One of the internet's immediate downsides is that it tends to democratize knowledge in a way out of whack with the facts, leading to equal time devoted to those speaking with the pretense of authority without any credentials. Anyone who's Googled the structural engineering of the World Trade Center in the past few years has encountered this phenomenon, probably to his or her frustration.
For every voice from MIT or Cal Tech, there are dozens of websites quoting each others' quoting of someone convinced that 9/11 was an "inside job" because of some fact-that-isn't about metal stress and a funny way of collapsing. Any facts missing from the narrative are merely more proof that the conspiracy exists: the only reason they're not there is because someone removed them.
Three days from now, 68 years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a glance around the internet will reveal speculations that are the grandaddy of the "9/11 was an inside job" theory: that president Roosevelt deliberately covered up foreknowledge of the Japanese attack to bring about American involvement in the Second World War. That's a pity for several reasons, not the least of which is that fascination with that theory will likely lead people away from
At Dawn We Slept, still probably the best book on the subject.
Published 28 years ago, Dawn represents the life's work of historian Gordon Prange, who over the course of 37 years collected over 10,000 documents, interviewed dozens of American and Japanese military leaders, pored over all 40 volumes of the congressional inquiry into Pearl Harbor and wrote 3,500 manuscript pages on the subject. As an official historian in Japan to General Douglas MacArthur, he had the unique privilege of being able to question Japanese leaders while the war was still fresh in their minds, before academic backlashes and revisionism started to dictate terms of the debate. Tragically, Prange died before seeing his labor read by the general public. Two professors taught and requested specifically by him completed the task of whittling his multi-volume analysis down to a comparatively sleek 700+ pages.
Prange's thesis is simple: war with Japan was inevitable. The Japanese were their own people, and it's foolish to think that any cabal of men in Washington, D.C. could dictate the terms of war's inception to the Empire of Japan. The strategic, nationalistic, imperialistic, economic and natural-resources interests of the two countries were unavoidably at odds. Even if, presumptuously, Roosevelt felt he could hasten the war's beginning by manipulating an independent government and military, he had no need to. Moreover, since Roosevelt was equally (if not more) interested in intervening against the Nazis in Europe, fomenting war with another enemy entirely was a poor means of actualizing that. (Remember: it was Hitler who declared war on the U.S. — though under no treaty obligations to do so — not the other way round. America has not officially declared war on Germany since 1917.) To put it another way: you don't convince your family of the rightness of getting into a fight with your neighbor across the street by baiting another unrelated neighbor down the block into punching you in the face. If anything, your family's going to want you to settle the hash of the guy down the block. It takes a big leap of faith to assume the neighbor down the block is going to hit you in the first place, and an even more improbable one to assume that your neighbor across the street is going to oblige your ambitions by joining in.
Of course, people dismiss Prange's thesis to this day, for numerous reasons. For one thing, in cases like these, the reasonable explanation is boring. The Japanese carried out one of the most impressive raids in history in conjunction with plain old human error on the American side?—pffffft! You knew that already! Besides, an author trying to tie all the disparate counter-arguments together has to write a lot more. There's all that relentless weighing of all the options. Reading them takes work, and the payoff is something level-headed. Who wants to read nearly 800 pages of Prange when there's the sexier, crankier conspiracist Day Of Deceit at 400 pages? Why bother with all 600 pages of the
The 9/11 Commission Report when you can watch Loose Change for less than two hours, on your computer, for free and get lots of spooky music and grainy footage intended to scare you like it's the "Blair-Bush Witch Project"?
One other factor influences why books like At Dawn We Slept provoke dismissal. We need blame; we need focus and agency. We need purpose, and we need it to come from Not Us. Something similar happened to Britons in WWII as well. A German bomb would level a house, and local newspapers would blame it on merciless targeting by the Luftwaffe. Now, nevermind the silliness of the Luftwaffe caring about a single house: the fact is, they'd be lucky to hit it if they wanted to. But it hurts to look at death and destruction and think both, "Our military couldn't stop it," and, "There was no direct purpose. It just happened."
To think that 3,000 people died on 9/11 because they had the misfortune to work in one particular place gives little comfort. To think that those who could have protected them simply failed gives even less. Better to assign agency, complicity, conspiracy: at least, then, it happened for a reason. They died not randomly but because. Better, too, to think that that liberal-socialist FDR didn't care about brave American servicemen and was happy pawn to Winston Churchill's war aims. Or better to think that he was a wanton Machievel who felt 2,000+ broken eggs were small enough price to pay for his omelette. At least that way the explanation admits of no chance, nothing like the cruel non-specificity of war.
It's a human response, no less honest because it finds a want that the record cannot satisfy. But it's a shame that that impulse sometimes pushes aside such good scholarship as books like Prange's. A book like his seeks not to mollify or assuage disappointment but to document its cause. How something happened can never really explain why it needed to happen. In the space between the facts and the desire for some narrative that gives everything purpose, that exculpates the self (or one's nation) while creating a perfidy that can absorb all agency and evil — that's where conspiracy is born and thrives. It's so much harder to acknowledge, simply, that at dawn we slept.
