(by the way, and only slightly unrelated, if you’re interested by this summary of dower’s talk, i encourage you to come next tuesday to one being given by ambassador joseph williams, former ambassador to baghdad and author of the politics of truth. he’s the one that said the bush administration was lying and they then outed his wife as a member of the CIA. shit should hit the fan. it’s from 5:45-7pm on tuesday, oct 19th, at the lone mountain campus (LM on the map) of USF in room 148. also it’s free and there’s a book signing afterwards along with some free food (yesterday they had chicken kabobs with peanut sauce!) and free wine.)
yesterday john dower gave a talk on campus about the cultures of war and the amazing similarities in speech/print between pearl harbor, hiroshima, and 9/11. these are ideas that might not be new, but which are incredibly astute and interesting so i’m going to go ahead and paraphrase his talk here.
immediately following pearl harbor, FDR claimed that it was “a date which will live in infamy” (changed from “a date which will live in world history” by FDR prior to the speech), then immediately following 9/11, newspapers along the eastern seaboard had headlines such as “INFAMY!” and “a new day of infamy”. slogans used in both the following wars were, “remember pearl harbor” and “9/11–we will never forget”, (personally, i’m surprised he didn’t make passing mention to “remember the alamo”).
for both of these two events, there was foreknowledge that an attack was coming. however, apparently the administrations didn’t feel that the enemy could actually pose a threat. FDR opined that he didn’t think “the little, yellow bastards” could carry out an action so far from their home. al-qaeda had given warning that they were planning on carrying out a “hiroshima” against the US, but again the US did not respond, and when the towers were hit the phrase “ground zero” was appropriated from hiroshima to apply to the new location on US soil.
in september of 2000, future members of the Bush administration (Rumsfeld, Cheney, etc.) composed the “project for the new american century”, in which they wrote that america needed a “catastrophic and catalyzing event; like a new pearl harbor.” there is some debate on the ‘back door to war’ theory that, in fact, FDR did nothing about the attack on pearl harbor, though he knew it was coming, because he wanted an event which would bring america together under one banner in order to enter the war against the axis. it could be said that the bush administration also wanted, or needed, an event which would brush away the uncertainties over their election and bring together a divided country to fight the war which bush desired. dower didn’t give much credence to FDR doing it on purpose, but no one asked him about bush. (hmm, if you go read the wikipedia link, it says that the quote is out of context, which sort of defeats dower’s argument there. or really, my argument, since he wasn’t advocating this theory, i just drew it out. his use of the quote was to show how one horrible act can be used to unite a country, as it did in the cases of pearl harbor and 9/11. well, the quote may not be valid in this instance, but the idea itself is still totally valid.)
hiroshima and pearl harbor are positive and exemplary models in military circles. hiroshima as a decisive strike of “shock and awe” (as written about by harlan ullman, a military strategist whose book circled widely in the pentagon), and pearl harbor as a model for pre-emptive strike. 9/11, of course, now is also being used as a model for pre-emptive strike, and so we come in a circle, to make it full though you might think that we should have dropped an atomic bomb on baghdad. but according to ullman’s book, all we needed to do was create a “non-nuclear hiroshima”. the question is, did we manage that? or were the air strikes just not quite shocking enough?
