I’ve always wondered how modern American leftists, Marxist or otherwise, react to the anti-Asian history of the American left and labor movement. I’m referring to things like the anti-coolie movements that spread across the Western Hemisphere during the nineteenth century. Anti-coolie activism itself originated in Chile, while countries such as Mexico and Peru saw anti-Asian violence fueled by competition with Asian indentured workers. In the United States, this often erupted into outright anti-Chinese violence and pogroms, whether in the 1871 Los Angeles massacre—considered by some historians to be the deadliest lynching in American history—the Rock Springs massacre, the Tacoma riots of 1885, or the anti-Asian agitation associated with the Workingmen’s Party of California under Denis Kearney, which became infamous for its role in the 1877 San Francisco riots that left numerous Chinese laborers dead.
The same pattern arguably resurfaced in a different form during the 1970s and 1980s with the wave of Japan-bashing that swept through much of the white working class. This hostility was often encouraged by politicians aligned with the Democratic Party, who were eager to attack Japanese economic competition while the Reagan administration and the GOP were generally more receptive to Japanese investment in the United States, even as the American automobile industry was struggling.
What I find particularly creepy and strange is how many white Americans today, on both the left and the right, have become outright weeaboos or at least highly positive toward Japan despite the fact that it was not even a century ago that Toyota vehicles were being vandalized by disgruntled union workers employed by Ford and other American manufacturers. Books such as Japan as Number One became bestsellers, while Hollywood frequently portrayed Japanese corporations as sinister or unstoppable economic rivals, especially in films like Blade Runner and Rising Sun.
I would argue that this continued into the 1990s, when many moral guardians began targeting Japanese anime as satanic or as a vehicle for spreading Japanese wartime nationalism. One only has to look at the various newspaper columns attacking series such as Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon, and even Pokémon for allegedly promoting Satanism, homosexuality, or whatever other cultural boogeyman happened to concern the American Christian right at the time—a movement which, it should be remembered, also preached tha
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