A few days ago, when I was reading some material on early Chinese and Japanese contract laborers, I found that the white sugar planters and officials in Hawaii referred to the Asian people back in the late 1800s as HORDES.
This attitude of certain white people flows from their prejudice against non-whites and from their cockeyed belief that they are superior because of color. Those who are possessed by the psychology of "hordes" think that Asians and non-whites elsewhere in various parts of the world breed like rabbits and place a low value on human lives. In, other words, they regard the life of a non-white as cheap.
Thus on the Hawaiian sugar plantations, the white planters used blacksnake whips and set dogs on immigrant laborers from the Orient. Ask the old-timers how horses and mules were treated better, watered and rubbed after a day's work.
This attitude of "haoles" still prevails today, and widely manifests itself in many ways. Recently, when the Honolulu Advertiser printed a booklet which it called "The Book of Facts" on Hawaii and in a hush-hush manner sent copies of it to the Mainland, it referred to the "fecundity" of the Japanese people here. And it said that people of Oriental ancestry here cling to the customs and living habits" of the Orient, eating pickles, dried fish and pickled vegetables and preferring by their standard of values, to live in a broken-down shack rather than in a new home.
All People Place High Value On Their Lives
Now, no one wants to live in the slums. And every parent wants to give his or her children something better than what he or she had to contend with. And people, white as well as non-white, place a high value on human lives.
Because the minds of certain white people in high places are pregnant with attitudes of white supremacy, they feel it is permissible to experiment with the A-bomb in Asia but not in Europe. For them, there is nothing wrong with the flattening and searing of people's homes in cities and the countryside, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in Korea. But they yelled to high heaven when the Nazis pounded Coventry in England in saturation bombing, but in milder form than the saturation bombing in Korea today.
Foreign Exploitation of Wealth Behind Continued Poverty
The common people of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, are poor today and many are forced to starve or survive on a sub-human level. But their lands have rich resources and these have been exploited by white businessmen and financiers from abroad. And in Malaya, for instance, where the people want freedom and independence, the British have armed soldiers standing behind laborers on rubber plantations.
Freedom from foreign imperialism and national unity make a country stronger, and instead of the riches being hauled away by foreigners, the people can enjoy the wealth of their land which rightfully belongs to them.
Press Hides Facts and Twists Information
This improvement in living standards is taking place in New China today. The American press tries to hide the facts. During the past week both the Star-Bulletin and the Advertiser ran items on their editorial pages, saying that Mme. Pandit of India, who is Premier Nehru's sister, after her trip to China, reported that conditions were bad there and the people were unhappy. A few weeks ago, Mainland newspapers carried reports of what was purported to be Mme. Pandit's observation of China.
The joke is that when Mme. Pandit found out about the erroneous news reports, she strongly refuted them, saying she had never said such a thing. For the record, she repeated that conditions had improved and there was enthusiasm among the populace.
The Star Bulletin and the Advertiser published their items after Mme. Pandit's refutation. Now, will they publish a correction, saying that Mme. Pandit had refuted the report of the observations on China attributed to her?
People Same Under Their Skins
Now, how can one think of other human beings in terms of "hordes"? I am sure Mme. Pandit does not think this of her people.
As a non-white, I have always resented this slander and I work with and hold the hands of white people who fight color prejudice, imperialism and for a better life for all at home.
I feel that human decency and respect everywhere among all people will come when man's exploitation of man ends everywhere, when man's inhumanity to man ends, when we stop sending arms to foreign countries to keep people divided and fighting among themselves so that they continue to be weak and always ripe for exploitation, and when the "horde" psychology ends—when human lives in Asia or Africa are not regarded as cheap, but that people are the same under their skins.
We Were Not for People's Independence
I remember how sick at heart I was when on the Burma border in 1944, I was told that we who were engaged in psychological warfare were prohibited from giving any hints of encouragement of independence to the Indians, the Burmese and the Siamese, because the British would object.
Then in Chungking, I was told by my superiors not to mention or encourage independence in leaflets we produced and which were dropped from our aircraft over Indo-China where the Viet Minh resistance forces were fighting the Japanese.
And I was sickened when, toward the end of 1944, I received a package of enlarged OWI photographs showing in detail how the British troops under General Scobie were crushing the Greek resistance forces which had fought the Nazis and defeated them in their region.
[ Burned Photographs of British Massacre of Greek Patriots
The war was far from over then, but the British imperialists were crushing the Greek patriots to assure Britain's postwar domination of Greece. I was supposed to exhibit these, photographs in North China and to have sets sent out into the guerrilla areas. When some of my superiors saw the photographs, they suggested that I burn them, for the Chinese in North China were fighting like the Greek partisans. They would become suspicious about our war aims, I was told.
Months later I recalled all these instances as I rode on horseback and with a radio team went south from Yenan to investigate a civil war front. Yenan charged that American arms were being used against its troops by Chiang Kai-shek's forces. It said that the war against Japanese militarism had. not ended and U. S. arms should not be used by Chiang in attacking Yenan's forces. Such arms should be concentrated on the anti-Japanese front, Yenan insisted.
A General Said U. S. Guns Plowed Out Every Bit of Grass
Civil war had started and I wondered if China would have to go through another period of internecine warfare. I wondered whether American arms would be used extensively.
The fighting was going on at Yehtai Mountain and on my way there I stopped at a sub-region headquarters of the Communist-led army. A general in command told me that after Chiang's troops had pounded the mountain area with American guns and bazookas, there wasn't a blade of grass standing.
At the front, I found Kuomintang troops had overrun Communist-held territory. They had been as ruthless to the peasants as the Japanese soldiers.
An Old Woman, Unable To Walk After Being Raped
I visited villages Chiang's soldiers had occupied and looted. Whatever they could not haul away on stolen oxcarts and pack-animals they rendered useless. They had destroyed furniture, large iron kettles and quilts. They had mixed corn, wheat and millet with manure to render the grain inedible. Deep-water wells of this mountainous region were filled with earth and precious ropes for drawing water were stolen or cult to pieces. Pigs and chickens had been slaughtered and their entrails stuffed in table and dresser drawers or hung in the cave houses. In a village school the Nationalist soldiers had defecated, as they had done elsewhere, and had splashed human excrement on the walls.
A young woman, just released by Chiang's soldiers, reported to me that she had been dragged from one blockhouse to another and raped for many days. An old woman past 75 was the only one in a village evacuated by the Nationalists just before we arrived. She was sitting, unable" to walk, because she, too, had been raped many times.
Cross the Line of Fire
Everywhere on the village walls the Chiang soldiers had written: "The Red Army cannot last long; we have American guns!"
I met hundreds of homeless refugees who demanded that I cross the line of fire to visit their ravaged homes the Nationalists were still occupying. They said that as an American it was my responsibility to report everything to my government, which was backing the Chinese government.
"Go to our village," an old woman begged me.
She said the Kuomintang troops would not shoot me since we were backing them. And she pointed to my uniform.
And the peasants brought me mortar shells and fins marked "U. S." They even collected small pieces of shrapnel.
A village leader said it would take more than a decade for the peasants to recover their losses and for that many years at least, they would not forget America's unfriendly act.
How Did the Refugees Take Wedemeyer's Statement?
I made a detailed report to General Albert Wedemeyer's headquarters. The Chiang forces had definitely used U. S. arms. General Wedemeyer came out with a press statement, saying that the arms manufactured in the U. S. had been sent to Chiang's government in separate pieces under the lend-lease setup. Chungking arsenals had assembled them and the U. S. had no responsibility about their employment.
One of my radio communication non-coms asked me how the hundreds of refugees we had seen would react to such a statement. He was not thinking of "hordes"—he was thinking of the Chinese peasants as people, no different from him under the skin.