So I'm a little late getting this up - I'm still trying to negotiate how to balance my work with travel.
Dower, John W. Cultures of War. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010.
Dower has published a number of other books between his classic 1987 War Without Mercy and his newer 2010 Cultures of War. I have not read these other works, but I did read these two back-to-back and can very much see the consistency and parallels between these two pieces, as well as the ways in which Cultures of War expands upon the ideas he lays out in War Without Mercy.
Cultures of War comes out of Dower’s interest in the aftermath of the events of 9/11, and the parallels he saw between this and the events and discourses surrounding the Pacific Theater of World War II. He breaks this down into comparisons between the triggering events - Pearl Harbor and 9/11 - and the developments in the aftermath - war with Japan and the bombing of Hiroshima and the invasion of Iraq. As with War Without Mercy, Dower divides the book into three larger sections, and unlike Mercy, gives detailed sub-section headings within each chapter. While it may seem minor, Dower’s use of headings and sub-headings provides a very clear understanding of the evolution of the book and his argument.
In Part I, “Pearl Harbor as Code”: Wars of Choice and Failures of Intelligence, Dower analyzes the comparisons between the lead-up and investigative aftermath of both the events at Pearl Harbor and on 9/11. This section has the strongest connection to his work in Mercy based around the ideas he presents on “Failures of Intelligence” and “Failures of Imagination,” where the US did not take seriously threats from non-white foreign others, nor understand their world view. He writes that, “Still, racial blinders alone do not adequately account for the failure to anticipate Pearl Harbor. The Americans also were unable to imagine what it was like to look at the world from Tokyo,” and also applies the same understanding to the events surrounding 9/11 (50). This is especially acute in the archival work he does around mass media in the days after 9/11, and the associations that they drew from Pearl Harbor, and that “In such graphic ways, “9-11,” like “Pearl Harbor,” became code for American Innocence” (68). This idea of innocence, then, is the key connection between the two events for Dower (and I would say for me as well), since it does not question the position, place, and actions of the US within a broader global dynamic and assumes an inherent right to sovereignty on the part of the US.
In Part II, Ground Zero 1945 and Ground Zero 2001: Terror and Mass Destruction, Dower compares the tactics of war on the part of the allied powers in Japan, and acts of terrorism in the contemporary moment. In contrast to the first Part where the comparisons are within the US, Part II’s analysis more closely calls out the hyprocrisy of the US’s and its allies war strategy with the final year or so of war with Japan. In that year, the US essentially engaged in acts that targeted the civilian population (which could be defined as an act of terrorism) through the firebombing of a number of cities, and ultimately with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Dower describes how these actions came out of a military strategy centered around “brute force” that has carried into contemporary military wars in the middle east, while ignoring the fundamentally different nature of war: where in WWII Japan was an organized and centralized nation-state, and in the contemporary moment Al Qaeda, the supposed target of these military efforts, is a highly decentralized non-state entity (which is further expanded upon in Part III). Finally, this section looks at the language of “Ground Zero” used between 1945 and 2001 - where initially it was part of the initial atomic testing vocabulary and then used to describe Hiroshima, has now been appropriated into the lexicon of American innocence and victimization in 9/11, without recognizing the history of how “Ground Zero” came to be a part of the American vocabulary in the first place.
In last part, Part III, Wars and Occupations: Winning the Peace, Losing the Peace, Dower finishes the comparisons between the two events by looking at the different ways that the post-war occupations functioned in Japan and Iraq (but largely neglects Afghanistan throughout the entire book). Again, Dower points to the different organization of the “enemy” between the two wars, and how differently the occupations between the two eras were organized, conceived, and operated. Throughout this section, “nation building” is a guiding concept and lens through which to view the two occupations, and how in the contemporary moment, the post-war nation building efforts in Iraq are deeply intertwined with “market fundmentalism” (and many of these ideas can also be seen in Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine).
Overall, Dower’s project in Cultures of War illuminates the hypocrisy of the US, and highlights “innocence” as one of the central ways that the US has positioned itself across the decades. While my work is less focused on this contemporary moment, Dower’s book has been useful in seeing how the ideas present in one era transcend and transform in following eras. This idea of “innocence” has also worked to help me frame and articulate how I’m trying to talk about how the US positions itself within sites of military history and memory.
Next week: Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism
