Tragedy brought by uncured wounds

Tragedy brought by uncured wounds. April. 15, 2017 07:23. by Taek Kyoon Sohn sohn@donga.com. The author was a historian and born in Belgium. His book was first published 17 years ago. In the preface of the 2015 revision of his book, he wrote, “My research on World War II is not completely objective. Most of them that claim to be objective are nothing more than a dominant opinion that people consider to be objective as it is widely accepted by the society.”

In his book, he mainly studied on America. He argued that the study of history for the role of the U.S. during World War II is similar to a historic novel that contains moving stories. His opinion was that it was not the ideal to be the defender of liberty as repeatedly appeared on Hollywood movies, but the desire to seek profits of large corporates and financial institutions in the war.

In America, the power elite have the power to control the country and they consider financial gains and business interests as the most important. Hence, large companies such as Ford, General Motors, and IBM act as the nerve center. IBM enjoyed the biggest boom under Hitler’s Third Reich. Dehomag, IBM's German subsidiary provided the technology of punch cards that significantly contributed for the seizure of properties of the Jews and their annihilation.

It is certainly not objective to argue that the U.S. intentionally induced the Pearl Harbor ambush as the country desired to engage a war with Japan in order to secure the dominant power in East Asian region and the U.S. also rushed to drop the atomic bomb to hastily end the war before Russia advances into East Asia. However, we cannot deny the fact that the defense industry, of which wording has been refined from the war industry, is the foundation of American economy as we know it. The story of the "good war" from Americans has transformed and reproduced as the world went through the Cold War.