This year, the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, will see an ugly torrent of red-white-and-blue celebrations of America as a “great country”—spearheaded by Donald “Make America Great Again” Trump. This is a celebration of America now led by fascists. But the truth is that America was NEVER “great,” whoever was heading up the government. 

As revolutionary leader Bob Avakian said, if people are stung by that truth about America, they need to look at reality:

This “Republic” to which we are supposed to pledge allegiance was founded on slavery and genocidal robbery: keeping millions of Black people in chains for generations... killing off huge numbers of Native Americans and stealing their land... waging a war that ripped off half of Mexico, greatly expanding slavery.

So, was this a great country all during that time—when millions of people were enslaved—owned by bloodsuckers who constantly whipped the slaves to make them work harder under horrific conditions, slave-owners who raped masses of enslaved women? Was this country great then?!

Was it great when, for generations after slavery was formally ended, Black people as a whole were segregated, discriminated against, and continually terrorized, with repeated massacres of Black people and thousands of Black people lynched? Was it great when, all during that time, LGBT people were “illegal,” when women were legally treated as inferior to men—and men could legally rape their wives? Was it a great country then?!

Or is it great, now, when people are everyday denied basic rights? When the police kill a thousand people every year, especially people of color, and in the 60 years since Civil Rights Acts were passed, segregation and discrimination has remained as bad, or worse, as it ever was, and thousands of Black people have been killed by police—even greater numbers than all those who were lynched during all the years of Ku Klux Klan terror after the Civil War!

Has this country ever been great, when, right from the beginning and down to today, the whole thing has literally been built on the broken bodies, the blood and bones, of millions and now billions of people, worldwide—cruelly exploited, used and abused, by this system—with all this backed up by murder on a massive scale carried out by the police and the armed forces of this country?

No, this country has never been great. It has always been a horror for masses of people. 

(from social media message REVOLUTION #2: When has the U.S. been a “great country”?)

It’s way past time for this system—capitalism-imperialism—that rules in this country, dominates the world and now has spawned fascist rule, to be thoroughly abolished, through an actual revolution.

Below is Part 17 of a series that highlights aspects of how 250 years of America has been nothing but a horror for the masses of people, here and around the world. We call on our readers to send in your contributions to this series—articles, video, audio, artwork, social media posts. Email revolution.reports@yahoo.com or message @therevcoms via social media.

See previous parts >>

Part 17: American Crime, Case #89: 120,000 People of Japanese Descent Put in U.S. Concentration Camps During World War 2

THE CRIME: During World War 2, 120,000 people of Japanese descent, nearly the entire Japanese population living in the continental U.S., were rounded up and imprisoned in concentration camps throughout the western states within months of Japan’s December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. naval base in Hawai‘i. Sixty-two percent of those imprisoned were U.S. citizens; and more than half were children. They were never charged with a crime; never given a hearing; but summarily rounded up and held for more than two years in remote locations, solely on the basis of their nationality.

When people were rounded up, they could only take what they could carry and people were forced to quickly sell almost all of their possessions. Before the war, Japanese Americans farmed 40 percent of the total acreage in California. Their land—as well as $40 million of crops in the ground and over $100 million in investments—was virtually stolen from them when they were forced to sell very cheaply. And because of the evacuation, people lost more than $4 million in businesses—mostly small businesses.

Any resistance was quickly dealt with. When three men, Minoru Yasui in Oregon, Fred Korematsu in California, and Gordon Hirabayashi in Washington state—refused to report for evacuation and insisted the orders were unconstitutional, they were arrested, convicted, and sent to prison. This was later upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court on the basis that the evacuation was based on military necessity.

Families found themselves surrounded by soldiers with rifles with bayonets; packed into filthy “assembly centers” where animals had been kept, with no beds. They were put on trains, not knowing where they were going—taken to 10 internment camps in desolate, desert areas. The camps were surrounded by barbed wire with guard towers, and patrolled by soldiers armed with rifles and bayonets. Guards had orders to shoot anyone trying to leave without a pass or refusing orders to halt. After rebellions in some of the camps, “troublemakers” were rounded up and put in one maximum security camp at Tule Lake, where tear gas was used against continuing resistance.

At the same time, over 2,000 people of Japanese descent living in 13 Latin American countries, 80 percent of them from Peru, were taken to Panama, and eventually to the U.S. camps. Five hundred or more of these Latin American prisoners were traded by the U.S. in exchange for prisoners of war (POWs) being held by Japan.

There were an additional 150,000 people of Japanese ancestry living in Hawai‘i —nearly a third of the entire population of the islands. Fearful of the economic and political impact of imprisoning so many professionals, small businesspeople, religious leaders, and agricultural workers, the government imprisoned only 2,000 of them. But all of Hawai'i was placed under martial law for the duration of World War 2.

THE CRIMINALS: President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, allowing regional military commanders to designate “military areas” from which any or all persons were excluded. One month before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt received a report saying Japanese in the U.S. did not pose any security danger. But this did not stop the U.S. from using Executive Order 9066 to “exclude all people of Japanese ancestry” from living anywhere on the West Coast—all of California, and large parts of Washington, Oregon, and Arizona.

The FBI was able to act quickly because the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) had already compiled lists identifying key community leaders. By 1939, lists of “dangerous” citizens and non-citizens were being compiled by the FBI, special intelligence agencies of the Justice Department, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the army’s Military Intelligence Division. The U.S. Census Bureau was forced to admit decades later that it had provided information on people living in the U.S. of Japanese ancestry

This enabled the FBI to arrest more than 1,200 Japanese immigrant men within hours of the Pearl Harbor attack—targeted as “potential threats to national security.” These were in fact community leaders, Buddhist priests, Japanese language teachers, and others who might be able to mobilize an outcry and political resistance to these roundups.

Major U.S. newspapers played a crucial role in creating the conditions and setting the stage for targeting U.S. citizens and children as well as immigrants by whipping up ugly, racist attacks on anyone of Japanese descent. The Los Angeles Times ran the following:

A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched. So, a Japanese American born of Japanese parents, nurtured upon Japanese traditions, living in a transplanted Japanese atmosphere... grows up to be a Japanese, and not an American... Thus, while it might cause injustice to a few to treat them all as potential enemies, I cannot escape the conclusions... that such treatment... should be accorded to each and all of them while we are at war with their race.

IN THEIR OWN WORDS

Lieutenant General John DeWitt, who was in charge of and carried out the internment program, told the newspapers: “A Jap’s a Jap.” While to Congress he stated:

I don’t want any of the [persons of Japanese ancestry] here. They are a dangerous element. There is no way to determine their loyalty.... It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen, he is still a Japanese. American citizenship does not necessarily determine loyalty... But we must worry about the Japanese all the time until he is wiped off the map.

THE ALIBI: The excuse for these crimes against humanity was the alleged “danger” to the country posed by these “enemy aliens.” The military’s reach included everyone who was at least one-sixteenth “Japanese”—the equivalent of having one Japanese great grandparent. And this was done despite the conclusion based on numerous military, FBI, and CIA investigations of the Japanese population in the U.S. conducted before and after Pearl Harbor—that the “Japanese problem” was non-existent.

THE ACTUAL MOTIVE: This massive crime against a whole people inside the U.S., with ominous implications, played an important role in cohering the country around the “necessity” to support a war of worldwide slaughter—including the massive U.S. war crimes committed against hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians when the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For those who rule this country, World War 2 was waged in the interests of U.S. capitalism-imperialism—to defend and expand its control and domination of whole areas of the world, including Asia, Southeast Asia, North Africa, and more against their imperialist rivals—Germany, Italy, and Japan.

REPEAT OFFENDERS: Long before the Japanese internment, the U.S. forced all the surviving Native American tribes into concentration camps—called “reservations.” This was the final stage in the genocidal destruction of the great majority of Native Americans, who had once numbered in the millions on the continent, and the theft of their lands across the country in the name of “Manifest Destiny.” The survivors were forced to find a way to survive and make a living in some of the most desolate parts of the country.

When it came time to find places to imprison over 100,000 Japanese descendants, the great majority were relocated to Native American reservations in the most remote, desolate areas of seven Western states.

Today the same racist justifications used against people of Japanese descent in the U.S. are being put out against immigrants from Mexico, Central and Latin America, and against any Muslims. Donald Trump and other major fascists are whipping up people with the same kind of arguments used to justify the American Crime of U.S. concentration camps during World War 2. This includes the rise of racist hatred and violent attacks, even murder, against people of Asian descent across the U.S.

See also: 

• Part 1: American Crime Case #98: 1953 CIA Coup in Iran: Torture and Repression–Made in the U.S.A.
• Part 2: American Crime Case #12: The 1921 Tulsa Massacre and the Destruction of Black Wall Street
• Part 3: Emmett Till and Lynchings, Past and Present—An excerpt from Revolution: Why It’s Necessary, Why It’s Possible, What It’s All About by Bob Avakian
• Part 4: American Crime Case #6: Lynching in America—The Torture, Mutilation and Murder of Thousands of Black People and the Terrorizing of Millions More, 1865-1950
• Part 5: American Crime Case #57: The 1973 CIA Coup In Chile
• Part 6: American Crime Case #94: November 2004—War Crime Fallujah
• Part 7: American Crime Case #96: Vietnam, March 16, 1968—The My Lai Massacre
• Part 8: American Crime Case #95: Reagan’s Butcher Carries Out Genocide in Guatemala
• Part 9: American Crime Case #59: The U.S. Invasion, Occupation, Domination, and Plunder of Cuba: 1898 to 1959
• Part 10: American Crime Case #97: August 6 and 9, 1945—The Nuclear Incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• Part 11: American Crime Case #91: School of the Americas—Training Ground for Mass Murderers and Torturers, 1946-Present
• Part 12: American Crime Case #99: May 13, 1985: The MOVE Massacre
• Part 13: American Crime Case #16: “La Matanza”: A Decade of Lynching & Terrorizing Mexican People in South Texas, 1910–1920
• Part 14: American Crime Case #70: "Operation Iraqi Freedom," 2003
• Part 15: American Crime Case #39: The Palmer Raids of 1919-1920
• Part 16: American Crime Case #92: Ronald Reagan Condemns 180,000 Gay Men and Others to Demonization, and Death by AIDS