1946 Atlantic Monthly, “What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought anyway? We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers.”128
In 1942, with the assistance of the Census Bureau, the United States locked up 110,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese in various internment camps, primarily on the West Coast, where they were identified by numbers rather than names. This action, taken by President Roosevelt, was supported two years later by the U.S. Supreme Court.129
In 1943 off-duty white U.S. troops attacked Latinos and African Americans in Los Angeles’ “zoot suit riots,” stripping and beating them in the streets in a manner that would likely have made Hitler proud. The Los Angeles City Council, in a remarkable effort to blame the victims, responded by banning the style of clothing worn by Mexican immigrants called the zoot suit.130
When U.S. troops were crammed onto the Queen Mary in 1945 headed for the European war, blacks were kept apart from whites and stowed in the depths of the ship near the engine room, as far as possible from fresh air, in the same location in which blacks had been brought to America from Africa centuries before.131
African American soldiers who survived World War II could not legally return home to many parts of the United States if they had married white women overseas. Black soldiers who returned to the Southern United States sometimes found themselves required to sit in the back of streetcars so that Nazi prisoners of war could sit in the front.132 White soldiers who had married Asians were up against the same anti-miscegenation laws in 15 states.
Whatever the United States fought WWII for -- and we’ve seen that it wasn’t to save the Jews -- it surely wasn’t to oppose any sort of racist injustice. Nor was it to put an end to the imperial conquest of territory.
During World War II the U.S. Navy seized the small Hawaiian island of Koho’alawe for a weapons testing range and ordered its inhabitants to leave. The island has been devastated. In 1942, the U.S. Navy displaced Aleutian Islanders. President Harry Truman made up his mind that the 170 native inhabitants of Bikini Atoll had no right to their island in 1946. He had them evicted and dumped as refugees on other islands without means of support. In the coming years, the United States would remove 147 people from Enewetak Atoll and all the people on Lib Island. U.S. atomic and hydrogen bomb testing rendered various depopulated and still-populated islands uninhabitable, leading to further displacements. Up through the 1960s, the U.S. military displaced hundreds of people from Kwajalein Atoll. A super-densely populated ghetto was created on Ebeye.
Also during WWII, the United States evicted all native people, but not whites, from their homes in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, and put them into camps lacking food, water, or basic hygiene. Ten percent of them died.133 In Hawaii, the U.S. government declined to remove the workforce desired by wealthy, white plantation owners, but did impose martial law and lock up 2,000 people of Japanese descent.134
On Vieques, off Puerto Rico, the U.S. Navy displaced thousands of inhabitants between 1941 and 1947, announced plans to evict the remaining 8,000 in 1961, but was forced to back off and -- in 2003 -- to stop bombing the island. On nearby Culebra, the Navy displaced thousands between 1948 and 1950 and attempted to remove those remaining up through the 1970s.135
Beginning during World War II but continuing right through the 1950s, the U.S. military displaced a quarter million Okinawans, or half the population, from their land, forcing people into refugee camps and shipping thousands of them off to Bolivia -- where land and money were promised but not delivered.136
In 1953, the United States made a deal with Denmark to remove 150 Inughuit people from Thule, Greenland, giving them four days to get out or face bulldozers. They are being denied the right to return.137
Between 1968 and 1973, the United States and Great Britain exiled all 1,500 to 2,000 inhabitants of Diego Garcia, rounding people up and forcing them onto boats while killing their dogs in a gas chamber and seizing possession of their entire homeland for the use of the U.S. military. They are being denied the right to return.138
When I say that WWII was not fought to save the Jews or to oppose racism or imperialism, I mean both that the U.S. government was not so motivated and that the U.S. public and U.S. recruits were not so motivated. The public actually had very little say in the matter. President Franklin Roosevelt had blocked passage of the Ludlow Amendment that would have put the decision to go to war to a public vote. As a result, the public got no vote and did not even have to be persuaded of a justification. As Jacques R. Pauwels puts it in The Myth of the Good War,
“A Gallup poll of September 1942 revealed that 40 per cent of Americans had no idea at all why their country was involved in the war, and that less than one-quarter of Americans had ever heard of the Atlantic Charter. Only 7 per cent were able to name one of the ‘four freedoms.’ For the American people, the war was not a crusade for freedom and democracy but simply, as Fortune magazine wrote, ‘a painful necessity’ -- a deplorable but inescapable misfortune.”139
6. The United States did not have to develop practices of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and concentration of people on reservations
Jeffrey Ostler is Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History at the University of Oregon. His 2019 book, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas, tells a complex and nuanced story of what overall and in many particular parts fits the UN definition of, as well as the popular conception of, genocide.140
In Ostler’s account, the U.S. government had a clear policy from the start, not just in 1830, of moving Native Americans west of the Mississippi, and enacted that policy. Yet, between the 1780s and 1830, the population of Native Americans east of the Mississippi increased. The formalized and accelerated policy of removal put in place in 1830 was driven by greed for land and racist hatred, not by any humanitarian impulse to help native peoples survive by moving them to better locations where they wouldn’t supposedly face inevitable demise. They would have survived better if left alone, rather than being forced on difficult journeys into already occupied lands and lands without the means to sustain them.
Greed for land -- or what might be called Lebensraum -- really seems to have been the dominant motivation. Smaller groups of Native Americans in the East not occupying highly desirable territory were allowed to remain, and in some cases have remained to this day. Others that put up too great a fight were allowed to remain for a time. Others that adopted European ways of agriculture and all the trappings of what was called “civilization” (including slavery) were allowed to remain until their land became too desirable. The supposed failure of native nations to become “civilized” seems to have no more basis in reality as a motivation for expelling them than does their supposed dying out. Neither does the supposed need to make peace among them. Nations fought each other as they were driven into each other’s territories by the U.S. settler colonists.
The United States did sometimes make peace between warring nations, but only when it served some purpose, such as facilitating the displacement of more people into their land. The work of empire was not the work of brute force alone. Much “diplomacy” was needed. Treaties had to be secretly made with minority groups within native nations. Treaties had to be secretly worded to mean the opposite of what it appeared. Leaders had to be bribed or coaxed into meeting, and then captured or killed. Carrots and sticks had to be applied until people “voluntarily” chose to abandon their homes. Propaganda had to be developed to whitewash atrocities.
There
