“I beg your pardon, sir,” Thomas apologized sincerely. “Nevertheless, I wish there were some way for me to do something for you.”
“That is another matter. Help your brother when you can, and help will come to you when you need it. ”
Thomas found the old anarchist’s philosophy confused, confusing, and impractical, but he spent considerable time drawing him out, as he seemed to know more about the PanAsians than anyone else he had met.
Finny seemed unafraid of them and completely confident of his own ability to cope with them when necessary. Of all the persons Thomas had met since the change, Finny seemed the least disturbed by it in fact, disturbed not at all, and completely lacking in any emotion of hate or bitterness. This was hard for him to understand at first in a person as obviously warm-hearted as Finny, but he came to realize that, since. the anarchist believed that all government was wrong and that all men were to him in fact brothers, the difference to him was one of degree only.
Looking at the PanAsians through Finny’s eyes there was nothing to hate; they were simply more misguided souls whose excesses were deplorable.
Thomas did not see it from such Olympian detachment. The PanAsians were murdering and oppressing a once-free people. A good PanAsian was a dead PanAsian, he told himself, until the last one was driven back across the Pacific. If Asia was overpopulated, let them limit their birth rate.
Nevertheless, Finny’s detachment and freedom from animus enabled Thomas more nearly to appreciate the nature of the problem. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking of the PanAsians as bad — they’re not, but they are different. Behind their arrogance is a racial inferiority complex, a mass paranoia, that makes it necessary for them to prove to themselves by proving to us that a yellow man is just as good as a white man, and a damned sight better. Remember that, son, they want the outward signs of respect more than they want anything else in the world.”
“But why should they have an inferiority complex about us? We’ve been completely out of touch with them for more than two generations — ever since the Nonintercourse Act.”
“Do you think racial memory is that short-lived? The seeds of this are way back in the nineteenth century. Do you recall that two high Japanese officials had to commit honorable suicide to wipe out a slight that was done Commodore Perry when he opened up Japan? Now those two deaths are being paid for by the deaths of thousands of American officials.”
“But the PanAsians aren’t Japanese.”
“No, and they are not Chinese. They are a mixed race, strong, proud, and prolific. From the American standpoint they have the vices of both and the virtues.. of neither. But from my standpoint they are simply human beings, who have been duped into the old fallacy of the State as a super-entity. Ich habe einen Kameraden.’ Once you understand the nature of — ” He went off into a long dissertation, a mixture of Rousseau,
Rocker, Thoreau, and others. Thomas found it inspirational, but unconvincing.
But the discussion with Finny was of real use to Thomas in comprehending what they were up against. The Nonintercourse Act had kept the American people from knowing anything important about their enemy. Thomas wrinkled his brow, trying to recall what he knew about the history of it.
At the time it had been passed, the Act had been no more than a de jure recognition of a de facto condition. The sovietizing of Asia had excluded westerners, particularly Americans, from Asia more effectively than could any Act of Congress. The obscure reasons that had led the Congress of that period to think that the United States gained in dignity by passing a law confirming what the commissars had already done to us baled Thomas; it smacked of Sergeant Dogberry’s policy toward thieves. He supposed that it had simply seemed cheaper to wish Red Asia out of existence than to fight a war.
The policy behind the Act had certainly seemed to justify itself for better than half a century; there had been no war. The proponents of the measure had maintained that China was a big bite even for Soviet Russia to digest and that the United States need fear no war while the digesting was taking place. They had been correct as far as they went but as a result of the Nonintercourse Act we had our backs turned when China digested Russia…leaving America to face a system even stranger to western ways of thinking than had been the Soviet system it displaced.