Doyle Saylor is a liar.

Report this comment

Doyle,
Weren’t you part of the Clinton Government? Rwanda happened during Clinton’s admin? Did you do something? I don’t care about whispering behind the publics back about how bad the situation was in Rwanda, I mean taking some sort of ‘nuanced’ ‘moral’ stance so we all know you could be depended upon to not turn right around and ethically and morally kill hundreds of thousands yourself.

You have argued in other places it was just dandy with you to kill all those commies in Indonesia in the sixties. So you have a moral blindness issue somewhere in there someplace.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor

Report this comment

Report this comment

He doesn’t understand that the context in which people think and act–the turning of large parts of Eurasia into an abattoir by some of the nastiest and cruelest governments in human history–affects how people think about moral issues?

Report this comment

Report this comment

Report this comment

1. The attempt to assign values to numbers killed in the absence of the calculations that resulted in those deaths misses the possibility that even when X die their deaths may have been the result of actions that saved Y where Y>X. Thus, the argument FOR the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is generally predicated on the assumption that had a conventional invasion of Japan resulted in similar proportions of casualties to those in the battles for Iwojima and Okinawa, the resulting death toll would have been far larger that the number who died in those two cities.

2. One can’t help noting the one-sidedness of arguments that some anthropologists’ contributions to the war effort were potentially genocidal while simply ignoring the possibility that other anthropologists’ contributions may have had positive effects, e.g., on the decision to leave the Japanese Emperor in place, limit purges, and work with (while in some cases modifying) bureaucratic structures in place—in contrast, for example, to the current clusterfuck in Iraq.

Report this comment

Report this comment

Personally I dont find these revelations very academically useful except insofar as they help illuminate some aspects of what certain historical figures were really thinking. The most interesting aspect of this revelation to me is that it was anthropologists whose theoretical perspectives matched (and may have been influential on) the authors of the OSS programme that actually became involved. Note the letter from Melville Jacobs to Mead as cited by Price – he complains that the crappy racist theories of the Harvard academics are likely to get them jobs in the war effort. He is frustrated that they will get jobs rather than him. He wants to join the war effort but is pissed that he is not attractive to the army! One thing that Price does not appear to consider is that those who rejected the OSS request may have been those who did not think they could be of any use, or who had theoretical orientations that made them think such an endeavour was pointless or unlikely to succeed. He implies, but doesnt give any evidence to support, that they simply found the prospect morally repugnant.

I can just see Jacobs writing a report on how to demolish the Japanese by introducing class conflict, or dropping leaflets pointing out the inherent contradictions of the Imperial state… and the US generals tossing it in the bin with a “Goddamn Red!”

Report this comment

Are you trying to claim that there is some sort of difference here, as in, it would be a different question whether to help the allies “kill lots of people who happen to be japanese through racially neutral techniques,” or to help the allies “kill lots of japanese people through techniques that target characteristics intrinsic to being japanese?”

Report this comment

How Brad’s remarks on Eurasian genocide and (more recently) the Manhattan project fit in to a conversation on anthropologists and the Pacific War is still beyond me. However I am sure he will not be surprised to hear that I, like everyone who lost family in the Holocaust, believe it is an event that should never be forgotten.

My point was simply that genocide is one thing and killing enormous amounts of people is another and that this needs to be seperated. In comparison with the atrocities committed by Europeans like Stalin and Hitler the 1 million Tutsis killed in Rwanda seems like a small number (although again, it is terrible to even contemplate the organized murder of even a fraction of this many people). It is the genocidal aspect of it that makes it even more horrible.

Genocide and mass death thus are not always the same thing. Stalin and Mao were — modulo persecution of ethnic minorities — mass murderers but not particularly focused on genocide. In the case of a significant number of Americans during the war, genocide was the intent, even though ‘only’ a million innocent civilians were killed by bombing at Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Tokyo, Kobe, etc.

Report this comment

Report this comment

It’s not a non-sequitur: the horror at what the Nazis were doing in Europe was, I have been told, a very important reason for people working on the Manhattan Project to conclude that the job was worth doing. The same may well apply here. You do your readers no good service when you neglect the really existing genocides that were then going on in Eurasia.

David Price is certainly a hanging judge here. His article closes: “anthropologists’ willing compliance with the dark desires of the OSS left American anthropology positioned but one fianchetto removed from complicity in genocide.”

A more honest Price would admit that the situation is more complex: not doing everything possible to get Japan out of China may well leave one complicit in genocide as well.

Report this comment

Incidentally, Patrick, don’t you think the thing that made Mao’s reign so terrible was not that he attempted to remake China in a place inhabited only by peasants, workers, and soldiers (although this was obviously a bad idea) but that so many workers, soldiers, and peasants ended up dying as well? In other words, not that he targeted a group of people but that huge amounts of people died for random and arbitrary reasons?

Report this comment

I am at a loss to figure out how one might try to evaluate the moral justification of working on weapons projects during WW2 without comparing the harm being pursued (attacking the food supply of a besieged nation, using biological weapons, etc) with the actual harm being wrought every day the war continued, and with the possible harm of losing the war, or of failing to win it decisively.

I also find it interesting that you define genocide in terms of a biological definition of race. Mao most certainly was trying to destroy an entire people’s way of life. A vast number of people who held to that way of life were killed in the process. But that’s not genocide because he didn’t go after all “chinese?”

On a separate note, though, what bugs me personally about these sorts of discussions is the refusal to come to grips with the implied critique of people who actually participate in morally difficult jobs, who are of course implicated much more heavily by these lines of reasoning than are the hypothetical creators of hypothetical anthropological superweapons. Soldiers, defense attorneys, prosecutors, police officers, and so forth. There’s a larger point here with greater implications that’s being sublimated.

Report this comment