Reading Eagle (January 31, 1944)
ON THE RECORD —
The great atrocity
By Dorothy Thompson
Like you, I read the official statement issued by the Army and Navy on the Japanese treatment of American prisoners who fell into their hands with the surrender of the Philippines. Like you, I felt the gorge rise in my throat, the steel enter into my heart, and horrified bafflement encompass my brain.
What drives human beings to behave in this manner? Men in battle, fighting for their lives. Feel no mercy. It is army and army and man against man.
But in the Philippines, the Japanese were victorious. The prisoners they had taken had fought long and heroically, but were utterly defeated. At that time, Japan was celebrating victory, and every Japanese was convinced Japan would win the war. In the days in which they were slowly torturing to death, by the most excruciating means, American and Filipino soldiers, the Japanese Empire was extending itself daily, with only the most ineffectual resistance from an unprepared America. So, these were not hysterical actions, born of fear. Not yet had a single Japanese official warned the troops it would be a dangerous war which they might lose.
Now could there be any normal feeling of revenge. We had not yet attacked even a Japanese outpost. We had been attacked, and the war had been fought exclusively on American territory.
Therefore, this hideous story gives us a picture of how the Japanese would behave in victory. Were they victorious, the war would not end. It would simply turn toward the systematic extermination of the white man, as far as Japanese power could reach.
What causes men to behave like this? All of us have known individual Japanese. They are not a race of savages. Japanese courtesy is proverbial, and to it every American official who has ever lived in Japan will testify. Uncreative in the great arts, they are masters of the aesthetic crafts, meticulous gardeners, exquisite arrangers of flowers, exceptionally skilled in all the decorative arts. These activities are civilizing to the mind and taste. Imagine an American who is beauty-loving, a fine gardener, a writer of lyric poetry and a painter of screens, torturing helpless prisoners!
Nor can anyone deny an immense sense of honor developed in Japan. infringement of its codes means self-imposed death. In fact, few civilizations have so highly developed a sense of code as Japan. What conceivable code permits men to torture to death those who cannot possibly render him harm?
This behavior is the result of the most terrible discovery of modern times – the science of mass indoctrination through the state, whereby a man, otherwise civilized, can be turned, as part of a mass, into a raving beast of prey. We have seen the same phenomenon in Germany. It is the phenomenon of the split personality. The very same German who would nurse a sick puppy and cherish his own children and those of his friends, could be found in gangs, first setting fire to synagogues, beating helpless Jews and otherwise torturing them, devising the most sadistic punishments for already-defeated Socialists and Communists, and later shooting innocent hostages from one end of Western Europe to the other, and in the east – in Poland and Russia – coldly exterminating whole populations, to clear “room” for German colonists.
What procedure makes this possible? The state, having made itself all-powerful over every phase of life, issues a total claim on the rights and souls of its subjects. It then reapportions to them a part of their rights and a part of their souls. Within the herd, it does not destroy conscience; it actually cultivates it. Thus, the Nazis have trained thousands of social workers; fostered and extended the spirit of comradeship, and disciplined aggressive instincts, as between the members of the herd. So have the Japanese. But outside the herd, the state takes the human conscience, organizes and mobilizes all the otherwise-suppressed aggressive instructs, and by conscious indoctrination directs them against the “enemy,” creating enemies where there are none. It, therefore, creates areas of “order” outside of which is jungle, and the very same men who live in the order, fight in the jungle – and are even indoctrinated to believe that by turning themselves onto beasts on the outside they will extend the area of order – whether they call it the “New Order” or the “Co-Prosperity Sphere of Influence.”
I hope we know that this is what we are fighting. Unless we can win back for men the sovereignty of the individual conscience, we shall lose this war. The power of the state must be limited. It must stop at the frontier of the human conscience and the human mind.
Let us direct the fury that we feel at the right objective. That objective is the superstate, the all-embracing Leviathan – eternal enemy of the human race on this earth.