War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War. John Dower's The War Without Mercy describes the horrific racial dimensions of conflict in the Asian theater of World War II and their consequences for military and reconstruction policy in the Pacific. “In the United States and Britain,” Dower reminds us, “the Japanese were more hated than the Germans before and after Pearl Harbor. On this point there was no dispute among contemporary observers. They were seen as a race apart, even a species apart – and an extremely monolithic one at that, there was no Japanese equivalent to the “good German” in the popular consciousness of the Western Allies. » (8) Conservative readers, don't worry – Dower is not making this argument to exonerate the Japanese from their own racism or war crimes – after all, "atrocious behavior occurred on all sides during the war." of the Pacific”. (12-13) Dower instead explores the propaganda of the U.S.-Japanese conflict to delineate "patterns of a race war," the cultural mechanisms of "othering," and the portability of racial/racist stereotypes. For “as the war years themselves transitioned into an era of peace between Japan and the Allied Powers, the shrill racial rhetoric of the early 1940s proved surprisingly adaptable. Expressions that once designated the impassable gap between oneself and the enemy. has proven capable of serving accommodation purposes as well. (13) Dower begins by examining the propaganda produced by both war machines (including a Frank Capra documentary, Know Your Enemy - Japan) and discovers two underlying patterns of stereotyping. “In everyday words,” he writes, “the first type of stereotypes could be summed up in the following statement: you are the opposite of what you say you are and the opposite of us, not peaceful but warlike, not good but bad. ... In the second form of stereotyping, the formula was more like this: you are what you say you are, but that in itself is reprehensible (30) In this case, Americans' commitment to. favor of individualism has become a rapacious self-interest in Japan's eyes, while the Japanese commitment to collectivity has become a herd thought for Americans. Speaking of "the herd", much of the book by. Dower focuses on public images of the Japanese in American culture during World War II. These images are easily summarized by Dower's chapter titles: "Monkeys and Others" notes how often the Japanese were identified with animals, especially to monkeys and vermin..