The United States is a comparatively egalitarian nation and therefore has a little more difficulty getting its population to wholeheartedly embrace wartime ethnic and racial hatreds. But in combat against Japan we had an enemy so different and alien that we were able to effectively implement cultural distance (combined with a powerful dose of moral distance, since we were “avenging” Pearl Harbor). Thus, according to Stouffer’s research, 44 percent of American soldiers in World War II said they would “really like to kill a Japanese soldier,” but only 6 percent expressed that degree of
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