The "logic" at work here, if I may abuse that term for a moment, is that all we need to know about the Pacific theater in WW II is that anti-Japanese racism was a sentiment among some in the American military command and political leadership, as well as a staple of war propaganda. Everything else is irrelevant: we don't have to consider the nature of the Japanese State or its actions, its aggressive imperialism, its racist atrocities in occupied countries such as Korea and China, and its totalitarian political rule. And because I suggest otherwise -- that one might actually look at what Japan was doing to understand the dynamic of the war -- that makes me a racist.
Of course, by this standard, one can never criticize any action by any Asian State, be it the mass murders under Mao, or the auto-holocaust of the Khymer Rouge, or the mass murder of Indonesian Communists, and so on, because that would make you one with the American racists threatened by the 'yellow peril.'
What a predictable, boring conclusion to a presentation where the only trope is hyperbole, interspersed with ever more frantic personal insults.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --