superrific
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Thank you for the response. I must be missing something here. Obviously I do not want to reinforce dishonest propaganda. It just doesn't seem to me that it's the only way to look at it, given that the analogy also occurred to me.My objection to your analogy is that your logic relies on stripping away key context differentiating a surprise attack preceding any declared war versus a surprise attack (by the victim of invasion) during a prolonged war. If we were arguing how far a baseball home run with an exit velocity of 105 mph should fly and your argument relied on assuming that the game is played in a vacuum, so there is no resistance, ok, fine, we don’t live in a vacuum but we’re just shooting the breeze anyway.
But in an actual war the context is exactly what the propagandists promoting the comparison want people to miss or ignore so they see Russia now and the U.S. then as brothers in arms, equivalent victims of a devious sneak attack, even though there is an obvious critical context intentionally elided by propagandists that undermines the analogy.
To me, your innocent but context-free analogy reinforces (or even creates a permission structure for) dishonest propaganda that is intending that the context be stricken from the conversation for nefarious purpose. Hence my objection.
I guess the question is as follows: is there severability between the different facets of Pearl Harbor? There's the narrow military outcome (that was my thought), and then the broader moral sense of it being a surprise attack of aggression? My analogy only applies to the former and I wouldn't think it would have anything to say about the obviously inapt latter point. If "Pearl Harbor" fundamentally links those two ideas, then the analogy doesn't play. I think of it as an event rather than a concept, but maybe that's not standard.
Maybe the problem is that I can't imagine anyone trying to claim that this attack was like Pearl Harbor in terms of aggression. It's beyond ridiculous, so I don't give it any thought. And if I'm wrong about that, then I can see why people would be eager to reject the analogy. It's not an airball though.