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The dehumanization of the enemy was meant to lead to extermination and total annihilation, as was reflected in the pronouncements of US military leaders and the media. Admiral William F. Halsey, commander of the US South Pacific Force, at a l944 press conference declared:

"The only good Jap is a Jap whose been dead six months. When we get to Tokyo ... we'll have a celebration where Tokyo was."

A popular wartime saying was "the only good Jap is a dead Jap". In l943, Leatherneck, the US Marine monthly magazine, ran a photograph of Japanese corpses on Guadalcanal with an uppercase heading reading: "Good Japs". The caption for the photo read: "Good Japs are dead Japs."

Extermination was buttressed by dehumanization. Admiral Halsey referred to the Japanese as "yellow bastards", "stupid animals", "yellow monkeys", and "monkeymen". He stated that he was "rarin' to go...to get some more monkey meat" and that "the Japs are losing their grip, even with their tails" and explained that "the Japanese were a product of mating between female apes and the worst Chinese criminals." The objective was to persuade to kill, to kill "them". Halsey rallied his men with the following motto: "Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs." The US Marine Corps motto was: "Remember Pear harbor---keep 'em dying."

Time magazine expressed its outrage after the attack on Pearl harbor in blatantly racist terms: "Why the yellow bastards!" The New Yorker depicted the Japanese as "yellow monkeys" while the Washington Post caricatured them as a large gorilla. Rear Admiral Husband Kimmel explained his shock at the attack on Pearl Harbor as follows: "I never thought those little yellow sons of bitches could pull off such an attack so far from Japan."

Captain H. L. Pence, the Navy representative to the first interdepartmental US government committee to consider the issue of the treatment of Japan after the war, stated in May, l943, that he advocated the "almost total elimination of the Japanese as a race," because this was "a question of which race was to survive, and white civilization was at stake."

The chairman of the War Manpower Commission, Paul V. McNutt, told a public audience in May, l945, that he favored "the extermination of the Japanese in toto ... for I know the Japanese people."

Vice Admiral Arthur Radford, several days before the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, stated that "Japan will eventually be a nation without cities---a nomadic people."

William Randolph Hearst's newspapers warned of the "yellow peril" and maintained that Japan was a "racial menace". The US war with Japan took on the nature of a race or racist war. The Japanese, along with other Asians, were regarded as "despised races", "unassimilable races", and "inferior races". Racism is a manifestation of consensual paranoia which sees a person or group that is different in any way as a "stranger", as an "alien", the enemy "other". Racism divides "us" against "them" based upon racial differences. In conjunction with the exterminationist and dehumanization policies, there was the use of racist stereotypes. Racist stereotyping is reflected in the following photograph caption from the National Geographic of October, 1942: "Who Says All Orientals Are "Inscrutable"? These Japanese, Arriving at an Evacuation Camp, Plainly Show They're Worried."

The dehumanization of the enemy is achieved also by picturing the enemy as a faceless and nameless "them", removing individuality from the enemy. The enemy becomes a homogeneous mass, an object for "us" to hate and to kill. It is accepted that killing other human beings is morally wrong. But defeating what we perceive as hostile ideologies can be commendable. We are not fighting a people and nation, but an ideology. Guilt and responsibility are thereby lessened. Of course, it is human beings who maintain the ideologies. As Stanislaw Lec has stated, "In a war of words, it is people who get killed." This is why ideology is so important in war and propaganda. The enemy, "them", must appear as a single, undifferentiated mass or unit guided by one idea, a single ideology, a single purpose. The Japanese people were said to be "photographic prints off the same negative". They were "an obedient mass with but a single mind", a "subservient mass" "a human herd", faceless hordes. This is a familiar and standard tactic in all war propaganda meant to lessen sympathy for the enemy people. The enemy people must be seen as an undifferentiated mass, inseparable from its leaders and government. All individuality must be eradicated. One could sympathize with the suffering and hardships of a Japanese individual caught up in a war his leaders had imposed. But as a faceless mass, the Japanese people were merely a numerical statistic, a thing, a cipher, not a person.

The exterminationist policy of the US was manifested in many ways during the war, such as not taking prisoners, killing POWs and surrendering troops, fire-bombing cities with incendiary bombs, using atomic bombs on cities, and the practice of collecting battlefield trophies from dead or near-dead Japanese soldiers. US troops routinely took gold teeth, ears, bones, scalps, and skulls from dead Japanese soldiers. In Guadalcanal Diary, Richard Tregaskis reported the following conversation between US soldiers:

They say the Japs have a lot of gold teeth. I'm going to make myself a necklace ... I'm going to bring back some Jap ears ... Pickled.

The Marine monthly Leatherneck ran this account in l943: "The other night Stanley emptied his pockets of 'souvenirs'---eleven ears from dead Japs." The Baltimore Sun and The Detroit Free Press ran stories about war 'souvenirs'. In Baltimore, a mother petitioned to be allowed to have her son mail her an ear he had cut off a dead Japanese soldier. In Detroit, a minor had attempted to enlist by promising his chaplain that he would send him the third pair of ears he collected from dead Japanese soldiers.

Eugene B. Sledge, a US Marine veteran of the Peleliu and Okinawa campaigns, recalled how US soldiers would routinely shoot even wounded Japanese soldiers to obtain their gold teeth, a practice more commonly associated with Nazi guards extracting gold teeth from Jews:

I've seen guys shoot Japanese wounded when it really was not necessary and knock gold teeth out of their mouths. .. I remember one time at Peleliu, I thought I'd collect gold teeth. One of my buddies carried a bunch of 'em in a sock. ... The way you extracted gold teeth was by putting the tip of the blade on the tooth of the dead Japanese---I've seen guys do it to wounded ones---and hit the hilt of the knife to knock the tooth loose. ...This Jap had been hit. One of my buddies was field-stripping him for souvenirs.. the guys dragging him around like a carcass...This guy had been a human being.... It was so savage. We were savages.

In l944, the New York Times reported that a US serviceman had sent President Roosevelt a letter opener made from the bone of a dead Japanese soldier. Life magazine published a photograph of a woman standing next to a Japanese skull which her fiance had sent from the pacific, with the caption: "Arizona war worker writes her Navy boy-friend a thank-you note for the Jap skull he sent her" in the May 22,l943 issue.

US soldiers routinely used Japanese skulls as ornaments on military vehicles and as war trophies, after the flesh was boiled in lye or left to be eaten by ants. On February 1, 1943, Life magazine published a famous photograph by Ralph Morse which showed the charred, open-mouthed, decapitated skull of a Japanese soldier killed by US Marines at Guadalcanal, which was placed on the tank. The caption read as follows: "A Japanese soldier's skull is propped up on a burned-out Jap tank by U.S. troops." Life received letters of protest from mothers who had sons in the war and others "in disbelief that American soldiers were capable of such brutality toward the enemy." The editors of Life explained that "war is unpleasant, cruel, and inhuman. And it is more dangerous to forget this than to be shocked by reminders." Indeed, remarkably, Life received more than twice as many protest letters over a photograph of a maltreated cat in the same issue than they did over the photo of the charred skull of the Japanese soldier. This is the ultimate achievement of propaganda and dehumanization: Man's inhumanity to man, even to the point where we are more concerned for the welfare of our pet animals than we are for other human beings. Daniel Okrent, the managing editor of Life in l996, commenting on the decision not to publish the photograph of an incinerated and charred corpse of an Iraqi soldier during the Persian Gulf War, stated that "at some point we have to acknowledge what people are capable of doing to one another." Such inhumanity is the necessary result of propaganda, of an us versus them bipolar opposition. Sam Keen has described this in Faces of the Enemy as follows:

In the beginning we create the enemy. Before the weapon comes the image. We think others to death and then invent the battle-axe or the ballistic missiles with which to actually kill them. Propaganda precedes technology.

In an unconditional, Manichaean exterminationist war, the enemy is archetypically depicted as a superman or as supermen. The psychological pattern in propaganda to create an image of the enemy as a superman is rooted in a paranoid, infantile orientation. The paranoid orientation cannot accept balance or equality; the paranoid must either sadistically dominate or masochistically be an inferior victim. Moreover, anxiety and guilt is lessened when the enemy is omnipotent and criminal. This tactic is necessary to galvanize and mobilize all the resources against the enemy, which is not as easily done if the enemy is not perceived as a threat or danger. The analogy most often used in propaganda is that of the bully. The Japanese were referred to as "Jap bullies" and Serbia was referred to as " a regional bully". The New York Times Magazine in l943 ran a caption which asked, "How Tough are the Japanese?" In l993, in Foreign Affairs, a caption under a photograph of Serbian soldiers in a tank asked, "Can these men be stopped?"

A standard element of war propaganda is to characterize any action against the enemy as defensive or reactive in nature. We only defend ourselves. The enemy are aggressors. Paranoia creates a passive-aggressive orientation. The passive-aggressive victim always reacts to the aggression of the enemy, thus all responsibility and guilt is negated. This is how war results. A passive-aggressive victim lacks balance, lacks equilibrium. As a powerless victim, the paranoid justifies his own attacks as an attempt to gain power over the enemy. A passive orientation dissipates all responsibility and guilt. An American soldier who slits the throat of a Japanese soldier "did it only because he knew the Japs had done it to his buddies." Eugene B. Sledge explained: "You developed an attitude of no mercy because they had no mercy on us. It was a no-quarter, savage kind of thing." Similarly, a Muslim soldier slits the throat of a Bosnian Serb soldier or nurse because he seeks to "go home and to get even". The weak, innocent, defenseless were being protected and saved from the barbarous, vicious, and cruel enemy supermen. The Japanese were "barbarous", "uncivilized", "inhuman", "depraved", given to "mad dog orgies of brutality and atrocity", exhibiting "primitive blood lust and brutal butchery", a "naked, tribal savagery". Similarly, Bosnian Serbs were termed "thugs", "degenerates", "illiterates", "butchers", "rapists", "efficient battlefield killers", "killers", "murderers". Charles Lindbergh kept a diary in which he wrote down his observations of the war in the Pacific. He noted the desire to ruthlessly exterminate all Japanese as follows: "They treat the Japs with less respect than they would give to an animal, and these acts are condoned by almost everyone."

The movie industry reinforced the propaganda archetypes of the enemy in Hollywood films. Movies, like television, alter our environments, that is, they are new ways of perceiving or perception. As Marshall McLuhan has explained, these new forms of media change the manner in which we process information and "evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions." By altering the medium or environment, we change our ways of perceiving the world, thus, new media change us at the epistemological level. By changing the media, "the way we think and act" is altered. Information becomes instantaneous and communal, processed in a "global village", the information being uniform and replicated, being received as simultaneous stimuli with little time for rational examination. Movies and television have a tremendous capacity to dehumanize and to persuade. Pauline Kael, the film critic of the New Yorker, recalled the propagandistic nature of Hollywood films during World War II in reinforcing archetypes of the enemy in the "The Good War" by Studs Terkel. Kael recalled how "a lot of the movies were very condescending to Europeans and Asiatics." Movies created a bipolar dichotomy of us versus them, dehumanizing the enemy, as Kael recounted:

I hated the war movies, because they robbed the enemy of any humanity or individuality. ... Even the German or Japanese who happened to be your friend ... had to be killed ...We had stereotypes of a shocking nature. They could never be people, who were just caught in the army the same way Americans were and told what to do.... I got so angry. It was so difficult to deal with, because in some intangible way they did represent the essence of war propaganda.

As explained by John W. Dower in War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, fighting the Filipinos in the Spanish-American War and later the Japanese was directly linked to US experiences fighting Indians on the western frontier. The US thus had developed an stereotypical and archetypical blueprint for the enemy other. The Japanese and Filipinos were substituted for the Native American Indians. In fact, many soldiers were transferred to Asia from frontier posts where they had fought Indians in the Spanish-American War. Arthur MacArthur, the father of Douglas MacArthur, was "one of the more conspicuous U.S. Indian fighters."

The war against the Japanese during World War II was characterized as "Indian fighting". The US Army Infantry Journal stated that the Japanese were "as good as Indians ever were." The New York Times magazine of February 13,l942, in an article called "The Nips", explained the analogy with the Indian wars as follows:

"The Japanese are likened to the American Indian in their manner of making war. Our fighting men say that isn't fair to the Indian. He had honor of a sort. Moreover, even a dead Jap isn't a good Jap...Yet such are the Nipponese. In death as in life, treacherous."

The racist and exterminationist language was obvious. Asians were termed "yellowbellies", "yellow bastards", "yellow monkeys", "slant-eye", "slant", "squint eyes", "almond eyes", "slopey", or "slopie", "gook", "goo-goo", "dinks", "ochre horde". "Gook" derives from "goo-goo", the ethnic label used to describe Filipinos at the end of the nineteenth century.

The exterminationist policy was further exemplified by the massive bombing campaign directed against major Japanese cities, targeting civilians, unarmed men, women, and children. US military planners at first espoused a policy of "precision bombing", targeting military and industrial targets only. But on March 9, 1945, precision bombing was abandoned when Tokyo was attacked by 334 US aircraft at low altitude with incendiary bombs which destroyed 16 square miles of the city and left over a million homeless. An estimated 80,000-l00,000 Japanese civilians---men, women, and children---were killed, "scorched and boiled and baked to death". This new aerial strategy, "strategic bombing", was developed by Major General Curtis LeMay, who applauded the fire bombing of Tokyo that "scorched and boiled and baked to death" so many Japanese civilians.