In just a few short days we’ll be upon the 66th anniversary of an event that many believed would never be overlooked in this nation – December 7, 1941. It became known as “a date which will live in infamy” when President Franklin Roosevelt addressed congress and asked for a declaration of war.
The Japanese military had attacked the U.S. Naval base at Pearl Harbor; nearly 3,000 U.S. personnel were killed, and the United States used it as the opportunity to join a widening conflict that had been underway in Europe since September of 1939.
College-aged people, like us, would have made up a large part of the more than 16 million individuals who eventually served in the U.S. Armed Forces during our 45 months of involvement in that war. They would have been born in the early 1920s and would have been intimately familiar with the emotional and political power evoked by phrases such as “a date which will live in infamy” or “Pearl Harbor Day,” or simply “Pearl Harbor.” But now that generation is pushing into its late 80s, and the idea of commemorating December 7 is fading with them.
So as next Friday rolls around and we break from 11 weeks of grueling studying, that 1941 version of the date itself will be the furthest thing from our minds. And why shouldn’t it? World War II is 60-some years into history and in another decade or two there will hardly be a soul around who actually took up arms in the conflict – so why shouldn’t the war slogans of that era pass quietly along as well?
After all, we have new slogans and new conflicts. The United States was attacked, nearly 3,000 people – citizens, not combatants – were killed, and the U.S. used this as the opportunity to coalesce a response to a widening series of attacks that had been underway since at least 1993. Many even declared that the events of September 11, 2001 were “the new Pearl Harbor,” and we have the slogans to prove it – Twin Towers, Ground Zero, September 11th, 9/11…
Some would like to believe the use of these terms is strictly positive and that they have real emotional meaning that sums up an event, evokes a pure patriotism, and serves as a linguistic monument that can unite a population towards a goal, whether that goal be peace, war, or peace through war. But intertwined with the humanistic purpose and effects of remembering such a traumatic event, these slogans are also political propaganda that serve a specific purpose for a specific time.
Eventually each slogan, as it and the population that coined it both age, loses much of its emotional and political currency. The phrases, however, remain with us, and these linguistic monuments, though stripped of much of their trauma, retain social meaning, even as they are displaced by the slogan that evokes the current traumatic event.
Though slogans such as these see the bulk of their use in wartime and political arenas, they are significant in a national and social context for a much longer time because each one retains with it not only a vague sense of the military conflict from which it came but also the often racial aspect that helped to inform that specific war.
As a nation we have become less comfortable with racializing our military conflicts – at least in the last decade – but it has not always been so, and this racial aspect of war propaganda has not been removed, only disavowed. As contemporary press and politicians attempt to deny that there is a racial undertone to the current wars, in the 1940s the ethnicities and races of those against whom the United States was fighting was actually brought to the fore.
Disney’s propaganda films depicted stereotypes of Germans, Italians, and Japanese, going so far as to distort facial features and give Japanese characters yellow or even green skin, as in the 1943 production “Der Fuehrer’s Face.” And in the U.S. thousands of individuals of German, Italian, and especially Japanese origin were forced into internment camps.
We cannot dismiss the emotional significance of our current monumental terms, but we do have to view them in the larger context of the genre and thereby understand more about how they operate. They are never just innocuous phrases that unite individuals; they also always hold within them the racialized coding that defines the enemy, the threat.
Whether the given image or concept of an enemy is real, fictionalized, or a hybrid of these, this racial coding remains long after the emotional and political fervor subsides. So if you commemorate Pearl Harbor day, consider how your commemoration will not likely be used by a politician to make you want to view Japanese individuals as “the enemy” that threatens your safety. But also consider how once it was used in that manner, consider if “9/11” and its commemoration ever directs your fear toward a racialized enemy that threatens your freedom, and question the validity of that racialized appeal.
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