{"id":5503,"date":"2015-12-30T18:10:14","date_gmt":"2015-12-30T18:10:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/?p=5503"},"modified":"2015-12-30T22:28:41","modified_gmt":"2015-12-30T22:28:41","slug":"americas-concentration-camps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/blog\/2015\/12\/americas-concentration-camps\/","title":{"rendered":"America’s Concentration Camps Are a Warning, Not a Model – Article by Gary McGath"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"The<\/a>Gary McGath<\/span>
\n<\/big><\/big><\/strong><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
******************************<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\n
\n

But some politicians are trying to revive their legacy <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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Woodrow Wilson\u2019s reputation has recently taken a well-deserved beating because of his racial policies. He restored segregation in the federal civil service, and the infamous movie Birth of a Nation<\/em> highlights his support for the Ku Klux Klan. Those policies are dead today, with very few advocates.<\/p>\n

However, a more recent president implemented an even worse race-based policy against Americans, and some politicians say we should emulate it today. Franklin D. Roosevelt\u2019s executive order forcibly removed about 120,000 Japanese-Americans, mostly US citizens, from their homes.<\/p>\n

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, people feared a Japanese attack on the West Coast, and many regarded the Japanese American population in California as disloyal. On February 19, 1942, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the military to remove people from designated military areas.<\/p>\n

As explained in Greg Robinson\u2019s By Order of the President<\/em>, Roosevelt\u2019s language was broad, but everyone understood \u201cany and all persons\u201d to mean Japanese-Americans and \u201cmilitary areas\u201d to mean the West Coast. The removals included \u201cIssei\u201d \u2014 resident immigrants \u2014 as well as \u201cNisei\u201d \u2014 native-born Americans with Japanese parents. Immigration from Japan had been banned since 1924, and all Japanese immigrants were ineligible for citizenship, although all had been living in America for at least eighteen years.<\/p>\n

They were forcibly removed to ten concentration camps. The government officially called them \u201crelocation centers,\u201d but Roosevelt himself used the words \u201cconcentration camp\u201d in a recommendation as early as 1936, as did a military proposal in 1942. The occupants were kept behind barbed wire, and armed guards kept them from leaving.<\/p>\n

The mass displacement of Japanese-Americans, but not people of German or Italian extraction, was the result of racial rather than security considerations. Roosevelt showed a lifelong hostility toward the Japanese. Robinson states:<\/p>\n

FDR had a long and unvaried history of viewing Japanese-Americans in racialized terms, that is, as essentially Japanese in their identity and emotional allegiance, and of expressing hostility toward them on that basis.<\/p>\n

In the years before World War I, Roosevelt considered immigration part of the Japanese threat to the West Coast. During the 1920s, when Roosevelt urged better relations with Japan, he supported immigration restriction and legal discrimination in order to deter Japanese-American settlement.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A report<\/a> commissioned by Congress concluded that<\/p>\n

Executive Order 9066 was not justified by military necessity, and the decisions that followed from it \u2014 exclusion, detention, the ending of detention and the ending of exclusion \u2014 were not founded upon military considerations. The broad historical causes that shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As documented by Thomas Fleming in The New Dealers\u2019 War<\/em>, Roosevelt proposed removing an even larger number of Japanese and Japanese-Americans in Hawaii. The military objected because so many of them were skilled workers who were necessary to the war effort.<\/p>\n

The order banning Japanese-Americans from the West Coast was lifted in January of 1945, and the camps were shut down soon afterward. Many returned to find they couldn\u2019t reclaim their property or return to their homes.<\/p>\n

These events should be a shameful chapter in America\u2019s past, but even today people cite them as an example to follow. David Bowers, mayor of Roanoke, Virginia, ordered the city government<\/a> to stop helping Syrian refugees, citing Roosevelt\u2019s internment\u00a0order as justification.<\/p>\n

Al Baldasaro, a New Hampshire state representative and co-chair of Donald Trump\u2019s state veterans\u2019 coalition, has defended Trump\u2019s proposal to ban Muslim immigration by citing World War II internment<\/a>: \u201cWhat he\u2019s saying is no different than the situation during World War II, when we put the Japanese in camps.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump has made the connection between his call for banning Muslim immigrants and creating a national registry and FDR’s policies explicit<\/a>:<\/p>\n

What I\u2019m doing is no different than FDR\u2019s solution for German, Italian, Japanese, you know… They stripped them of their naturalization proceedings. They went through a whole list of things; they couldn\u2019t go five miles from their homes. They weren\u2019t allowed to use radios, flashlights.\u00a0I mean, you know, take a look at what FDR did many years ago and he\u2019s one of the most highly respected presidents.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Trump evaded\u00a0the question of whether he would have supported Japanese internment, saying<\/a>, \u201cI would have had to be there at the time to give you a proper answer.\u201d He wasn\u2019t there, but there are still living Americans who were. One was George Takei, who played Lt. Sulu on Star Trek<\/em> and was sent off at the age of five. He recalls how it happened<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Without charges, without trial, without due process \u2014 the fundamental pillar of our justice system \u2014 we were summarily rounded up, all Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, where we were primarily resident, and sent off to 10 barb wire internment camps \u2014 prison camps, really, with sentry towers, machine guns pointed at us \u2014 in some of the most desolate places in this country.<\/p>\n

For the sake of a false sense of security, the US government ruined countless lives, imprisoned tens of thousands without charges, without even accusation, with only the mere fact of their skin color and ancestry. The internment stoked hatred against a minority group, squandered potential assets in the war, and fueled the Axis\u2019s anti-American propaganda.<\/p>\n

The lesson that America\u2019s concentration camps should have burned into our national consciousness that we must never do that again \u2014 not to a racial, national, or a religious minority, nor anyone else \u2014 no matter how afraid we are. They are a warning, not a model.<\/p>\n

Gary McGath is a freelance software engineer living in Nashua, New\u00a0Hampshire.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education<\/a> and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License<\/a>, which requires that credit be given to the author.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gary McGath ****************************** But some politicians are trying to revive their legacy Woodrow Wilson\u2019s reputation has recently taken a well-deserved beating because of his racial policies. He restored segregation in the federal civil service, and the infamous movie Birth of a Nation highlights his support for the Ku Klux Klan. Those policies are dead today, with very few advocates. However, a more recent president implemented an even worse race-based policy against Americans, and some politicians say we should emulate it…<\/p>\n

Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,5],"tags":[4426,3549,4480,4220,711,2664,2665,3605,4478,4477,1283,4479,4476,25],"class_list":["post-5503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-politics","tag-anything-peaceful","tag-authoritarianism","tag-concentration-camps","tag-donald-trump","tag-fascism","tag-fee","tag-foundation-for-economic-education","tag-gary-mcgath","tag-george-takei","tag-internment-camps","tag-islam","tag-japanese-internment","tag-muslims","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5503"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5503\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5507,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5503\/revisions\/5507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}