Monarchy and War
hopelessly defensive rear action.) Yet the hate propaganda of the “democracies” was partly very successful. Thus (mixed with racist motives), the United States decided to put the West Coast’s entire foreign as well as American population of Japanese ancestry in concentration camps (which the British had invented during the Boer War). There were among them U.S. citizens with only one Japanese grandparent, looking like “Caucasians,” and not speaking a word of Japanese.35 And after the final mass surrender of German soldiers in May 1945, they were not treated as ordinary war prisoners protected by the Hague Convention, but as DEF (“Disarmed Enemy Forces”) and were dealt with miserably. They were starved and suffered enormous losses—possibly even a million.36 Indignation about the German concentration camps, however, played only a minor role in this “policy,” because the facts were largely not believed. People remembered the lies spread about the Germans during World War I.37
35See
Carey MacWilliams, “Moving the West-Coast Japanese,” in Harper’s Magazine, September 1942. Their fully “Caucasian” spouses usually went with them. Of the far-more-exposed Hawaiian population, one third was Japanese, but they were not “concentrated,” since the “Sons of the Golden West” were not active on these islands. However, there was not a single case of espionage among the “American Japanese,” and the most heavily decorated American battalion consisted of Hawaiian “Japanese.” They paraded in New York. 36See James Bacque, Other Losses (Toronto: Stoddard, 1989). Germany complained that 1.7 million prisoners had not been returned after the war. It is true that the Third Reich starved to death many Russian prisoners. German prisoners starved in Russia, but on their trip home, those who returned were often implored for food by the hungry population. 37In November 1945, people were interviewed on a street corner in Detroit about their reactions to the horrors of the German concentration camps. Ninety percent were convinced that all films about them had been “staged” and reminded the interviewers of the fake propaganda stories of World War I—Belgian babies with their hands cut off! As Cicero said in his De divinatione: “We do not believe a liar, even if he speaks the truth.” 101