Christine Hong

A Violent Peace offers a radical cultural account of the midcentury transformation of the United States into a total-war state. As the Cold War turned hot in the Pacific, antifascist critique disclosed a continuity between U.S. police actions in Asia and a rising police state at home. Writers including James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and W.E.B. Du Bois discerned in U.S. domestic strategies to quell racial protests and urban riots the same logic of racial counterintelligence structuring America's devastating hot wars in Asia. Christine Hong examines the centrality of U.S. militarism to the Cold War cultural imagination. She assembles a transpacific archive—including war writings, Japanese accounts of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima, black radical human rights petitions, Korean War–era G.I. photographs, Filipino novels on guerrilla resistance, and Marshallese critiques of U.S. human radiation experiments—and places these materials alongside U.S. government documents to theorize these works as homologous responses to unchecked U.S. war and police power. In so doing, Hong shows how the so-called Pax Americana laid the grounds for solidarity—for imagining collective futures of total liberation.

Race, U.S. Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific

A Violent Peace

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Dependent on its production of war materiel for the United States in the Korean and Vietnam theaters, Japan’s economic rehabilitation broadcast a clear message to the region: modernity, democracy, and peace were all possible but only through complicity with U.S. war and police power. 

America, as Martin Luther King Jr. observed two decades after the racial integration of the U.S. military, offered a damning “image of violence” to the world, not a galvanizing vision of “revolution, freedom and democracy.” If superficially evocative of the unified black-white front so central to the midcentury antifascist struggle—and Ellison’s notion of democratizing art—the alignment of “Negro and white boy . . . in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village” (King, 33) in Vietnam  signaled its perversion. These “strange liberators” had been sent “eight thousand miles away” to “kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools”.

More than 80 percent of U.S. soldiers executed for capital crimes in the European theater were black, even though they represented just 10 percent of the U.S. armed forces. 

“Once the classic method of lynching was the rope. Now it is the policeman’s bullet. . . . We submit that the evidence suggests that the killing of Negroes has become police policy in the United States.” On the postwar home front the practice of “keeping the peace,” as these critics remarked, was indistinguishable from the waging of war.

According to accounts like these, the presence of antiblack racism in Japan is testament to the global reach of white supremacist ideology and the “indigenization” of imported prejudices, a dynamic intensified by the “distributive currency of American mass media and popular culture” (Russell, 5) within the postwar era. Following Japan’s defeat, American racism has been uncritically translated, to extend the argument, into the Japanese cultural idiom and social practices. 

In the early Cold War decades the United States stockpiled weapons of mass destruction and erected more than eighty military installations in Okinawa, putting these resources into lethal play first in the Korean War and then during the Vietnam War.

Perversely framed as reconstructive occasions, the devastating Korean War was foundational to postwar Japan’s economic recovery and the brutal Vietnam War likewise critical to South Korea’s compressed development. Luce’s proposal on how to govern the peace-to-come, what he called “America’s Vision of Our World,” may have elaborated a “rationale for an expanded American state-form and understanding of national mission after World War II,” yet it disavowed the basis of economic recovery in the U.S. sphere of influence in Asia and the Pacific—namely, participation, alignment, and complicity with U.S. militarism.19 “Democratic” rehabilitation for the enemy abroad and “enemy alien” at home, in other words, was contingent on their compliance within the militarized ambit of U.S. power. 

Even as the United States was geographically vulnerable to radioactive fallout from these nuclear tests, it asserted immunity from the atrocities it committed against the Marshallese people, including the devastation of their bodies, lands, waters, and lifeways. Insofar as the U.S. atomic bombings of Japan and high-yield atmospheric nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands surfaced into national discussion, they were not framed as massive human rights violations, let alone apocalyptic in and of themselves. Rather, these acts of nuclear aggression were construed as possessing future import for American lives. 

In other words, these lands and peoples were valued as dystopian, theoretically parallel universes—sites that could be devalued by being laid to waste and thereafter subjected to scientific scrutiny. In reference to uranium mining on Diné (Navajo) lands, Traci Brynne Voyles describes “pollutable” indigenous environments as wastelands either defined by their perceived lack of value or valued “for what can be mined from beneath them.”

 Within necrocapitalism, mass dispossession, destruction, and death are the predictable outcomes of the sovereignty-suspending practices of imperial accumulation. They are, as Naomi Klein has argued in her analysis of disaster capitalism, the basis of reconstruction as a form of colonialism.48 Yet within the military-imperial framework of the nuclear Pacific, devastation—far more than an epiphenomenon—must be understood as itself the object of commodification. 

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