On February 19, 1942, following the failure to distinguish Japanese immigrants to the United States from Japanese loyal to the Japanese Emperor and in support of the bombing of Pearl Harbor two months earlier, Roosevelt determined that Japanese ethnicity was sufficient reason to rip ordinary Japanese-Americans from their homes and ship them - 120,000 of them - to ten internment camps away from the West Coast: Heart Mountain in Wyoming, Tule Lake and Manzanar in California, Topaz in Utah, Poston and Gila River in Arizona, Granada in Colorado, Minidoka in Idaho, and Jerome and Rowher in Arkansas.
Nearly 72,000 of these were American citizens and we now know that all but a tiny slice of that population were indistinguishable from other immigrants to the U.S., saw it as their only home, and had no reason to work against its best interests. It was a crude political action, based on the racist belief that ethnicity and culture are indistinguishable from political loyalty. Throwing them out of their homes and seizing their property cost the Japanese-American community a net income loss of $2.7 billion dollars, calculated in 1983 dollars.
The Oakland Asian Cultural Center has produced a superb memorial on this, the 83rd anniversary of this black mark on American democracy, which you can view here.
I say this insult to the civil rights of American citizens is tied to modern-day events because it's obvious the same lack of nuanced thinking and behavior is currently front-and-center. One of the participants in the Oakland Asian Cultural Center presentation argues Executive Order 9066 was not an exception to the American Way but part of its legacy. Genocide of the American native population, slavery and segregation, police brutality based on race, and Islamophobia, she argues, are merely earlier examples. Today we have a president who creates conspiracy theories such as spreading the cruel and hateful untruth that Haitian immigrants are eating the pets in Springfield, Ohio, and that Ukraine, and not Putin, started the war there, that Zelensky is a dictator with only 4% of his population behind him, when the actual number is something like 57%.
Rather than make the common distinction between right and left wing (or red states and blue states) I think it makes sense to see an important distinction between closed and open-minded thinking and coming down in favor of open-mindedness because it matches the scientific method which defines truth as what we know as of the present moment and always subject to change as new information becomes available.
It's a small world, and we are not alone in our folly. If you watched the German election last Sunday, you saw that the battle between progressives and authoritarians in Germany is quite similar. The two centrist parties, the center right Union Parties under Friedrich Merz and the center left Democratic Socialists under Olaf Scholz, will form a coalition, probably with the Green Party (the only other more-or-less centrist party left) because all of the German parties are united, despite vast differences, in refusing to work with the Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party despite the latter's rapid growth into the second largest political party in the country. The reason is their nationalistic anti-immigrant policy and desire to downplay the Hitler legacy. Meanwhile, by the way, our Vice President goes to Germany, ignores the Chancellor and meets with and throws his support behind the head of the AfD Party. The new American ethic of might makes right has blurred American eyes. It apparently takes too much work, too much thinking, to separate the person from their ideas and the person's rational thoughts from their irrational ones. Where will this all lead?
It's no easy job spot and reject jingoism and insist on a nuanced acceptance of a national legacy with all its scars and warts. The immature parts of us want to root for the home team, "my country right or wrong." My main concern these days is the fact that we in the U.S. have surrendered to the oligarchs. We have allowed the likes of of Rupert Murdoch, the Koch Brothers, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, JD Vance, Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and their ilk to "flood the zone" with mis- and disinformation, and have decided to follow a leader who openly and unabashedly shows total disregard for objectivity in reporting facts. Or, to put it in plain language, to distinguish between good guys and bad guys. In the 1940s it was Japanese = traitor; today it's Muslim = terrorist; black man = thug; authoritarian (non-, even anti-democratic) leader = admirable strongman.
Where is the ability to draw a line between decency and integrity on the one hand and self-serving tribalism on the other? Where did that distinction go? How do we get it back?
It's a small world, and we are not alone in our folly. If you watched the German election last Sunday, you saw that the battle between progressives and authoritarians in Germany is quite similar. The two centrist parties, the center right Union Parties under Friedrich Merz and the center left Democratic Socialists under Olaf Scholz, will form a coalition, probably with the Green Party (the only other more-or-less centrist party left) because all of the German parties are united, despite vast differences, in refusing to work with the Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party despite the latter's rapid growth into the second largest political party in the country. The reason is their nationalistic anti-immigrant policy and desire to downplay the Hitler legacy. Meanwhile, by the way, our Vice President goes to Germany, ignores the Chancellor and meets with and throws his support behind the head of the AfD Party. The new American ethic of might makes right has blurred American eyes. It apparently takes too much work, too much thinking, to separate the person from their ideas and the person's rational thoughts from their irrational ones. Where will this all lead?
It's no easy job spot and reject jingoism and insist on a nuanced acceptance of a national legacy with all its scars and warts. The immature parts of us want to root for the home team, "my country right or wrong." My main concern these days is the fact that we in the U.S. have surrendered to the oligarchs. We have allowed the likes of of Rupert Murdoch, the Koch Brothers, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, JD Vance, Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and their ilk to "flood the zone" with mis- and disinformation, and have decided to follow a leader who openly and unabashedly shows total disregard for objectivity in reporting facts. Or, to put it in plain language, to distinguish between good guys and bad guys. In the 1940s it was Japanese = traitor; today it's Muslim = terrorist; black man = thug; authoritarian (non-, even anti-democratic) leader = admirable strongman.
Where is the ability to draw a line between decency and integrity on the one hand and self-serving tribalism on the other? Where did that distinction go? How do we get it back?
