I quite understand the psychological and social utility of the scapegoating mechanism.
I also know that a study had been conducted that convinced Army Intelligence, the FBI and the Justice Department that the Japanese-American citizen were an unusually loyal segment of the population. "A high degree of loyalty" was the term used. That study having been kept secret, the urge to scapegoat would be less inhibited by rationality than it might otherwise have had. What a shame!
I also know that *no one* believed that 100%, or even 50%, or even 10%, or even 5% of those citizens, men, women, children, whole families, generations of hard, stoop-labor farmers saving together to build easier futures for their children, to build businesses, to participate in the American dream, were spies or saboteurs.
But let's make a wild hypothesis, and stipulate for the sake of discussion that a wildly unlikely, hyperbolic 10% of the men, the women, the old folks, and the children (let's say they were, like Palestinian children, being convinced by the Japanese American adults to strap on bombs and commit suicide to blow up the statue of Liberty) (let's just say it!) -- and so you, feeling as you do, decide that all of the Japanese American citizens must be taken to camps, because how can one tell who the one-in-ten evil farmers and farmer's wives are?
So... J.C., you have now organized the internment of the stipulated 90% innocent people. (Your task has been lightened because in Hawaii, the very place Pearl Harbor was bombed, oddly enough!, none of the local Japanese Americans was interned. Good! That leaves those workers free to continue their lives and contributing to the economy (and by some strange coincidence, none of them will do anything bad! What luck.)
I am now going to try to discern whether this program of yours was about racial hatred or about the safety and security of our country (because in our hypothetical you know more about that that the FBI, Justice Department and Army Intelligence) by studying just how you undertake this undoubtedly more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger incarceration of the (stipulated) 90% of the men, women and children who are innocent citizens.
Did you, for example, apologize to the unfortunates for this requirement, as you saw it, explaining to our understandably shocked fellow Americans the sad necessity of this measure, assure them that their farms, homes, assets, their livelihoods, would be protected, so that when the security threat to their nation and ours was over, they would be able to pick up where they left off? Did you do this because this is America, and they had committed no crime for which torment, loss of freedom, trauma, neglect, hardship and impoverishment was the punishment?
Did you allow them sufficient time to, if they chose, sell their homes, their farms, their businesses (as opposed to 72 hours, say)? Did you then send them to decent, if secure, quarters, where although our society was protected from harm by the few bad apples you suspected might be among them, the families could all remain in tact, fathers, mothers and children always together, and be supplied with with adequate heat, space, nutrition, medical care, privacy, and dignity during their unfortunately necessary emergency deprivation of liberty? Did you take good care of them?
Did you explain how sad you would be if some of their sons or daughters attempted to flee and you had to have them shot?
Tell me how you went about protecting our nation from the "Yellow Peril," as it was commonly referred to? "A Jap is a Jap," wasn't your motto, was it JC? Did you tell them that you for one were appalled by Westbrook Pegler's call for one of their number to be removed from the camp and shot whenever there was a report of brutality against American soldiers by our enemy who looked like them?
When you found, later, that they had been robbed, ruined, malnourished, neglected, impoverished, had suffered under terrible, harsh, unnecessary, punitive conditions, did you, JC, personally apologize to the innocents for what was done to them by those who had disobeyed your orders that every consideration should be given? Did you explain to them how wrong you understood what had happened to them had been?
Oh wait, strike that last question. We know the answer. You rationalized and justified to the end. Even today you post rationalizations.
Not a word have you uttered condemning the wholesale, indiscriminate brutality of the treatment of those innocent American citizens who'd done nothing whatever to deserve that shocking, harsh punishment that left them and their children penniless and traumatized.
All you've said is that it was right to lock them all up. About their treatment? -- Have you said a word of condemnation? Of acknowledgment that that treatment was a blot on our nation's history?
I thank God that my immigrant grandparents and my first generation parents were all German, and blond, and looked physically like the barbaric Nazis instead of the barbaric Japanese. |
