The propaganda was bipartisan in the US, and, with few noteworthy exceptions, was widely disseminated by the country’s uncritical and pseudo-patriotic media. I recall the Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson – alongside John Maynard Keynes, arguably the greatest economist of his time – remarking that anti-Japanese propaganda had gone so far that Japan’s critics would argue that the Japanese bow in greeting Westerners to make it easier to cut them off at the knees.