Race War!: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire [Paperback]

Gerald Horne (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2005 | ISBN-10: 0814736416 | ISBN-13: 978-0814736418

Japan’s lightning march across Asia during World War II was swift and brutal. Nation after nation fell to Japanese soldiers. How were the Japanese able to justify their occupation of so many Asian nations? And how did they find supporters in countries they subdued and exploited? Race War! delves into submerged and forgotten history to reveal how European racism and colonialism were deftly exploited by the Japanese to create allies among formerly colonized people of color. Through interviews and original archival research on five continents, Gerald Horne shows how race played a key—and hitherto ignored—;role in each phase of the war.

During the conflict, the Japanese turned white racism on its head portraying the war as a defense against white domination in the Pacific. We learn about the reverse racial hierarchy practiced by the Japanese internment camps, in which whites were placed at the bottom of the totem pole, under the supervision of Chinese, Korean, and Indian guards—an embarrassing example of racial payback that was downplayed by the defeated Japanese and the humiliated Europeans and Euro-Americans.

Focusing on the microcosmic example of Hong Kong but ranging from colonial India to New Zealand and the shores of the U.S., Gerald Horne radically retells the story of the war. From racist U.S. propaganda to Black Nationalist open support of Imperial Japan, information about the effect of race on U.S. and British policy is revealed for the first time. This revisionist account of the war draws connections between General Tojo, Malaysian freedom fighters, and Elijah Muhammed of the Nation of Islam and shows how white racism encouraged and enabled Japanese imperialism. In sum, Horne demonstrates that the retreat of white supremacy was not only driven by the impact of the Cold War and the energized militancy of Africans and African-Americans but by the impact of the Pacific War as well, as a chastened U.S. and U.K. moved vigorously after this conflict to remove the conditions that made Japan's success possible.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“This fabulous study shows where global history can go. It adventurously moves to practically every continent, producing especially sharp insights into world views of race in the U.S. Horne arrestingly shows how Anglo-U.S.racism enabled Japan to pursue empire while claiming a place as the champion of struggles against white supremacy.”
-David Roediger,University of Illinois, author of Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past

“Through multi-archival research that spans five continents, Gerald Horne demonstrates how and why the Pacific War should be understood as a Race War, not as an exculpation of Japan's Pan Asianism, but because of the poisonous triumph of the 'color line.' Horne powerfully argues that we should not forget that white supremacy retains salience in spite of, or because of, the Anglo-American victory in the Pacific War half a century ago.”
-Yukiko Koshiro,Colgate University

“Gerald Horne is one of the most gifted and insightful historians on racial matters of his generation. In Race War! Horne presents a provocative yet convincing argument that unearths the racial dimensions of U.S. policies pursued in the Far East during the Second World War. Horne's thesis provides a strikingly new and powerful interpretation of the international politics of race in the twentieth century.”
-Manning Marable,Center for Contemporary Black History, Columbia University

“An expansive and unflinching survey of race and empire, Race War! shows the complexities of white supremacy and resistances to it.”
-Gary Y. Okihiro,Columbia University and author of Common Ground: Reimagining American History

“Besides writing an important history, Horne adds to our understanding of the evolution of white supremacy.”
-Political Affairs

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About the Author

Gerald Horne is Moores Professor of History and African-American Studies at the University of Houston. His books include Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois and Race War!: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire (both available from NYU Press).

Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: NYU Press (November 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0814736416
• ISBN-13: 978-0814736418
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,113,074 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting topic, shoddy scholarship, March 31, 2006

By 

J. Chang "Jimmy" (Cambridge, Mass., USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Race War!: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire (Hardcover)

This is an interesting topic, since very few people before Horne wrote directly and exhaustively about it. Nevertheless, Horne's conclusion is largely unfounded basing on what really happened in history. Horne essentially argued that it was one successful Japanese campaigne after another that finally mentally liberated the colonized peoples of Asia from being psychologically and spiritually subjugated by the White man. This actually is quite untrue. Japan had *already* established itself as militarily equal to, if not superior to, any Western power *in the region* by 1905. Not only did the Western nations at that time acknowledged it, they based their policies on the assumption that the Japanese Empire was their equal. This is evidenced by the way they acquiesced to almost all Japanese demands in the Versailles Conference after the Great War. This, together with the fact that Japan had already established itself as a colonial empire (over Korea and Taiwan), placed Japan squarely within the camp of the family of imperialist nations (though I grant you that the West recognized Japan as equal only reluctantly.)

Aside from overstating the impact of the 1941 invasion, the author also ignored the fact that most Asian peoples (the educated elites, say, in Hong Kong anyways) were aware of horrendous Japanese atrocities committed in Korea and China prior to the invasion. This is especially true in Hong Kong, where most of the upper class families had relations in the Japanese-invaded mainland. So they did not really have much of an anti-colonialism excuse. They had been compradors for the British in the past, and not they're merely switching masters. Racial tension and hatred against the White man played a relatively minor role.

Another thing the author failed to mention was how almost right after the Japanese invaded most SE Asian colonies, the ordinary people, who initially did buy in to the Japanese anti-Western propaganda, became aware of the tyrannical character of the Japanes occupation. How could they had not! Japanese sentinels was authorized to bayonet any "local" who failed to bow to the Imperial Japanese Army standard. Regardless of how people feel about race or racial relation pre-war, this probably was too much even for the most vehement anti-colonial activist to swallow, and most of them, Gen. Aung San for instance, organized anti-Japanese guerilla cells immediately.

I think the problem with the author is that he has been projecting our own experience in the United States into a wholy different historical arena. East Asia in 1930 is different from Postbellum America. Psychologically, most Asian peoples paid (and still pay) much more attention to kinship, ethnicity and nationality than to race. Race itself is a European-American construct, developed in late 19th century by pseudo-scientists of European (mostly German) and American origins. There is not a single country on the surface of Earth that was, is and tragically perhaps will be as race-conscious as the U.S., and it is plainly wrong to project the American mental frame onto what happened in 1940 Asia. As the reviewer below noted: ask any Chinese or South East Asian how they feel about the Japanese invaders and the American/British colonialists respectively, and you'll hear an entirely different story. The grudge against the Japanese Imperial forces is just so much more venomous. This makes sense, since after all the British and American had never bayonet and rape at will. And in light of the raping, looting and killing the Japanese had been doing, being blond-haired and blue-eyed just didn't mean much to the Asian peoples.

11 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not a historically accurate argument, March 17, 2004

By 

Seth J. Frantzman (Jerusalem, Israel) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Race War!: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire (Hardcover)

The basic treatise here is that because the White colonialists were racist against Asians the Japanese were able to make allies out of those same suppressed people against the United States and England. Unfortunately this is patently untrue. The Japanese themselves were the ones obsessed with Race as they invaded half of Asia to create a `co-prosperity sphere'. Of course the only people meant to prosper were the Japanese. Far from `turning racism on its head' the Japanese were far more imperious to the people they conquered then the U.S and English had ever been. In fact millions of Koreans, Indians, Thais, and Philippines were enslaved, raped and murdered during the war, not by the Americans(who they viewed as liberators) but by the Japanese occupation forces. In China, especially at Nanking, the Japanese entered into a war of extermination against the Chinese. Why? Well the patently racial doctrines convinced the soldiers that the enemy was `inferior' and this key point is missed in the text.

This books argument must be taken to task for it ignores the facts. The reading here doesn't fully explain the true affects that `racism' had on the Japanese mind set prior to the war. The Japanese didn't set out to `payback' the Europeans, rather they took the racial doctrines to heart and simply adopted them. In the end it was the Japanese offensive that used race as a motivator rather then the U.S and England. How else can one explain why all the nations of Asia viewed the Americans as liberators?

Seth J. Frantzman

16 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thanks to Japan: Asia is free., May 8, 2004

By 

Naibedya Chattopadhyay (Kolkata, West Bengal, India) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Race War!: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire (Hardcover)

Gerald Horne makes point-by-point case to demonstrate how Japan psychologically represented non-whites in the Second World War against the whites and hence the war was nothing but a Race War - the name of the book. Horne has done a splendid job in interpreting events of history and rightly pointed out that U.S. propaganda essentially saw Second World War as a fight to resist a defeat in the hands of Asiatic people (for learning more on this issue, I will recommend John Dower's War without mercy: race & power in the Pacific war). Horne's thesis is not over-simplification of the history of the Second World War rather he fixed it. He has in fact straightened up all the tortuous arguments and cases made by the Western historians and exposed their hypocrisy of highlighting moral and heroic roles played by the U.S. to deter Japanese aggression.

There are several new things to learn from the book. First, why the Africans then living in U.S. mentally aligned themselves with Japanese and how FBI and U.S. propaganda machinery was trying to deal with this issue. It was good to know that Jessie Owens was shown a great deal of respect by the Nazis, contrary to the popularly held notion by the Americans that he was disrespected and ignored. Also, his demonstration of the fact that most of the Chinese residing in Singapore and Hong Kong colluded and sides with the advancing Japanese army simply because they just hated British oppression and inhuman subjugation is again something many Chinese need to know. Japanese strategy was to attack European and American imperialism by invading colonial bases in Asia-Pacific and drive them out which the colonized people viewed as liberation. I think, Horne has successfully got his message through that Japanese had not just wanted to liberate the Asian people from white oppression but also give the Asians a psychological and moral booster that whites are not invincible. In this process Japan had also liberated the whites from a superstitious mindset of white supremacy, which the westerners should thankfully accept.