Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

and resisters. But this popular current of resistance had no
strategic direction to advance along.
The main dissenting political views had been
crushed. Some Japanese rejected U.S. "citizenship" and
the oppressor nation that had imprisoned them, but sought
their identity by looking backwards towards the Japanese
Empire. Clandestine pro-Imperial groups and propaganda
flourished. Claims of U.S. military advances were denied
and the day of Japanese Imperial victory eagerly looked
forward to. The unconditional Japanese surrender in 1945,
plus the news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, made a vain
hope out of this perspective.
The other major dissenting view was communism.
A number of young Japanese college students and union
activists had joined the CPUSA during the 1930's.
Japanese-Amerikan communists had been very active in
CIO organizing drives in the fish canneries, in opposing
the Imperial invasion of China, and in rallying people to
fight anti-Asian oppression. All this had been smashed on
Dec. 7, 1941, when Pearl Harbor happened. In a panic to
assure their fellow Euro-Amerikans that the CPUSA was
loyally "American," this revisionist party came out in fuN
support of the government's concentration camp program
for Japanese-Amerikans. Even further, the CPUSA
ordered its Japanese-Amerikan members to rally the community
for its own imprisonment - and then publicly expelled
all its Japanese-Amerikan members to show White
Amerika that even the "Communists" were against the
"Japs." Communism was completely discredited for an
entire generation inside the Japanese-Amerikan community.
Leadership of the community was left completely
in the hands of the pro-imperialist Japanese-Amerikan
Citizens League (JACL), which for forty years has been
the main civil rights organizaton. The JACL, in the name
of those who suffered in the concentration camps, publicly
called for and lobbied for the passage of the 1952
McCarran-Walter Immigration & Nationality Act. This
was in the best tradition of "Americanization," and, for
that matter, of Civil Rights.
In 1952 A. Philip Randolph was saying that civil
rights meant that Afrikans should go to Korea and help
U.S. imperialism kill Asians - provided that the Empire
gave them equal wages. In the same way, in 1952 the JACL
was saying that so long as Japanese-Amerikans got some
benefits from it, white supremacist de-population of the
Chicano-Mexicano communities was fine. This is the sewer
philosophy of "I've Got Mine."
Having mutilated themselves to fit into Babylon,
the JACL is even quite proud of what they did. U.S.
Senator Pat McCarran (D-Nevada) was a white
supremacist, and a known Mexican-hater. He devised his
new immigration law to genocidally cut down Third-World
population in general (and Chicano-Mexicanos in
specific). He warned White Amerika that unless they
restricted Third-World population "we will, in the course
of a generation or so, change the ethnic and cultural composition
of this nation." In his crusade for settler purity he
joined forces with Congressman Francis Walter, the Chairman
of the rabid House Un-American Activities Committee
(HUAC).(76) 126
Congressman Walter was, of course, a fanatical
anti-Communist. Led by Mike Masaoka, the JACL
developed a close relationship to Congressman Walter. In
any case, JACL leader Bill Hosokawa called Walter "a
strong friend of the JACL. The JACL eventually ave
Walter a special award. Walter and McCarran a%ded
clauses in their repressive legislation giving some concessions
to Asians - primarily ending the 1924 Oriental Exclusion
Act - which made it possible for non-citizen
Japanese to become U.S. citizens. With this the JACL was
glad to help sponsor this vicious legislation and give cover
to the reactionary wing of U.S. imperialism. Hosokawa,
who has been a senior editor for the Denver Post, writes
that the final passage of this repressive law was ' a supreme
triumph" of the JACL. (77) Two million Mexicano men,
women, and children, victims of "Migra" terror raids, saw
very well whose "triumph" that was.
That's why the shallow rhetoric that says all Third-
World people automatically "unite against racism" is
dangerously untrue. Pro-imperialist Civil Rights is a pawn
in the crimes of the Empire against the oppressed nations.
The example of the JACL was just the opening wedge of a
strategic process in which the Empire was promoting
Asians as a "buffer" between settlers and the oppressed
nations. We can see this in daily life, by the numbers of
Asian professionals and small retailers entering the inner
city. This process began, however, with Japanese-
Amerikans in the years right after World War 11.
A Pause and a Beginning
It may have appeared to some in those years that
the U.S. Empire had consolidated its Fortress Amerika,
that it had won "a supreme triumph." But the streams of
national consciousness ran deep within the colonial
masses. If the Adam Clayton Powells and the Roy
Wilkins' occupied the public mainstream of Afrikan
politics, we can see that nationalism was only forced down
out of sight. It still lived in the grass-roots and continued
to develop. This pause was historically necessary, since
anti-colonial struggles and leaders of the 1920s and 1930s
had many strengths, but did not yet have programs for
liberation that could successfully lead the masses. Now we
can see that this was a stage in development, in opening up
new doors. And so we can also see literally everywhere we
choose to look, the "seeds beneath the snow."
An Afrikan G.I. named Robert Williams went
home from Asia to Monroe, North Carolina, having learned
something about self-defense and world politics. In Los
Angeles in the early '40's Chicano teenagers formed the
Pachuco youth sub-culture, flaunting "Zoot suits" and
openly rejecting Euro-Amerikan culture. Chicano-
Mexicano historians now see the defiant Pachuco movement
as "the first large current within the Chicano movement
towards separatism." An Afrikan ex-convict and
draft resister was building the "Nation of the
Lost-Found." The revolutionary explosions of the 1960s
had their seeds, in countless ways, in the submerged but
not lost gains and developments of the 1920s, 1930s and
1940s.