For what it’s worth, I came across the theory before, in a pretty respectable setting: a popularization book by a historian, where many conspiracy theories (along with “mysteries” like Easter Island) where examined, usually with skeptical conclusions. The Pearl Harbor one was one of the few with a “possible, but unproven” verdict.
I read it long ago, in a Spanish translation from French. It seems the book has not been published in English. The original title is Dossiers secrets de l’histoire, by Alain Decaux.
That reduces the value of the example, IMO. Political conspiracy stuff relies on so much contextual material and government records that it’s hard for a foreigner to make a good appraisal of what went on. It would be like a monolingual American trying to make heads or tails of that incident decades ago (whose name escapes me at the moment) where a high-level Communist Party official died in a airplane crash with his family; was it a normal accident, or was he fleeing a failed coup attempt to Russia, as the conspiracy/coverup interpretations went? If you can’t even read Chinese, I have no idea how one could make a even half-decent attempt to judge the incident.
For what it’s worth, I came across the theory before, in a pretty respectable setting: a popularization book by a historian, where many conspiracy theories (along with “mysteries” like Easter Island) where examined, usually with skeptical conclusions. The Pearl Harbor one was one of the few with a “possible, but unproven” verdict.
Do you remember the title of that book?
I read it long ago, in a Spanish translation from French. It seems the book has not been published in English. The original title is Dossiers secrets de l’histoire, by Alain Decaux.
That reduces the value of the example, IMO. Political conspiracy stuff relies on so much contextual material and government records that it’s hard for a foreigner to make a good appraisal of what went on. It would be like a monolingual American trying to make heads or tails of that incident decades ago (whose name escapes me at the moment) where a high-level Communist Party official died in a airplane crash with his family; was it a normal accident, or was he fleeing a failed coup attempt to Russia, as the conspiracy/coverup interpretations went? If you can’t even read Chinese, I have no idea how one could make a even half-decent attempt to judge the incident.