Pearl Harbor 63

This is the 63rd anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that (finally) spurred the US entry into World War II and, in the words of the attack's commander Admiral Yamamoto, woke the sleeping giant.

Less than four years after that, the US with Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada helped liberate Southeast Asia from the Japanese and Western Europe from the Nazis. Forty-five (or so) years after that, the US ultimately won the Cold War and Poland, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Hungary, et al. unhitched the Soviet yoke. It's a long distance that the world has traversed politically since the days of kings, czars and absolute rule in the 1700s through the French-inspired revolutions of the mid-1800s, to the nationalist movements of Germany, Austria and Italy in the late 1800s, to the anarchist terrorism of the 1900s that later led to communist insurgencies in the early 1900s, through Nazism and the greatest governmentally institutionalized evil the world has ever known. Hopefully, freedom and democracy are still on the march and will set foot in the totalitarian nations of Arabia and Muslim Asia, and the squalid continent of Africa.

Click the link for some Pearl Harbor sites recommended by Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review.