Getting a Grip In the News
August 11, 2008
Note: Guest columnist Natsu Taylor Saito is filling in for Phil Tajitsu Nash while he is on vacation.
The New York Times on August 8 included a clip on “Passing Poston,” a short film about, in the reviewer’s words, “one of the most shameful episodes in United States history: the forced internment of American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II.”
My first reaction at seeing the review was one of relief. The mass imprisonment that had traumatized my community, as well as my family, had not been lost to history; our collective struggles against denial had, in some small measure, been vindicated.
Or had they? I only had to read the opening line before my blood began to boil. The internment certainly was shameful, to say nothing of racist and criminal. But “one of the most shameful”? The reviewer said that Poston was located in “a dusty wasteland on the site of a former Indian reservation in the Arizona desert.” Wasn’t this camp located on a functioning reservation, where the Native American residents were forced to accept a makeshift prison on their land and where, at the end of the war, the government plowed under the timber and plumbing rather than let them use the scraps they so desperately needed?
Admittedly, that’s a pretty obscure piece of history. But didn’t it cross the reviewer’s mind that the Native Americans had also been forced onto that “dusty wasteland”?
That very issue of the Times also had an article about the Cobell litigation and how a federal judge has ruled that the U.S. government, which declared itself “trustee” over Native American lands and resources, wasn’t held to the same standard as private trustees.
At issue in the Cobell lawsuit is over the $100 billion due to this country’s poorest people. Judge Royce Lamberth, hardly a raving liberal, was forced to conclude after years of hearings - and shortly before he was summarily removed from the case in 2006 - that the practices at issue were “the morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down of a disgracefully racist and imperialist government that should have been buried a century ago, the last pathetic outpost of the indifference and anglocentrism we thought we had left behind.”
The Japanese American internment was shameful - Shameful because it reflected this country’s willingness to intern en masse those perceived as “other,” even orphaned babies; Shameful because it set the precedent for disregarding the Constitution upon the government’s unsupported assertion of “military necessity” or, one might say today, “national security.” To put it in the category of most shameful, however, erases, or at the very least minimizes, our history of mass internments, massacres, chattel slavery and the present quandary that is happening now in the “war on terror.”
The Times on August 8 also reported on the sentencing of Salim Ahmed Hamdan who was convicted of what the government calls the “war crime” of providing material support for terrorism - in this case, driving bin Laden. Mr. Hamdan, who has been held at Guantánamo for more than five years and subjected to coercive treatment of the kind we’re not allowed to know, apparently won the respect of the jury, which acquitted him of the more serious charges and gave him about the lightest sentence they could. Even Judge Keith Allred expressed his hope that Mr. Hamdan would soon be reunited with his wife and daughters, thereby acknowledging the government’s position that, regardless of the verdict, it could hold Mr. Hamdan forever as an “enemy combatant.”
The movie review made my blood boil not because this reviewer was particularly insensitive, but because his phrasing reflects the worst possible outcome of my community’s efforts to bring the injustices of the Japanese American internment to light. Our history - my family’s trauma - is not being used to understand, much less change, this country’s “shameful” practices; it’s being used to minimize them.
But the article on the first military tribunal at Guantánamo also reported that, as he left the courtroom, Mr. Hamdan, “who at times has shown a mischievous sense of humor, raised his arms and said a good-natured, ‘Bye, bye everybody.’” I guess if Salim Ahmed Hamdan can maintain a sense of humor in this world beyond the looking glass, I should be able to as well.
Natsu Taylor Saito is a Professor of Law at Georgia State University and author of From Chinese Exclusion to Guantánamo Bay: Plenary Power and the Prerogative State (Univ. Press of Colorado, 2006).
Comments
7 Responses to “Getting a Grip In the News”
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As usual no mention of the internment of German Americans or Italian Americans.. Why do those who want to discuss internment in its fullest, always fail to mention the internment of Euro-Americans?
Please see http://www.foitimes.com for more on this matter.
The U.S. was a fighting a war for survival; many Japanese-Americans WERE disloyal:
http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=3941
Italians were interned, too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_American_internment
German, Italian, and Japanese-Americans were all interned to one extent or another. Japanese-Americans are the only ones who complain and keep complaining after more than 60 years have passed.
Japanese-Americans like Phil Nash, also obssess about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, claiming the bombings were unnecessary, etc.
Unlike the Germans and Italians, Japanese were fanatics who vowed to fight to the last man, woman, and child rather than surrender. The Japanese military elites also refused the hopelessness of the Japanese imperialist cause. Tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers and sailors died to defend the miniscule island of Iwo Jima and Americans suffered heavy casualties fighting the fanatical Japanese.
Honest Japanese historians and statesmen have already acknowledged that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved tens of millions of Japanese lives, military and civilian, by giving an acceptable excuse for the Japanese military to surrender (without “losing face”). Some have even called the bombings the “greatest blessing” for the Japanese people-Of course the U.S. helped Japan rebuil itself to become an economic juggernaut.
Columnists like Nash and Saito keep harping on the evils of the U.S., but never discusses the Japanese atrocities during WWII, such as biological experiments on live human subects and cannibalism of captured Americans, the cruelty of Japanese colonial rule, and the Japanese-Americans’ cooperation and espionage for the Japanese government.
Here’s a summary of Japanese atrocities:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_war_atrocities#The_crimes
AP:
Does one atrocity justify another?
And who supplies all your citations and stats and claims and demagoguery?
It’s not Phil Nash who “revealed” the FDR foreknowledge of “Pearl Harbor,” and it’s none of us who looked on, and even supported and armed Der Schicklgruber, just as “we” did the Taliban when Russia was in the shoes we apparently intend to put on now that we may be getting out of Iraq.
Our “enemies” don’t need any help. Other than the likes of this administration AND their theoneocon cohorts, who are still talking about, if not contemplating, the “nuking” of Iran, even as their idiocies in “Georgia” are now coming home to roost.
“AP,” you continue to amuse as you amaze.
By now, I would imagine you are confusing yourself.
Framl-man
To the FAKE “asian”president. Will you stop cluttering this page up with your nihilistic KKK ravings and go back to the fetid cesspool of inbred morons from whence you came?