Race Baiting and Imagery in the Pacific War - Essay Example

? Manufacturing Hatred: Race-Baiting and Imagery in the Pacific War It has been said that in war the victor gets towrite the history. It is certainly true that the United States, with its overawing cultural and communications industries, shaped the prevailing post-war views of World War II. Nowhere has the image of what took place between 1941 and1945 been more carefully and elaborately engineered than in the United States itself. That image largely concerns the war in Europe. The horrors of the Holocaust made it easy to position the struggle against Nazism as a deadly and heroic crusade against the evils of institutionalized racial genocide. By comparison, the war in the Pacific has taken a back seat because Americans, in particular, need to feel that such a vast and consuming conflict has some higher meaning. What has been lost is the fact that the war against Japan covered a much larger territory than the European conflict, involved tremendous logistical challenges and presented an enemy so intractable that it was felt the most devastating weapon in the history of mankind was needed to secure final victory. Yet there was an even darker sub-theme at work – the war in the Pacific was, in a very real sense, a race war. This is the subject of John W. Dower’s illuminating book, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. The differences in the European and Asian conflicts are obvious: one involved a massive conflict between nations peopled by Caucasians, who, despite the aberrant Name 2 ideology of Nazism, shared a common moral philosophy. America’s war with Japan had no such “mitigating” factor. As Dower points out, the Japanese and Americans sought to depict each other as sub-humans, or animals bent on everything from racial miscegenation to utter annihilation. The element of race hatred, Dower argues, “remains one of the great neglected subjects of World War Two” (1986, p. 4). He examines the phenomenon of racial hatred between Japan and America in all its psychological, religious and cultural aspects, and the ways in which these virulent perspectives were disseminated through the employment of propaganda. The news and entertainment media were used to further racial stereotypes in both countries. World War I witnessed the use of propaganda with racist overtones, but it wasn’t until World War II that media-generated hate campaigns were tacitly accepted by the public. Thus, the war in the Pacific was “total war” literally in every sense. Dower goes about the task of explaining how symbols and expressions gain meaning and context through the commitment of atrocities and the use of genocidal policies. The vehemence of the mutual abhorrence between the American and Japanese forces manifested itself in the frequent use of torture and other terror tactics that seemed justified given that they were carried out against an enemy that symbolized evil incarnate. To reinforce such beliefs, both sides formalized and legitimized dormant yet powerful feelings of racial superiority; the Americans believed that the white races were inherently superior, while the Japanese believed just as strongly that their racial and cultural ascendancy was without question. It is not difficult to imagine the incendiary effect this kind of race-baiting was sure to have on the battlefields and in the jungles of the Pacific. “Race hate fed atrocities, and atrocities in turn fanned the fires of race Name 3 hate” (Dower, 1986, p. 11). Dower refers to this as the “dehumanization of the Other,” a psychological distancing that has an anesthetizing effect on both the individual and on the men who plan strategies designed to kill masses of people, whether it be through conventional means or with nuclear weapons (1986, p. 11). The war of words had the effect of excusing the obsession with exterminating the enemy, whose very existence was seen as a direct threat, a “truly Manichaean struggle between completely incompatible antagonists” (1986, p 11). This psychology of war can be seen in every conflict; it is a defense mechanism that inhibits the capacity for sympathy and facilitates killing. The American Civil War produced one of the most notable advocates of total war in Union General William Sherman, whose insistence on inflicting, and sustaining, maximum death and destruction spoke directly to the ethos of doing evil in the interest of a greater good. “We can make war so terrible and make (Southerners) so sick of war that generations pass away before they again appeal to it” (Masur, 2011, p. 73). Dower refers to this chilling psychology in terms of desensitization, which made the war in the Pacific particularly brutal. One cannot help but wonder how such a visceral and widespread mindset could be implemented and sustained among an entire race of people. Japanese and Americans had interacted for generations. Japanese had immigrated and assimilated within the greater American population, and Japanese nationals frequently attended American universities and did business with American companies. Despite all of this, the most exaggerated propaganda imaginable was able to exacerbate pre-existing fears and prejudices in both countries. Name 4 The common thread in the massive dehumanizing initiatives that manufactured public opinion and stoked war fervor on both sides of the Pacific was a diabolically inventive use of imagery and symbolism. In our own era, the power of imagery is undeniable; it convinces us to purchase items or to avoid voting for a particular candidate because he or she supposedly stands for “un-American” values. Propagandists in America used this power to create inhuman images of their enemy, portraying the Japanese as apes, octopuses, midgets and rapists. Conversely, millions of Japanese saw Americans depicted as demons, cannibals and gangsters. This purposeful manufacturing of negative images enabled, even encouraged, entire populations to see another society as an infestation of dangerous vermin that had to be stamped out in the interest of civilization. Dower explains that the presence and contributions of Japanese-American citizens, and years of social interaction between American and Japanese societies were successfully obscured because propaganda became virtually the only means of exchange between two cultures. “In this milieu of historical forgetfulness, selective reporting centralized propaganda, and a truly savage war, atrocities and war crimes played a major role in the propagation of racial and cultural stereotypes” (Dower, 1986, p. 73). Perhaps more disturbing than the success of these propaganda campaigns, or the horrendous violence it helped engender, is the fact that normally rational human beings, people who are otherwise capable of learning and accepting new ideas, could be so willing to absorb racist dogma clearly aimed at emotional and psychological manipulation. Seen in this light, it is difficult not to compare what happened in the U.S. and Japan to the Nuremberg rallies and the incendiary rhetoric that caused millions to Name 5 blindly follow Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime. Propagandists in the U.S. had fertile ground in which to operate. Sax Rohmer’s Dr. Fu Manchu books presented Orientals in the guise of the evil genius, a sly, sinister mastermind. Rohmer, a British author, wrote stories that drew on common racial stereotypes and anatomical differences. When Hollywood picked up on these stories, it was virtually assured that the specter of the malevolent Asian would become cemented in the American consciousness. In MGM’s 1932 production of In the Mask of Fu Manchu, audiences saw a stereotypical Asian villain with “menace in every twitch of his finger…terror in each split second of his slanted eyes” (Dower, 1986, p. 158). Transforming the diabolical Oriental figure of Dr. Fu Manchu into the symbol of Japanese military aggression was a fairly simple matter. Indeed, the American populace was only too willing to accept this image in the wake of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and the execution of the three American pilots from the Doolittle raid. The more fanciful such images became, the more virulent was the response in the public and the military. Cartoon imagery wielded tremendous power in both countries. The Japanese soldier became virtually synonymous with the ape-like caricature that cartoonists made famous during the war years. Warner Brothers cartoons, which made a virtual cultural pantheon out of its animated characters, produced a cartoon entitled “Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips” (Dower, 1986, p. 84). Dower mentions Sir Alexander Cadogan, the undersecretary of the British Foreign Office, who referred to the Japanese as “beastly little monkeys,” a perspective held by many British foreign service officials (Ibid). Japanese imagery showed Americans and British Name 6 as alligators and snakes; in one notable cartoon, two grubs bore the faces of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. Propaganda could also have an unintended “boomerang” effect. After the initial American setbacks in the Pacific, the U.S. government felt it necessary to use the media to convince American military personnel that the image of the Japanese as myopic, physically inferior automatons was clearly wrong, and that G.I.s actually faced a deadly foe steeped in an ancient warrior culture. Dower notes that Archie Roosevelt, son of former president Theodore Roosevelt, complained that the “deadly enemy” propaganda campaign had been so successful that American soldiers were going into battle fearful that they were up against some sort of “superman-superdevil” (1986, p. 115). It is a measure of the success of this campaign that after the war one marine mentioned having been astonished at discovering that Japanese soldiers were relatively small in stature (Ibid). Dower’s work is significant not only in the attention it devotes to an epochal event in modern human history, but in the way it considers human psychology and the ability of symbols to impact human behavior. Prejudice and race hatred has always been part of the human psyche, but it is nevertheless disturbing that visual manipulation of emotion could motivate rational human beings to believe that an entire race of people could be a dangerous sub-human race that had to be annihilated. This form of intolerance made another disturbing appearance less than 20 years later in Vietnam. Though it is highly unlikely we will again see such overt race-baiting carried on such a large scale in the legitimate media, the human predisposition to fear and violence remains with us. Name 7 Works Cited Dower, John W. War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986. Masur, Louis P. The Civil War: A Concise History. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 2011. Read More