MM#489--A History Comparison: Two Mornings That Changed America

Welcome And A Different Mojo Minute

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Welcome to the Theory to Action Podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now, here's your host, David Kaiser.

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Hello, I am David, and welcome back to another Mojo Minute. Struggling getting over a either a severe cold or slight flu, not sure, but been down for the last five or so days, and appreciate your guys' patience. And if if I'm clearing my throat, still in the after effects of whatever I had. So please excuse those. I'll try to hit the mute button where I go, where I can, and we'll try to not clear the clear my throat in your ear.

Two Dates That Reset History

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So today's show is going to be a little unique. We're going to take a look back at two dates, two mornings, two moments in history, when Americans woke up and the world was still normal, and when they went to bed in a country that would never be the same. We're going to compare December 7, 1941 to September 11, 2001, some 60 years apart. And this year we mark that 25th anniversary, which we just did on the second one. And that's the story we're going to talk about today. So again, we just passed the 25-year mark for 9-11. Nearly 3,000 Americans were murdered in a single morning. Four hijacked airplanes, two towers, one building at the Pentagon, a field in Pennsylvania where 40 or so passengers decided that they would rather die fighting than die doing nothing. We're going to call that the first battle in the war on terror. Now, every American who was old enough to remember that morning, they reach for the same comparison almost instinctively. And there's a reason for that because we didn't know any better. Now, our source today is the 9-11 Commission report itself, the official bipartisan account of what happened and why was published in 2014 after a two-year

Pearl Harbor Scale And Unpreparedness

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investigation. If you caught last week's Liberty Minute or two weeks ago, after my sickness, after my sickness, excuse me again, forgot about the mute button. You already know that we cannot talk about 9-11 now, 25 years later, without referencing Samuel Huntington's essay and then turned into a book. For that matter, for many people who have come after the fact. Now more on that in a moment. But let's go back to 9-11 versus Pearl Harbor. Because both were surprise attacks on American soil, both exposed a country caught looking the wrong way. America was not the mightiest power on earth in 1941. Some people say that. They weren't close. Going into that world, the United States ranks somewhere between 17th and 19th in the size of its armed forces, smaller than Romania's at the time. We had a peacetime military built for a peacetime world and the Pacific Fleet that Japan caught flat footed, precisely because nobody in Washington believed we were a target worth that kind of gamble. Now that's agonizing to admit in 2026, but it's the truth. You can read about it in many history books, some that we've talked about here on this podcast. The truth matters more than the flattering version. So more than 2,300 Americans died at Pearl Harbor. The USS Arizona alone became a tomb for 1,177 brave sailors. On 9-11, nearly 3,000 people died, most of them civilians who had done nothing more dangerous that morning than grab a cup of coffee and go to work. And here comes today's nugget of wisdom.

The Character To Rebuild

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And it's the one I want you to sit with. America didn't become the mightiest power on earth until after Pearl Harbor. Because unprepared as we were, we had the industrial will and character to outbuild every enemy we faced once we decided to fight. That's not a story about starting strong. That's a story about starting weak and for refusing to stay that way. That speaks to American character. Both attacks exposed a failure of imagination, too. The 9-11 Commission didn't just say America lacked information. It said we had the information in bits and forms. We all know that. We've heard this. And we just failed to put those dots together and to imagine what could have been or meant or where it was actually going to happen. The specifics is what we were lacking. Both attacks united our country, at least for a season. We know Pearl Harbor did that much better than 9-11. Flags went on porches, lines around the block at recruiting stations. And for a moment we remembered we were one people. We were Americans. And both attacks sent America to war. Pearl Harbor put us in a global fight against Japan and Germany. 9-11 sent us to Afghanistan to root out the Taliban regime who was giving Al-Qaeda a home.

Why The Comparisons Break Down

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And that's where the comparison breaks down. You see, Pearl Harbor had a nation state behind it that was attacking America. Japan had a flag, a navy, an emperor, factories, territory, things you could find on a map, defeat with an army and a navy. 9-11 was different. Al-Qaeda had no capital, no navy, no territory to conquer, or forced to surrender. It was a network organized around an ideology inside outside of a border, hard to tell, morphing in protected states. And you see all that is a whole problem in one sentence. You can defeat a country, you cannot invade an idea. And that's why I think Huntington's thesis and argument earns its keep. He argued that once the Cold War's ideological fight ended, something older will come roaring back. Not economics, not a rival government, but civilizations, religion, memory, and hered loyalty. Al Qaeda wasn't a state we could conquer. It was a movement, and movements don't sign surrender papers.

You Cannot Invade An Idea

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World War II had a finish line. Germany surrendered, Japan surrendered, the war ended, everybody knew it. The war on terror never has had that moment 25 years later. We knew that going into it. But it's sobering some twenty-five years later. Pearl Harbor struck at the Pacific Fleet, a military target. 9-11 struck at civilians going to work. Some 50,000 terrorist targets have happened since 9-11. The most egregious October 7th. Terrorism is meant to terrify a whole nation, not just crimple a navy. World War II produced a total mobilization, a durable post-war consensus. That's where America became a superpower. The post-9-11 era for the last twenty five years has fractured. Fractured over Iraq with surveillance and how long a war without a finish line can last. Afghanistan, twenty years. So twenty-five years later, this threat hasn't shrunk. It's adapted and morphed. And here's what I have to correct about the comfortable story we've told our souls, told ourselves about bin Laden after he was killed in 2011. Too many Americans assumed the threat was shrinking. It didn't shrink, it adapted. And by some measures, it's more entrenched now than it was a decade ago.

The Threat Adapts After 2011

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The Taliban, the very regime, was removed in 2001 as retook Afghanistan in 2021. Iran's proxy network across Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, Yemen is more active today, or was at least until February of this year, than at any point since 9-11. Many believe that's the reason President Trump had to act because of the intelligence, not because of Israel. ISIS just lost its caliphate, but its ideology spread online faster than the territory it lost. Anti-Semitic violence on USA campuses and rhetoric tied to Islamic movements and Islamist criteria has surged across Europe, the UK, and America. Especially since October 7, 2023. Israel is 911. So did you catch all that? We fought a 20-year war measured in territory, and the deeper fight, the one over belief, identity, civilization. Some will even say religion now. Never actually paused. And that's exactly Huntington's warning. And it's aged better than the optimism of the early 2000s. I know I believed in that optimism. Huntington said this century's defining conflicts would run along those civilizational fault lines, not the ideological ones. Twenty-five years of hindsight. Boy, it's hard to argue with him. So it's worth a book checking out The Clash of Civilizations. Samuel Huntington. What's

The Next Attack Might Be Digital

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actually changed? The well the world faces today doesn't look much different September twelfth of 2001, because a great power competition with China has become the central long-term threat. Now Russia still remains a live military problem, especially invading Ukraine. But cyber attacks, drones, and disinformation can now do more damage than was once reserved for armies. And boy, the civilizational contest Huntington described hasn't cooled at all. It's actually spread into Europe and in the UK, on their own streets and their own universities, and certainly in our most radical universities, which is over half of them. Now the next Pearl Harbor may not come from the sky at all. It may come through a power grid or a lie spread so fast across social media enough to divide a country to cause its own civil war. But here's the harder truth. A divided nation is easier to defeat than a strong one. Sometimes an enemy doesn't need to beat America on the battlefield, it just needs to widen the cracks we've already put on ourselves. And that is the nugget of wisdom. That's the lesson worth keeping.

Three Lessons To Keep

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Three things, plain and simple. Don't confuse eventual victory with early strength. America was weak going into 1941, but her will to rebuild, not her starting position, is what won the war. It displayed American character. I still believe that American character is there. Maybe not in all its citizens. But I'm gonna say over half. Don't mistake a quiet decade for a solved problem. The threat that produced 9-11 spent the last twenty-five years adapting, not disappearing. We've had major terrorist attacks. Our media downplays them. We've diffused thousands of terrorist attacks on our homeland. The media looks the other way. Prepare for what you haven't imagined yet, because the next attack, like the last one, will not look like the history books. That's what I had to learn.

Grief Gratitude And The Closing Charge

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So as we just passed this 25th anniversary of 9-11, remember it the way it deserves to be remembered. Grief for the nearly 3,000 people who never came home that morning to their families. Gratitude for the firefighters, the police, first responders, the passengers on Flight 93 who fought back with nothing but their bare hands and truth and honesty because history that flatters us instead of teaching us isn't worth telling. Pearl Harbor and 9 11 were both surprise attacks that woke a sleeping giant. One gave us an enemy we could see in a war that we could win and finish. The other is asking a deeper question. Cause it's given us a civilizational contest. Exactly what Honeyton warned us about. And twenty-five years later, we're still deciding whether we understand what we're actually fighting. God bless the men and the women we lost on both of those mornings. And God bless our country, still trying after all these years to be worthy of their sacrifice. Till next time, as always, keep fighting the good fight.

Where To Find More Resources

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Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this Theory to Action podcast. Be sure to check out our show page at TeamMojoAcademy.com, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast as well as other great resources. Until next time, keep getting your mojo.