As another anniversary of the Day of Infamy, December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor Day, approaches, the final story of what happened has yet to be written. But it is clear that the loss of 2,323 U.S. servicemen was not entirely the fault of the Japanese. Americans were completely unprepared, despite warnings.

General George Marshall, FDR's principal military advisor, had repeatedly assured the President that the Oahu fortress complex, which included Pearl Harbor, was the strongest in the world and that a seaborne attack was out of the question, according to Paul Johnson in A History of the American People. The Japanese attack plan, which involved transporting a gigantic carrier force thousands of miles unobserved, was possibly too audacious to be believed. A war warning sent from Washington on November 27 resulted in no increased level of alertness at Pearl Harbor. An enlisted man's radar report of the approach of strange airplanes was disregarded, stated Carroll Quigley, Bill Clinton's favorite historian, in Tragedy and Hope.

At the time, Americans still knew how to condemn lying, at least by an enemy. In response to a message handed to him by Japanese envoys, after he knew of the attack, Secretary of State Cordell Hull said: ``In all my fifty years of public service I have never seen a document that was more crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions on a scale so huge that I never imagined until today that any government on this planet was capable of uttering them.''

Imperial and totalitarian governments are dependent upon the Big Lie to stay in power. A pervasive atmosphere of deceit has been called the most oppressive feature of life in places such as the Soviet Union. It is truth that makes men free, and without truth freedom cannot survive.

In December, 1934, Albert Einstein wrote: ``Without morality and trust it is impossible for society to flourish.'' Yet Einstein broke off a ten-year friendship with journalist Isaac Don Levine after a letter in which Levine pointed out truths about Stalin, such as the deliberate starvation of Ukrainian peasants long covered up by American journalists and officials.

Levine also wrote: ``The only known effective weapon against such hatred and oppression [as by the Nazis] is the Anglo-Saxon system of justice.'' He also observed that ``the storm of protest in the Western non-Jewish world has not been great enough .... perhaps due to the fact that the Western intelligentsia has dulled our sense of indignation by condoning the Red Terror and by falling for the Leninist dogmas instead of adhering to the old cries of justice, human rights, and freedom'' (Eyewitness to History, 1973).

In Levine's time, the Anglo-Saxon system of justice was nearly subverted by an effort to indict key witness Whittaker Chambers for perjury, thus destroying the massive case against Alger Hiss. The tide was turned, in his view, when Congressman Richard M. Nixon ``threw his full weight behind my desperate effort to save Whittaker Chambers from indictment.''

Nixon stated in the official published transcript:

As Levine saw it, the era of peace that followed the Napoleonic Wars resulted from the fact that the differences between the Great Powers were ``secondary to the cultural-civilizational forces which bound those powers together in a family of nations united in thought and speech.'' Today, there is no such common ethos: ``The social revolution unleashed by Lenin opened an unbridgeable gap in the human family which no amount of nostalgic crying for One World can close.''

During the heat of the Cold War, Levine hoped for a world of free men to ensure America's defense and ``deliver divided humanity, [which is] half free and half in chains.''

After the end of the Cold War, where do we stand?

When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, America out-produced Japan twenty to one in steel, a hundred to one in oil, and five to one in aircraft. In the 1940s, American entrepreneurs such as Henry Kaiser, who had been systematically harassed by Harold Ickes (FDR's Secretary of the Interior) for violations of federal regulations, created the Arsenal of Democracy with an astonishing acceleration of production. The Pentagon, with 16 miles of corridors and 600,000 square feet of office space, was built in 14 months rather than 7 years.

Such a feat may be impossible today, even before the global energy rationers use lies to drive the rest of American heavy industry offshore. The U.S. produces only 17% more iron than in 1940, and 59% of the amount produced in 1970.

But the crumbling of the industrial fortress is still less serious than the degradation of the culture, the erosion of Anglo-Saxon justice, and the pervasive loss of respect for truth.

In some American public universities, it is against the rules for freshman students to register for physics and calculus unless they also enroll in a course that teaches students to deny absolute truths and denounce Western mores. American medical schools teach students that the absolute ethics of the Oath of Hippocrates are outmoded and indoctrinate them in the fundamental axiom of the Communist Manifesto. And in a federal courtroom, a U.S. attorney can tell judges a lie so egregious that his DoJ colleagues in the audience snicker. (Appealing a sanction for outrageous obstructionist litigation tactics in the case of AAPS v. Clinton, the Department of Justice claimed to have turned over everything the Court ordered in discovery, and that words like ``employee'' have no objective meaning.)

And Congressmen now inquire, not about the state of our nation's defenses or the truthfulness of the Commander-in-Chief, but about technical aspects of the prosecution. As Monica Lewinsky told Linda Tripp: she had been brought up to regard lying as necessary.

Is another Day of Infamy at hand?

``Every one understands how praiseworthy it is in a Prince to keep faith, and to live uprightly and not craftily. Nevertheless, we see from what has taken place in our own days that Princes who have set little store by their word, but have known how to overreach men by their cunning, have accomplished great things, and in the end got the better of those who trusted to honest dealing....

``[N]o Prince was ever at a loss for plausible reasons to cloak a breach of faith. Of this numberless recent instances could be given, and it might be shown how many solemn treaties and engagements have been rendered inoperative and idle through want of faith in Princes....

``It is necessary, indeed,...to be skilful [sic.] in simulating and dissembling. But men are so simple, and governed so absolutely by their present needs, that he who wishes to deceive will never fail in finding willing dupes....

``It is not essential, then, that a Prince should have all the good qualities which I have enumerated above, but it is most essential that he should seem to have them....A Prince should therefore be very careful that nothing ever escapes his lips which is not replete with the[se] five qualities, so that to see him and hear him, one would think him the embodiment of mercy, good faith, integrity, humanity, and religion. And there is no virtue which is more necessary for him to seem to possess than this last....Every one sees what you seem, but few know what you are, and these few dare not oppose themselves to the opinion of the many who have the majesty of the State to back them up....A certain Prince of our own days, whose name it is as well not to mention, is always preaching peace and good faith, although the mortal enemy of both....''

Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513

The centerpiece of the Clinton strategy against chemical weapons is the Chemical Weapons Convention, signed in 1993, ratified by the Senate in 1997, and being widely violated by parties and nonsignatories alike. Thanks to President Bush, the U.S. is on a ``glide-path to unilateral chemical disarmament,'' having forsworn the use of chemical weapons for any reason and dropped its position that it should be allowed to keep 2% of its arsenal until the CWC is joined by all CW-capable states.

The largest stockpile (more than 40,000 tons) is currently owned by Russia, which is continuing to amass weapons which are more lethal, more capable of penetrating defenses, and less susceptible to antidotes. China, another signatory, also has a large and active production complex, and aggressively exports agents to other nations, particularly Iran. Despite the most intrusive on-site inspection program in history, Iraq is believed to have retained 46,000 chemical weapons. North Korea has a 1,000-ton stockpile and produces 15.2 tons per day.

The Treaty itself provides foreign engineers and chemists the opportunity for stealing trade secrets from information provided, even without entering facilities. The on-site inspections permit unfriendly powers to purport to find ``evidence'' of illegal production and stockpiling even where none exists-a particularly grave threat to Israel. Moreover, the training given to inspectors may teach them how to defeat inspections in their own countries.

Frank Gaffney (``Making the World Safe for VX,'' Commentary, October, 1998) writes: ``A realistic program [to protect armed forces and civilians against chemical and biological warfare] would go well beyond training and equipping `first responders' ... to include significantly improved intelligence to warn against the sources and timing of attacks; extensive planning for the relocation and treatment of those exposed; the production and stockpiling of antibiotics and other medications; and measures to ensure the safety of the food supply against biological assault.''

Gaffney considers it a scandal that the U.S. does not already have protective measures. The inability to shoot down even a single ballistic missile armed with such weapons could be most readily remedied, he believes, by modifying the Navy's AEGIS air-defense system to enable it to shoot down incoming missiles. But the Clinton Administration, in deference to the 1972 ABM Treaty, has refused to allow existing infrastructure to be used for that purpose.

In what U.S. Climate Change Negotiator Stuart Eizenstat told Congress was a ``symbolic gesture'' to ``jump-start'' negotiations, the Clinton Administration signed the Kyoto Treaty, which it has no intention of submitting to the Senate any time soon. From the Buenos Aires meeting of the Conference of Parties (COP), Fred Singer reports that Eizenstat is trying to bully Brazil and Mexico into binding emissions limits, as by threatening to derail their IMF loans. The conference as a whole was about money, not science: what has been described as a ``resource transfer from the poor in the rich countries to the rich in the poor countries.''

Robert Watson, new chairman of the IPCC, made an impassioned plea to raise the Kyoto reduction target from a 5.2% cut from 1990 levels to a 15% cut, or a 50% reduction in energy use by the year 2010. ``This economically suicidal level,'' stated Singer, ``would do nothing to stabilize CO₂.''

As described by Richard Maybury in his Chaostan model, the two laws held in common by all religions are the foundation of Anglo-Saxon Common Law: (1) Do all you have agreed to do (contract law); and (2) Do not encroach on other persons or their property (tort and some criminal law).

Governments hate these laws because they want the privilege of breaking agreements, stealing, killing, or otherwise doing as they please. From the beginning, judges were under great

pressure to make exceptions for public officials: the origin of the divine right of kings (or now the divine right of majorities).

The laws are higher than any human law, and human law cannot repeal them. Widespread violation of the laws by anyone, including the government, causes damage until the civilization collapses and the survivors, if any, must start over.