I love conspiracy theories. They are just simple enough in their complexity to be accessible to all. In a world of seemingly ever more intricate and intractable problems they offer such simple, satisfying explanations. All you have to do to feel just a tad superior is to connect the dots. Unfortunately, the world has not changed. Things have always been intricate and intractable. People haven't changed either.
I would eagerly believe all conspiracy theories except for two undeniable facts. You should never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity and most conspiracies really boil down to confederacies of dunces.
Conspiracy theories can be very powerful. The international communist conspiracy for a time stripped democracy from the United States. Currently, the international Islamic conspiracy has us pretty much eating our young. That's nothing compared to what the international Zionist conspiracy theory did to Europe in the early part of the last century. That theory eventually produced World War Two.
You think WWII was something? Wait till you get a load of this. The World Trade Center was attacked twice because the attackers saw it as the center of Jewish Banking in the world. No other reason. It was the locus of the Zionist Conspiracy. How's that for a conspiracy theory? When you consider the World Trade Center was a failed real estate development, owned by the Port Authority because it couldn't be run at a profit the whole thing is pretty funny. Here's a conspiracy factoid for ya. You can make the case Manhattan real estate brokers and building owners were primary beneficiaries of the 9/11 attacks because it so dramatically changed the vacancy factor for prime office space. Hmm. I wonder if the new building has anywhere near the offices the Twin Towers had? Who's a big owner of office space in Manhattan?
See how easy it is to string together simple statements and questions to create an almost Byzantine world? But that's not my point. And I do have one.
I was originally thinking about the importance of institutional memory in organizations large and small. In this particular instance I was thinking of the U S Navy. Pearl Harbor is, in one way, a story of how institutional memory was preserved. It's also the basis of a conspiracy theory. It's a dandy and parts of it have the useful feature of being true.
The story is Roosevelt and his cabal knew the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor and did nothing because they needed an excuse for a reluctant America to enter WW II. We had broken the Japanese military codes and knew the date and hour and just waited. Some of that is sorta true.
At that point we had broken the Japanese diplomatic codes but it wasn't till later we broke the Japanese military codes. Nevertheless, we did know they were coming and where and when. The idea of a reluctant American public is kinda funny. A couple years of contemporary Gallup polling shows that somewhere around 80% of Americans thought war with the Axis Powers was inevitable. There may have been a need for casus belli to motivate republican isolationists in Congress but the public was ready to fight. We're Americans by God! We'll fight at the drop of a hat. I wish people would quit believing that's not true. In point of fact we are the most violent people who have ever lived. We are the people who conceived and built an atomic weapon and then we actually used the damned thing. Now we have 10 or 12 thousand laying around ready to go.
The Arizona was the most modern battleship in the fleet. It was built in 1916. In the 1920's and '30's Japan had built a modern battle fleet. The truth is: Had our battle fleet met the Japanese fleet it would have been a disaster. Our fleet would have been dispatched to the bottom along with the crews.
The difference on that Sunday morning was the crews were at liberty. It's a truth of combat that those who have survived a first encounter tend to continue to survive subsequent encounters. There is a deadly truth to the phrase, ' battle hardened veterans'. For example: The veterans of North Africa and the Italian campaigns cut thru the Germans in France like a knife.
So, by allowing the Japanese to sink a fleet of obsolete ships while their crews were ashore, institutional memory was preserved and then employed in modern ships to defeat the Imperial Fleet.
It was a conscious decision. The lives of 1,300 people were traded for the lives of maybe 130,000. How would you like to be confronted with that decision?
So, was it some sort of conspiracy? No, it was a choice made by decent men faced with totally unattractive alternatives.
The question we face is: Do we currently have men who could make such a decision?
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