 75 years later) · 1:07am Dec 8th, 2016
Today marks the 75th anniversary of an event that would forever change the world and whose legacy is felt to this day. Since few people talk about it, I'm here to take some time out of my studying towards my final exam tomorrow to discuss the legacy and impact that Pearl Harbor had on the world and how we still feel it.
It was a shocking and tragic day for Americans to learn that over 2400 of their soldiers were killed in a surprise attack by the Imperial Japanese Navy at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii; this was the 9/11 of their time. The country was in panic with fears that Japanese forces were going to invade the mainland United States and may even reach as far as Chicago, coming in from the West Coast, before the US could begin to fight back. Americans were scared and suspicions against Japanese Americans skyrocketed, leading to the atrocities that were the internment camps.
The immediate effect of the attack was that the United States dropped it's non-internationalist policy towards WWII and declared war on Japan, quickly dragging the nation into yet another world war. Since Germany had declared war on the US in retaliation for its declaration of war on Japan, the US became directly involved in the European Theatre as well as the Pacific. This would cause the US to become allies with a country they had uneasy feelings about, the Soviet Union.
As the Allied Forces emerged victorious from the war, their was a serious conflict as to how Europe and the former Japanese colonies should be rebuilt. The Soviet Union wanted communist governments sympathetic to their causes and interests whereas the United States and Great Britain were opposed to such a plan and wanted governments aligned with their interests. This would lead to a Europe divided between communist states with planned economies in the east (except for Greece and Scandinavia) and democracies with market based economies (except for Spain and Portugal which under dictatorships until 1975 and 1974 respectively, they still had market orientated economies, however). This disagreement spread to the former Japanese colonies as well, causing Korea to become divided as it remains today and for interests to conflict with each other when the Chinese Civil War between communist and nationalist forces resumed after the Japanese surrendered.
These tensions would lead to the Cold War. Since Great Britain was damaged considerably in WWII and its resources were severely drained, its empire collapsed after the war and Britain faded away as a superpower. This left the United States, undamaged by the war, as the only superpower to fight against the influence of the Soviet Union, the world's only other superpower. With this burden of responsibility, the US felt the need to be a constant force in global politics and became involved in almost every conflict that arose. The United States would also go on to do some very unethical actions in the way of disposing of governments that they felt conflicted with their interests, this was especially true in Latin America. The Soviet Union would do likewise in Eastern Europe.
Even after the Soviet Union collapsed, ending the Cold War and leaving the US as the world's sole superpower, the United States continues to be heavily involved in most of the global conflicts occurring at any given time. The mentality of the Cold War which was born out of the aftermath of WWII still remains intact to a certain extent in the way the US functions in global politics. Pearl Harbor marked the beginning of a transition from a nation that refused to get involved with foreign affairs to a nation described by many as the 'world's police' due to its involvement in a multitude of global conflicts at any given time.
The Date Which Will Live in Infamy lives to this day.
-Tony Montana
