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Last update: 6 August 1997.
However far Iwo Jima might be from Western history, I think the controversy raises questions about the relative authorities of sources that are acutely relevant to our field. As a social historian, I am trained to seek out "voices," particularly those of actors with unique or previously unrecorded perspectives on events.
I am therefore rather puzzled by the stridency with which veterans' perspectives on the seminal events of World War II are being attacked, and ultimately discounted. I do agree that oral histories and present recollections must be examined with the same rigor with which we critique documentary evidence. Yet it seems to me that some of the criticism has bordered on outright dismissal of veterans' perspectives, something we normally do not permit in the "New" Western history. Much of our new social history is built on the recollections, sometimes recorded long after the events remembered, of people who were partisan participants at the time, and whose feelings have not necessarily moderated with age and distance from the events--events that, like those of World War II, retain their importance to the present world. Vicki Ruiz' use of union organizers as informants in Cannery Women, Cannery Lives comes to mind. It seems a betrayal of our standards (and skills of critique) to simply write off as biased, and therefore unusable, the memories of veterans.
Scott Riney
Arizona State University
sriney@asu.edu
(2)
Date: Tue, 28 Feb 1995
From: CURTIS KENT ALEXANDER
(broalex@falcon.cc.ukans.edu)
Stephen Fisher suggests that I have called for taking sides ("Does this mean we should indulge in Japan bashing . . . ?). I didn't.
Bruce Mitzit asserts that I have rejected "with patronizing condescension the accounts of people who lived the event." Where, Bruce?
Gus Seligmann, while claiming agreement with my argument, goes on to depict the United States as hapless victim, "The desire for revenge was not manufactured in Washington. It grew naturally out of the ruins of Pearl [Harbor]."
Walter Kendall wants to find threads of morality among 1945 decision-makers, "Wasn't it clear in 1945 that killing innocent people required a compelling reason?"
Lee Sultzman cuts to the heart by pointing out that "These old men [soldiers] still have a very clear idea of the situation in 1945 and their motivations and probably resent some 'kid' telling present generations that they were something ugly and different."
Pete Barnett displays the rationale of the soldier, and argues that historians who haven't been there can't understand it.
Other than Kendall, the responses seem to be thinly veiled (and not so thinly veiled) attempts to justify U.S. behavior in the Pacific. As I initially stated, 1945 military strategy and GI perspective are important. But they are not enough. The same methodology could be used to create a justification for Japanese behavior in the war. I am suggesting that we need to stop fighting the war (intellectually), and create an archeology of warfare itself. Not who was right and who was wrong, but how do (purportedly) advanced civilisations descend into barbarism? What are the signs, how are rationales constructed, what are the combinations of facts and fictions that drive this activity? Here is where history can serve us, if only we can tear it free of emotionally charged memories and nationalistic myopia.
Peace.
Kent Curtis
University of
Kansas
broalex@falcon.cc.ukans.edu
(3)
Date: Tue, 28 Feb 1995
From: Brad Fisher
(brad@telerama.lm.com)
I, a non-scholar, offer this thought humbly as someone who has no right to speak other than to ask questions. Something has lingered in the back of my mind in reading this thread, and I finally figured out what it was. If it's way too obvious for comment, please be gentle.
Our revision of Hiroshima and Nagasaki parallels our revision of the opening of the West 80 years earlier, doesn't it? Didn't most of us, at the time, believe it was the right thing to do, for whites and Indians alike? And don't most of us now acknowledge that we were practicing a brutal end game against another race to further our own colonial interests? One might think that we now have a clearer consensus on why the West was won than we do on why we bombed Hiroshima merely because we have moved further along the time line. Of course, it's not that simple. And the conflicts were not the same. But doesn't the evolution of thought seem very similar?
Return to resources for BANG! and Nuclear Fictions.
Last update: 6 August 1997.