We're currently hosting our discussions at Café Walnut, near the corner of 7th & Walnut in Olde City, just across the street from Washington Square Park. The cafe's entrance is below street level down some stairs, which can be confusing if it's your first time. Our group meets in the large room upstairs.
Since we're using the cafe's space, they ask that each person attending the meetup at least purchase a drink or snack. Please don't bring any food or drinks from outside. If you're hungry enough to eat a meal, they have more substantial fare such as salads, soups & sandwiches which are pretty good and their prices are reasonable.
The cafe is fairly easy to get to if you're using public transit. With SEPTA, take the Market-Frankford Line & get off at the 5th Street Station (corner of 5th & Market), and walk 2 blocks south on 5th and then turn right on Walnut Street and walk 2 blocks west. With PATCO, just get off at the 9th-10th & Locust stop and walk 3 blocks east & 1 block north. For those who are driving, parking in the neighborhood can be tough to find. If you can't find a spot on the street, I'd suggest parking in the Washington Square parking deck at 249 S 6th Street which is just a half block away.
FALSE PRETEXTS & ACTS OF WAR:
WAS THE U.S. DRAWN INTO THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR, WWI, WWII, AND THE VIETNAM WAR BY LIES & CONSPIRACIES?
INTRODUCTION:
This meetup will address some conspiracy theories about the manner in which the U.S. was drawn into several major wars, all of which started with naval attacks that ostensibly constituted "acts of war". We'll start by looking at allegations that the suspicious explosion that sunk the USS Maine in Havana Harbor and provoked the Spanish-American War was either an accident or self-sabotage, and yet the "jingoists" like Teddy Roosevelt & "yellow journalists" like William Randolph Hearst convinced Americans it was the result of a Spanish mine. Next, we'll look at the sinking of the Lusitania and allegations that the British purposely sent it unprotected into an area where they knew a German U-boat was waiting so it would get sunk and anger Americans enough they'd enter World War I. We'll then move onto looking at the Pearl Harbor attack that brought the U.S. into World War II, and allegations that FDR knew the attack was coming but allowed it to happen in order to enrage the American public enough to overcome the prevailing isolationist sentiment. Lastly, we'll look at the alleged attack on the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin that brought the U.S. into the Vietnam War and allegations that it was either a pure fabrication or merely the result of sailors getting spooked by radar anomalies & firing blindly into the night.
NOTE: This meetup builds on some concepts from a previous discussion about whether the 9/11 attacks, the decision to invade Iraq in 2003, and U.S. involvement in the Libyan & Syrian civil wars were the product of intelligence failures, policy failures, or conspiracies. To review the outline from that discussion, go here: https://www.meetup.com/Philly-Skeptics/events/254780511/
In that earlier meetup, we covered 3 basic ways of thinking about the causes of foreign policy disasters:
(1) intelligence failures - i.e. errors in surveillance, poor analysis, or problems in sharing of classified information that lead to disaster.
(2) policy failures - i.e. misunderstanding of or failure to heed intelligence reports, poor executive decisions, or failures in the chain of command that lead to disaster.
(3) conspiracies - i.e. secret plots to intentionally cause the disaster for ulterior purposes, e.g. war profiteering, enabling imperialism, diverting public attention from a domestic scandal, generating nationalistic sentiments to win an election, etc.
We also discussed how conspiracy theories about foreign policy disasters can typically be sorted into 3 categories:
(1) MIHOP - i.e. the plotters "made it happen on purpose" (a.k.a. false flag attack),
(2) LIHOP - the plotters "let it happen on purpose" (a.k.a. sacrificial lamb, cannon fodder),
(3) Hoax - it didn't really happen, but the plotters lied & said it did.
There's 3 other types of conspiracy theories we didn't discuss previously but which posit opportunism in the wake of an accident rather than prior planning:
(4) conflation of friendly fire with an enemy attack,
(5) conflation of an accidental disaster (e.g. fire or explosion) with an enemy attack,
(6) conflation of a false alarm with an enemy attack.
Of course, honest mistakes can happen when international tensions are high prior to the outbreak of war, but conspiracy theorists typically believe the conflation is intentional if it appears to benefit the government or fit in with their overall goals.
When we look at scholarly debates about the causes of wars, it's important to distinguish arguments over facts from arguments over moral judgements. As is often the case, two historians may agree on most or all of the facts surrounding an attack, but they'll disagree about whether it constituted an unprovoked "act of war" under international law or whether it was a justified act of self-defense in response to a military provocation, economic warfare, sabotage, espionage, etc. Philosophical debates about the moral significance of past events is a major part of what's known as "historical revisionism", which is very different from illegitimate attempts to revise our view of past events by introducing misinformation, denying well-evidenced incidents even happened, or making claims about secret plans & conspiracies with little or no evidence - that's known as "historical negationism". Wikipedia has entries for both of these terms that help explain the differences in more detail: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_revisionism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_negationism
WHY THIS TOPIC IS IMPORTANT - ESPECIALLY RIGHT NOW:
For skeptics who want to learn to distinguish credible allegations of conspiracy from the irrational rumors we usually call "conspiracy theories", this topic is important because the notion that "false flag" attacks are rife in American military history is quite common. Part of the reason for this is the proliferation of blogs & viral videos espousing conspiracy theories about how America's wars have started, coupled with a generally low level of historical knowledges among the public that leaves people open to believing things most military historians would find preposterous.
A good example of a popular conspiracy theory video is Peter Joseph's "Zeitgeist", which treated all the incidents we'll discuss in this meetup as the result of conspiracies by international bankers who wanted to get rich off financing wars. (Thus, this topic connects with some of the banking conspiracies we discussed in our last meetup.) For a skeptical debunking of claims made in "Zeitgeist", see Edward L. Winston's Skeptic Project blog: http://skepticproject.com/articles/zeitgeist/part-three/#war
Another reason it's important to understand the way naval clashes can spark wars is that this could happen in the near future, particularly where US naval forces face off against the Chinese in the South China Sea or the Russians in the Baltic & Black Seas. Some international relations scholars like James Cable & David Winkler have done quantitative analyses of the types of naval clashes we'll discuss in this meetup in order to learn how to head off future incidents that could spark a major war.
However, some military historians like Douglas Peifer have warned that "quantitative approaches fail to provide a textured understanding of the interplay of foreign and domestic concerns, and factor out the importance of chance, personalities, and the specifics of particular crises." Peifer argues that "a better approach is to understanding naval incidents is to study them using an historical mindset... [This means] studying an issue in all its richness in order to understand the 'essential elements of context and detail that make up a complex political-military situation.' A historical mindset embraces similarities and dissimilarities, intended actions and the accidental, patterns and the unique. It trains the mind to ask disciplined, critical questions. It provokes a degree of skepticism about overdependence on theoretical models and 'lessons learned'.” https://militaryhistorynow.com/2016/07/31/dangerous-waters-what-can-history-teach-us-about-americas-next-naval-confrontation/
