Comment by JamesLeonis
1 day ago
Ignorance is a Weapon.
Much of the US media is captured, so virtually nothing is fed back to us Americans. This also builds on top of US gunboat diplomacy going all the way back to the Monroe Doctrine. Keeping Americans ignorant allows our government and corporations a free hand in foreign affairs. The limited information allowed through is heavily sanitized and depicts US actions as the Good Guys attacked by the Evil X, which is why so many of our wars start with a ship "under attack" (USS Maine, RMS Lusitania, Gulf of Tonkin incident), or supposed WMDs (Iran, Iraq)
A great example is the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. Ask any American and they can call up all kinds of minute details about the attack. However if you ask them about the US trade embargoes and blockades against Japan in the months leading up to the attack, the vast majority of Americans will draw a blank. That is on purpose.
When stuff does break through to us, raw and unfiltered, most will react with horror. The self image of Americans as the Good Guys cracks. This happened in the Viet-Nam conflict when journalists had a free hand to show what was happening. Massive protests and a near mutiny by the US Army caused the Pentagon to get far more involved in how wars are presented in future conflicts. More recently Americans were so horrified when they witnessed the Israeli genocide after October 7th that it completely inverted both public sentiment and support for Israel, causing the forced sale of TikTok to Oracle and under US control to clamp down on the coverage.
I find it hard to look at the actions of the Japanese and the Americans in the late 1930s and come away with any other impression than that the Americans were the good guys.
In war, there are no good guys. Just guys that aren't as bad
I'm not saying Japan was good, and this isn't a callout to you. I'm arguing that the erasure of US brutality in China and the Philippines, as well as Gunboat Diplomacy on Japan itself, is why we can see ourselves as the Good Guys. This erasure is part of Manufacturing Consent. Its better to abandon the temptation to moralize the sides in war and see it as Great Power competition.
First we have US [Commodore Perry] who, in 1854, used gunboat diplomacy in Nagasaki harbor to end Japan's isolation and open it up for trade. This would snowball into the Meiji restoration, which ended the Shogunate, and an Emperor that rapidly modernized Japan's economy and military to prevent foreign domination that China was experiencing at that time.
Three decades prior to Japan's invasion of China, and a decade before Japan seized Korea, the United States and other Great Powers were suppressing the Boxer Rebellion as part of China's [Century of Humiliation] to exploit China for themselves. In addition the US, after it seized the Philippines from Spain, spent several years brutally putting down the native independence movent [p-h war]. Americans aren't taught this history, and fear of that brutality of American reprisals influenced the Japanese against surrendering during WW2.
Speaking of the Philippines, its seizure by the US and other Spanish territories after the Spanish-American war as well as the annexation of Hawaii alarmed Japan. They saw US and other imperial powers as rapidly encroaching on Japanese sphere of influence, in particular the decades of 1890s-1900s. Japan saw all of this and didn't want to be the next China. Japan also saw all of East Asia was it's sphere of influence as a Japanese mirror of the Monroe Doctrine and the western imperial powers as both a tacit threat and competition.
The US wasn't interested in helping China against Japan out of a moral duty, but protecting US interests against a rising Japanese Empire, in addition to British, French, and Dutch colonies in the Far East. The tipping point for Japan was when the US embargoed Oil and ship-grade Steel (as well as other strategic commodities and economic sanctions) from Japan throughout 1941, which led to Japan planning to seize more territory in SE Asia. To support these annexations, Japan had to push the US out of the Philippines, and to do that they attacked Pearl Harbor as a way to buy Japan time to take and hold territory before Americans could respond.
I mention all of this because Americans aren't taught this yet so much of our history hinges on these events.
[Century of Humiliation]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation
[Commodore Perry]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Expedition
[p-h war]:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine%E2%80%93American_Wa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes#Phili...
You should look up what the Japanese did to the Chinese.
Right? Ask any European POW who was imprisoned in Japan.
> caused the Pentagon to get far more involved in how wars are presented in future conflicts
Don't be better, be better looking!