Monday, December 7, 2015

Thoughts on Pearl Harbor Day.




Seventy four years ago today, the Empire of Japan killed more than 1,000 American servicemen at Pearl Harbor. Over the next 44 months, more than 100,000 Americans were killed in the Pacific theater and several times that number of Japanese died at American hands. We interned thousand of our own innocent citizens because they had Japanese ancestry. They tortured American prisoners of war. We incinerated two of their biggest cities with atomic weapons. And then we stopped butchering one another. But rather than humiliate our defeated enemy, we did something truly remarkable. We waged peace in a way that had never really been tried before. No two nations have ever gone from such brutal warfare to such deep and abiding respect for one another. And the benefits for both have been immeasurable. The seventy years of cultural exchange, economic integration and shared political values that have followed is one of humanity's greatest achievements. That is what we should remember on December 7th.