The American Revolution from the view of Brexit

so-called Betsy Ross flag

We cannot legitimately celebrate history if we are not honest about what that history has been, both good and bad.  We must separate the fact from the folk fiction and from the more dangerously toxic fake fiction.

Union Jack from 1801

We MUST OWN both the best and the worst, and not try to sanitize the bad.  Revisionist history is the enemy of the present.


Today we celebrate the birth of our nation, as Lincoln phrased and praised it:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

In the UK, out of disgust with conservative anti-immigrant bigotry combined with economic and political stupidity verging on national suicide, both Scotland and Northern Ireland may leave the United Kingdom.

While the colonies which became the United States of America did this in the 18th century, the premise then was the lack of representation in Parliament regarding taxation and other important issues of colonial determination, and the failure of legal petition as a means of redress. No option existed in that period for either the addition or expansion of representation, or a legal option for the colonies to leave the UK if their petition failed -- but at least they tried petition first. 

That left only the option of violent revolution and secession for those UK colonies.  However, a few things should be noted regarding that revolution, beginning with the uncomfortable fact that it was not supported by anything like a majority of the people who lived in the colony, as required by modern secession provisions.  Rather the divisions were roughly a third who were genuinely in favor of revolution, a third who were neutral, and a third who wanted to remain a part of the UK every bit as much as the revolutionaries wished to separate from the UK. OUR revolution never represented the majority, unlike the secession option requirement from voters for the secession of either Scotland or Northern Ireland.

Both Scotland and Northern Ireland have, respectively, a legal process for their secession, should they so choose, where in contrast no such possibility existed for the American colonies.  In our own Civil War, there was a process in place under which the southern states could have opted to pursue a legal
separation from the United States, but they never attempted to use it.  So far as I can follow in US history, there was never even a serious consideration of using the legal option; discussion of such an option is slim to none in the records of the time. Further, contrary to the conflict of the American Revolution, there was no equivalent history of violence perpetrated on the southern states by the United States government to that perpetrated by the UK in the colonial period.

Further, where the American Revolution was about representation, and while the United States in the earliest post-revolutionary period did not, by any stretch, support universal suffrage, they did systematically over a comparatively brief period of time expand the boundaries of who was eligible to vote.  In contrast, there were far fewer voters in those southern states which formed the Confederacy, reflecting even then a pattern of an intentional lack of representation, and those states continue to have a shameful history all the way through to the present of voter suppression, the antithesis of freedom, the polar opposite of the central, core premise of the American Revolution.

Just over a year ago there was a mass shooting by a confederate flag waving racist in Charleston, South Carolina.  South Carolina was also the state which fired on the Fort Sumter to begin the Civil War in an attempt for the Confederacy to violently secede from the United States.  There was a fascinating profile of those modern pro-Confederate flag wavers filmed by, coincidentally, a crew from that quintessentially UK government funded news service, the BBC, who were in Charleston, filming a documentary about the Klu Klux Klan. What was clear from that documentary as well as from decades of history, is that those Confederate pro-slavery states have been a continuous stain on our history as a nation, opposing that core premise for the vote for all free citizens.  Instead we have a history of traditions like the intimidation and lynching by the KKK, and Jim Crow, which attempted to approximate much of the horrors of slavery.  They perpetuate factually false notions of race and racial superiority, interspersed and promoted with violence, which we now better know to be a faulty and artificial construct.  Even a casual look at the views of so many of the modern Confederacy celebrating battle flag wavers resembles nothing quite so much as the worst of the Nazis and neo-nazis; in many cases they overlap.

There is no justification for treating the Confederate flag as some sort of equally respectable part of the United States history.  The Confederacy was about denying people the vote and perpetuating slavery of people they insisted then (and now) were inferior human beings -- even denying the vote to many white people who were not wealthy.  The Confederate flag continues to be about perpetuating the tradition of racism, bigotry, and hate crimes. 

To assert - as some do - that it deserves some form of legitimacy because some individuals acted honorably on the Confederate side is a bogus argument.  There is a comparable flag in Northern Ireland to the Confederate flag, and it is also not treated with equal legitimacy to the Union Jack, the so-called Ulster Banner. IF Northern Ireland does secede, they would either adopt a new and neutral banner, or join with the rest of the island, the Republic of Ireland, as one nation under the green, orange and white Irish tri-color.

There were honorable Japanese soldiers who fought against the United States in WW II, while trying to take territory that belonged to the United States.  We don't put up Japanese flags alongside the
sunken ship Arizona at Pearl Harbor because of that.  There were likewise soldiers on BOTH sides of the Civil War and of WW II who acted dishonorably and who even committed war crimes.  The issue if we are honest in recognizing our history with symbols, monuments and flags, and ceremonies can never be about issues like the honorable and dishonorable conduct of individual combatants. That is an attempt to divert and distract from the premises for war, both legitimate and illegitimate.  We are still suffering the continuing effects of illegitimate causes for modern war, and they, like the Confederacy, are a stain on our national history.

We cannot celebrate the 4th of July without considering the history of separation, and the new history of it being made.

Right Wing Revisionist History - 1st, in an ongoing series

The photo to the left appeared on facebook, on a liberal page. It is factually correct, although it has a serious omission. Part of what led John Newton to write Amazing Grace was in fact his deep regret over his abuse of his fellow human beings and selling people into horrific conditions for profit, after his faith in Christianity deepened. Newton not only wrote the hymn Amazing Grace, he worked very effectively towards the voluntary ending of slavery in and by the UK, during the same century as our American Revolution. 

The rape and torture of slaves is not a contradiction or hypocrisy on the part of Newton, but rather represents a cause and effect relationship in the creation of a very famous piece of religious music. 

Slave trade in England was big business and initially the church supported it. A preacher named John Newton was one of the first clergymen to attack slavery after becoming a “changed man”. John Newton was a slave trader in the mid 1700’s. He had considered his trade to be honorable as did most Europeans of the time. He shared in the common practice of sexually abusing slave women and using torture devices such as thumb screws to control them.

 “  Newton shared in the brutality against his fellow creatures. If naval, life had been brutal it was for a high cause. The Slave Trade was for gain, and in 1745 not a pen nor a tongue had questioned or condemned it. In old age John Newton revealed what it had done to his character as a young man when he told a Committee of the Privy Council, from his own experience, that he knew no method of getting money which had so direct a tendency to efface the moral sense, to rob the heart of every gentle and humane disposition and to harden it like steel."

  "About a third of the cargo was female. As black women and girls came on board, naked, trembling, terrified, almost exhausted with cold, fatigue and hunger, they were exposed to the wanton rudeness of the crew. The poor creatures could not understand English, but looks and manner were sufficiently  intelligible as in imagination  the prey was divided upon the spot for future use... John Newton let lust run unchecked. His heart lay with Polly but his body refused to be denied. Since the women were kept on deck at liberty in daytime, a seaman’s opportunity came easily and he need ask no consent, since resistance or refusal would be in vain. Sometimes, he might take one at night while on duty, for owing to the heat and filth the crew went naked in the holds where the women lay, especially before the holds grew crowded. Any consequence would be born far away in the sugar islands, perhaps adding to the profit of the voyage. It is a curious fact that there may be American or Caribbean blacks in whose veins runs the blood of John Newton.”

That the UK, and other old and new world countries like Mexico, VOLUNTARILY opted to end slavery, without a civil war is key here.

One of the comments on the graphic included this phrase, which I take to be from a conservative of the variety who tout American exceptionalism and who tend to ignore, deny or at least minimize American faults or failures with revisionist history:

"...BTW Barack Obama's family owned slaves and slavery is still practiced today in Africa. This is the only country that fought a war ending slavery."

It is true that on his mother's side of Obama's family tree, there were slave owners.  It does not in some way excuse or legitimize slave ownership.  And it has nothing to do with Barack Obama, since he shares no responsibility for those actions.  This is a classic 'straw man' argument, that attempts to wrongly define the terms of the argument or discussion.

But the real FACTUALLY FALSE conservative revisionist history is the notion that the United States fought a war TO END SLAVERY.  The United States fought a civil war that INCIDENTALLY ended slavery in this nation, but that was not why the United States fought that war.

These tend to be the same crackpot conservatives who fantasize about new treasonous modern secession.

The Union side of the civil war went to war AFTER the Confederate side declared war on the USA by attacking Fort Sumter.  That war was to preserve the Union, NOT to end slavery.  In fact in the early years of the war, President Lincoln was not in fact in favor of ending slavery, in the vain hope that not pursuing that change would help end the war, and because even when he thought it was wrong, Lincoln upheld the provisions of the Constitution, as he had sworn an oath to do.  His political position was to restrict slavery expansion, not to end slavery.

From wikipedia:

In the 1850s, Lincoln was politically attacked as an abolitionist, but he did not consider himself one; he did not call for the immediate end of slavery everywhere in the U.S. until the proposed 13th Amendment became part of his party platform for the 1864 election.
In 1842, Abraham Lincoln married Mary Todd, who was a daughter of a slave-owning family from Kentucky.

...During the American Civil War, Lincoln used the war powers of the presidency to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared "all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free" but exempted border states and those areas of slave states already under Union control. As a practical matter, at first the Proclamation could only be enforced to free those slaves who had already escaped to the Union side. However, millions more were freed as more areas of the South came under Union control. Lincoln pursued various plans to colonize free Blacks outside the United States, but none of these had a major effect.
At the beginning of the war, Lincoln prohibited his generals from freeing slaves even in captured territories. On August 30, 1861, Major General John C. Frémont, the commander of the Union Army in St. Louis, proclaimed that all slaves owned by Confederates in Missouri were free. Lincoln opposed allowing military leaders to take executive actions that were not authorized by the government, and realized that such actions could induce slaveowners in border states to oppose the Union or even start supporting the enemy. Lincoln demanded Frémont modify his order and free only slaves owned by Missourians working for the South. When Frémont refused, he was replaced by the conservative General Henry Wager Halleck.

The situation was repeated in May 1862, when General David Hunter began enlisting black soldiers in the occupied district under his control. Soon afterwards Hunter issued a statement that all slaves owned by Confederates in Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina were free. Despite the pleas of Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln ordered Hunter to disband the black 1st South Carolina Regiment and to retract his proclamation. At all times Lincoln insisted that he controlled the issue—only he had the war powers. Lincoln's view was that in order for freedmen to effectively and legally rely on the promise and declaration of freedom it had to be grounded in the president's constitutional authority.

On August 22, 1862, just a few weeks before signing the Proclamation and after he had already discussed a draft of it with his cabinet in July, he wrote a letter in response to an editorial by Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune which had urged complete abolition. Lincoln differentiates between "my view of official duty"—that is, what he can do in his official capacity as President—and his personal views. Officially he must save the Union above all else; personally he wanted to free all the slaves:

I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was." If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.

We did NOT, in the good old US of A, fight a war to end slavery.  We fought a war to preserve the U of U-S-A, and to do so, we had to kill many confederate slave proponents who would not otherwise give up their treasonous secession in order to continue slavery (as distinct from attempting a legal secession) and pretty much grind the remaining confederate slavery proponents into the dirt to stop their death hold on owning, raping, and torturing a significant population of human beings they held in slavery.

If you doubt that the core, central cause of the civil war was the continuation and expansion of slavery, I refer you to the primary documents that show otherwise.  Even when there were secondary issues, like tariffs, they were about tarrifs on products produced by slave labor, like cotton.  The argument about states rights was an argument that the federal government could not stop states from continuing SLAVERY, specifically.  In every argument of the Christian Conservative Confederacy, CONTINUING AND EXPANDING SLAVERY WAS PROMINENT AND FUNDAMENTAL TO THEIR REBELLION.

In more humane nations, including those with a more genuinely Christian conscience like Newton and the UK, NO WAR TO END SLAVERY WAS REQUIRED.  Basic human decency and conscience was sufficient.

This notion that we deserve some sort of credit as the "ONLY NATION TO FIGHT A WAR TO END SLAVERY" is nothing more nor less than pure, total, unmitigated bull crap.

I would argue to you, our good readers, that if you cannot look at the failures of your nation squarely, and without flinching, AND STILL LOVE YOUR COUNTRY, you lack individual integrity of intellect and you are a damn poor patriot.  Every country has a checkered history of good and bad.  It is imperative to know both, honestly and factually, in order to be a good citizen.

Using such guidelines, conservatives are not patriots at all, they are just liars and fools.  They do not love their actual country, they are in love with and loyal to a non-existent ideology-drunk fantasy.

Conservative Revisionist History: digging a little deeper into the politics of a minor modern controversy

Professor Richard J. Jensen

Recently I have come across multiple references to what widely seems to be a losing battle between a conservative history revisionist and a child history buff, regarding the 19th century.  This is significant not only because the kid pretty thoroughly spanks the old white duffer, but because revisionist history is a key political agenda item for the right, ranging from their policies to propaganda. 

It must sting, being routed by a mere girl, and a liberal.

In particular denial of very real discriminatory and violent victimization of certain groups, such as native Americans, blacks, progressive waves of voluntary immigrants, and those persecuted for religion (Catholics, Jews and Mormons, and more recently Muslims) is a key point on which the right are relentless.  The past intolerance of conservatives haunts them, even as they continue that intolerance and bigotry in the present against all of those groups as well as against women.  Consistently, bad historians like Jensen want to discredit the very real bigotry these groups suffered, while at the same time consistently playing the bogus white victim card.  Jensen is very keen on 'nativism', which is the bias of established immigrants and their descendants, against new immigrants.

This provides a fascinating lens through which to view a range of controversies, from the revisionist history the right has attempted to foist on advanced history classes in high schools for qualification for college credit, to the political campaigns on the right dealing with issues of discrimination in voting rights and on the topic of immigration.

The two adversaries in this particular informational and intellectual battle are a 14 year old girl in the 8th grade at the same school attended by the Obama daughters, Sidwell Friends, which some might consider a bastion of liberal education.  While the retired professor was previously predominantly teaching in Illinois - the state from which Obama was elected president.  Professor Richard Jensen taught at the University of Illinois, Chicago, from 1973 to 1996.  He is also a editor at Wikipedia, which notes he has strong ties as well to Conservapedia, a right wing revisionist source noted for errors of fact.

President Obama taught at the very prestigious University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004, and began his career in state government representing Chicago in the state legislature from 1997 to 2004.  While it is impossible to know if the two men ever met, they clearly represent the opposite sides of both the educational and the political spectrum from that geographic area, a difference now being continued by a new generation.

I find this new battle over revisionist history particularly interesting from a personal perspective, because when I took high school honors history around the same age, back in the days of the dinosaurs, as it seems now, my own teacher, a PhD in history, REQUIRED that we do research into primary sources, much like that done by this 14 year old. 

In doing similar research, I found not only very much the same information as this young woman, but additional primary source material in the historical museums at the state and local level, that documented fear and discrimination against most of the large waves of immigrants that tended to overwhelm those who were already established.  I've SEEN this kind of evidence myself at her age, without using google, seeking out primary sources.  Each wave received its own discrimination, not only the Irish, but also Germans, Scandinavians, southern and eastern Europeans, and the Chinese, to name a few, with additional religious bias against Catholics and Jews associated with the southern Mediterranean and eastern European / Russian Jews getting singled out for particularly virulent bias.  As a general rule, anyone who was not a native speaker of English as their first language was targeted then, as now, by those who were bent on bigotry and fear of the 'other'.  Anyone who was more WASP - (perceived as)white anglo-saxon protestant (Christian) - received less demonizing than those who were perceived to be more different in key categories.  For example, up until the last century or so, Irish immigrants were not considered 'white', to give an example of crazy justification for bias, even though they are clearly primarily a Caucasian ethnicity, and spoke an accented English dialect.

From wikipedia (ironically) by way of Upworthy.  (Let me know if this looks like ethnic and racial bigotry to you, particularly in the part of the caption that refers to superior and inferior races, that would likely lead to job discrimination, of the kind Jensen is denying, and that would carry over into employment as well as other aspects of normal civil life.):

Or did you know that the Irish weren't even considered "white" until the last hundred years? So while you probably won't witness much Irish racism in 2015, the reverberations from that suffering surely still exist.

An actual illustration from a 19th-century scholarly text. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

The evidence for these waves of discrimination are frequent, and obvious. To deny them or to ignore them requires a massive effort of ideology driven intellectual dishonesty, which is what we are consistently seeing from the right, and it is more extreme the further to the right the ideology.  This is nothing less than a denial of large collections of evidence.  This is on a par with claims that slavery was benevolent and good for black Americans in history, and denials of the facts of evolution or that the earth is only 6,000 years old.  They might as well claim the earth is flat, or that the sun orbits the earth.

Here is one link of many to the specific story:

From the Smithsonian Magazine:

SmartNews Keeping you current

Teen Schools Professor on "No Irish Need Apply" Signs

Armed with a Google search and a theory, a 14-year-old enters the fray on a longstanding historical debate

This week, a 14-year-old made headlines for her epic takedown of a popular theory put forth by University of Illinois history professor Richard Jensen, Ben Collins reports for The Daily Beast.

The historical business practice of posting “Help Wanted! No Irish Need Apply” signs in windows and newspaper want ads to deter Irish workers has become part of America's cultural history and a powerful symbol of the discrimination faced by Irish immigrants at the turn of the last century. But for decades, Jensen has suggested that it was more myth than fact.

Here’s how Jensen’s argument goes: the signs were actually extremely rare and perhaps nonexistent, and the myth of the signs persists due to a popular song entitled “No Irish Need Apply.”
Jensen received backlash when he first published his theory, and the debate flared up again this March with the publication of numerous think pieces about St. Patrick's Day. One of those articles made it into the hands of eighth-grader Rebecca Fried, who turned to Google for more information.
To her surprise, she got results. The Washington Post's Moriah Balingkit reports that newspaper archive databases turned up dozens of work ads from the 1800s with the “No Irish Need Apply” caveat spanning a number of professions and U.S. states. According to Fried's findings, which were published last month in the Journal of Social History, the New York Sun newspaper ran 15 “No Irish Need Apply” ads in 1842 alone.
Driven more by curiosity than by academic fervor, Fried poked holes in the theory with a few calculated keystrokes. Jensen quickly responded to her work, arguing that the teen misinterpreted the data and that the signs were still quite rare. When Casey Egan at Irish Central first reported the story, the two went back and forth in the article's comments.
Though the debate about "No Irish Need Apply" signs may still be raging in the comments section, Fried’s work proves that the signs and the discrimination they represented did indeed exist — and that anyone with a curious mind and a nose for research can challenge the historical status quo.

I have long contended that conservatives are poorly informed, believing inaccurate things on a basis that is both broad and deep.  Their errors run the gamut from just plain crazy and faked to willful ignorance and incomplete information of the selective, cherry-picking variety.  I cannot imagine that this publication back in 2002 when Jensen originally published it was well received, but I would not be surprised if it is included in some form in Conservapedia, or if it is one more little cog in the broader propaganda effort to deceive voters from the right.

I would argue that in the very abstract of Professor Richard J. Jensen's original 2002 publication, the selective facts which he includes, which tends to limit immigrants to only the most menial and low paying jobs, much like the racial ceiling in employment experienced by native American and black Americans, and subsequently other groups, from Europe, and Asia, and more recently Hispanic immigrants, IS in itself the very essence of discrimination, not a total absence of employment.  These employment discrimination policies were also reflected in a broader range of discrimination, from education opportunities to housing to voting rights to where someone could travel during certain hours.  Discrimination is never ONLY about being barred from ALL jobs.  To pretend otherwise is the core of intellectual dishonesty.

Here is the abstract for Jensen's original abstract. Not only do the original 'NINA' signs remain extent, but so do many similar signs for other groups in our history.  What I find particularly of interest however is the end section, where Jensen tries to play the classic conservative white victimization card -- that it was WASPs who were the victims of the Irish, not the other way round:

Abstract Irish Catholics in America have a vibrant memory of humiliating job discrimination, which featured omnipresent signs proclaiming "Help Wanted--No Irish Need Apply!" No one has ever seen one of these NINA signs because they were extremely rare or nonexistent. The market for female household workers occasionally specified religion or nationality. Newspaper ads for women sometimes did include NINA, but Irish women nevertheless dominated the market for domestics because they provided a reliable supply of an essential service. Newspaper ads for men with NINA were exceedingly rare. The slogan was commonplace in upper class London by 1820; in 1862 in London there was a song, "No Irish Need Apply," purportedly by a maid looking for work. The song reached America and was modified to depict a man recently arrived in America who sees a NINA ad and confronts and beats up the culprit. The song was an immediate hit, and is the source of the myth. Evidence from the job market shows no significant discrimination against the Irish--on the contrary, employers eagerly sought them out. Some Americans feared the Irish because of their religion, their use of violence, and their threat to democratic elections. By the Civil War these fears had subsided and there were no efforts to exclude Irish immigrants. The Irish worked in gangs in job sites they could control by force. The NINA slogan told them they had to stick together against the Protestant Enemy, in terms of jobs and politics. The NINA myth justified physical assaults, and persisted because it aided ethnic solidarity. After 1940 the solidarity faded away, yet NINA remained as a powerful memory.

NINA remains as a powerful memory, because it is a real memory, and it is real history from which we need to learn important lessons. Conservatives don't want those lessons taught, or learned.  It undermines white privilege and power.  To people who live by fact, which largely includes both liberals and most independents, this is an example of right wing lying, and propaganda. To the right.... it's just business as usual by one of their right wing authorities engaged in calculated pandering dishonesty.

The Australian Point of View on VJ day

The Hoodoo Guru's Tojo

Tojo never made it to Darwin.



I should add that I was introduced to them by a cricketing buddy named John Ravenscroft. AKA The BBC's John Peel

Remember the End of World War II, Pacific Theater

The end of World War II in the Pacific Theater took place on September 2, 1945.  Japan formally surrendered, on the U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

Some people don't think history is important.  The war and peace strongly influenced what came after. The outcome of that war shaped the modern era around the Pacific rim every bit as much as the tectonic plate activities that caused a minor earthquake in Beverly Hills over the weekend.  I am always surprised at how little some people know in our country know, not only about our history, but about the other participants with us in it.

For example, very few know that Australia was also attacked more than 100 times, beginning not long after we were attacked at Pearl Harbor, in February 1942.  In that first attack, an exclusively aerial one, the city of Darwin was hit with more bombs than were rained down on Pearl Harbor.  Sydney and Newcastle were attacked by Japanese midget submarines, including the accidental sinking of a ferry while attempting to sink a heavy destroyer, the USS. Chicago, which was later sunk during the 1943 Guadalcanal campaign.


A Japanese Ko-hyoteki class midget submarine, believed to be Midget No. 14, is raised from
Sydney Harbour the day after the attack.

Since 2008, the first Wednesday of September is celebrated as the Battle for Australia Day.  It's not the most accurate term for a holiday, in the sense that there was no specific battle or campaign launched by the Japanese to invade Australia, in the sense that there was the Battle of Britain, or the proposed Operation Sea Lion that was planned to follow with Nazi amphibious landings in the UK.
The holiday commemorates a series of naval battles that were intended to separate Australia from the U.S., with Australia putting their forces with the U.S., under the U.S. General, Douglas Mac Arthur.  Australia was the staging ground for the southwestern Pacific war effort.

It's important to learn history, both world history and American history (all of it).  It's important to know what is revisionist history and myth as distinct from more factual and honest history.  There may have been no formal Battle for Australia, no formal plans for invasion (although the Japanese navy had lobbied for it) but Australia was certainly attacked directly, every bit as much as the U.S. at Pearl Harbor, and certainly made enormous sacrifices for the war effort, and suffered comparable losses.  The Japanese surrender on Sept. 2, 1945, the Battle for Australia day, those represent important events in our relatively recent history.  Learn them, and remember them, honor them.

U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, Commander of Allied forces in the Pacific, with Australian Prime Minister John Curtin, left;  and an Australian propaganda poster from 1942, below.