[act-ma] 9/23 "Cultures of War", John Dower, MIT (Th)

[Martin Voelker]

Thursday, September 23, 2010, 6 p.m.
"Cultures of War" Book Talk 
by Professor John Dower
Speaker: Professor John Dower

Time: 6:00p–8:00p

Location at MIT: W20-306, Student Center, Twenty Chimneys

Professor John Dower will speak about his new book "Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, and Iraq". Copies of "Cultures of War" will be available for signing following the talk. 

John W. Dower, author of Cultures of War, has also written Embracing Defeat (winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize), War without Mercy (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award), as well as many other books on Japan. He is professor emeritus of history at MIT and founder/co-director of the online Visualizing Cultures project, established at MIT in 2002 and dedicated to the presentation of image-driven scholarship on East Asia in the modern world.

Open to: the general public

Sponsor(s): MISTI, Center for International Studies, MIT Japan Program, Japan Society of Boston

There's a good article about the book here: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/cultures-of-war-0915.html


excerpt: 
"The book is partly a critique of American foreign policy of the last decade, and partly an argument against the notion that America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq reflect a newly emerging “clash of civilizations” primarily driven by cultural or religious conflict, an idea popularized by the late political scientist Samuel Huntington, among others. If it were a new clash, Dower believes, American leaders would not have been recycling such familiar tropes. Moreover, asserts Dower, in launching war in Iraq, America became enveloped in the same irrational “culture of war” as its past enemies. Whereas the 20th-century historian Samuel Eliot Morison once derided Japan’s “strategic imbecility” in attacking Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Dower thinks the United States displayed the same quality by attacking Iraq."

 Add to my calendar (in beta)

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