Just for fun, I decided to take Donald Trump at his word.
After the Republican presidential candidate responded to the San Bernardino terror attack by calling for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” I thought it might be interesting to study a historical example of what state-sponsored racism actually looks like. Consider it a practical form of voter education.
So, last Friday, I drove up to the Skirball Cultural Center to view its exhibition on Manzanar, the World War II incarceration camp for Japanese-Americans located in California’s arid Owens Valley, depicted here through the photographs of Ansel Adams. In describing “the temper of the times” there are parallels to current events that seem so relevant, it’s eerie: “A wave of fear and paranoia swept the western United States and the Hawaiian Islands following the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor… Anxiety over possible invasion by Japanese forces or sabotage by Japanese Americans overrode common sense…”Just a few months after the December 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing the rounding up and relocation of all persons of Japanese descent, as well as some Germans and Italians, to incarceration camps in the Western United States. Think of this as America’s cousin to the Nuremberg Laws, because in the days and weeks that followed, an estimated 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry — citizens and non-citizens, or what the Japanese referred to as Issei (first-generation Americans) or Nisei (second-generation) were evacuated from their homes; forced to close or sell their businesses at a fraction of their value; and relocated to camps in the American “interior,” where they could be monitored and controlled.
Comments posted at the JJ:
* Big difference. No Japanese on the west coast actually tried to kill their neighbors and coworkers. Nobody from the 442 decided to do “workplace violence” in bootcamp. And on a parochial level no Japanese ever thought blowing up a synagogue or heaping abuse on Jewish college students was a cool thing.
* And no japanese learn how to fly a plane to crash it into a building, the Pentagon or the White House.
* I forgot Boston and Fort Hood.
