Americans should never forget the heroic sacrifices of our veterans. None stands out more boldly than the bloody campaigns of the Pacific Islands. Over 6,000 died at Iwo for an 8 square mile rock in the Pacific Ocean, necessary for basing our B-29s required to prepare Japan for the eventual U.S. assault. On this 60th Anniversary of the Iwo Jima Campaign, I’d like to take some time to salute all of the Pacific Campaign veterans, including especially my paternal grandfather Jim Roach.
One might not know that for the WWII generation in America the refrain was “Remember Pearl Harbor!” The significance of the Pacific Campaign has faded in recent years. I speculate the relative absence of public memory of the Pacific Campaign has to do with several factors all related to the triumph of liberal ideological thinking among our opinion-makers.
Japanese imperialism belies the leftist obsession with our civilizational faults. The racist and super-violent Japanese empire shows that homegrown evils in the developing world can often eclipse those of the west. In other words, the evil of the Japanese–just like the evil of the Soviets, of the Rwandans, of the Indians, of the Cambodians, of the Iraqis, and all the rest–suggest that evil may be a nearly universal human trait.
I also think that there is some ambivalence about the Pacific campaign because it lacks the ideological relief of our conflict with Germany. The European campaign, as memorialized in Capra’s films, represented the clash of the democracies with the regimented stoodges of old world dictatorships: the moral validity and practicality of our chosen way of life was on the line. Studying the clash of Nazis and America lets us condemn ourselves and praise ourselves all at once, with the Nazis as the old, illiberal, ethnic-defined west, and America as the vangaurd of modernism and liberalism. In contrast, our battle with Japan had as much in common with the ancient battles of Greece and Persia; it was a classic fight for the integrity of a homeland, brutally attacked by another nation. The Japanese were fighting for little more principle than their own interest in dominating the Pacific. It was perhaps the least ideological war the U.S. ever fought. Judging by the “New World Order” talk of Gulf War I, and the “War for Democracy” rhetoric of the current President Bush, America has a perrenial tendency to conceive of its wars as world-historical clashes of good and evil. The Pacific Campaign, fought for the modest principle that people should not attack our country, shows that our fighting men fight quite well when the stakes are concrete and tangible.
Finally, the conflict with Japan is notable for extreme violence and contempt on both sides, including the extensive use of racism in U.S. propaganda against the Japanese and the ultimate U.S. decision to drop nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While Americans of a liberal stripe like to view WWII as the “Good War” against all that was evil in the western world (and which supposedly formed its essence), these brutal realites are embarassing, particularly when the ideological stakes were so low, relatively speaking. For most contemporaries, though, the two campaigns were of equal validity, both fought to protect the U.S. from foreign attacks. But only the Nazi campaign has the potential to be conceived of as a clash of liberalism with right-wing dictatorship, the supposed death gasp of European illiberalism. Examining the Nazis permits a broader exercise in western self-examaniation, including our collective capacity for violence.
A more complete appreciation for the Pacific Campaign would be useful for Americans as an antidote to the glittering political rhetoric to which we are subjected daily by the Wilsonians in both political parties. We learn that the US was not defined by a nondiscrimination principle in WWII, extending even to the blanket internments of Americans of Japanese, German, and Italian ancestry. We also learn that America did not conceive itself to be engaging in a war of liberation with the enemy while it was still an enemy. It was us versus them, two collective entities, nations engaged in mortal combat. We lastly learn that America is capable of great, purposeful, and single-minded focus upon an enemy. Far from being a weak nation of morally relativist moderns, American retained the ancient sense of a people who came together in the time of an attack out of the rational sense that countrymen are bound together in such matters. Far from thinking we were doing Japan a favor, we knew that it needed to be slapped down, and slapped down hard, for there to be any prospect of postwar peace between our nations. This victory, and the sacrifice required to bring it about, is more than enough to celebrate.
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I actually agree with most of this post but I want to pick an important philosophical nit:
“Far from being a weak nation of morally relativist moderns, American retained the ancient sense of a people who came together in the time of an attack out of the rational sense that countrymen are bound together in such matters.”
Tha ancient sense of a people of coutnrymen who come together in times of attack IS moral relativism. The Nazis embraced that view as well in equating their cause with the liberation of oppressed Germans in Central Europe. The rhetoric of Wilsonianism is morally absolutist and categorical — thou shalt have universal democracy.
The problem is not in moral clarity or relativism versus absolutism, but it the moral progmatics of aggression and peace.
I don’t see how the defense of a real community, which has nurtured one and to which one is connected by ties of interest, blood, and history, can be morally relativist. It’s true, it’s not a universal value, such as “democracy.” In other words, a German, an American, and a Russian could all act upon this value, as we saw in WWI. But it’s not a relativist value; it’s an unchosen obligation that varies from person to person, like one’s obligations to one’s family.
That all said, there can be a moral obligation not to participate in an unjust an aggressive war by one’s community–as in the Nazi attacks on Poland and France–but in most cases the lion’s share of this responsibility should fall on the leadreship class of a society.
Or, Matthew, if I may, a relevant passage from G.K. Chesterton’s “Everlasting Man”:
There is something we all know which can only be rendered, in an appropriate language, as realpolitik. As a matter of fact, it is an almost insanely unreal politik. It is always stubbornly and stupidly repeating that men fight for material ends, without reflecting for a moment that the material ends are hardly ever material to the men who fight. In any case no man will die for practical politics, just as no man will die for pay. Nero could not hire a hundred Christians to be eaten by lions at a shilling an hour, for men will not be martyred for money. But the vision called up by real politik, or realistic politics, is beyond example crazy and incredible. Does anybody in the world believe that a soldier says, ‘My leg is nearly dropping off, but I shall go on till it drops; for after all I shall enjoy all the advantages of my government obtaining a warm water port in the Gulf of Finland! Can anybody suppose that a clerk turned conscript says, ‘If I am gassed I shall probably die in torments; but it is a comfort to reflect that should I ever decide to become a pearl-diver in the South Seas, that career is now open to me and my countrymen! Materialist history is the most madly incredible of all histories, or even of all romances. Whatever starts wars, the thing that sustains wars is something in the soul; that is something akin to religion. It is what men feel about life and about death. A man near to death is dealing directly with an absolute; it is nonsense to say he is concerned only with relative and remote complications that death in any case will end. If he is sustained by certain loyalties, they must be loyalties as simple as death. They are generally two ideas, which are only two sides of one idea. The first is the love of something said to be threatened, if it be only vaguely known as home; the second is dislike and defiance of some strange thing that threatens it. The first is far more philosophical than it sounds though we need not discuss it here. A man does not want his national home destroyed or even changed, because he can not even remember all the good things that go with it; just as he does not want his house burnt down because he can hardly count all the things he would miss. Therefore he fights for what sounds like a hazy abstraction, but is really a house.