The elderly gentleman had a stack of file folders full of clippings he had obviously brought with him, and he thumbed through these on the table where he had taken a seat, waiting for my talk.
His clippings caught my eye, as did the man himself. The talk I was giving (this was in July 2005) was to promote my book, Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community, at the historic old Panama Hotel in Seattle's International District. Most of the other patrons that evening were Japanese Americans; a number of them were elderly Nisei who had been interned at "relocation centers" during World War II, and some of these were people I had interviewed in the process of writing the book.
This man, however, was an elderly Caucasian, and it was apparent shortly after I finished my brief talk, when I opened up the floor to questions, that he was there to defend the internment as justifiable. He was obviously familiar with the arguments offered by such historical revisionists as Lillian Baker, David Bowman, and Michelle Malkin, and proceeded to attack the book's thesis.
I was somewhat prepared for this, and gladly answered his questions with what I think were accurate and succinct responses that refuted his underlying assumptions (like most revisionists, he continually ignored the distinction between American citizens and Japanese nationals). I could see that the rest of the audience was growing agitated by his persistent willingness to assume their guilt as potential traitors, the same assumption that had resulted in their incarceration.
He finally stepped in it, however, when he attacked my consistent use of the term "concentration camps" to describe the 10 so-called relocation centers that held some 120,000 internees. (There has been some ongoing discussion of exactly what terminology to use to describe the Japanese American "internment"; currently, most historians favor using "internment camps" to describe the military camps that held a number of "enemy aliens" swept up in Justice Department arrests shortly after the outbreak of war, while the "relocation centers"—a bureaucratic euphemism concocted by architects of the evacuation—are more accurately described, in terms of the incarceration they represented, either as "prison camps" or "concentration camps.")
"You shouldn't call them concentration camps," he said. "We weren't starving people to death or murdering them in gas chambers. Calling them that makes people think that's what went on there."
Well, I responded, what you're describing is properly called a death camp. "Concentration camp" was a term popularized during the Boer War to describe the mass prison camps the British erected to incarcerate Boer families. It has been used consistently since then to describe these kinds of arrangements, including by both Franklin Roosevelt and Attorney General Francis Biddle, in official documents, to describe the Japanese American camps.
It was at this point, however, that several of the elderly internees in the audience nearly came out of their seats; they were shaking with anger.
"If that wasn't a concentration camp, I'd sure like to know what the hell it was," said one of them, a Nisei man. "I was there. I saw the armed guards in the watchtowers, the barbed wire."
"That barbed wire was just a line in the sagebrush," the skeptic retorted. "You could have walked over it at any time."
"Yes, and we'd have been shot the moment we tried," said the Nisei. "You have no idea what we had to endure. You weren't there."
Other audience members jumped in, demanding to know how he could distort the reality of the camp experience of their own memories, especially as he tried to depict the camps essentially as vacation camps with golfing and nice schools. I let them argue for a while—it was more of a verbal dogpile, actually—and then finally stepped in and moved on to other questions and questioners. My elderly interlocutor, looking nonplussed, packed up his clippings and left.
The whole incident underscored for me the way we let invented terminologies disguise and distort the reality of the things we do. It's an easy way of softening it—because we just don't like looking the reality in the face.
We slaughtered thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens in the process of dislodging their dictator, and called it "collateral damage." We stood by as thousands more were slaughtered in the name of ancient hatreds, in places such as Rwanda and Darfur, and we named it "ethnic cleansing."
We've done it throughout history. We stole land from Native Americans and murdered them relentlessly, and called it "Manifest Destiny." We lynched thousands of African Americans under the rubric of an imagined threat of rape and called it "defending white womanhood," while driving out thousands more from our communities and calling it "defending our way of life." The violent ethnic cleansing in which hundreds of black people were brutally murdered en masse and driven out of their homes and the centers of prosperity they built were euphemistically described as “race riots.”
And we put 120,000 people behind barbed wire under armed guard and called it a "relocation center." Nowadays, we have a new name for it: the "family detention center" or, better still, the utterly neutral "residential center." Once again, the arrest policies filling these “detention centers” are race-based, as they have been since at least 2006.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the right’s favorite lightning rod, brought the old debate roaring back to the national discourse last week when she tweeted her view that the current immigrant detention centers on the border where families are being separated and children are being held in cages are in fact concentration camps. Predictably, the right erupted in outrage that she dared compare official American behavior overseen by Donald Trump to the monstrous genocidal factories of the Nazi German regime in the 1930s and ‘40s, with Rep. Liz Cheney leading the charge.
There’s no small irony in this, of course: Wyoming, the state that Cheney ostensibly represents, was home to one of the most notorious of all the World War II-era concentration camps operated by the United States: the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, which was home to the most robust resistance to the so-called loyalty pledge required by the federal government for young men in the camps to be accepted into the military. (It would surprise absolutely no one if it emerged that Cheney was utterly ignorant of this camp’s existence, not to mention its remarkable history.)
It wasn’t just Cheney who attempted to distort reality: House GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California (another state that operated a notorious concentration camp, namely the one at Manzanar) also demanded an apology from Ocasio-Cortez. NBC’s resident “centrist” guru, Chuck Todd, chastised her on Meet the Press.
These smears are utter rubbish, naturally: As Ocasio-Cortez noted, her view is supported by a broad range of historians on the subject. These include Waitman Wade Beorn, Andrea Pitzer (who observes that “concentration camps” is the only accurate descriptor for these “detention centers”), and a number of academics who came to her defense, saying “she is being completely historically accurate.”
The whole episode, in fact, is another instance of the American right’s denials about its growing extremism becoming a projection-fueled self-own, very much in the way its accusatory denials in 2009 about the DHS warning of recruitment of veterans by far-right extremists actually revealed its growing ideological proximity to those same extremists.
Their wrongheaded assertion that the term “concentration camps” refers strictly to the death camps (the proper term for what they’re talking about) operated by the Nazis actually only serves to remind us that the path on which the Trump administration now has put the nation leads directly, if not inevitably, to that same outcome.
Because death camps don’t just happen overnight. There’s a progression. First there are concentration camps, just as there were first in places such as Dachau, before the Nazis built death factories in places such as Auschwitz. These things always take on a life of their own—and once the country gets started down that path, it’s impossible to say where it will end, but a genocidal nightmare is decidedly one of those possible destinations.
It’s also true that the United States dodged that particular bullet with its concentration camps in the 1942-45 period when it operated them: Even though there were congressmen who agitated for making conditions in these camps even more harsh, more brutal, and probably more lethal, the Roosevelt and Truman administrations resisted those voices and ensured that American concentration camps never reached that stage.
That is not the kind of administration that now controls the White House—indeed, if anything, it happily exploits the cruel streak that runs through the American political psyche. The path down which it is headed is a dark and frightening one, and we should thank the politicians who have enough bravery to call it out for what it is.
