Chinese in the diaspora often act with more loyalty towards China than to their host nation. The same type of things often goes for Jews, Muslims, Blacks, Mexicans, Japanese, etc. It’s a tribal mentality.
I’m reading Bob Wurth’s book on WWII, The Battle for Australia.
He writes about Japan’s vicious 1942 air attack on Darwin, Australia’s biggest city up north: “For years Japanese agents, including members of the Japanese population living in Darwin, had sent home intelligence and had photographed and mapped the Northern Territory coastline, especially near Darwin.”
That a nation such as the United States, while at war with Japan, would want to remove its Japanese citizens from the West Coast during that contest, is entirely rational.
In 1942, Australia’s prime minister, John Curtin, cabled America’s president, Franklin Roosevelt: “We are now, with a small population in the only white man’s territory south of the equator, beset grievously.”
It was natural then to point out the white solidarity that existed between Australia, America, England, Canada, and New Zealand. These were white countries of British origin that spoke English and rallied to each other’s aid. Australia was then 99% white and America was 90% white.
Britain’s first lord of the Admiralty, Albert Alexander, said in 1942: “We have a duty towards out kith and kin in the Commonwealth.”
These ties were not just ideological but also genetic.
The late psychologist J. Philippe Rushton proposed genetic similarity theory:
Most theories of ethno-political conflict and nationalism focus on cultural, cognitive and economic factors, often with the assumption that modernisation will gradually reduce the effect of local antagonisms and promote the growth of more universalistic societies (Smith 1998). However, purely socio-economic explanations seem inadequate to account for the rapid rise of nationalism in the former Soviet Bloc and too weak to explain the lethality of the conflicts
between Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs in the
Indian subcontinent, and Croats, Serbs, Bosnians and Albanians in the
former Yugoslavia, or even the level of animosity between Blacks, Whites and Hispanics in the US. Typically, analysts have also failed to consider the ethno-political repercussions of the unprecedented movement of peoples taking place in the world today (van den Berghe 2002).
One of the hallmarks of true science is what Edward O. Wilson (1998)
termed the unity of knowledge through the principle of consilience, in
which the explanations of phenomena at one level are grounded in those at a lower level. Two prominent examples are the understanding of genetics in terms of biochemistry once the structure of the DNA molecule was worked out and, in turn, of chemistry in terms of atomic physics. Anthony D. Smith’s theory of ethno-symbolism unifies knowledge in the consilient manner through its integration of history and psychology, thereby solving the problem that nationalism poses for purely socio-economic theories – the phenomena of mass devotion and the belief that one’s own group is favourably unique, even ‘chosen’ (e.g. Smith 2000 and 2004; Guibernau and Hutchinson 2004; Hutchinson 2000). With its emphasis on a group’s preexisting kinship, religious and belief systems fashioned into a sense of common identity and shared culture, however mythologised, Smith’s theory explains what purely socio-economic theories do not, why the ‘glorious dead’ fought and died for their country. It is more robust than other theories because its research analyses show that myths, memories and especially symbols, foment and maintain a sense of common identity among the people
unified in a nation.
Japan’s Navy wanted to invade Australia in 1942 but Japan’s Army was “wary of the fighting spirit of the Australians.” (Wurth, pg. 103)
