Beagles the Reactionary

I first started calling myself a reactionary back in the 50s when I read somewhere that was what the Communists called somebody who was opposed to Communism.  Like a lot of words, reactionary has more than one definition.  My understanding of the word in a political context goes something like this:  A liberal wants to change things, a conservative wants to keep things the way they are, and a reactionary wants to put things back the way they were before the liberals changed them.  Those guys who wanted to restore the monarchy after the French Revolution were certainly reactionaries, but they weren't the only reactionaries in history.  I began to question my reactionaryism when Uncle Ken asked me, if I could turn back the clock, what time would I turn it back to, and I didn't know.  I think that I'm still a reactionary on some issues, like gay marriage for instance, but not on every issue.  I wouldn't want to abolish civil rights for minorities, but I would oppose any attempt to give minorities more civil rights than the rest of us.  So I guess I am a reactionary or a conservative, depending on the issue.

Ayn Rand was a reactionary in that she opposed Communism, socialism, or any other kind of collectivism.  This was understandable because she spent part of her childhood in Soviet Russia and she didn't want to see the US go down the same drain.  Donald Trump is a reactionary in that he wants to "make America great again", which implies that it used to be great but is not so great now.  One may dispute the accuracy of that assertion, or anything else that Trump says for that matter, but nothing says you have to be truthful to be a reactionary.  Conversely, nothing says that you have to untruthful to be a reactionary, or a conservative or a liberal for that matter.

Speaking of accuracy, I don't think the Japanese took the Philippines in one day.  I also don't think  they were trying to take the Hawaiian Islands when they attacked Pearl Harbor.  It is my understanding that their mission was to disable the US Pacific Fleet, and they were only half successful in that attempt.  I read somewhere that another Japanese force was sent to disable the other half of the fleet out on the open sea, but they couldn't find it in the fog.

Speaking of the Philippines, is it possible that they modelled their money on ours instead of the other way around?  I don't know why they needed their own money anyway because they were still a US territory at the time.  I seem to remember that they staged some kind of rebellion around that time, so maybe it had something to do with that.