It is 1976. The United States of America is celebrating its bicentennial year. The first stations of the Metro open, after seven years of construction. Patty Hearst is convicted of armed robbery. Olympic athletes head to Innsbruck, Austria, where the Soviet Union will dominate, winning 27 medals, 13 of them Gold — higher than the medal count of all but one other participating nation.
In the world of technology, personal computers are still nascent, and e-mail even more so. Steves Jobs and Wozniak found Apple, ironically on April Fools' Day.
In among the rest of the news is President Gerald R. Ford's rescinding of Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Executive Order 9066 resulted in the internment of 120,000 people during World War II.
(Diarist's note: This diary entry, minus nontrivial editing, originally ran here. I am its author. Yes, that's me in the picture.)
In American history, there are many events we can point to and say "This makes me proud to be an American" or "This is why this country rocks."
This ain't one of 'em.
This was — is — a national embarrassment. Damnit, we're supposed to above this stuff. We're supposed to accept your tired, your hungry, your yearning to be set free, not inflict that set of circumstances on those people.
This was Japanese internment. This was the government removing innocent people — most of them American citizens — from their homes, their livelihoods, their American ways of life.
Make no mistake. This was not like wearing a bracelet with a GPS unit on it. No, this was a body of people who were forcibly removed from their homes because they represented a threat to national security. No less a man than future Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren had this to say:
When we are dealing with the Caucasian race we have methods that will test the loyalty of them. But when we deal with the Japanese, we are on an entirely different field.
(In his memoirs, however, he acknowledged error.)
But hey, who knows what those wily enemy citizens of the state would have done if we hadn't put them under watchful eye and indoctrinated them with American values like love of football?
But all this happened generations ago. Why talk about it now? Didn't something more important happen on an April 19, maybe an April 18 or April 20? Why devote time to writing this diary, to researching it, to reading it — when there is so much else to talk about? There's a war going on right now. Forget about 1942. And most of those people lived; people are still dying in Darfur, and this country is too busy in the middle of a civil war in what's left of Iraq to tend to that atrocity. Speaking of which, this government is detaining people right now. Those American citizens we put in internment camps those 65 years ago are free now.
Wrong is wrong.
It was wrong in 1942, when Sen. Ralph Carr, R-Colo., publicly opposed it and was voted out of office at the next opportunity.
It was wrong in 1976, when Ford opposed it and terminated the executive order establishing the government's ability to basically play God with people's lives.
It was wrong in 1990, when the U.S. government finally started giving reparations to those who survived and to affected families.
And it is wrong now.
Oh, one thing about the rescinding of the order. As I said above, it was tossed not in 1945, once those uppity furriners were no longer a threat, but in 1976 — 31 years after it should have been. And the reparations, made to families whose property had been seized, began in 1990 — 45 years after it started. Here's the text of the document declaring them:
A monetary sum and words alone cannot restore lost years or erase painful memories; neither can they fully convey our Nation's resolve to rectify injustice and to uphold the rights of individuals. We can never fully right the wrongs of the past. But we can take a clear stand for justice and recognize that serious injustices were done to Japanese Americans during World War II.
In enacting a law calling for restitution and offering a sincere apology, your fellow Americans have, in a very real sense, renewed their traditional commitment to the ideals of freedom, equality, and justice. You and your family have our best wishes for the future.
I will give credit where credit is due: that is a beautiful document which almost does justice to the injustices the U.S. government was responsible for in the 1940s. Just a few minor quibbles. First, the last sentence of the first paragraph (bolding mine):
But we can take a clear stand for justice and recognize that serious injustices were done to Japanese Americans during World War II.
That, friends, is an example of "the gun was discharged" — passive voice to deflect attention away from the subject of the sentence. The subject, incidentally, is entirely absent from that clause. If it were present, the sentence might read thus:
But we can take a clear stand for justice and recognize that the United States government was responsible for serious injustices that irredeemably and irreparably damaged Japanese Americans during World War II.
But notice a few other things about this apology and promise for financial restitution: notice the words internment or unlawful or the phrase civil rights anywhere in there? Yeah. Beautiful language that makes mention of reparations — just no mention of the specifics requiring those reparations.
The months after the rescinding of Executive Order 9066 have become years, and the years have become decades — now three and into a fourth of them. Any Americans of Japanese descent who were interned as adults are dead or very old. Even the children interned are now mostly in their late 60s. And where we as a global community decry the concentration camps in Europe in World War II, there is not even 1/100th the outcry seen, for example, here.
And unless we want to challenge George Santayana, we might heed his oft-quoted advice: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.