Week 5

Josh Omoletski

Section 3

This week’s readings most certainly take on a more ominous tone than previous weeks (or at least they do in my eyes). Hamamoto's “Empire of Death” focuses on the effects that the wartime society of the US had on Asian Americans. Throughout the entire piece, it was made apparent that there was a morbid pattern between the war in Vietnam and a rise in the serial killing of Asian Americans, almost all of them being young women. I think that what really speaks volumes about this society is not that the killings happened nor the reasons the killers had concocted to justify their actions. I think it’s how the government, the media, and the public reacted to these killings of Asian Americans. The media made an attempt to downplay and even sympathize with the killers. They tried using PTSD as an excuse in an attempt to get people to sympathize and not condemn the killers. I think that this was due to the complete racial bias that was predominant then and is still predominant now. The killers were white and the victims were not (in most cases). If you were to bring this fact up to an unknowing individual, they would probably make the assumption the victims were African American since racial bias against that ethnic group is very well-known on the historical level. However, the victims are Asian American, a hugely overarching label for an ethnic group that is not so. These young female victims were targeted as objects of sexual pleasure and fulfillment of fetishized fantasies. The whole concept of the “exotic Oriental” woman is what entrapped these men, leading to the mental state that many people know from pop culture as “yellow fever.” This compiled with the wartime society lead to killers that violently fulfilled their sexual fantasies involving Asian American women or just Asian women. Will something like this happen again? It probably won’t. Today’s generation is hell-bent on being 100% politically correct and being all-inclusive of everyone. Something so blatantly targeting “one” ethnic group (if Asian American can be considered as a single ethnicity) would be called out immediately, or so you would think.

Question: Why do you think killings like these happened during the Vietnam War and did not happen again during the Gulf War or the war in Afghanistan?

This is a graph showing annual murder rates across the US. This shows the correlation between homicides and a wartime society.

References:

Cramer, C. (2012, May 17). Madness, Deinstitutionalization & Murder. Retrieved from http://www.fed-soc.org/publications/detail/madness-deinstitutionalization-murder

Hamamoto, Darrell Y. (2003) Masters of War: Militarism and Blowback in the Era of the American Empire. New York, New York: Routledge.