Stop Mass Hysteria

by Michael Savage

  But whatever they were called, after December 7, 1941, the United States government regarded Japanese immigrants as just one thing: potential enemies. Spies, saboteurs, liaisons for invasion—you name it, the Japanese were presumed to be ready, willing, and able.

  Of course, our government itself is not capable of becoming hysterical. It isn’t a monolithic mind, like North Korea or Nazi Germany. It’s typically composed of a lot of little minds, each with their own agendas. Occasionally, these minds are fanatics: Lincoln about maintaining the Union, Governor George Wallace of Alabama about preventing racial integration, Barack Obama about minority causes. The difference between fanaticism and hysteria is instructional. The secession of the southern states was regarded as illegal, a view later validated in court. Jim Crow laws—named for a folkloric stereotype—were also legal in some states. In Obama’s case he acted out, trampled the rule of law to have his way on health care, on immigration, on equal justice for whites accused of crimes. Fanaticism pushes boundaries. Hysteria ignores them. Obama’s hysteria infected the vulnerable, horrified the inoculated, and divided a nation, perhaps irreparably. It didn’t do this by empowering the marginalized but by enabling the selfish, lunatic left in every walk of life, from professional athletes kneeling during the national anthem to illegal immigrants finding no reason to obey any law to Muslims refusing to wash their hands of radical elements in their midst to actors of color screaming at fellow, struggling white actors who accept acting parts the Social Justice Warriors unilaterally don’t think whites should be able to have. I’ll discuss that further in the last chapter.

  While our government cannot be hysterical, it is certainly capable of generating hysteria. It does so when our leaders have a mission to accomplish, whether for themselves or for the good of the nation. Winning World War II was one of those missions.

  Suspicion of American-based Japanese did not start with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Japan had been enhancing its military and moving aggressively in Asia since 1931. As early as 1936, while conducting domestic surveillance, U.S. intelligence agencies had begun amassing lists of people to be placed in detention camps should hostilities break out between Japan and the United States.10

  In late 1941, there were 112,000 Japanese living on the West Coast.11 12 A majority were American citizens. Many others had lived in America for a generation or two. Once war was declared, the U.S. Department of State commissioned an investigation into these individuals’ loyalty. Two separate reports indicated there was little cause to question Japanese allegiance, but both were suppressed because they didn’t fit the narrative being crafted by Washington. The narrative was helped along by the Niihau Incident, in which a Japanese pilot crash-landed on a tiny Hawaiian island immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack. Three Hawaiians of Japanese descent, who did not know of the attack, aided the pilot in an ultimately fatal escape attempt.13

  That story made headlines, and was used by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in February 1942 to issue an executive order allowing armed forces commanders to create “military areas” from which “any or all persons may be excluded.”14 All of California and parts of Arizona, Oregon, and the state of Washington were designated military areas.

  The order said nothing about Japanese people. It didn’t have to. By the end of spring 1942, any citizen within who was at least one-sixteenth Japanese—the Yonsei, or fourth generation—had been uprooted by the War Relocation Authority and placed in one of ten relocation camps, kept there by armed soldiers and barbed wire. Their number included orphaned infants of Japanese descent, whose threat as fifth columnists was never explained. It didn’t matter. Hysteria, as we’ve seen, is a bootstrap operation. Propaganda makes the most susceptible people become fearful, with the unease causing fear in others. Pretty soon, the movement has metastasized as hysteria.

  As the war raged and word of Japanese aggression and atrocities abroad circulated, and as American sons died in the Pacific Theater, popular sentiment held that all Japanese, including those interred on the West Coast, deserved their fate. The California legislature disseminated a paper claiming the loyalty of “ethnic Japanese” was with the Japanese emperor, and that Japanese schools in America taught racist ideologies. Media embraced these claims, endorsing internment so the military could avoid running “even the slightest risk of a major disaster from enemy groups within the nation,”15 as the Atlanta Constitution put it. The Los Angeles Times refused to consider the possibility of American loyalty among the detainees, writing that “no matter where born, there is unfortunately no doubt whatever. They are for Japan; they will aid Japan in every way possible by espionage, sabotage and other activity.”

  Late in the war, in 1944, the Pentagon formed the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a unit made of soldiers recruited from the Japanese internment camps. They fought heroically in Europe, were highly decorated, yet even they could not change public opinion.16 Hysteria doesn’t listen.

  Of course, public opinion may also have been swayed by reasons other than patriotism. The Japanese on the West Coast were excellent farmers and irrigation specialists. Their internment opened jobs that white agriculturalists were happy to take. Unfortunately, there weren’t enough whites to fill all the positions. To make up the shortfall, the United States welcomed massive waves of Mexican farmworkers, which we discussed earlier.

  Ironically, in Hawaii, sugar and pineapple plantation owners needed Japanese workers. The United States needed the produce. As a result, very few of the 158,000 Japanese living there were relocated to camps.17 Hawaii was far away and that news remained largely unreported on the mainland.

  Legal action during the war went nowhere. Even the Supreme Court ruled the actions constitutional. Afterward, U.S. courts determined that while removing the Japanese from designated military areas may have been legal, imprisoning them was not. Most internees were given a pittance in cash and a train ticket to where they had been moved from—although their homes and businesses were long gone. Many returned to find that there was still so much hatred for imperial Japan, so many American homes that had suffered loss of sons and fathers, that the American Japanese sons and daughters were no longer welcome. That wasn’t hysteria, it was pain. And whether they understood or not, the Japanese Americans were forced to accept this reality. They settled elsewhere. I find this reaction both sad and touching. It displayed a level of dignity and empathy that spoke well of those immigrants. It is a lesson many Muslim Americans would be prudent to explore.

  The U.S. government quickly moved to eliminate traces of its injustice. Rather than leave the internment camps as a reminder of what had happened, most were destroyed. However, in 1988, Congress did attempt to apologize for the internment by awarding each survivor of the camps twenty thousand dollars.18 For many, the phrase “too little, too late” seemed to have been written for the compensation.

  AN AXIS TO GRIND

  The Japanese, of course, had company in the hell of the American psyche.

  The Germans were there, too.

  Part of the responsibility for this belongs to the news media, but part also came from comic books, radio, and Hollywood. When Superman or Captain America attacked Japanese soldiers or leaders, the Japanese were diminutive and bucktoothed, quite literally rodents. Germans were depicted as wild-eyed lunatics; often it was Hitler himself being punched or manhandled. Over the airwaves, there were news reports from foreign cities and from the front (typically censored to avoid creating too much hysteria) while Amos ’n’ Andy and Fibber McGee and other popular characters battled spies. Walt Disney made some of the most famous anti-Nazi shorts beginning in 1943, with Der Fuehrer’s Face starring Donald Duck as a beleaguered German factory worker. The poster showed Donald hitting Hitler in the face with a tomato.19 That Oscar-winning cartoon also caricatured Mussolini as a jut-jawed thug and Japan’s Prime Minister Tojo as a toothy dwarf. Feature films included the 1939 melodrama Confessions of a Nazi Spy, starring Edward G. Robinson. The screaming headline on the poster was s
omething Obama might have found instructional regarding Islamic terrorists: “The Picture That Calls a Swastika A SWASTIKA!”20

  The purpose of these films was flat-out propaganda, with the goal of creating not hysteria but something else. Roughly six million people within our borders—fifty times more than the Japanese population here—had at least one parent who had been born in Germany.21 Rounding them up would have been impossible and also utterly destructive to our economy and war effort. There were internment camps for Germans, but only for those coming to America—a sensible precaution that we ignored when dealing with Syrian refugees under Obama. At the start of hostilities, America already had a historic mistrust of Germans. They didn’t need a big push. What the government wanted was to create unbridled hatred of Nazis. Citizens had to be on the lookout for symbols of the Reich, listen for spoken support of Hitler, and honor the blackouts to protect us from aircraft and submarines dispatched by the Nazis.

  As I’ve said, you cannot be consistently vigilant if you are hysterical. Mass hysteria permits you to go along with the unlawful incarceration of Japanese, which is why that had to be done quickly: hysteria subsides and passions ebb as the “enemy” vanishes. If the government had allowed its citizens to become rabid about Germans instead of Nazis, we would have turned on Dutch or Hungarians or Poles in much the same way that Sikhs were targeted as Muslims after 9/11 because hysterics confused their turbans with the Muslim keffiyeh.

  The government knew that, unlike a potential invasion of Hawaii, Alaska, or the American West Coast by the Japanese, any suspicious groups or lurking U-boats were looking for information. Fear Nazis, all American citizens had to do was keep their mouths shut, and Hitler’s agents would come away empty-handed. That was the government’s more measured response to Germany and lingering Germanophobia.

  In our overly plugged-in day and age, it is difficult to imagine a government war policy having nuance. But this one did, and for all its flaws it kept the homeland safe. With hindsight, we can condemn the internment camps. With hindsight, we know that blameless people were herded into these places, their lives and livelihoods shattered. But we cannot forget that the “day that will live in infamy” was a national body blow. Rage—impotent rage—is a breeding ground for hysteria, and there likely would have been attacks on Japanese citizens who were still in their homes, in unguarded streets. That’s what happened to blacks in the South at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan.

  Hindsight is a great luxury, and any emotion other than sympathy in the face of lawless acts against our citizens is abhorrent to most Americans. It is the singular responsibility of historians to remind us of the way things were, not the way things appear in the rearview mirror, or the way things are through a distorted lens. Actor George Takei, best known for playing Sulu on Star Trek, was interned as a child and personifies the challenge. What he experienced was horrible. But his view is entirely subjective. He commends Franklin Roosevelt for successfully battling the Great Depression, then condemns him for “the horror that he inflicted on a small group of Americans who happened to look different… it was a racist and hysterical act on the part of the government and certainly the president of the United States at that time. Seventy-five years later another person… I hate to give him that title.”22

  Takei is not correct. As we’ve seen, the internment was neither racist nor hysterical on the part of the government. It was ultimately wrong, but it was tactical and reasoned. Then Takei goes on to condemn Donald Trump with a vague, noncontextual brush informed by his own childhood experiences. That is not reason, that is emotion. That is the stuff of which hysteria is made.

  Angry subjectivity is particularly true in discussing the postwar era, when America was subjected to an unprecedented wave of mass hysteria, one that not only had the traditional media but also television to work its way with us.

  Like the Internet and the liberal rallying cry of “net neutrality,” the film industry was a natural target for hysteria. It was its own dedicated media—ideas went from the minds of leftist writers to screens nationwide—and it had glamour, which meant that accusations of treason against it would get front-page coverage in the news media. A U.S. House committee dragged one industry luminary after another in front of it, making and destroying careers indiscriminately. Once again, since children were seen as particularly vulnerable, comic books came under scrutiny as well. Congress pondered the extremely important questions: Was Wonder Woman a lesbian? Were Batman and Robin homosexuals?

  11.

  FROM COMMIES TO COMICS

  Congressional Witch Hunts Destroy Lives and Careers

  In the same way that Great Britain decided to make me the token white, male American to ban from their country, Congress turned on a young man and made him a poster child for their own inability to control a plague sweeping the nation. To Congress—in particular, the United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency—the problem with American youth wasn’t bad parenting or Hollywood sensation-peddlers and the glorification of bad boy antiheroes like Marlon Brando. No, they said the problem was Bill Gaines, a man who published a small line of comic books. And like me, Gaines fought back.

  What I learned as a botanist has served me well in life. For example, sometimes the seeds of hysteria grow in a flash, like bamboo or algae. That’s how we get a War of the Worlds panic. The stock market crash of 1929 was like that as well—a triumph of self-preservation and impulse over reason. In August of that year, after a period of aggressive speculation, investors were becoming skittish because production had declined and unemployment had risen. Compounding these concerns were low wages, extensive debt, the questionable solvency of banks that were carrying that debt, and weakness in agriculture. Stock prices began to decline, resulting in a market “correction” that lasted from September into October. When the situation failed to stabilize, the pace accelerated and then—hysteria. On October 24, Black Thursday, a record number of shares were traded. Investors and banks calmed things by securing massive blocks of stock, causing things to look better on Friday. But then on Monday, Black Monday, after having had a weekend to work up balance sheets as well as panic, investors bailed and caused the market to plunge. On Black Tuesday, October 29, the panic became hysteria and the market collapsed completely. Investors lost billions and the Great Depression had begun.

  Sometimes, though, hysteria takes time and careful watering. And like pollen grains or fungus spores, hysteria occasionally requires bees or a strong wind or rain to spread its seed to fertile ground. That’s just how liberals have fomented another case of mass hysteria, this one in that second category I described earlier—denial of the existence of a threat despite overwhelming evidence that it does exist. That is the best way I can describe the American public’s widespread belief that the investigations into communist influence in the 1940s and ’50s were “witch hunts,” based on exaggerated claims of communist influence in Hollywood, academia, the press, and the federal government.

  Today McCarthyism is synonymous with witch hunting, paranoia, and government overreach, based on Senator Joseph McCarthy’s activities in tandem with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during the 1950s. There is only one problem with the liberal narrative supporting that meme: McCarthy was right.1 Whatever you may think of his methods or alleged personal failings, his core proposition was true. Communism had made major inroads into all the institutions he alleged it had. As we’ll see, most of the people identified didn’t even deny the charges.

  THE BLACKLIST

  In 1938, Congress authorized the formation of the House Un-American Activities Committee.2 The committee was empaneled to investigate subversive activities on both the left and right. HUAC began investigating Hollywood in 1940, when a former Communist Party member fingered forty-two film industry figures as “fellow travelers,” a phrase that had originated in Russia in 1917 to describe those who were sympathetic to, if not yet active participants in, the Russian Revolution.3 The names were huge and included
Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Katharine Hepburn, and Lionel Stander.4 Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, said this in defense of his colleagues: “At this crucial time when the cooperation of all democratic forces is so essential, this attack throws a very dubious light on the character of the whole… investigation.”5 The pressure temporarily subsided due to lack of evidence and popular support for fan favorites. The only one negatively affected was Stander, who lost his contract with Republic Pictures.6

  World War II arrived and the uneasy alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union put a damper on anticommunist activism. The American Communist Party took advantage of this change in attitude to recruit aggressively. Membership hit fifty thousand.7 Many ordinary Americans who went through the Great Depression were taken in by communism’s utopian promises.

  Parallels with the early 1940s and the tactics of socialist Bernie Sanders in 2016—with the entire Democratic Party, in fact—show how closely Sanders adopted the classic playbook while seeking the presidential nomination. Many see Sanders as an “idealistic,” grandfatherly figure who is, at worst, unrealistic in his estimation of socialism’s viability. I do not. I recognize Sanders for what he is, one of the most dangerous figures in American politics. It is precisely his unthreatening public image that makes him so dangerous, as it allows him to soft-sell the most inhumane and oppressive political system in human history.