Our Historical Narratives Should Account for Fear

It may not excuse but it can explain historical tragedies.

Fear. Merriam-Webster defines it as “an unpleasant often strong emotion caused by anticipation or awareness of danger.” That’s a decent definition — and it is reasonably useful when looking at historical events where fear is a motivator. What Merriam-Webster’s definition lacks is any reference to irrationality. Like love, there is always an element of irrationality to fear. (READ MORE: History Isn’t All Black and White. Just Look at Israel.) Fear and love are the hardest motivators to understand and capture when shaping a historical narrative. They rarely justify an action (arguably that’s more true of fear than love), but can sometimes explain what looks like an irrational overreaction. So, in the interest of accounting for fear, let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a Californian in March of 1942. A few months ago, out of nowhere, Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii — a place you were probably unaware of until they did so. The world has been embroiled in war for almost two years, but until those pilots dropped their bombs on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. had been untouched (and, officially, mostly uninvolved). That attack was the 9/11 of World War II. There was a surge of patriotism — big enough to support a war effort — and with it, a surge of enlistment. America went to war. That was exciting. It was also frightening. The West Coast seemed like a vulnerable place (San Francisco in particular). Sure it was separated from Japan by something like 5,000 miles, but it was also the closest populated target on the mainland to Japan. If you lived on the West Coast, you may then have looked around at your fellow countrymen and suddenly noticed that 120,000 looked very similar to the soldiers the Marines were fighting in the Philippines. (READ MORE from Aubrey Gulick: Remembering Corregidor: ‘I Shall Return’) The fear wasn’t that every Japanese man, woman, and child was a spy — it was that one (or perhaps some) of them could be a spy. A spy, the Americans reasoned, co...