Source: TomDispatch
by John Dower
“On February 17, 1941, almost 10 months before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Life magazine carried a lengthy essay by its publisher, Henry Luce, entitled ‘The American Century.’ The son of Presbyterian missionaries, born in China in 1898 and raised there until the age of 15, Luce essentially transposed the certainty of religious dogma into the certainty of a nationalistic mission couched in the name of internationalism. Luce acknowledged that the United States could not police the whole world or attempt to impose democratic institutions on all of mankind. Nonetheless, ‘the world of the 20th Century,’ he wrote, ‘if it is to come to life in any nobility of health and vigor, must be to a significant degree an American Century.'” (10/13/25)