american-holocaust

252 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTJewish fulminations from those of Adolf Hitler is a line of great importance,but it also is a line that is frighteningly thin. And once crossed, asit was not only in Germany in the early twentieth century, but in the Indiesand the Americas four centuries before, genocide is but a step away.From time to time during the past half-century Americans have edgedacross that line, if only temporarily, under conditions of foreign war. Thus,as John W. Dower has demonstrated, the eruption of war in the Pacific inthe 1940s caused a crucial shift in American perceptions of the Japanesefrom a prewar attitude of racial disdain and dismissiveness (the curator ofthe Smithsonian Institution's Division of Anthropology had advised thePresident that the Japanese skull was "some 2,000 years less developedthan ours," while it was widely believed by Western military experts thatthe Japanese were incompetent pilots who "could not shoot straight becausetheir eyes were slanted") to a wartime view of them as super-competentwarriors, but morally subhuman beasts. This transformation became a licensefor American military men to torture and mutilate Japanese troopswith impunity-just as the Japanese did to Americans, but in their ownways, following the cultural reshaping of their own racial images of Americans.As one American war correspondent in the Pacific recalled in anAtlantic Monthly article:We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killedor mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed thedying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh off enemyskulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones intoletter openers. 15Dower provides other examples of what he calls the "fetish" of "collectinggrisly battlefield trophies from the Japanese dead or near dead, in the formof gold teeth, ears, bones, scalps, and skulls"-practices receiving sufficientapproval on the home front that in 1944 Life magazine published a "humaninterest" story along with "a full-page photograph of an attractiveblonde posing with a Japanese skull she had been sent by her fiance in thePacific." 16 (Following the Battle of Horse Shoe Bend in 1814, AndrewJackson oversaw not only the stripping away of dead Indians' flesh formanufacture into bridle reins, but he saw to it that souvenirs from thecorpses were distributed "to the ladies of Tennessee.") 17A little more than two decades after that Life photograph and articleappeared, General William C. Westmoreland was describing the people ofVietnam as "termites," as he explained the need to limit the number ofAmerican troops in that country:If you crowd in too many termite killers, each using a screwdriver to kill thetermites, you risk collapsing the floors or the foundation. In this war we're