I was just listening to actor George Takei (Mr. Sulu, helmsman of the USS Enterprise) on the radio, as he related some stories of his childhood in which his family was interned in a California concentration camp.
He explained: “We (his family) were Americans. My mother was from Sacramento. My father was a San Franciscan. I and my brothers were born in Los Angeles. But because we looked like the people that bombed Pearl Harbor, they threw us into jail.”
From a comfortable suburban LA home, the family of 5 was forced to live in a horse stall.
What had happened to the Constitution?
He also related that his father had joined the US Army, where he fought in Germany and lost an arm.
On returning, in uniform, he went into a San Francisco barber shop. The barber told him “I don’t cut Japanese hair”.
History doesn’t tell us much about these atrocities.
I think I’m gonna go out and eat worms.
BTW, Takai will soon be in a Broadway production about the Internment.
We'll see it again.
History has a way of repeating itself. Next time the camps will be called FEMA camps and there will be all sorts of americans in them.
Everybody wants to lock someone up...
The Canadians locked up Italians during World War II.
(I didn’t know this until a few years ago.)
'us/them'
My theory on that is that it’s a form of mental jujitsu people perform on themselves in order to limit anxieties about other people. As in, “really, it’s only that group of easily identifiable people I have to be afraid of. I can relax around everybody else, sort of.” Not a thought that consciously arises, but that seems to be how it operates.