Whitewashes and Black Legends

Comparison is central to how nations understand themselves. This book shows how cultural contrasts are used to construct moral innocence and explain violence. Focusing on the United States, Russia, and Japan from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, it examines how claims of national virtue depend on contrast with imagined Others. American exceptionalism emerges here not as a unique belief, but as an influential instance of this broader comparative logic. The key contrast rests on what the book terms comparative demonology: the attribution of inherent cruelty, authoritarianism, or moral deficiency to foreign societies against which American violence appears restrained and humane. Through sustained comparison, the book traces recurring patterns of state expansion, communal violence, and counterinsurgency, showing how similar justificatory myths accompany conquest, pogroms, and mass repression across all three cases. By identifying these shared dynamics, it dismantles both the sanitized narrative of American moral superiority and its inverse—the caricature of the foreign Other as inherently barbaric. Across all three cases, cultural contrasts are shown to legitimate violence—rendering some forms restrained and tragic, and others savage and inevitable.