{"id":109624,"date":"2025-03-31T02:19:19","date_gmt":"2025-03-31T08:19:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=109624"},"modified":"2025-03-31T02:44:15","modified_gmt":"2025-03-31T08:44:15","slug":"thoughts-occasioned-by-a-visit-to-pearl-harbor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2025\/03\/thoughts-occasioned-by-a-visit-to-pearl-harbor.html","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts occasioned by a visit to Pearl Harbor"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The forward magazines of the U.S. Navy battleship USS Arizona (BB-39) explode shortly after 08:00 hrs during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii (USA), 7 December 1941.
(Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This afternoon, we made a pilgrimage to Pearl Harbor, and, very specifically, to the USS Arizona Memorial. \u00a0It was sobering, as always. \u00a0We also spent time in the exhibits there and watched a couple of films about the Japanese attack of 7 December 1941. \u00a0That horrible event happened nearly eighty-five years ago, and there are, surely, few if any survivors on either the Japanese or the American side still alive today. \u00a0To my shock, though, I found myself almost tearing up at some points. \u00a0Almost. \u00a0Cold-hearted Scandinavian though I am, I\u2019m plainly becoming more sentimental as I age. \u00a0I thought of all the young men, most of them a a few years younger than my father, who died suddenly, unexpectedly, and in many cases horribly, on that beautiful Hawaiian Sunday morning. \u00a0It\u2019s not impossible, had they been allowed to live, that I might have come to know one or two of them. \u00a0I think of the children they would have had. \u00a0One of them could have been a schoolmate of mine, or a friend in my neighborhood. \u00a0I think of the contributions those young men might have made. \u00a0Of the massive loss, the literally incalculable loss, that they represent.<\/p>\n

\"Emperor<\/a>
Napoleon on his Imperial Throne, by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1806) \u00a0(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This is why, as I\u2019ve aged, I\u2019ve become less and less easily impressed with leaders whom we often term \u201cthe Great.\u201d \u00a0I shared a few thoughts about King Kamehameha the Great yesterday; some have responded in his defense, and I freely admit that I\u2019ve spent very little time studying him and that perhaps some defense of him is possible. \u00a0But then I think of those hundreds of defending O\u2019ahu warriors who were forced over the cliff at the Nu\u2018uanu Pali by Kamehameha\u2019s invading army.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m skeptical of many of these \u201cgreat\u201d men. \u00a0I find it more and more difficult to admire those who, as the eighteenth-century English poet Thomas Gray put it, \u201cwade[d] through slaughter to a throne.\u201d<\/p>\n

What about Napoleon, for example? \u00a0Back in the early nineteenth century, the population of Europe was much smaller than it is today. \u00a0But the estimates that I\u2019ve seen suggest that between 2.5 and 3.5 million soldiers died during the Napoleonic Wars, with civilian deaths estimated to have been between 750,000 and 3 million. \u00a0In other words, the death toll during the Napoleonic Wars was at least 3.25 million people and possibly as many as 6.5 million. \u00a0And, again, for what<\/em>, exactly? \u00a0Did Napoleon need a larger bed? \u00a0Did his murderous conquests enable him to consume more food than he already did? \u00a0To wear more shirts? \u00a0Did almost seven million people need to die so that he could have a nicer home? \u00a0Did he improve the lives of those whom he conquered? \u00a0Not discernibly. \u00a0And yet I know that he is venerated by many French people. \u00a0Does he deserve such veneration?<\/p>\n

\"Goya's<\/a>
\u201cEl tres de mayo de 1808 en Madrid,\u201d by Francisco de Goya (1814), depicts some of the hundreds of Spanish resistance fighters who were executed by Napoleon\u2019s troops in the early morning hours of 3 May 1808. \u00a0(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I\u2019ve come to think much more highly, instead, of such rulers as the genuinely great Mauryan emperor Ashoka of India \u2014 great, certainly, in the later period of his life, after his much more conventional beginning as a bloody conqueror \u2014 about whom I wrote for the Deseret News<\/em> back in 2012<\/a>. I admire Anwar Sadat of Egypt, who finally decided, after decades of destructive wars between the Arabs and Israel, to try to put an end to the fruitless violence and bloodshed. \u00a0His dramatic visit to Jerusalem and his involvement in the Camp David Accords ultimately cost him his life. \u00a0My wife and I were living in Cairo at the time, and we will never forget the horrible and sorrowful day of President Sadat\u2019s assassination. \u00a0Blessed be his memory.<\/p>\n

And true greatness can easily be found among non<\/em>-rulers. \u00a0Take Maximilian Kolbe, for instance. \u00a0Nicholas Winton. \u00a0The villagers of Le Chambon. \u00a0Saint Damien of Moloka\u2019i. \u00a0Political power isn\u2019t needed for greatness. \u00a0Nor is wealth.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte in the Crypt of the D\u00f4me des Invalides, in Paris \u00a0(May 2013 Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph by Ben Garrett, of London). The surroundings of the tomb remind me, vaguely, of a temple baptistry. But the contrast could not be more stark: Temple baptismal fonts are dedicated to remembering and blessing the dead. Napoleon devoted much of his life to prematurely dispatching untold millions of people to the world of spirits, all (so far as I can see) to satisfy his own vanity and lust for glory.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And yet . . . \u00a0And yet . . . \u00a0I want to come back to the idea of the historical \u201cgreat man\u201d \u2014 a topic that suggests itself to me perhaps only by reason of its verbal similarity to what I\u2019ve been considering in the cases of King Kamehameha the Great, the Emperor Napoleon, and others of their class.<\/p>\n

There has been a justified rejection in modern academic historiography of \u201cthe great man theory of history,\u201d in which (in former generations, at least), history was seen almost as a derivative of ruler biographies. \u00a0Such an approach had obviously been a huge oversimplification. \u00a0The Augustan age was never even remotely reducible to Augustus, nor Periclean Athens to Pericles, nor the Elizabethan Age to Queen Elizabeth, nor Victorian England to Victoria. \u00a0Fernand Braudel and other twentieth-century historians \u2014 I myself was profoundly influenced in my own professional studies of Islam by Marshall G. S. Hodgson \u2014 taught us to pay much more attention to the role of large-scale socioeconomic factors in the making and writing of history. \u00a0The use of the stirrup, the adoption of gunpowder, the invention of the printing press and moveable type, the harnessing of steam power and the building of railroads \u00a0\u2014 such developments have been far more consequential for history overall than the character and whims of the mostly forgettable and often rather small individuals who happen to have occupied this or that throne at any given moment.<\/p>\n

But we mustn\u2019t overcorrect. \u00a0History isn\u2019t a matter solely of vast, impersonal, almost subterranean forces any more than it is a blank canvas for vivid personalities. \u00a0Strong individuals also have their effects, and often to profound effect.<\/p>\n

Sadly, Adolf Hitler offers an example of the power of a particular unique personality to affect historical developments. \u00a0If der F\u00fchrer<\/em> hadn\u2019t existed, could Ernst R\u00f6hm, Hermann G\u00f6ring, Martin Bormann, Heinrich Himmler, Julius Streicher, or even Joseph Goebbels have led the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei<\/i>\u200a to the epoch-making lethal heights that it unfortunately reached? \u00a0During the Third Reich, German military personnel, including officers and soldiers, swore an oath of allegiance directly to Adolf Hitler, known as the \u201cHitler Oath\u201d or the \u201cF\u00fchrer Oath,\u201d promising unconditional obedience to him, not to Germany, and a readiness to risk their lives for him.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I found myself thinking of such matters today at Pearl Harbor. \u00a0There were powerful economic and political factors pushing America and Japan toward war. \u00a0 But the Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who planned the 7 December attack, actually opposed<\/em> war with the United States. \u00a0Having studied at Harvard and having been attached for a time to the Japanese embassy in Washington DC, he believed that Japan could not prevail in a prolonged military conflict with America. \u00a0\u201cI fear,\u201d he is reported to have said after the Pearl Harbor attack, \u201call we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.\u201d \u00a0Had Admiral Yamamoto\u2019s counsel against war with America been followed, history would, I think, very clearly have turned out differently than it did.<\/p>\n

And what if Neville Chamberlain had still been prime minister, or what if the accommodationist Lord Halifax had succeeded him in that office, during that \u201cdarkest hour\u201d when the British Expeditionary Force seemed doomed to imminent destruction on the beaches near Dunkirk in May 1940? \u00a0What if that role had not fallen, instead, to Winston Churchill, with his strikingly quasi-religious confidence that destiny had raised him up for the fight against Hitler and the Nazis?<\/p>\n

Many more examples might be adduced. \u00a0An obvious one is George Washington, with his mysterious invincibility \u2014 and consciousness of invincibility \u2014 during the Revolutionary War. \u00a0He wasn\u2019t the most profound thinker among the American Founders, nor the greatest orator. \u00a0But could Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson or John Adams or Aaron Burr have replaced him? \u00a0None of them<\/em> thought so. \u00a0There is a reason that James Thomas Flexner named his famous 1994 book Washington: The Indispensable Man<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Without taking any position pro or con, I think that a plainly apparent current example of what I have in mind is President Donald Trump. \u00a0Would the MAGA movement exist in anything like its current form or with its current power in the absence of Mr. Trump? \u00a0It seems to me obvious that it has coalesced around his personality much more than around a clear and coherent set of political, economic, or philosophical principles existing in the abstract apart<\/em> from him, and that neither Steve Bannon, Kari Lake, George Santos, Elon Musk, Lauren Boebert, Rudy Giuliani, Tulsi Gabbard, Elise Stefanik, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Marjorie Taylor Greene, nor Matt Gaetz could have brought the MAGA movement to the commanding heights that it now occupies.<\/p>\n

Posted from Honolulu, O\u02bbahu, Hawai\u2019i<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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