3/1 Discussion

Are you convinced by Dower’s argument in War Without Mercy that the Japanese and Allied forces expressed a great deal of racial animosity during the war, and that this drove its particularly high civilian casualty numbers?

I agree with Dower’s argument in War Without Mercy that the Japanese and Allied forces expressed a great deal of racial animosity during the war, because there was a lot of racism on both sides of the war towards each other. Although racism was a major issue on the side of the Axis Powers, there was a lot of racial animosity among the Allied Powers; there was specifically a lot of racism towards African Americans and Japanese Americans in the United States. Furthermore, as Dower points out, Japan became sort of a figurehead for Asian countries fighting against a hypocritical America. Due to this wartime racism, I agree with Dower’s argument that this racial animosity was a large contributing factor to its high civilian casualty numbers, as racism often leads to dehumanization and we see that murders and massacres become more common when people are dehumanized.