“Those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it.”

Eighty years ago on 7 December 2021, as planned and as a result of efforts of a great many people in multiple nations, the United States of America officially entered World War Two, when the Imperial Japanese Navy launched a massive aerial attack on the United States Navy’s base at Pearl Harbor, Hawai’i. This and other attacks on American, British, and French bases and possessions in Asia and the Pacific signaled the beginning of the Great Pacific War.

It was virtually the last excuse that Franklin Delano Roosevelt needed to join in a great “crusade” against the evil Axis: first and foremost the Dritte Reich: Nazi Germany, and its close ally the Kingdom of Italy under the rule of Mussolini. Two “fascist” (national socialist) regimes and nations. And of course, Japan itself, an imperial power condemned immediately as “fascist” although that was definitely mislabeling the Japanese governmental system and its empire. More disgusting were the three allies of Roosevelt: the British Empire of George the Sixth and Winston Churchill, the French Empire (disguised as a “republic”), and the Soviet Union (an empire disguised as a Communist collection of soviet socialist republics) of Josef Stalin.

Of course, the FedGov had been an unofficial belligerent and ally of the Brits, the French, and even the Soviets for more than 2 years by that time. It just wasn’t American boys (at least not American boys in American uniforms) who were fighting that war before 7 DEC 41.

Even more than the planned entry of the FedGov into the First world war, foreign adventures and lust for control and power in 1941 further removed the United States of America from its foundations, its roots. To the outside observer – and the vast majority of Americans – it seemed to be as stupid (or more so) than American entry into the Great War. But it was all carefully planned to keep most Americans unaware of what was really going on.

But neither stupidity at the time or the lies spread like lime on a mass grave are the subject of this brief commentary. Instead, let us touch on the results of what seemed to be stupidity – and what was most certainly lies.

In less than four years after that attack, the FedGov stood astride a planet which it dominated. Yes, even that of the Soviet Bloc and the Communist-controlled areas of China. But intentionally or not, the opportunity for a global imperium was squandered, almost immediately. In just five years, the opportunity was seemingly lost – the Soviets were firmly entrenched and expanding their power in Europe and had atomics. Their Comintern was growing like weeds. Mao had almost all of China. The Communist monarchy put into power by the Russians in northern Korea invaded the South. And DC was spending billions (trillions in today’s dollars) to prop up Western Europe and the British and French Empires.

But the real benefit was in the Forty-Eight States: the Home Front. The massive expansion of the FedGov started with Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and exploding during FDR’s regime was now virtually permanent as Truman and Democrats (strongly allied, I note, with Republicans) consolidated their gains. And society started rapidly spirally downward as the masses of people were prepared for more and more surrender of their true freedoms to government.

The effects of the fedgov’s damage to society during the 1930s and 1940s, especially on the men and women growing to maturity during those two decades, would not really be known for decades more, and not fully understood for still more decades. Families were offered up on the altar of the State, and the American States (now Fifty of them) were reduced to little more than dependencies of the Central, General Government. The seemingly stupid actions of more than two years of quasi-war and almost four of “official” war paid off: the creation of the Cold War ensured that a fundamental law of war was triggered. That law? The longer you fight an enemy, the more you become like them.

Nearly half a century of Cold War and then – sadly from the point of view of the enemies of liberty – the Soviets collapsed, along with their Eastern European empire. The Chinese were not yet strong enough to provide the enemy for the next phase of the rise of the brave new world so lusted after by the “progressives” and their like. But both World Wars had sown the seeds of another convenient enemy: the bloody death cults of fundamentalist Islam.

Wonderful as our modern age is in so many ways: technology, travel, medical advances, communications, ease of living and more, the distopia in which we live in 2021 is largely a creation of the planned (and unplanned) events of three and a half decades of war and preparations for war, of which Pearl Harbor is an apt reminder.

Again, reminding us of another axiom or law of war: war is the health of the state.