OPPapers.com Essay Index >> Book Reports >> War Without Mercy
We have many free term papers and essays on War Without Mercy. We also have a wide variety of research papers and book reports available to you for free. You can browse our collection of term papers or use our search engine.
Review of Dower's War Without Mercy. Dower, John W. War Without Mercy: Race
and Power in the Pacific War. Pantheon Books, New York, 1986. ...
war without mercy. paper from: http://www.kevincmurphy.com/dower.html John Dower,
War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War. List: 20th Century. ...
war without mercy. ... I agree with Dower’s ideal that racism shaped self
and other images, and made war fierce and without mercy. ...
War Without Mercy. War Without Mercy In “War Without Mercy”, Dower’s
principle is a surprising one: Though Western allies were ...
... Japanese American Relocation. John W. Dower War Without Mercy (New York:
Pantheon, 1986), 8. 2 Ibid., 3. 3 Ibid. The Germans as ...
Submitted by cornelkm on April 9, 2008
Category: Book Reports
Words: 1489 | Pages: 6
Views: 32
Popularity Rank: 100,012
Average Member Grade: N/A (Add a Comment / Grade this Paper)
paper from:
http://www.kevincmurphy.com/dower.html
John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War.
List: 20th Century.
Subjects: World War II, Race, Popular Culture.
John Dower's War Without Mercy describes the ugly racial dimensions of the conflict in the Asian theater of World War II and their consequences on both military and reconstruction policy in the Pacific. "In the United States and Britain," Dower reminds us, "the Japanese were more hated than the Germans before as well as after Pearl Harbor. On this, there was no dispute among contemporary observers. They were perceived as a race apart, even a species apart -- and an overpoweringly monolithic one at that. There was no Japanese counterpart to the 'good German' in the popular consciousness of the Western Allies." (8) Conservative readers, don't fret - Dower isn't making this argument to exonerate the Japanese for their own racism or war crimes -- after all, "atrocious behavior occurred on all sides in the Pacific War." (12-13) Rather, Dower is exploring the propaganda of the US-Japanese conflict to delineate the "patterns of a race war," the cultural mechanisms of "othering," and the portability of racial/racist stereotypes. For "as the war years themselves changed over into into an era of peace between Japan and the Allied powers, the shrill racial rhetoric of the early 1940s revealed itself to be surprisingly adaptable. Idioms that formerly had denoted the unbridgeable gap between oneself and the enemy proved capable of serving the goals of accommodation as well." (13)
Dower begins by examining the propaganda churned out by both war machines (including a Frank Capra documentary, Know Your Enemy - Japan) and discovers two underlying patterns of stereotyping. "In everyday words," he writes, the "first kind of stereotyping could be summed up in the statement: you are the opposite of what you say you are and the opposite of us, not...
You must Login to view the entire paper.
If you are not a member yet, Sign Up for free!