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Why We Fought is a timely and provocative analysis, examining how that the United States was hard-pressed to articulate a compelling argument for a political obligation to go to war in 1940, even a war as just as the struggle against the Axis powers. Unlike other depictions of the patriotic "greatest generation," Westbrook argues that, strictly speaking, Americans in World War II were not instructed to fight, work, or die for their country--above all, they were moved by private obligations. Finding political theory in places such as pin-ups of Betty Grable, he contends that more often than not Americans were urged to wage war as fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, lovers, sons, daughters, and consumers, not as citizens. The thinness of their own citizenship contrasted sharply with the thicker political culture of the Japanese, which was regarded with condescending contempt and even occasionally wistful respect. Westbrook concludes by considering Dwight Macdonalds effort to read the Holocaust as symptomatic of a wider erosion of the very conditions of moral and political responsibility.
