Chilling Vocabulary, part 2

Yesterday was the 75th anniversary of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's infamous Executive Order 9066, the document that lead to the internment of around 120,000 persons of Japanese descent, more than half of which (70,000) were American citizens--as well as some Germans and Italians.  If the tRump administration has its way, something like this may happen again.

Image from the Library of Congress, public domaim

The internment of Japanese Americans has taken its place as one of the low points in American history and culture.  Above is a photograph of a processing station at the Santa Anita Race Track in Los Angeles, CA, just east of Pasadena.  This morning, George Takei, famous for his portrayal of Lt. Sulu in the Star Trek TV series and subsequent films and also for his vigorous activist efforts for the gay community and other causes, spoke on Democracy Now! about his childhood in the camps.

As a matter of fact, his family was processed and held at the Santa Anita Race Track.  In the interview, he recalled being woken up by his parents and then his family of five being forced at gunpoint from their two-bedroom home.

Well, we were first taken to the horse stables at Santa Anita race track. We were taken there in a truck with other families that had been rounded up. And there, they herded us over to the stable area, and each family was assigned a horse stall, still pungent with the stink of horse manure, to sleep in. For my parents, it was a degrading, humiliating experience to take their three children and arrange the cots for us to sleep in.

He noted that for him, at five years old, it seemed like a kind of adventure at first.  That wore off, though.  It is bad enough that this whole episode even took place, but what makes this anniversary even more problematic is the fact that the Japanese internment camps have been cited by tRump and Co. as justification for their proposed measures against Muslims in the US.  In the video clip above, starting at the 1:18 mark is a clip of then-candidate tRump defending his proposed ban specifically citing FDR's actions as a president.  Shortly thereafter, a tRump surrogate, Carl Higbe, used the same kind of language on Fox News.

Several days later, he tried to walk back the language of his original statement without denying the proposed action of keeping a Muslim registry nor denying the slippery slope between that action and camps.

This slippery slope showed up again and was called out on Democracy Now! earlier this month when the tRump administration announced plans to publish a weekly list of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, a practice of the Nazi regime used as a prelude to the Konzentationslagern.

What might be more disturbing is the fact that in the US, such lists were also published.  Andrea Pitzer, an independent journalist, spoke about a similar American practice around the same time.

So this preoccupation with focusing in on one subset of the population’s crimes and then depicting that as somehow depraved and abnormal from the main population is something we’ve seen quite a bit in the past, even in the U.S. Before Japanese-American internment, you had newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle running about the unassimilability of the Japanese immigrants and also the crime tendencies and depravities they had, which were distinguished from the main American population.  (from the Democracy Now! interview transcript)

 Between the last post and this one, I have tried to show that American concentration camps--whether we call them internment camps, detention centers, or, in the case of Guantanamo Bay, prisons--are a real part of our national culture that must be challenged.  They run inherently counter to the best principles of our country.  Takei pointed out in his Democracy Now! interview that the invoking of these strategies and this history is calculated to create fear to mobilize support or action...psychological terrorism.

Well, on so many issues, not just the Muslim travel ban, but issue after issue has been a failure...You know, the real terrorist is Donald Trump. Donald Trump is the terrorist president of the United States.  (from the interview transcript)