Did Japan initiate force against us before WWII?

[Travis Retriever]

unicornmagik666:  "@lordthawkeye

No, that's not the argument. Once again, please TRY to understand this. He set the historical background. He then talked about the war. The dropping of the bomb was not the entire point of the video. Some of the video was about the dropping of the bomb, some of it wasn't. He was trying to put the WAR into context, not put the BOMBING into context.

Whether Japan was planning on surrendering is a debated historical point. You stated it as an objectively true, when it isn't."

in the comments to this video:  [yt]6bboqH5u6bo[/yt]

I can't pin it down, but I smell bs, did Japan really initiate force against the US?
What, exactly happened here?
From what I understand the blockades were our government initiating force against them and their government.

[MrBogosity]

And we sunk at least one Japanese sub pre-Pearl Harbor.

[Travis Retriever]

Another odd one:

unicornmagik666:  "He [HowTheWorldWorks] was saying that the initiation of the Pacific Theater was not an act of aggression on the United State's part. He was providing historical background for the embargo that the US initiated. It does have SOMETHING to do- it was part of the long chain of events that culminated in WWII.

No one's saying two rights make a wrong. No one is making that claim."

This comment isn't the only one that goes into some "embargo" of sorts.

Odd, at first I thought he was saying that the reason we blockaded Japan was because they started crap with us before, but can't seem to find it. Maybe I just imagined it, or skimmed over the comment too quickly?

In my last debate with a conservative on the issue, he told me we did the blockade because the Japanese Military was screwing around and stirring up s**t in Australia, but then they wouldn't have initiated force against us, but against Australia, duh.
And let's say that it was to piss us off, to prevent goods from getting to our country; well, he himself admitted we (and by that I mean our government) were constantly building military equipment to send to the allies to use against the Axis Powers, despite his constant whining about the US having an isolationist foreign policy up until Pearl Harbor.


Either way, from what I understand, had we not had a federal reserve and income tax to fund our (unnecessary and unneeded) entry into WWI, WWII would never have happened.

[Gumba Masta]

And thanks to Einstein and his Time Machine we all know how that ended up.