“Internment in the Land of the Free”

“Internment in the Land of the Free”    Feb. 18, 2018    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

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We have no one to go to for help. Not even a church. Anything goes, now that our President Roosevelt signed the order to get rid of us. How can he do this to his own citizens? No lawyer has the courage to defend us. Caucasian friends stay away for fear of being labeled "Jap lovers." There's not a more lonely feeling than to be banished by my own country. There's no place to go.”
― Kiyo Sato, Kiyo's Story: A Japanese-American Family's Quest for the American Dream

For those of us at the tail end of the Baby Boom, a happy childhood was, at least in part, thanks to the advent of the first serious attempt at a science fiction TV series. Gene Rodenberry’s “Star Trek” which, by today’s standards had not only pretty bad acting but also a lot of really bad science, was, none-the-less, visionary for its time and they can legitimately claim to have envisioned several technological innovations which did eventually come into existence.

  George Takei played “Sulu,” the helmsman of the U.S.S. Enterprise. He did go on to star in other shows and he made a bit of news when he revealed that he is gay. He has translated his public notoriety into a meaningful gay rights advocacy role.

In recent years he has become well known for his snarky presence in social media. I loved him when he was Sulu during my childhood and I can tell you that I think that I love him even more for his sardonic posts about conservative politicians.

      Takei was born a United States citizen in California. Takei’s mother was also born a citizen in California. His father was an immigrant who had become a citizen before Takei was born.

But when he was just five years old, two months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, his family was rounded up with 120,000 other people of Asian descent who lived on the west coast of America and was imprisoned in an internment camp for three years. Americans of Japanese descent were suddenly cast as being potential enemies of the state and they were taken away from their jobs, homes, businesses, farms, and property and put behind barbed wire in miserable camps where they were surrounded by armed guards and watched over from menacing guard towers.

When WWII was ended, they were released from their camps and were each given a bus ticket and $20 to help them start a new life in the land of the free that had just robbed them of everything they owned, took three years of their lives, all in an unconstitutional, knee-jerk reaction of racism and fear.

As bad as the internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940’s was, it obviously was not nearly as bad as America’s two original sins of the 18^th and 19^th centuries in the practice of African slavery

and the genocide of Native Americans followed by the forced removal to reservations where many Native Americans remain to this day. And maybe that’s why it is not often mentioned.

But this was not a sin of frontier America. This is not a product of a pre-modern mentality that had not learned from the sins of past generations. This was in the middle of the 20^th century when my parents were adults. This was when the world was shocked by cruelty of the Nazi’s who were forcing Jews into barbed wire concentration camps. We were decrying the abuses of the Japanese against the Koreans and the Chinese.

The architects of this move to ignore judicial process, the constitution and everything our country stands for was none other than President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the then California Attorney General, soon to be the nation’s famous liberal Supreme Court Chief Justice, Earl Warren.

Franklin was broadly feared to be a socialist because he was so liberal in so many ways. He brought the Great Depression to an end through his New Deal measures, he built the coalition that won World War II, he created Social Security and established a Minimum Wage and did a great deal to end employment discrimination based on race. But this famous liberal also signed Executive Order 9066 that indefinitely incarcerated Japanese Americans in internment camps.

Earl Warren was California’s Attorney General, but he was running for Governor at the time. We remember him for his culture changing decision that racially integrated America’s schools in Brown vs the Board of Education and in his restrictions on police aggressive arrests in the famous Miranda v Arizona case that gave us the institution of Miranda rights. But he ran for governor in 1942 under the slogan, “Get rid of the Japs,” and he facilitated the Secretary of War’s rounding up of all of the Japanese Americans in California, putting them on cargo trains at gun point to be shipped off to internment camps.

Warren was seen as being so liberal on the Supreme Court that there was a massive “Impeach Earl Warren” movement in America but in February of 1942, this man who would become one of our most famous liberals, did one of the most racist and unconscionable acts of the 20^th century.

These are two of the most important books in my library. I consult these two books whenever I am talking about something that touches on American history, especially when I talk about issues that Americans have tried to either forget or to gloss over with propaganda. Loewen and Zinn, in these 1100 pages, compile remarkable evidence of the truth about American history. However, when it comes to the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans, many of whom were both children and legal citizens of the United States, Loewen doesn’t even mention it and in Howard Zinn’s encyclopedic work there are two short paragraphs on page 416 that mentions the internment.

Can you even imagine federal troops coming and rounding up everyone in Springfield, Willard, Nixa, and Ozark, forcing us at gunpoint onto box cars and shipping us off to spend three years in an internment camp? How could this happen? How could it have been carried out by leaders who are largely remembered as heroes? And how can it be so benignly forgotten?

In a nation that cherishes freedom, independence, even the ownership of private property and the liberty to live lives of self-determination, how did this happen? In a word, it happened because generally good people were scared. Which is how the most educated population in the world, the German people, were led to blame the Jews for their economic woes. Good people, quickly and easily persuaded to do horrible things, because they were afraid… well, and because they were greedy, racist and rather irresponsible but let’s, just for the moment, focus on good people who were scared.

In 1992, Mike Huckabee, the father of our current White House Press Secretary, Sarah Huckabee, was running for the Senate in Alabama. In that campaign he suggested that AIDS patients be detained in internment camps to stem the spread of the HIV virus. That was a suggestion made in fear, perhaps even hysteria at the time, but 15 years later when he was the frontrunner in the Republican presidential primary, he refused to walk that statement back. Huckabee wants to be thought of being a sort of super Christian, but he thinks that the civil rights of gay people are a small price to pay for limiting the spread of AIDS.

Frankly, so far as the sentiment of the gay community goes, our current Vice-President, Mike Pence, is not too far off. In 2000, when he was governor of Indiana, he advocated using the funds the state had allocated for the care of AIDS patients to be diverted to Evangelical Christian organizations that conducted what is called “conversion therapy” aimed at turning gay people straight.

Neither Huckabee nor Pence seem to be aware of the fact that a fourth of AIDS patients in America are not gay but why confuse prejudice with facts?

All of which pales in comparison to the very public discussion in the final month before the 2016 Presidential election when Trump surrogates were citing the 1940’s Japanese internment camps as a precedent for rounding up Muslims living in the United States.

I believe that you guys trust me not to make this stuff up, but I want to give you a few seconds of this clip from a Fox News interview:

I would like to believe that this non-sense is part of what made Megyn Kelly decide to rescue some scraps of her dignity and to make a pricy exit from Fox News. Carl Higbie thought it was safe to bring up internment camps for Muslims in 2016 on Fox News and that should be sobering enough for us.

Our current president seems to be unwilling to apologize for anything but 45 years after the internment it was no one less than President Ronald Regan who formally apologized for this dark chapter in American history and promised a reparation of $20,000 to each of the surviving Americans interred in those camps though Congress has been sufficiently slow in dispensing the money so that most survivors have died long before ever cashing a check.

Still, they did get an apology.

What I am suggesting to you today is that we go one step further by resolving never to do anything like that again so that no future apology and reparation will be similarly necessary.

Fear seems to break down religious convictions and cross all conservative and liberal political lines to turn us into moral pigmies. My suggestion to you today is, long before the next incident happens that will have some hero or moron calling for barbed wire and watch towers, that we are not going to make decisions out of fear.

Faith, after all, does not so much mean “blind belief” as it means to have the courage of your convictions. Because we are people of faith, I just think that we should stop being afraid.