truepenny: artist's rendering of Sidneyia inexpectans (Default)
[personal profile] truepenny
When I was a senior in high school, as part of the civic pageantry of Oak Ridge's 50th birthday, I had to go interview a man who'd worked as an engineer in the gaseous diffusion plant during World War II. He was a lovely man, very patient with his shy, gauche, and reluctant interviewer.

He still called the Japanese "Japs"--just casually, you know. Conversationally. And he gave me an anecdote.

Famously, the people working in Oak Ridge, as in the other "secret cities" of the Manhattan Project, had only the vaguest idea of what they were working on. But when America dropped its atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the people of Oak Ridge knew that it was their doing.

They celebrated. They danced on the tennis courts all night long.

They knew they'd done the morally right and heroic thing.

Date: 2006-09-18 04:16 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] truepenny.livejournal.com
Actually, yes. The gentleman I interviewed was racist. Americans during World War II were incredibly racist. (Although it is not the primary point of the site, Superdickery (http://www.superdickery.com/) collects (http://www.superdickery.com/images/dick/97_4_0000058.jpg) some (http://www.superdickery.com/images/oneshot/21013acs.jpg) telling (http://www.superdickery.com/images/propaganda/249_4_014.jpg) images (http://www.superdickery.com/images/propaganda/exciting35.jpg).) Their racism is, unfortunately, an objective fact.

When I say I shouldn't judge them, I don't mean that we shouldn't face the truth: the Americans were racist. The Germans were racist. The Japanese were racist. What I'm saying is that taking that racism out of context--and I think I was exposed to that racism very out of context, in a private home in 1992--makes it impossible to understand, to do anything except judge.

The past is a foreign country. And I try to approach it as an anthropologist.

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