Days of commemoration, remembrance, glorification — and questioning.
This has been a full week. December 7, a moment in World War II, would change the world in ways never imagined. December 9, the feast day in the Catholic world of a Mejica peasant Indian who, it is said, encountered a dark complected “girl” — an apparition of the Virgin Mary that would change Nueva España — and its successor, the United States of Mexico — forever. December 12, 1531, the day on which that indio, given the name Juan Diego during his recent baptism, first spoke with the saintly apparition that would become known as La Virgen de Guadalupe.
These quite different historical moments have in common their transformative results — and their individual gatherings of doubters.
The attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, so stunned U.S. society that few could at first believe it happened. It did not stun President Franklin D. Roosevelt exactly that way, nor some of his staff, nor Winston Churchill. It did stun FDR’s opponents and those American citizens of every political hue who simply didn’t want to get into another European war. Thus, the shock had double voltage — a surprise that came from the other side of the world.
Roosevelt, Churchill and many others sensed that the Japanese would eventually attack. Japan, with its militarily dominated government, was feeling squeezed by a surging increase in its population, and by the “Western powers’” widened search for oil supplies. Lacking natural resources, Japan was having to import oil, steel and scrap iron, among other raw materials critical to its growth. This led it to, first, aggressively “detach” Manchuria from China in 1931. In 1933, Japan walked out the League of Nations, which it believed was dominated by Western powers intent on curbing Tokyo’s expansionist plans. Then as revolution in China broke out, Japan found reason to invade that nation, rich in resources.
Simultaneously Adolf Hitler was on the march. Roosevelt, still dealing with the Depression, faced increasingly vocal resistance from U.S. neutralists, isolationists and pro-German sentiment, as he sought ways to aid Britain when Hitler’s army began overrunning western European countries.
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