The More Things Change...

Coronavirus which is dominating the news cycle at the moment is a big deal. I've been poo pooing it for a few weeks now but have been informed in no uncertain terms that's wrong. There's nothing funny about the nearly 3,000 people who have died so far at this writing and the eighty plus thousand individuals around the world we know of who have contracted the disease. That's a lot of people, true a small percentage of all the people in the world, but that percentage surely will go up as so far there are no vaccines to stem the spread of the disease. By all indications it is a tremendously infectious virus whose end is nowhere in sight.

So by all means take every reasonable precaution. As a public service, here is a link to the site of the World Health Organization with some tips on what to do and also what not to help keep yourself and others safe.

Listening to the radio this morning I heard an epidemiologist with some dire warnings sharing much of the same advice you'll find on the WHO website. But he added another important bit of advice.

Don't panic.

It would appear that lots of people are not heeding that advice and are letting fear and ignorance get in the way of rational decision making. A while ago before the outbreak of the disease was made public, I saw a brilliant cartoon that describes much of the current state of the world. In the cartoon, a laboratory beaker with a substance labeled as "ignorance" is heated by a burner labeled as "fear". The resulting condensation of the vapor collected in an adjacent test tube was labelled "hate".

A couple days ago in my own city of Chicago, there was a group of good people who put together a public outing to patronize the restaurants of this city's Chinatown, as despite there not being one report of an infection here, those business saw a dramatic drop in business since news of the outbreak which began in China reached these shores.

I reiterate, Coronavirus is nothing to, pardon the pun, sneeze at. But that reaction in Chicago and elsewhere harkens back to a story my mother was told by the nuns when she was a child in Catholic school in the early forties. The story went something like this:

There was a high school couple who were ice skating on the frozen lagoon in Humboldt Park in Chicago, back in the day before climate change made that impossible. The girl fell on the ice and cut her lip. The boy used his handkerchief to help stop the bleeding. Shortly thereafter the girl contracted syphilis. As these were two good Catholic kids, they certainly could not have been up to any monkey business right? Certainly not. Fortunately for the reputation of the two, it turns out that the handkerchief had recently been laundered at a local Chinese laundry, most certainly the source of the dreaded disease which at the time, was still a few years away from a cure.

Mystery solved.

As absurd as that story is, it left an indelible mark on my mother and her classmates about Chinese people. Remember this was the time when we were sending American citizens of a particular ethnicity to concentration camps because we were at war with their ancestral relatives. And for no reason other than physical resemblance, some Americans had to assure their fellow countrymen that they were of Chinese ancestry not Japanese.

German Americans whose ancestral relatives were also at war us, and folks who merely resembled them did not have the same unfortunate experience.

Clearly there is a long history of bigotry in this nation and recent events have shown that not much has changed.

Now you might say I'm over-reaching, as the two stories are completely un-related. Coronavirus is highly contagious, transmitted through moisture droplets suspended in the air. In other words, you can get it through very casual contact with people while syphilis is only transmitted sexually. Coronavirus originated in China and that is where the majority of its victims live. You might say it only makes sense that limiting one's exposure to Chinese people is simply a matter of sensible risk management.

Fair enough.

But let me add that as of this writing, the country with the third highest total of Coronavirus infections is Italy.

I wonder if pizza restaurants are taking a hit.

75 Years

Today is the seventy fifth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the entry of the United States into World War II.

Here is a recording of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's message to the American people before a joint session of Congress made the following day:

Gives you goose bumps doesn't it? Well it does me anyway.

The war in Europe was already over two years old by the time the US was drawn into the battle. France and the rest of mainland Western Europe had fallen, leaving Britain alone to fight Germany. Then in June, 1941, Hitler reneged on his non-aggression pact with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union. Meanwhile in the Pacific, Germany's ally Japan, whose empire already included Korea, Taiwan and significant portions of China, Indochina and Mongolia, looked to expand further south.

Despite all that, before Pearl Harbor, public sentiment in this country was strongly opposed to entering the war. Roosevelt understood the threat of Hitler and Nazism, and the aggression of Japan, but knew he could not declare war against the Axis powers without the support of the American people and Congress. In order to help the Allied effort as best he could, Roosevelt signed the "Lend-Lease" act, which enabled the United States to send food, oil and supplies to Great Britain, Free France, the Soviet Union and China, in return for their leasing us territories for the use of strategic military bases. In theory, the supplies would be returned after the war. Roosevelt, as a means to sell the still skeptical American public, likened the act to "lending a neighbor your garden hose to put out a fire."

German U-boats attacked and destroyed merchant marine vessels transporting lend-lease supplies across the Atlantic. Roosevelt ordered US war ships to protect those vessels and threatened Germany that any attack on the US Navy would constitute an act of war. A perturbed Hitler, already with a two front war on his hands, was not eager to engage the United States. He ordered his navy to withhold attacking US ships.

For Japan's part, the only thing stopping them from expanding their empire to the Philippines, Indochina in its entirety, Indonesia and beyond, was the U.S., who at the time controlled the Philippines and had significant economic interests in the rest of the region. Roosevelt imposed an oil embargo on Japan after their aggression in French Indochina.

Most likely the attack in response to the embargo on the enormous American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii had been planned at least one year in advance.

As Roosevelt mentioned in his December 8th address, late in 1941 with relations between the two countries at all all time low (up to that point), Japan's ambassador to the US, Kichisaburō Nomura met with US Secretary of State Cordell Hull, attempting to negotiate an end to hostilities between the two nations. Nomura went to his grave claiming he knew nothing of the imminent attack, and his claims were backed up by Hull who insisted that the Japanese ambassador was sincere in his attempts to make peace with the Americans. His bosses in Tokyo were obviously not on the same page.

Conspiracy theories abound that Roosevelt and his generals knew in advance of the attack, but did nothing to stop it in order to rile up American sentiment in favor of going to war. Plausible as it may seem, there is little evidence to back this theory up. Roosevelt's biggest concern at the time was the war in Europe and it's very unlikely that he relished the idea of his own two front war.

Not only is it unlikely that Roosevelt knew about the attack in advance, but apparently neither did Japan's buddy, Adolph Hitler. Rumor has it that when the news of the attack reached Nazi headquarters in Berlin, one of the generals present asked the assembled group where Pearl Harbor was. Nobody knew.

Hitler reportedly said after the attack:

Now we can’t lose the war. We have an ally that has not been defeated in 3,000 years of history!” 

Still he wasn't eager to declare war on the United States. He was on the other hand, eager to engage Japan in his war against the Soviet Union. Japan clearly had a bargaining chip, and demanded that as fulfilling terms of their Tripartite Pact signed with Germany and Italy in September of 1940, Germany and Italy declare war on the United States.

Despite objections from his generals, Hitler did so on December 11, 1941.

Next to invading the Soviet Union, that was his biggest blunder. Allied troops in a combined effort led by U.S. General Dwight David Eisenhower, attacked mainland Europe via the English Channel on June, 6 1944 and began their inexorable push east toward Berlin. Meanwhile the Soviet Army did the same from the east. The Third Reich met its end with the suicide of Adolph Hitler in his bunker on April 30, 1945. Germany unconditionally surrendered seven days later.

Which leads to the obvious question: what would have happened to Europe, and the rest of the world, had Japan not attacked Pearl Harbor?

Only God knows.

I for one, shudder to think about it.