Axis of evil

Originally posted by jaguar
a: The US provoked Japan into war deliberately.

Ah, yes. I forgot about that letter FDR wrote to Hirohito. The text is below:
<b>
Dear Slitty-Eyed:

Bet your sorry ass won't attack us! Nanny nanny boo boo! Hahahahaha! We are INVINCIBLE! You can go hiri kiri yourself!

Love,
Frank</b>

In other words: in any war, there will be a first strike, and no matter what has been done before that, that strike is going over the edge. They are crossing the line by that strike. Japan, very simply, crossed the line. If I call you names and make rude comments about your mother and, in turn, you hit me, you should expect that I will come back to pound the living shit out of you. "For every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction" - except the first strike. That's always disproportionately large.


Anyway, I'd like you to back up your assertion that "the US provoked Japan into war deliberately".

[Nic Name]

Originally posted by me

The world won't be safe until the USA is the only nation with weapons of mass destruction. Only the USA can be trusted not to use these weapons against civilian populations.

Tell that to the Koreans.

UT is getting a call from Mr. Ashcroft, asking for my IP.

Wednesday, Feb. 06, 2002

U.S. opposes release

By LARRY MARGASAK-- The Associated Press



John Walker Lindh is seen in this handout photo released by the Alexandria County Sheriff's Department in Alexandria, Va.,

Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2002. (AP)

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) -- Saying that John Walker Lindh repeatedly expressed "hostility towards his country," federal prosecutors filed court papers Wednesday arguing against his release pending trial.

Shortly after Lindh was driven to the courthouse from the city jail under heavy security, the U.S. Justice Department filed a motion citing a number of e-mails written by the 20-year-old U.S.-Taliban figure accused in a federal indictment of conspiring to kill Americans.

In the motion, the government cited among other things a Sept. 28, 1998, letter that Lindh wrote his mother suggesting that the bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa "seemed far more likely to have been carried out by the American government than by the Muslims."

In its 11-page filing, the government also cited an e-mail that Lindh sent his mother on Feb. 15, 2000, suggesting that she should move to England.

"I really don't know what your big attachment to America is all about. What has America ever done for anybody?" it said.

In a June 24, 2000, e-mail, the motion asserts, Lindh told members of his family that it was the United States which incited the Gulf War and that Saddam Hussein was "heavily encouraged" by an American official to invade Kuwait.

In a Dec. 3, 2000 e-mail to his mother, the memorandum said, Lindh referred to the president (George W. Bush) as "your new president" and adds: "I'm glad he's not mine."

Lindh broke off contact with his family in late April 2001.

Originally posted by dhamsaic

Just curious - what is the wording of your "freedom of speech" bit?

Be careful not to express hostility toward America and use email to incite your mothers and families against America or GWB personally. Have a nice country.

[Xugumad]

Originally posted by dhamsaic
Anyway, I'd like you to back up your assertion that "the US provoked Japan into war deliberately". [/b]

Do your homework yourself? It's an established basic fact of elementary College history education that the US systematically provoked Japan into action.

Maybe if people wouldn't get their views of history from 'Pearl Harbor' and 'Black Hawk Down', they would be *somewhat* better informed?

Anyway, here're a few links to 'back up' that 'assertion'. Alternatively, pick up a College-level modern history book? (Nothing taught in freshmen courses, obviously)

http://www.blueskypie.com/nonfiction...ayofdeceit.asp
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/00000002D0F9.htm
http://www.blancmange.net/tmh/articles/pearl.html
http://www.iwm.org.uk/online/pearl_h...background.htm
http://www.propagandamatrix.com/amer...oney_wars.html
http://www.mackido.com/Politics/FDR1940.html

X.

Maybe if people wouldn't get their views of history from 'Pearl Harbor' and 'Black Hawk Down', they would be *somewhat* better informed?

I've seen neither, so go fuck yourself.

Anyway, you're missing the point.

If I piss in your lemonade, I am provoking you. That does not mean that I am provoking you deliberately such that you will attack my country.

The burden of proof is on the accuser. Jag suggests that we deliberately provoked Japan so that we could enter war with them. I'm asking him to provide proof. Not some web pages that say "yeah, Japan and the US weren't the best of friends". I don't care about that.

Proof that it was US policy (maybe unknown to the public) that we were going to provoke Japan such that there would be a war.

[Nic Name]

Attributed to Douglas Adams

"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so."

[Griff]

You mean something like Lieutenant Commander Arthur McCollums memorandom of October 7,1940?

"...9. It is not believed that the present state of political opinion the United States Government is capable of declaring war against Japan without more ado; and it is barely possible that vigorous action on our part might lead the Japanese to modify their attitude. Therefor the following course of action is suggested:

A. Make an arrangement with Britain for the use of British bases in the Pacific, particularly Singapore.

B. Make an arrangement with Holland for the use of base fascilities ans acquisition of supplies in the Dutch East Indies.

C. Give all possible aid to the Chinese Government of Chiang-Kia-Shek.

D. Send a division of long range heavy cruisers to the orient, Philippines, or Singapore.

E. Send two divisions of submarines to the Orient.

F. Keep the main strength of the U.S. Fleet now in the Pacific in the vicinity of the Hawaiian Islands.

G. Insist that the Dutch refuse to grant Japanese demsnds for undue economic concessions, particularly oil.

H. Completely embargo all U.S. trade with Japan, in collaboration with a similar embargo imposed by the British Empire.

10. If by these means Japan could be led to commit an overt act of war, so much the better. At all events we must be fully prepared to accept the threat of war."

Check out Robert Stinnetts book Day of Deceit to see how each of these ideas were implemented.

About fucking time someone does it.

Thanks, Griff. That's mostly what I wanted to see. Not some fucking web page that some guy wrote with a conspiracy theory.

[Undertoad]

Next question is: what led to the memo?

I am woefully ignorant about the whole subject, but I gather from some of X's links that the US was alarmed at Japanese imperialism, especially into China. (If so, what a mistake?)

[Nic Name]

The decision to drop the bomb on Japan, characterized as part of an anti-American Axis of Evil, was justified based on a belief that Japs were less than human.

The first step in justification of using weapons of mass destruction is to dehumanize the enemy, in the minds and hearts, so that force can be used without thinking and without feeling.

The Japanese were no more allies of the Nazis than the Koreans are of the Iraqis, or they of the Iranians.

The current rhetoric that "you are either with us" in all we say and do, or you are "with the terrorists" and part of an axis of evil, is pretty offensive language in a State of the Union address, especially when Germany, Italy and Japan are part of the coalition in the "war on terrorism."

The decision to drop the bomb on Japan, characterized as part of an anti-American Axis of Evil, was justified based on a belief that Japs were less than human.

By whom? By Truman? Ultimately, he made the decision. If not him, then who else?

Furthermore, <b>what proof</b> do you have that his basis for the decision was that "Japs were less than human"? Was that an internally circulated memo as well? Can you go ahead and paste the part of US policy in August of 1945 that declared Japanese civilians as "less than human"?

Or, <b>maybe</b> it was justified based on the belief that it would <b>save lives</b>.

[Nic Name]

OK, dham, while I find you some evidence that American's viewed the Japs as less than human, can you clue us in as to the proof you have that has given you this entrenched belief that dropping the bomb on Japan saved lives?

Originally posted by Nic Name
OK, dham, while I find you some evidence that American's viewed the Japs as less than human, can you clue us in as to the proof you have that has given you this entrenched belief that dropping the bomb on Japan saved lives?

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaank. Americans think all sorts of things. The KKK thinks "niggers" are less than human. That doesn't shape American policy.

Regardless of whether or not even the President viewed Japanese citizens as less than human, I want proof that it was "justified" by a belief that Japs were "less than human". Those are your words, not mine. Back them up.

As for proof - I will gather information on this when I get home. Unfortunately, I am at work and have a critical piece of software that needs to be delivered on the 12th, so I can't spend time gathering it here. But here's what I'm going to show you, basically:

Number of deaths at Hiroshima + Number of deaths at Nagasaki < (Number of deaths of American forces invading mainland Japan and forcing an unconditional surrender + Number of deaths of Japanese soldiers defending mainland Japan + Number of deaths of civilians committing suicide because of invasion + Number of deaths of civilians who took up arms against invading Americans who were then forced to "neutralize" said civilians)

The last numbers and ideas have traditionally been based off the total population of Japan, the total number of ground forces needed to invade the island, the likely number of casualties, and the fact that the civilian death toll on Okinawa is estimated to have been <b>at least</b> 42,000 by <b>suicide alone</b> (suicide, in this case, being that they sealed themselves in caves) - the estimated civilian death toll on <b>Okinawa alone</b> was estimated by the US Army to have been, I believe, some 140,000 on an island with a population of about 350,000.

Anyway, yes, I will show you real numbers later that would convince even the most skeptical that if the US had invaded mainland Japan, the losses would have been far larger than those suffered by the dropping of the bombs.

[jaguar]

to echo what griff stated, the key turning point was oil, an oil embargo was a huge provocation agains't the japanese and virtually forced their hand. Point safely proven.

The second point is that the administration wanted to enter the war(a german owned Eurpoe wasen't a too preasent reality), but public opinion was agains't such action, by provoking Japan into war, it opned the route to supporting the European war too.

Mabye on top of some high collage reading, you could have alook on the theory behind how a nations national interest and therefore, its foreign policly is formed.

[Nic Name]

The historian Allan Nevins characterized the American war against Japan as follows:

"Probably in all our history no foe has been so detested as were the Japanese...Emotions forgotten since our most savage Indian wars were reawakened by the ferocities of Japanese commanders."

The US government and media adopted an exterminationist policy towards the Japanese which called for the total destruction, annihilation, and extermination of the Japanese people and nation. John Toland, in Infamy, maintained that the war against Japan was "a war that need not have been fought...fought because of...American racial prejudice, distrust, ignorance of the orient, rigidity, self-righteousness, honor, national pride and fear." The methodology and tactics used by the US to defeat the Japanese were in part based on the patterns of the "Indian wars" and on a Manichaean total war between good and evil, between us and them. In a poll conducted in December, l944, Americans were asked, "What do you think we should do with Japan as a country after the war?" 13% of the respondents wanted to "kill all Japanese", while 33% supported destroying Japan as a political entity.

The first step in defeating the Japanese was to dehumanize them as a people and to depict them in archetypical racist terms as inferior, subhuman, apes, "savages", and "barbarians". Standard archetypes or exemplars or avatars of propaganda were utilized to dehumanize and stereotype the enemy. These archetypes of propaganda reappear in all propaganda campaigns and all wars. This was precisely how Native American Indians were defeated and how blacks were enslaved and excluded. The Japanese were denoted as animals, reptiles, insects, as "yellow monkeys", baboons, gorillas, dogs, mice, rats, vipers, rattlesnakes, cockroaches, and vermin. Depicting the enemy as an animal lessens the amount of guilt when the enemy is killed. In Nazi Germany, for instance, Jews were depicted as lice or rats to expedite mass extermination. Franz Stangl, the commander of the Treblinka concentration camp explained that dehumanization was necessary to expedite the extermination process:

To condition those who actually had to carry out the policies. To make it possible for them to do what they did.

The enemy was subhuman, or lesser than human, or not human, and thus deserved or warranted extermination. Killing such an enemy is proper and appropriate and those doing the killing should feel no guilt or moral compunction. The Japanese were "mad dogs" or "yellow dogs", and as reflected in a statement during the war, "mad dogs are just insane animals that should be shot."

A manifestation of racism and racist hysteria was to refer to the Japanese in racist stereotypical terms: "Nip", from Nippon, the Japanese word for Japan, and the shortened "Jap". These were the equivalent of "nigger" and "gook" and "Hun". New terms were also coined by US Marines: "Japes", a combination of "Japs" and "Apes". Another neologism was "monkeynips". US Marine Eugene B. Sledge recalled that native peoples of the Pacific were referred to as "gooks". The major themes were of hunting and then exterminating vermin, or predatory animals, "a nameless mass of vermin". Guadalcanal was described as "a hunter's paradise...teeming with monkey-men."

J. Glenn Gray described how American troops hunted down a Japanese soldier and killed him as if he were not a human being, but an animal, a beast of prey:

"When a Japanese soldier was "flushed" from his hiding place...the unit...was resting and joking. But they seized their rifles and began using him as a live target while he dashed frantically around the clearing in search of safety. The soldiers found his movements uproariously funny. Finally...they succeeded in killing him...The veteran emphasized the similarity of the enemy soldier to an animal. None of the American soldiers apparently ever considered that he may have had human feelings of fear and the wish to be spared."

[Nic Name]

The dehumanization of the enemy was meant to lead to extermination and total annihilation, as was reflected in the pronouncements of US military leaders and the media. Admiral William F. Halsey, commander of the US South Pacific Force, at a l944 press conference declared:

"The only good Jap is a Jap whose been dead six months. When we get to Tokyo ... we'll have a celebration where Tokyo was."

A popular wartime saying was "the only good Jap is a dead Jap". In l943, Leatherneck, the US Marine monthly magazine, ran a photograph of Japanese corpses on Guadalcanal with an uppercase heading reading: "Good Japs". The caption for the photo read: "Good Japs are dead Japs."

Extermination was buttressed by dehumanization. Admiral Halsey referred to the Japanese as "yellow bastards", "stupid animals", "yellow monkeys", and "monkeymen". He stated that he was "rarin' to go...to get some more monkey meat" and that "the Japs are losing their grip, even with their tails" and explained that "the Japanese were a product of mating between female apes and the worst Chinese criminals." The objective was to persuade to kill, to kill "them". Halsey rallied his men with the following motto: "Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs." The US Marine Corps motto was: "Remember Pear harbor---keep 'em dying."

Time magazine expressed its outrage after the attack on Pearl harbor in blatantly racist terms: "Why the yellow bastards!" The New Yorker depicted the Japanese as "yellow monkeys" while the Washington Post caricatured them as a large gorilla. Rear Admiral Husband Kimmel explained his shock at the attack on Pearl Harbor as follows: "I never thought those little yellow sons of bitches could pull off such an attack so far from Japan."

Captain H. L. Pence, the Navy representative to the first interdepartmental US government committee to consider the issue of the treatment of Japan after the war, stated in May, l943, that he advocated the "almost total elimination of the Japanese as a race," because this was "a question of which race was to survive, and white civilization was at stake."

The chairman of the War Manpower Commission, Paul V. McNutt, told a public audience in May, l945, that he favored "the extermination of the Japanese in toto ... for I know the Japanese people."

Vice Admiral Arthur Radford, several days before the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, stated that "Japan will eventually be a nation without cities---a nomadic people."

William Randolph Hearst's newspapers warned of the "yellow peril" and maintained that Japan was a "racial menace". The US war with Japan took on the nature of a race or racist war. The Japanese, along with other Asians, were regarded as "despised races", "unassimilable races", and "inferior races". Racism is a manifestation of consensual paranoia which sees a person or group that is different in any way as a "stranger", as an "alien", the enemy "other". Racism divides "us" against "them" based upon racial differences. In conjunction with the exterminationist and dehumanization policies, there was the use of racist stereotypes. Racist stereotyping is reflected in the following photograph caption from the National Geographic of October, 1942: "Who Says All Orientals Are "Inscrutable"? These Japanese, Arriving at an Evacuation Camp, Plainly Show They're Worried."

The dehumanization of the enemy is achieved also by picturing the enemy as a faceless and nameless "them", removing individuality from the enemy. The enemy becomes a homogeneous mass, an object for "us" to hate and to kill. It is accepted that killing other human beings is morally wrong. But defeating what we perceive as hostile ideologies can be commendable. We are not fighting a people and nation, but an ideology. Guilt and responsibility are thereby lessened. Of course, it is human beings who maintain the ideologies. As Stanislaw Lec has stated, "In a war of words, it is people who get killed." This is why ideology is so important in war and propaganda. The enemy, "them", must appear as a single, undifferentiated mass or unit guided by one idea, a single ideology, a single purpose. The Japanese people were said to be "photographic prints off the same negative". They were "an obedient mass with but a single mind", a "subservient mass" "a human herd", faceless hordes. This is a familiar and standard tactic in all war propaganda meant to lessen sympathy for the enemy people. The enemy people must be seen as an undifferentiated mass, inseparable from its leaders and government. All individuality must be eradicated. One could sympathize with the suffering and hardships of a Japanese individual caught up in a war his leaders had imposed. But as a faceless mass, the Japanese people were merely a numerical statistic, a thing, a cipher, not a person.

The exterminationist policy of the US was manifested in many ways during the war, such as not taking prisoners, killing POWs and surrendering troops, fire-bombing cities with incendiary bombs, using atomic bombs on cities, and the practice of collecting battlefield trophies from dead or near-dead Japanese soldiers. US troops routinely took gold teeth, ears, bones, scalps, and skulls from dead Japanese soldiers. In Guadalcanal Diary, Richard Tregaskis reported the following conversation between US soldiers:

They say the Japs have a lot of gold teeth. I'm going to make myself a necklace ... I'm going to bring back some Jap ears ... Pickled.

The Marine monthly Leatherneck ran this account in l943: "The other night Stanley emptied his pockets of 'souvenirs'---eleven ears from dead Japs." The Baltimore Sun and The Detroit Free Press ran stories about war 'souvenirs'. In Baltimore, a mother petitioned to be allowed to have her son mail her an ear he had cut off a dead Japanese soldier. In Detroit, a minor had attempted to enlist by promising his chaplain that he would send him the third pair of ears he collected from dead Japanese soldiers.

Eugene B. Sledge, a US Marine veteran of the Peleliu and Okinawa campaigns, recalled how US soldiers would routinely shoot even wounded Japanese soldiers to obtain their gold teeth, a practice more commonly associated with Nazi guards extracting gold teeth from Jews:

I've seen guys shoot Japanese wounded when it really was not necessary and knock gold teeth out of their mouths. .. I remember one time at Peleliu, I thought I'd collect gold teeth. One of my buddies carried a bunch of 'em in a sock. ... The way you extracted gold teeth was by putting the tip of the blade on the tooth of the dead Japanese---I've seen guys do it to wounded ones---and hit the hilt of the knife to knock the tooth loose. ...This Jap had been hit. One of my buddies was field-stripping him for souvenirs.. the guys dragging him around like a carcass...This guy had been a human being.... It was so savage. We were savages.

In l944, the New York Times reported that a US serviceman had sent President Roosevelt a letter opener made from the bone of a dead Japanese soldier. Life magazine published a photograph of a woman standing next to a Japanese skull which her fiance had sent from the pacific, with the caption: "Arizona war worker writes her Navy boy-friend a thank-you note for the Jap skull he sent her" in the May 22,l943 issue.

US soldiers routinely used Japanese skulls as ornaments on military vehicles and as war trophies, after the flesh was boiled in lye or left to be eaten by ants. On February 1, 1943, Life magazine published a famous photograph by Ralph Morse which showed the charred, open-mouthed, decapitated skull of a Japanese soldier killed by US Marines at Guadalcanal, which was placed on the tank. The caption read as follows: "A Japanese soldier's skull is propped up on a burned-out Jap tank by U.S. troops." Life received letters of protest from mothers who had sons in the war and others "in disbelief that American soldiers were capable of such brutality toward the enemy." The editors of Life explained that "war is unpleasant, cruel, and inhuman. And it is more dangerous to forget this than to be shocked by reminders." Indeed, remarkably, Life received more than twice as many protest letters over a photograph of a maltreated cat in the same issue than they did over the photo of the charred skull of the Japanese soldier. This is the ultimate achievement of propaganda and dehumanization: Man's inhumanity to man, even to the point where we are more concerned for the welfare of our pet animals than we are for other human beings. Daniel Okrent, the managing editor of Life in l996, commenting on the decision not to publish the photograph of an incinerated and charred corpse of an Iraqi soldier during the Persian Gulf War, stated that "at some point we have to acknowledge what people are capable of doing to one another." Such inhumanity is the necessary result of propaganda, of an us versus them bipolar opposition. Sam Keen has described this in Faces of the Enemy as follows:

In the beginning we create the enemy. Before the weapon comes the image. We think others to death and then invent the battle-axe or the ballistic missiles with which to actually kill them. Propaganda precedes technology.

In an unconditional, Manichaean exterminationist war, the enemy is archetypically depicted as a superman or as supermen. The psychological pattern in propaganda to create an image of the enemy as a superman is rooted in a paranoid, infantile orientation. The paranoid orientation cannot accept balance or equality; the paranoid must either sadistically dominate or masochistically be an inferior victim. Moreover, anxiety and guilt is lessened when the enemy is omnipotent and criminal. This tactic is necessary to galvanize and mobilize all the resources against the enemy, which is not as easily done if the enemy is not perceived as a threat or danger. The analogy most often used in propaganda is that of the bully. The Japanese were referred to as "Jap bullies" and Serbia was referred to as " a regional bully". The New York Times Magazine in l943 ran a caption which asked, "How Tough are the Japanese?" In l993, in Foreign Affairs, a caption under a photograph of Serbian soldiers in a tank asked, "Can these men be stopped?"

A standard element of war propaganda is to characterize any action against the enemy as defensive or reactive in nature. We only defend ourselves. The enemy are aggressors. Paranoia creates a passive-aggressive orientation. The passive-aggressive victim always reacts to the aggression of the enemy, thus all responsibility and guilt is negated. This is how war results. A passive-aggressive victim lacks balance, lacks equilibrium. As a powerless victim, the paranoid justifies his own attacks as an attempt to gain power over the enemy. A passive orientation dissipates all responsibility and guilt. An American soldier who slits the throat of a Japanese soldier "did it only because he knew the Japs had done it to his buddies." Eugene B. Sledge explained: "You developed an attitude of no mercy because they had no mercy on us. It was a no-quarter, savage kind of thing." Similarly, a Muslim soldier slits the throat of a Bosnian Serb soldier or nurse because he seeks to "go home and to get even". The weak, innocent, defenseless were being protected and saved from the barbarous, vicious, and cruel enemy supermen. The Japanese were "barbarous", "uncivilized", "inhuman", "depraved", given to "mad dog orgies of brutality and atrocity", exhibiting "primitive blood lust and brutal butchery", a "naked, tribal savagery". Similarly, Bosnian Serbs were termed "thugs", "degenerates", "illiterates", "butchers", "rapists", "efficient battlefield killers", "killers", "murderers". Charles Lindbergh kept a diary in which he wrote down his observations of the war in the Pacific. He noted the desire to ruthlessly exterminate all Japanese as follows: "They treat the Japs with less respect than they would give to an animal, and these acts are condoned by almost everyone."

The movie industry reinforced the propaganda archetypes of the enemy in Hollywood films. Movies, like television, alter our environments, that is, they are new ways of perceiving or perception. As Marshall McLuhan has explained, these new forms of media change the manner in which we process information and "evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions." By altering the medium or environment, we change our ways of perceiving the world, thus, new media change us at the epistemological level. By changing the media, "the way we think and act" is altered. Information becomes instantaneous and communal, processed in a "global village", the information being uniform and replicated, being received as simultaneous stimuli with little time for rational examination. Movies and television have a tremendous capacity to dehumanize and to persuade. Pauline Kael, the film critic of the New Yorker, recalled the propagandistic nature of Hollywood films during World War II in reinforcing archetypes of the enemy in the "The Good War" by Studs Terkel. Kael recalled how "a lot of the movies were very condescending to Europeans and Asiatics." Movies created a bipolar dichotomy of us versus them, dehumanizing the enemy, as Kael recounted:

I hated the war movies, because they robbed the enemy of any humanity or individuality. ... Even the German or Japanese who happened to be your friend ... had to be killed ...We had stereotypes of a shocking nature. They could never be people, who were just caught in the army the same way Americans were and told what to do.... I got so angry. It was so difficult to deal with, because in some intangible way they did represent the essence of war propaganda.

As explained by John W. Dower in War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, fighting the Filipinos in the Spanish-American War and later the Japanese was directly linked to US experiences fighting Indians on the western frontier. The US thus had developed an stereotypical and archetypical blueprint for the enemy other. The Japanese and Filipinos were substituted for the Native American Indians. In fact, many soldiers were transferred to Asia from frontier posts where they had fought Indians in the Spanish-American War. Arthur MacArthur, the father of Douglas MacArthur, was "one of the more conspicuous U.S. Indian fighters."

The war against the Japanese during World War II was characterized as "Indian fighting". The US Army Infantry Journal stated that the Japanese were "as good as Indians ever were." The New York Times magazine of February 13,l942, in an article called "The Nips", explained the analogy with the Indian wars as follows:

"The Japanese are likened to the American Indian in their manner of making war. Our fighting men say that isn't fair to the Indian. He had honor of a sort. Moreover, even a dead Jap isn't a good Jap...Yet such are the Nipponese. In death as in life, treacherous."

The racist and exterminationist language was obvious. Asians were termed "yellowbellies", "yellow bastards", "yellow monkeys", "slant-eye", "slant", "squint eyes", "almond eyes", "slopey", or "slopie", "gook", "goo-goo", "dinks", "ochre horde". "Gook" derives from "goo-goo", the ethnic label used to describe Filipinos at the end of the nineteenth century.

The exterminationist policy was further exemplified by the massive bombing campaign directed against major Japanese cities, targeting civilians, unarmed men, women, and children. US military planners at first espoused a policy of "precision bombing", targeting military and industrial targets only. But on March 9, 1945, precision bombing was abandoned when Tokyo was attacked by 334 US aircraft at low altitude with incendiary bombs which destroyed 16 square miles of the city and left over a million homeless. An estimated 80,000-l00,000 Japanese civilians---men, women, and children---were killed, "scorched and boiled and baked to death". This new aerial strategy, "strategic bombing", was developed by Major General Curtis LeMay, who applauded the fire bombing of Tokyo that "scorched and boiled and baked to death" so many Japanese civilians.