{"id":5384,"date":"2007-08-24T16:43:22","date_gmt":"2007-08-24T21:43:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.froginawell.net\/japan\/2007\/08\/useful-inconvenient-history\/"},"modified":"2014-08-30T14:02:34","modified_gmt":"2014-08-30T14:02:34","slug":"useful-inconvenient-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/2007\/08\/useful-inconvenient-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Useful, Inconvenient History"},"content":{"rendered":"

President Bush cited John Dower<\/a> regarding the potential for post-war democratization. Bush was using Dower’s Embracing Defeat<\/i> to ridicule those who believe the occupation of Iraq is failing to achieve a stable or democratic result by citing those who incorrectly believed that creating a liberal democratic state in Japan after WWII was impossible. This is a fairly transparent invocation of the “Galileo Gambit<\/a>,” pointing out that people have, unsurprisingly, sometimes been wrong about things they felt strongly about and that the people who were right have sometimes been in the minority.<\/p>\n

It’s interesting to see the example of Japan coming up again, as it was very commonly cited in the run-up to the Iraq war. John Dower himself, as the article points out, wrote several articles demolishing the idea that Japan was a good analogy to Iraq in this regard.1<\/a><\/sup> Dower has also argued that Iraq is like Manchuria<\/a> (with the US in the role of Japan) and more likely to be a quagmire than a shining example of modernity<\/a>.2<\/a><\/sup> The Bush Administration immediately disavowed any endorsement of Dower’s views outside of the citation made by the President, and this kind of historical cherry picking and selective ignorance<\/a> is all too typical<\/a> of politicians in general. <\/p>\n

It bolsters my complaint from yesterday<\/a>, though: a better understanding of Asian history generally, and of US involvement in it, would be all to the good, but so often Asia is just a foil, out of context and interesting only insofar as it affects us. <\/p>\n

  1. November 2002<\/a> and March 2003<\/a>  ↩<\/a><\/p><\/li>

  2. I’ve also made the Manchuria analogy<\/a>, and it still stands up pretty well, I’m afraid.  ↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    President Bush cited John Dower regarding the potential for post-war democratization. Bush was using Dower’s Embracing Defeat to ridicule those who believe the occupation of Iraq is failing to achieve a stable or democratic result by citing those who incorrectly believed that creating a liberal democratic state in Japan after WWII was impossible. This is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[166,102,119,126,63,187,189,194,198,84,206],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-china-japan","category-english","category-general","category-japan","category-memory","category-occupation","category-politics","category-us-japan","category-war","category-206"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9yoH3-1oQ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5384"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5384\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5575,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5384\/revisions\/5575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}