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The Impact of Racial Ideas on World War II
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11498 |
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BOOK WORLD
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10 / 1986 |
4,010 Words |
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Alan J. Levine
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WAR WITHOUT MERCY
Race and Power in the Pacific War
John W. Dower
New York: Pantheon Books 1986
$22.50
Race and racism present problems that are peculiarly difficult to analyze in our time. Although by any measurement racism - in the sense of beliefs in the innate inferiority of racial groups - has declined, to the point where intransigent white South Africans are its last open defenders, the whole issue of racism remains a fantastically emotional matter. The popular tendency to regard racism as just about the worst thing in the world does not make the task of serious scholarship an easy one. Somehow it is more horrible to kill, or even just discriminate against, a group of people because they belong to a certain race, than it is to murder people for religious or political reasons. We need merely compare the attitudes of the news media and world "public opinion" toward the rulers of South Africa with the attitudes expressed toward the Soviet rulers to realize the utter absurdity of this approach. The former may have recently caused up to 2,000 deaths in their efforts to maintain their particular system of injustice, while the latter have murdered upwards of a million people in Afghanistan alone to maintain their political domination. The result of this emotional climate is that many historical works purportedly dealing with racism descend into sheer hysteria, while others are mealy mouthed. As Leon Poliakov has commented, "It begins to look as if, through shame or fear of being racist, the West will not admit to having been so at any time, and therefore assigns to minor characters. . . the role of scapegoats."
But it is not impossible to avoid these faults. In War Without Mercy, John Dower, a distinguished expert on modern Japan, has produced a major contribution to the history of World War II. Despite some flaws, this book successfully explores one of the pricklier questions raised by the war in the Pacific, the role of racism and racial imagery in the war and its aftermath. Although Dower tends to exaggerate the importance of his chosen subject and sometimes ties his work to a very dubious theoretical framework, that is a small price to pay for a superbly clear account of a very emotional question.
Dower recounts and analyzes the vitriolic expressions of hatred on both sides of the Pacific that were unleashed by the war. He studies their prehistory and the relation of racism to misjudgments of the enemy, to atrocities, and to hatreds that led to the development of a "kill-or-be-killed mentality," an atmosphere of "brutish, primitive hatred."
Misperceptions
At least as far as Western students of the war are concerned, American and British underestimation of the Japanese is a dismally familiar story. The Japanese were deemed to be incompetent technologists and mere copy cats who duplicated the patches on the boilers of British warships and whose own designs were top-heavy. Thanks to an innate defect of eyesight, they were poor pilots who could not hope to contest Western control of the air. After Pearl Harbor, this nonsense died fairly quickly, along with thousands of Allied military men, though not without some ridiculous last gasps; some British and Americans insisted that the Japanese planes at Pearl Harbor,
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