know your enemy

Firstly, take the time to read this brilliant essay by Kevin Barrett.

http://www.truthnews.us/?p=1530


I don't agree with all of Barrett's views in regards to the "war on terror" and 9/11, but I think he nails this. I believe, and always have, that humans are essentially noble, that they have to be coerced into killing. I know that we have savage animal traits lingering below the surface but I also think that our common humanity is something that is discounted much of the time, especially by our politicians. The only way governments keep us in line anymore is out of fear, and it's the same fear touted by Bush and Ahmadinejad. I'm not sure about Barack Obama's chances of winning, either in the primaries or in a greater national election, but he is the first viable presidential candidate in quite some time who talks about hope, not fear. Maybe they'll nab him like Robert Kennedy for daring to force people to think beyond fear, but I guess that's rather cynical of me.
Regardless, I've been reading a very troubling, very noble volume of forgotten history called "War Without Mercy". It's by a man named John Dower, and he chooses to examine World War 2 in the Pacific theater as a race war, on both sides. Dower argues that not only were the policies of Imperial Japan genocidal (something that has been argued for years) against supposed "lesser" groups of Asians such as Chinese, Filipinos, and Koreans, but the rhetoric on both the American and Japanese sides ensured a kind of war of annihilation that did not occur between the Germans and the western Allies (as opposed to the Germans and the Russians or Slavs). In other words, did we have to drop the bomb, and if so, would we have dropped it on Germany instead of Japan? Of course not. In American propaganda of the time, the Japanese are depicted as less than human, ripe for wholesale slaughter, and I think (as does Dower) that this had a profound effect on the American conscience, coming as it did after the crippling shock of Pearl Harbor and a rapid succession of military defeats. Perhaps the reason this troubles me so much is that the rhetoric really hasn't changed that much, just the target of our hate. We have always been in fear of the "other", and Dower argues that the object of our fear simply changed from the the Japanese to the Russians to the Chinese to the Vietnamese and so on. He could have now added Arabs/Muslims.
Dower begins his book with an examination of Frank Capra's series of propaganda films he directed for the War Department, the legendary "Why We FIght" series. The last installment, "Know Your Enemy-Japan" is perhaps the most notorious, released a short time before the bombing of Hiroshima and when a land invasion of Japan was still being reckoned with. It's very troubling, very effective propaganda, because it mixes truths (the various war crimes and atrocities of Japan) with gross misrepresentations of Japanese culture (misreading Shintoism, so on), all in an effort to demonize and dehumanize the average Japanese, so as to make them easier to kill.
I'm putting up a couple of excerpts here. The film is posted in entirety on Youtube, but I wanted to give a flavor of it. To Americans of our generation, who know Japan only as an ally, culturally, politically, and economically, this will seem at turns very disturbing and puzzling.