Higgs, a great scholar in many areas, writes today about his 2006 article on Pearl Harbor:
Here’s a little something for all of you red-blooded, Pearl Harbor patriots. Not that you will take it seriously, of course, when you will be so much more comfortable to rest in the lap of the Establishment propaganda you’ve been fed for your entire life. BTW, this little article rests on a tremendous amount of serious historical scholarship (not by me), but as the author of an 1,100-word column in a magazine, I could not do much more than emphasize a few main points.
If you’re going to react to this article by lecturing me about the brutality of the Japanese Empire and so forth, don’t bother. I know about those things. But they are not immediately relevant to the point I’m making here. Besides, the fact that some government somewhere on earth is attacking some other government is never in itself a sufficient excuse for the U.S. government to trick, maneuver, and drag the American people into the fight.