Attack on Pearl Harbor

The Attack on Pearl Harbor appears in Noam Chomsky’s account as a revealing but misleading analogy for the September 11 attacks. Its importance in the comparison lies in the location and character of the targets: Pearl Harbor involved attacks on military bases on U.S. colonies, not on the national territory itself. Against a longer history of U.S. expansion and intervention abroad, Chomsky presents September 11 as a dramatic reversal in the direction of violence.

The analogy with September 11

Chomsky acknowledges that commentators commonly compared the September 11 attacks with the Attack on Pearl Harbor, but argues that the analogy obscures a decisive distinction. Pearl Harbor’s targets were military bases on two American colonies. In his account, the U.S. national territory had not been threatened; calling Hawaii a territory, he says, preferred a label that concealed its colonial status.

The contrast defines what Chomsky considers unprecedented about September 11. He does not claim that its scale or character was new in world history. Rather, he emphasizes that it was the first time since the War of 1812 that the U.S. national territory had been attacked, or even threatened. Pearl Harbor therefore does not provide an equivalent precedent for an attack on the mainland.

A reversal in the direction of force

Chomsky places the comparison within a much longer account of U.S. power. He describes the destruction of Indigenous populations, the conquest of half of Mexico, interventions across surrounding regions, and the conquest of Hawaii and the Philippines. He also points to the extensive use of force by the United States across much of the world during the preceding century, with a colossal number of victims.

In this context, September 11 represents a reversal: for the first time, Chomsky writes, the guns were pointed in the other direction. Pearl Harbor matters to his argument because it is often invoked as a parallel, yet does not erase the distinction between an attack on military installations outside the national territory and an attack that reaches the United States itself. The comparison thus shifts attention from familiar wartime analogy to the larger historical asymmetry between U.S. violence abroad and vulnerability at home.

The wider historical contrast

Chomsky extends this reasoning beyond the United States to Europe. European states had endured devastating internal wars while their empires conquered much of the world with extreme brutality; with very rare exceptions, he argues, their victims did not attack them in return. He gives India and England, the Congo and Belgium, Ethiopia and Italy, and Algeria and France as examples of that imbalance.

The distinction helps explain, in his account, why the September 11 crimes deeply shocked Europe as well as the United States. Their novelty was not their scale, but that violence reached powers accustomed to exercising it elsewhere. The Attack on Pearl Harbor functions in this argument as a limited historical comparison: it sharpens, rather than resolves, the difference Chomsky draws between attacks on colonial military bases and the unprecedented threat to national territory represented by September 11.