Oh, so that's why history education is so screwed up ...

Want to know what passes for the higher-level history education now days?

Read the whole H-Diplo Roundtable Review, Volume XIII, No. 1 (2011), 1 September 2011 on their review of John Dower's book, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor / Hiroshima / 9-11 / Iraq. The Onion couldn't do it better.

These are the quotes from the best minds from Columbia to MIT. As usual, their prose is a bit opaque - but gut it out for the greater good.

Dower argues that whether ruled by monarchs or “imperial presidents,” such states--and the U.S. most notably--cannot qualify as genuine democracies. ... the rhetoric of empire cannot hide the American rulers’ historical hostility to democracy. They manifested their hatred of democracy for others under the guise of “benevolent assimilation” in the era of McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, when U.S. troops killed “at least two hundred thousand Filipino civilians in the Philippines war” (p. 82), and they do the same in our own time--the era of “benevolent global hegemony,” when our armed forces slaughter even greater numbers of civilians.
...
... it is impossible to explain the behavior of Japan’s top leaders in the 1930s and America’s senior leaders today without taking account of their “failures of imagination,” and “absence of transparency, accountability and plain common sense” (p. xxxii). This is as true for George W. Bush and his small, six-person, inner circle as it was for Japan’s collective decision makers grouped around Emperor Hirohito.
...
“American veneration of force,” self-righteousness, and arrogance are a third group of themes running through Dower’s book.
...
... once in Iraq, over-confidence and arrogance led them to discount the many “red flags” (p. 121) that went up, suggesting that they had not thought through the aftermath of their military intervention and had no exit plan. Irrationality, I would add, was inherent not only in their ideological passions but in every action they took in violation of Kant’s categorical imperative maxim.

... a major failure of imagination, on a par with Japan’s failure to grasp what Pearl Harbor would look like from the American viewpoint or how quickly the enormous war potential of the U.S. could be brought to bear against their forces. Racism on both sides led to denigration of the enemy.

Part Two explores terror bombing and the American change of attitude about the aerial killing of civilians before and after Hiroshima. Its six chapters focus on code words such as “Pearl Harbor”, “ground zero,” “Hiroshima,” and “shock and awe,” and how they came to be used to conceal reality and inhibit reflection on the past.
...
Dower’s larger thesis is that the errors imperial Japan committed, and the pathologies to which its leaders succumbed in the 1930s and early ‘40s, are especially instructive in the present era of U.S.-led aggression, when it is U.S. policy that openly flouts international law and engenders massive atrocity-producing situations by attacking and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq.
...
U.S. attitudes toward Japan reflect a deeply rooted racism whereas Japanese attitudes toward China had a racial basis but were attributable more fundamentally to a fear of instability and Communism, et cetera. At worst, Japan’s misdeeds are equated with those of the Allied powers: “In theory, Japan’s defeat liberated hundreds of millions of Asians who had been invaded, occupied, and oppressed by the emperor’s men. In actuality, it paved the way for wars and occupations that involved the Allied victors themselves – and that hold a murky mirror, in their own way, to the invasion of Iraq and aspects of that later tragedy that are less unique than often claimed”

It gets worse.

If you wonder who such smart people can see the world so wrong - a lot of it has to do with their poor eduction at our "best" institutions.