While it is natural for people and nations to focus on their own sacrifice and suffering rather than the death and destruction they themselves inflict, in the case of the United States such cognitive astigmatism is backlighted by the country’s abiding sense of being exceptional, not just in power but also in virtue. Air Force photo Terror bombing from World War II to Korea and Vietnam to 9/11 A B-29 Superfortress bombing Osaka on June 1, 1945. Much the same morbid asymmetry characterizes war-related deaths in World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War of 1991, and the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq following Sept. Many scholarly accounts now offer higher estimates for Filipino civilian fatalities.
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troops shot most of the water buffalo farmers relied on to produce their crops. The State Department’s Office of the Historian puts the death toll in the latter war at “over 4,200 American and over 20,000 Filipino combatants,” and proceeds to add that “as many as 200,000 Filipino civilians died from violence, famine, and disease.”Īmong other precipitating causes for those noncombatant deaths, U.S. forces has been the pattern ever since the decimation of Amerindians and the American conquest of the Philippines between 18. Despite panic about communist threats in the past and Islamist and North Korean threats in the present, the United States has never been seriously imperiled by outside forces.Īpart from the Civil War, its war-related fatalities have been tragic but markedly lower than the military and civilian death tolls of other nations, invariably including America’s adversaries.Īsymmetry in the human costs of conflicts involving U.S. Alone among major powers, it escaped devastation in World War II and has been unmatched in wealth and power ever since. Geographically, the nation is much more secure than other countries. When present-day Japanese cabinet members visit Yasukuni Shrine, where the emperor’s deceased soldiers and sailors are venerated, they are stoking victim consciousness and roundly criticized for doing so by the outside world, including the U.S. In Japan after World War II, this phrase- higaisha ishiki in Japanese-became central to left-wing criticism of conservatives who fixated on their country’s war dead and seemed incapable of acknowledging how grievously Imperial Japan had victimized others, millions of Chinese and hundreds of thousands of Koreans foremost among them. Such “victim consciousness” is not, of course, peculiar to Americans.
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“September 11th” has taken its place in this deep-seated invocation of violated innocence, with an intensity bordering on hysteria. Thomas Jefferson and his peers actually established the baseline for this in the nation’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence, which enshrines recollection of “the merciless Indian Savages”-a self-righteous demonization that turned out to be boilerplate for a succession of later perceived enemies.
AMERICAN CONQUEST OF THE PACIFIC IN WORLD WAR II CODE
They possess a seemingly boundless appetite for retellings of the Civil War, far and away the country’s most devastating conflict where American war deaths are concerned.Ĭertain traumatic historical moments such as “the Alamo” and “Pearl Harbor” have become code words-almost mnemonic devices-for reinforcing the remembrance of American victimization at the hands of nefarious antagonists.
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Americans embrace military histories of the heroic “band of brothers” sort, especially involving World War II. When it comes to the nation’s wars, however, he was not entirely on target. Some years ago, a newspaper article credited a European visitor with the wry observation that Americans are charming because they have such short memories.