Using Race As A Weapon

by pessimist

Today is the 64th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Back in August, on the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, I stated that there was an element of racism in the decision to bomb that city, and received a whole lot of flack about it. It was as if "How could you say that America is/was racist?" (We'll ignore for the moment the obvious historical disagreement with that denial that Blacks and Native Americans would share with Asians.)

Imagine my feelings when I discovered that the US government was definitely planning on using race-based weapons during WWII against the Japanese - if any could be discovered:

How US Anthropoligists Planned "Race-Specific" Weapons Against the Japanese
A CounterPunch Special Investigation
By DAVID PRICE
November 25, 2005

During the Second World War, over two dozen anthropologists worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the institutional predecessor to the CIA, performing a variety of tasks ranging from covert-ops to desk-bound propaganda analysis. For the first time, I can now describe one 1943 OSS document, the "Preliminary Report on Japanese Anthropology", which which reveals that World War II-era anthropologists were recommending culture- and race-specific means of killing Japanese soldiers and civilians.

Posterity is left to wonder what recommendations would have been made if significant characteristics had been isolated. If the OSS had access to the Human Genome Project's dataset, it would certainly have been analyzed to see if any genetic anomalies could be exploited in Japanese populations.

The OSS instructed the anthropologists and other advisors to try to conceive ways that any detectable differences could be used in the development of weapons, but they were cautioned to consider this issue "in a-moral and non-ethical terms," with an understanding that, "if any of the suggestions contained herein are considered for action, all moral and ethical implications will be carefully studied."

Two anthropologists, Ralph Linton and Harry Shapiro, objected to even considering the OSS' request ­ but they were the exceptions.

Prefiguring the findings of Stanley Milgram's later "shocking" obedience experiments, most consulted anthropologists abandoned their moral authority and complied with the OSS' request.

One Harvard anthropologist, Ernest A. Hooton, recommended that the OSS undertake a "constitutional study of Japanese prisoners or of native-born males of military age in the relocation centers, [to] yield useful information regarding the weak spots of Japanese physique." Another Harvard anthropologist, Carl Seltzer, recommended that physiologists, hygienists, anthropologists, psychologists or sociologists examine Japanese "specimens" to find desired weaknesses.

At least one anthropologist's works were cited by the Eugenics movement as justification for their positions, and a contemporary anthropologist expressed grave concerns that the war 'research' was likely to be tainted by personal biases:

Hooton and Seltzer's views aligned with Harvard's racial anthropology of this period. Months before this report, anthropologist Melville Jacobs wrote to Margaret Mead complaining, apropos his difficulties in joining the war effort (likely because of his Communist past) that "the thought that members of the Hooton-Harvard bunch, with their racist slantings, should get in on any army or governmental services that may be already or might in the future be set up to do a job with a racial bearing gives me the itch."

American anthropologists weren't the only scientists conscripted for racial warfare:

Important new scholarship by Gretchen Schafft documents how German anthropologists informed Hitler's views of race and carried out Nazi atrocities, and Nakao Katsumi and other Japanese scholars are now documenting how Japanese anthropology assisted in the brutal military campaigns of the Pacific War. Japan's Manchukup Unit 731 developed and used anthrax and other bio-weapons against the Chinese and Russians on the Mongolian-Manchurian border and in Central China.

We Americans like to think that we will 'play by the rules' without recognizing that, like today in Iraq, the rules are made by the player with the most power. Thus, 'anything goes' is the rule. But that doesn't mean that there still aren't questions being asked - and the most dire observations made:

To some, OSS anthropologists' contemplation without implementation of "race"-specific weapons is insignificant in comparison to Joseph Mengele's applications of his anthropological training, while others may find it incongruous to fuss about contemplated-but-not-used bio-weapons against a civilian enemy that was firebombed and atomized.

Aftermath of the Tokyo firebombing

All the same, these anthropologists' willing compliance with the dark desires of the OSS left American anthropology positioned but one fianchetto ["small step"] removed from complicity in genocide.

In the end, it was all for naught:

The report's conclusions identified "no significant structural, physiological, or constitutional variations on the part of the Japanese as compared with other races. Attempts to exploit such minor differences as do exist are almost certain to prove futile."

The person who wrote this report remains remains classified.

And if this project had succeeded, might there not be a huge statue of this man? After all, to the victor goes the spoils - and the honors.

Author Attribution

David Price teaches anthropology at St. Martin's University in Olympia, Washington. He is the author of Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (Duke, 2004). His next book is entitled: Weaponizing Anthropology: American Anthropology and the Second World War. He can be reached at: dprice@stmartin.edu

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