Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption
A Refutation of Historical Relativism
In Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, she lists a series of horrifying events that befalls Louis Zamperini including his time within a Japanese prisoner of war camp. During that time Zamperini experienced, near starvation, beatings of all manner, slavery, and even medical experimentation. But Hillenbrand’s work actually takes two tracks. It is not just one man’s incredible will to overcome adversity, but also a catalog of the evil perpetuated by the Japanese Empire against the peoples of countries including China, Japan, and Korea.
After concluding Unbroken, it is interesting to compare the exhaustive detail in Hillenbrand’s book with what is discussed in a modern history text book, the one that the American education system uses to inform our children. There are comments throughout the text that concern the disreputable acts perpetuated by the Japanese but there is also the internment story. In what is arguably one of the United States most spurious acts in World War II, people of Japanese descent were imprisoned within internment camps. Many of these Japanese were US citizens. Only an irrational mind would consider that this was a defensible act. Yet here is the issue. Within this textbook, on World History, this act of the US received almost as much press as did the far, far more egregious acts of the Japanese Empire. Why is this?
Within the liberal dominated historical narrative the concept of relativism is paramount. This is the argument that all countries and all cultures are relative with none being truly superior to another. Therefore the Japanese killed hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians in Nanking? Well the US put its own citizens in jail.
There are two fundamental issues with why relativism has a deleterious effect upon our study of history. First, liberals do not practice the very relativism that they preach. There is example after example of liberal historians giving other countries, such as the Japan, a pass on historical examples in which they visited ills upon either their neighbors, or their own members. Yet the United States is displayed in a negative light in which all of the mistakes of the nation are not held up as mistakes, but rather a suspicion that America is a fundamentally evil place dominated by classism, sexism, and racism. In this narrative the Japanese Empire did what they did because they needed natural resources and were forced by Western nations, particularly the United States to take what they needed to ensure their very survival.
The other reason relativism does not work is because nations are simply not relative. We have countries today in 2012, Syria in particular who are massacring their own citizens so that a single family, and their cliques, can maintain power. Yet in example after example including saving South Korea from North Korea, protecting Western Europe from an aggressive Soviet Union, Freeing the Bosnians from Serbian aggression, supplying countries such as Haiti, Indonesia, and even Iran with supplies after natural disasters, the United States is the driving force for these benevolent acts. In the history of mankind only nations who were the preeminent nation of the time, have used their military for good. The first is Great Britain. The second is the United States. America is, relatively, a great nation.