When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called immigrant facilities “concentration camps,” she ignited an uproar from critics who neither understand history, nor care about learning lessons from the Holocaust. By now, using concentration camps to describe facilities in the United States goes largely unquestioned, specially thanks to voices like George Takei’s, whose own childhood experience in Japanese internment camps helped put some perspective.
For people who have forgotten that the US put a large group of its own citizens in places that were euphemistically called internment camps, here’s a reminder of why and how things went down.
@unbroken.chainTakei himself recalls how, in 1942, at 5 years old, US soldiers took him and his family at gunpoint from their home to be incarcerated in an American military concentration camp, where other Japanese-Americans, some of which were born in the United States, were also imprisoned. No charges, no explanation. This went on for the duration of the war. But how did it start?
@unbroken.chainMany people believe that it was in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, that anti-Japanese sentiment and hysteria, propagated by politicians and the media, had swept the American public away. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, known for describing December 7th as “a date which will live in infamy,” signed an executive order in 1942 that would effectively begin the internment program, but anti-Japanese attitudes had started decades before. The rhetoric that developed during the 1930’s and 40’s, radio shows, movies, and plays that made caricatures out of Japanese-Americans characters in which they were portrayed as bloodthirsty and villainous, were only the most extreme version of the anti-Japanese rhetoric.
@unbroken.chainHostile attitudes began when thousands of Japanese immigrants moved to Hawaii during the late 19th century, with many eventually settling in the West Coast. By then, clashes among the different groups of immigrants that have made up the United States from its inception were business as usual, and this community was no exception to discrimination and bigotry. However, as I mentioned before, Japan was rising as an Imperial power during the 1930’s, threatening US hegemony in the Pacific ocean.
@unbroken.chainRoosevelt, often hailed as the president who stood up to the Nazis, ordered the investigation of many Japanese-Americans, questioning their loyalty to the country many of them had adopted, and the country where about two-thirds of the community had been born (meaning they were by every right American citizens).
@unbroken.chainWhen Japan decided to preemptively attack the United States at Pearl Harbor, Japanese immigrants in the US were subjected to violent rhetoric and measures were carried out, not by the people, but by authorities. According to Richard Reeves’ book Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment in World War II (2015), the Los Angeles Police Department shut down businesses in the Little Tokyo area, and teachers barred Japanese-American students from reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.
Despite a special report known as the “Muson Report” concluding that Japanese-American did not threaten the security of the United States, by Christmas 1941, FBI agents were illegally raiding the homes of Japanese-Americans, with many public officials endorsing the idea of detaining Americans of Japanese descent. And on February 19, 1942, Roosevelt signed the executive order which allowed the evacuation and relocation of Japanese families into these facilities in the middle of nowhere.
@unbroken.chainThe camps would incarcerate around 115,000 people living in the West Coast from 1942 to 1946. These camps were made up of open spaces with a row of toilet pots where women had to share the space with children and men without any privacy. They bathed outside. Detainees were allowed to lead a normal life. There were schools, newspapers, sports teams, gardens, and hiking clubs. The War Relocation Authority (WRA) made them fill out a loyalty questionnaire that contained the infamous questions 27 and 19. The first asked if they were willing to serve in combat duty; the second asked if they would swear allegiance to the U.S. and forswear allegiance to the Emperor of Japan, an allegiance that never existed in the first place.
@unbroken.chain
After some years, finally, in January of 1945, the Supreme Court ruled that the government could not detain “loyal” citizens, so the War Department announced that the internees were free to leave. Most camps closed shortly thereafter, but many had lost irreplaceable items. The US government offered to pay for compensation, but considering that people’s tax returns had been destroyed, there was no way to prove what they had lost.
@unbroken.chainIn 1974, President Gerald Ford described the whole thing as “wrong” and declared that it should never be repeated. “We now know what we should have known then—not only was that evacuation wrong but Japanese-Americans were and are loyal Americans. On the battlefield and at home the names of Japanese-Americans have been and continue to be written in history for the sacrifices and the contributions they have made to the well-being and to the security of this, our common Nation.” In 1980, the government set up a committee to go deeper into this dark episode and found, after three years of research, that internment camps were “unjust and motivated by racism rather than real military necessity.”
@unbroken.chainDecades later, the Trump Administration considered using one of the sites, an Army base at Fort Still, Oklahoma, to house unaccompanied migrant children. How is that for “infamy”?
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