United States
Review: Cultures of War

Review: Cultures of War

The last 70 years of modern warfare have been filled with atrocities, from the first bomb that exploded the tranquility of Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941 to the advent of large-scale saturation bombing of civilian centers culminating in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, from the terror attacks of 9/11 to the ill-advised invasion of Iraq and subsequent quagmire. In his ambitious and comprehensive comparative study Cultures of War, historian John Dower exposes many striking similarities between the thoughts, actions, and attitudes of Imperial Japan, the United States, and radical Islamists.

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One November’s Dead: The American War Dead Disappear into the Darkness

Remember as the invasion of Iraq was about to begin, when the Bush administration decided to seriously enforce a Pentagon ban, in existence since the first Gulf War, on media coverage and images of the American dead arriving home at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware? In fact, the Bush-era ban did more than that. As the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote then, it “ended the public dissemination of such images by banning news coverage and photography of dead soldiers’ homecomings on all military bases.”

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