Taboo Topics 2: Race

Remember everyone's a little bit racist.

Also sources for my clams on Japanese-American stuff found here:

Dower, John W.[ War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War.] New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.

Kennedy, David M. [Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945.] New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Spector, Ronald H. Eagle Against the Sun. New York: The Free Press, 1985. Print.

Quotes:
"In the last war, I looked at dead Germans and thought about their wives and children," one general told a reporter; "these [Japanese] bastards that don't even occur.

"In April, 1943," Dower reports, "the Baltimore Sun ran a story about a local mother who had petitioned the authorities to permit her son to mail her an ear he had cut off a Japanese soldier in the South Pacific. She wished to nail it to her door for all to see. On the very same day, the Detroit Free Press deemed newsworthy the story of an underage youth who had enlisted and 'bribed' his chaplain not to disclose his age by promising him the third pair of ears he collected." A year later, Life "published a full-page photograph of an attractive blonde posing with a Japanese skull she had been sent by her fiancé in the Pacific. Life treated this as a human-interest story."

In a test 54%of combat infantry men interviewed said that seeing [white] Axis POWs had given them the feeling "they are men just like us; it's too bad we have to be fighting them." In contrast 42% of soldiers who after seeing a Japanese POW, "felt all the more like killing them

Not to mention the incident with the S.S. St. Louis where in June 1939, the ship, carrying nearly a thousand German Jewish refugees seeking asylum from Nazi persecution, was refused permission to dock in the U.S. on Roosevelt's direct orders. Canada and Cuba both also refused to let them in. The ship returned to Europe, and most of the refugees eventually were killed.

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S01E73 - Taboo Topics 3: Politics