On Internment of Japanese Americans In World War II

Workers Vanguard No. 1137	27 July 2018

TROTSKY

LENIN

On Internment of Japanese Americans In World War II 

(Quote of the Week)

Amid widespread outrage over the incarceration of immigrants in detention centers, the Democrats cynically pretend that such barbarity is unique to the racist Trump administration. During World War II, some 120,000 people of Japanese descent, the vast majority U.S. citizens, were savagely uprooted and thrown into concentration camps in a calculated atrocity ordered by the Democratic administration of liberal icon Franklin Roosevelt.

The Stalinist Communist Party expelled all of their Japanese American members in a grotesque example of their support to the “democratic” imperialists in the war. The then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, facing persecution themselves for opposing U.S. imperialist war aims, were among the very few—including the Quakers—who courageously campaigned against the repression of Japanese Americans. We print below an excerpt from an article they wrote shortly after the roundups began.

A minority problem as acute as any in Europe is being created by the forced removal of Japanese-Americans from the Pacific Coast.

In a move unprecedented in U.S. history, American citizens are being taken from their homes and transported to hastily constructed concentration camps....

Evacuations are being enforced by army officials acting under a presidential decree empowering them to bar from certain areas any person they consider undesirable. The army command has power to declare any district a restricted area and to order the removal of any residents. No reason need be given for the evacuation, and American citizenship is no protection.

So far the measure has been applied only to Japanese-Americans and to enemy aliens: but militant workers, liberals or “uncooperative” citizens could be ousted similarly.

After Pearl Harbor, the press whipped up an hysterical picture of a West Coast invasion aided by Japanese-American residents. The administration had to make a decisive move to show West Coast residents it was alert to their danger. The FBI rounded up all suspected enemy agents in the first few days of the war, but this was not demonstrative enough to give the effect of energetic preparedness the administration was seeking to offset Pearl Harbor.

Considerable pressure for the ousting of Japanese-Americans came, however, from California Chambers of Commerce, the Bank of America, and the reactionary Associated Farmers. These groups see in the Japanese-American farmer not a military menace, but an obstacle to their complete domination of California agriculture. Taking advantage of the situation to demand their ousting in the name of “national defense,” California bankers hope to seize control of the truck gardening fields vacated by the Japanese-Americans....

And so the story of the Japanese-American evacuations stands today—a repressive measure, based purely on racial discrimination and motivated chiefly by the desire of Big Business for additional profits, which is presented as a necessary part of the “war for democracy.”

—“Behind the West Coast Evacuations: Bankers Profit from Driving Japanese-American Citizens into Concentration Camps,” Militant (30 May 1942)