Summary of John W. Dower's War Without Mercy

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 World War Two meant many things to many people. It meant death for many, technological innovation, bureaucratic expansion, and an extraordinary mobilization of human resources and ideological fervor for governments.
#2 Racism played a significant role in World War Two, and it was not limited to the Nazis. The Western Allies, particularly the United States and United Kingdom, had many racist policies in place, and they supported these policies even while condemning Nazi racism.
#3 The racism that existed in America during World War Two was also present abroad, especially in Asia, where the Allied struggle against Japan exposed the racist underpinnings of the European and American colonial structure.
#4 The Japanese played on these sentiments, and the favorable response of many Asians to the initial Japanese victories against the Americans, British, and Dutch intensified Western presentiments of an all-out race war in Asia.

Sujets

• Colonisation
• Histoire
• Segunda Guerra Mundial
• Military
• World War II
• History
• Seconde Guerre mondiale

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 16 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822511248
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on John W. Dower's War Without Mercy
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

World War Two meant many things to many people. It meant death for many, technological innovation, bureaucratic expansion, and an extraordinary mobilization of human resources and ideological fervor for governments.

#2

Racism played a significant role in World War Two, and it was not limited to the Nazis. The Western Allies, particularly the United States and United Kingdom, had many racist policies in place, and they supported these policies even while condemning Nazi racism.

#3

The racism that existed in America during World War Two was also present abroad, especially in Asia, where the Allied struggle against Japan exposed the racist underpinnings of the European and American colonial structure.

#4

The Japanese played on these sentiments, and the favorable response of many Asians to the initial Japanese victories against the Americans, British, and Dutch intensified Western presentiments of an all-out race war in Asia.

#5

The media in the West often portrayed the war in Asia as a racial war, and the Japanese as a threat to the world’s racial purity. In reality, Pan-Asian unity was a myth, and the Japanese actually earned more hatred than support.

#6

The Japanese had a racist component to their ideology, as they believed that the Japanese were the superior race, and the Co-Prosperity Sphere was meant to maintain that superiority.

#7

The Japanese used a lot of racist code words and imagery to describe their enemies, and these were often excessively graphic and contemptuous. The Western Allies, on the other hand, used images of apes and vermin to convey the subhuman nature of the Japanese.

#8

The Japanese were also influenced by Western race stereotypes, which had been reinforced by nineteenth-century Western science. The Japanese found their place in the Confucian classics they had inherited from China, and their notions of purity in the rituals of the indigenous Shinto religion.

#9

The two sides had a lot in common, including race hate and martial fury, but they also had things that separated them, such as battlefield courage and dreams of peace.

#10

The most basic attitudes toward life and death among the Japanese and Westerners that participated in the war were not that different. Many Japanese died instead of surrendering because they had little choice in the matter, and the Allies never took prisoners.

#11

The patterns of a race war are like a palimpsest that reveals unexpected and hitherto obscured layers of experience. What passes for empirical observation is revealed to be permeated with myth, prejudice, and wishful thinking.

#12

The war years themselves changed over into an era of peace between Japan and the Allied powers, and the racial rhetoric of the early 1940s was surprisingly adaptable. The archetypical demon of Japanese folklore had always had two faces, being not only a destructive presence but also a potentially protective and tutelary being.

#13

The films produced by Capra and his team were classic wartime propaganda. They were designed to combat the isolationist sentiments that lingered in the United States, and with this in mind, the seven core films were given the collective title Why We Fight.

#14

The American people needed to be inspired to fight for their country, but they also needed to be shown that they were carrying the torch of freedom for a better postwar world. The two worlds were illustrated as literally as possible by drawings of two globes, one black and one white.

#15

The Why We Fight series, which was created to explain the reasons behind the war, focused on the struggle in the West. Only one film was devoted exclusively to the war in Asia. The Battle of China and Japan was released on August 9, the day Nagasaki was atomic-bombed, and withdrawn on August 28, two weeks after Japan had surrendered.

#16

The film Know Your Enemy - Japan, which was produced in the spring of 1942, was a casualty of this disagreement. It was meant to illustrate the Japanese as ordinary humans who were victims of their leaders, but the Pentagon rejected several drafts because they thought the passages in question would evoke too much sympathy for the Japanese.

#17

The film Know Your Enemy - Japan, was a potpourri of most of the English-speaking world’s dominant clichés about the Japanese enemy, excluding the most blatant and racist. The filmmakers adopted a strongly historical approach, and presented the Japanese as being imprisoned in an ideological cage built of two unique elements: the Shinto religion and belief in a divine emperor.

#18

The Japanese were portrayed as prints off the same negative in the American media, and the country was widely seen as being cataclysmic in its effect on the world. But underneath the facade of parliamentarianism and progress, Japan was still feudalistic.

#19

The film Know Your Enemy – Japan was meant to show the world the dangers of Japan’s militaristic and undemocratic development. But it also showed the passions and presumptions that underlay the clash in Asia and the Pacific.

#20

The Japanese military and civilian bureaucracy had separate projects that aimed to domesticate the population and prepare them for war. The military pamphlet, Read This and the War Is Won, explained how to behave in a tropical combat zone, and why the Japanese had to fight there. The Ministry of Education published a major ideological manifesto, The Way of the Subject, which explained who the Japanese were as a people, nation, and race.

#21

The southern region, with its treasure trove of resources, was also a land of everlasting summer. It was a place where a half million British ruled 350 million Indians, and another few score thousands of Englishmen ruled 6 million Malayans.

#22

The Japanese government published a book called Read This and the War Is Won, which contained practical instructions for winning the war. The book often was recovered by Allied soldiers from the bodies of Japanese killed in the Southeast Asian theater.

#23

Middle-register discourse is ideological and overt, but not completely cynical. It is designed for public consumption, and while it is not completely frank and densely detailed, it is not simply a tissue of lies.

#24

The three depictions of self and enemy in this section follow predictable patterns of contrariness. The positive self-images of one side are singled out for ridicule and condemnation by the other.

#25

The first of these patterns, that of contrariness or mirror opposites, can be seen in the Japanese portrayal of themselves as a militaristic, repressive, and irrational nation. The Western response was to believe that Japan was fundamentally peaceful and rational, and that its militarism was the result of external conditions.

#26

In the first type of stereotyping, you are what you say you are, but that itself is reprehensible. In the second type, you are what you say you are, but that itself is reprehensible. The Japanese government’s propaganda, for internal as well as external consumption, emphasized the primacy of the group or collectivity over the individual.

#27

The Japanese government and military constantly emphasized the unique and particular qualities of the Yamato race, and the Japanese people ultimately paid a price for this racist and ultranationalist raving.

#28

The war in Asia engendered a hatred of the Japanese that was unlike any other war. The Japanese were more despised than the Germans, and there was a simple reason for this: the Japanese were extremely treacherous and savage.

#29

The German onslaught against the Soviet Union and eastern Europe was much more severe than the attack to the west, and German atrocities on the eastern front were planned and persistent, while on the western front they were more episodic.

#30

The war against Japan was a conflict that was unique in its brutality and hatefulness, and the Japanese were hated for it. They were more brutal to their Anglo-American prisoners than the Germans were.

#31

The attack on Pearl Harbor inspired a thirst for revenge among Americans that the Japanese had failed to anticipate. The Americans were driven from the Philippines, a hundred thousand British troops surrendered to thirty-four thousand Japanese in Singapore, and throughout Southeast Asia, prize after prize fell into the Japanese lap.

#32

The American response to the Pearl Harbor attack was racist, with many immediately evoking the idea of the yellow bastards. However, some Allied observers began to argue that the meaning of atrocity had become ambiguous in an age of wholesale slaughter.

#33

The Western powers, especially the United States, saw the Japanese as the main practitioners of atrocities during World War Two, because they were the ones who started bombing civilian populations.

#34

The American public was horrified by the Japanese bombing of Chinese cities in 1937, and the German bombing of Warsaw and Rotterdam in 1939.

#35

The Briti