Scott Martelle, a regular critic for the LA Times and other outlets, recently had this review of John Dower's "Cultures of War," which looks at the U.S. response to 9/11 through the prism of Japan and the attack on Pearl Harbor, among other slices of history. The book is a finalist for the National Book Awards. From Martelle's review:
Just after the turn of the 20th century, with the United States basking in the glow of victory in the Spanish-American War, insurgents in the Philippines decided that they'd rather not have their former Spanish occupiers replaced by American occupiers. So they fought, and they were eradicated by U.S. troops in what turned out to be the first brutal military campaign of history's most violent century.
But what stands out about the bloody suppression of rebellious Filipinos by American troops isn't the violence, John W. Dower argues in "Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, Iraq," which is a finalist for this year's National Book Award in nonfiction, so much as the "righteous expansionist vocabulary" that enshrouded it. "The boilerplate," as he calls it, of "innocence, virtue, and 'our freedoms.'"
"These," Dower writes, "were the ghosts behind the ghostwriters behind George W. Bush."
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