Remember Japanese-American Concentration Camps

(Letter)

Old Lyme, CT
2 March 2016

Dear WV:

Donald Trump’s call to totally ban all Muslims from entering the U.S. is not just mad raving from this bad clown in the horror show of American bourgeois politics. Such xenophobic, racist hysteria can and did happen here, when liberal icon Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 9066 on 19 February 1942, consigning some 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry—two-thirds of them citizens—to concentration camps during World War II.

After protests in the 1970s, followed by books and exposés, and finally some token government apologies, it has been mainly accepted that this was a bad thing, as liberal bourgeois commentators have opined well after the fact. There was even a recent Broadway play, Allegiance, inspired by beloved Star Trek actor George Takei’s boyhood experiences in an American concentration camp. But the current liberal attitude that this was an unfortunate “mistake” can easily shift to whatever the prevailing winds of bourgeois opinion and self-interest dictate. So it’s important to remember what really happened: a gigantic atrocity perpetrated and supported by all levels of government and virtually all capitalist politicians, judges and newspapers at the time. Imperialist war—politics by other means—reveals the true nature of the beast.

A new book, Infamy by Richard Reeves (Henry Holt and Company, 2015), is a useful history. Besides documenting damning quotes from “liberals” of the time, it also provides many new details of inmates’ lives, of protests and work stoppages, hunger strikes and draft resistance inside the camps. At Tule Lake especially, where “disloyal” internees were segregated, there were many protests against U.S. policies. At Heart Mountain, some camp inmates formed a “Fair Play Committee” protesting their being stripped of citizenship and therefore refusing induction into the U.S. military.

Especially powerful was the exhibition by Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library (which closed on February 26): “Out of the Desert”: Resilience and Memory in Japanese American Internment. It was a collage of letters, leaflets, photos, drawings and watercolors, diaries and stories by the internees: a portrait of deprivation, harsh slave-labor and heartbreaking “ordinary” life including yearbooks and high school proms surrounded by barbed wire and soldiers with machine guns. In World War II America, many of the camp administrators had already overseen reservations, the barren wasteland concentration camps for Native Americans, while black Americans, everywhere they lived, were socially and often legally segregated, as in the Jim Crow South. Heart Mountain, Minidoka, Tule Lake, Topaz, Manzanar, Poston, Gila River, Granada, Jerome, Rohwer: these are the names of America’s concentration camps for Japanese Americans. For each one, the Yale exhibit provided an online map with details and documents of the site.

We first wrote about this in “The Agony of Japanese Americans in U.S. Concentration Camps” (WV No. 139, 7 January 1977). The Trotskyists then, themselves persecuted for opposing the U.S. imperialist war, were among the few to defend Japanese Americans, as that article documents.

CGs,
HC