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Internment Camp Survivor George Takei Warns Muslim Registry Is ‘A Prelude To Internment’

Internment Camp Survivor George Takei Warns Muslim Registry Is ‘A Prelude To Internment’

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters. 

From the November 17 edition of MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell:

LAWRENCE O’DONNELL (HOST): Joining us now, George Takei, he’s an actor, director, and human rights activist. He and his family were held in Japanese-American internment camps. George, thank you very much for joining us tonight. We wanted to hear your reaction to this as soon as this happened.

GEORGE TAKEI: It was shocking, but it was not unexpected from a Trump surrogate. Mr. Higbie used the imprisonment of innocent Japanese-Americans as a precedent. Yes, it happened, but it is not a precedent. It is the most disgraceful chapter of American history.

This is a country that believes in order, law. It’s a nation of law. We believe in due process, and all of that disappeared. As a matter of fact, in 1988, President Ronald Reagan had to apologize for the imprisonment of innocent Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. We were totally innocent, and yet we were imprisoned, because of racist — race, bigotry, war hysteria, and the failure of political leadership.

That is what happened that made this happen. And here again, they’re talking about the political leadership that’s about to be, is talking about the very same thing, and using us as a precedent. It was a disgrace and a shameful chapter of American history.

[…]

O’DONNELL: George, obviously he has no idea what he’s talking about, “you sign them up at different places.” He wasn’t asked how he would be able to tell what someone’s religion is.

TAKEI: Yes, he’s going to go by a faith of a people, and register them. Registration of any group of people, and certainly registration of Muslims, is a prelude to internment.

This is something that we cannot have happen again. It is dangerous and it is a moral bankruptcy. We’ve got to stand up and resist this, and I would urge all good Americans to write to your congressional representatives and the president-elect and tell them that this is not what we stand for as a nation.

We are — we go by the rule of law, and a registry is this simple categorization of a people of one faith. In our case, it was people of one ancestry. We were American citizens, and yet we were — because we looked like the enemy, we were treated like the enemy, and imprisoned. And this is what’s going to happen with a Muslim registry, and we as Americans will not tolerate that again, and we en-masse will oppose that.

[…]

O’DONNELL: Prior to this presidential campaign, did you ever dream that you would be publicly discussing something like this, a registry, something like this, in this country? That this country hadn’t learned its lesson in World War II?

TAKEI: I just spoke here at Penn State, on the internment of Japanese Americans. I’ve been doing this all my life, in order to prevent that from recurring again. And yet, you know, deep down inside, I thought I was doing this, planting seeds, so that we won’t have this happen again, but now they’re saying that this is a precedent.

It is not a precedent. It was when our nation was disgraced. Our good democracy was smeared, and we will not allow that to happen again. This must not happen again, and we should all let Donald Trump know, in no uncertain ways.

Trump Surrogate: Japanese Internment ‘Precedent’ For Muslim Registry

Trump Surrogate: Japanese Internment ‘Precedent’ For Muslim Registry

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters. 

While publicist Maria Sliwa attempts to mitigate the negative coverage surrounding Stephen Bannon, President-elect Donald Trump’s newly appointed chief adviser and the former head of the “alt-right” Breitbart News, one of the men she suggested could speak on Bannon’s behalf recently claimed that Japanese internment camps are Trump’s “precedent” for a Muslim registry.

A November 16 article from The Wrap explained that after Trump announced Bannon as a member of his administration, Bannon received “lots of bad press, some of it accusing him of racism, sexism and anti-Semitism,” and that Sliwa is working to make over his image (though she says she isn’t working for Bannon but has “a client who is”). While the funding behind the rehab campaign is unclear, the piece said Sliwa “sent out two emails to reporters offering interviews with two men available to talk about Bannon: U.S. Navy Seal (Ret.) Carl Higbie, and Breitbart Jerusalem bureau chief Aaron Klein.”

While members of the media were reading Sliwa’s pitch, Higbie was making his own news. On the November 16 edition of Fox News’ The Kelly File, Higbie justified Trump’s possible Muslim registry by suggesting that there is some “precedent” for it because the United States interned Japanese-Americans during World War II. Higbie continued, “Look, the president needs to protect America first, and if that means having people that are not protected under our Constitution have some sort of registry so we can understand, until we can identify the true threat and where it’s coming from, I support it.”

Watch:

Backlash to the comments has already started. This morning, Rep. Mark Takano (D-CA) released a statement calling on Trump to “denounce the comments” and pointing out the dark history of Japanese-American internment:

“The imprisonment of thousands of Japanese-Americans during World War II, including my parents and grandparents, is widely understood to be one of the darkest chapters in American history. More than 100,000 Japanese-Americans were accused of no crimes and received no trial before being relocated, interned, and stripped of their possessions.”

In September, Higbie attempted to defend Trump’s attacks on former Miss Universe Alicia Machado — who the now-president-elect called “Miss Piggy” for gaining weight after she won the crown — by claiming that Trump was helping her by putting her through a “luxury exercise program.”

 

The Tragic History Of Race Wars

The Tragic History Of Race Wars

He wanted to start a race war.

That, you will recall, was what authorities say white supremacist Dylann Roof had in mind when he shot up a storied African-American church in June. It might have surprised him to learn that we’ve already had a race war.

No, that’s not how one typically thinks of World War II, but it takes only a cursory consideration of that war’s causes and effects to make the case. Germany killed 6 million Jews and rampaged through Poland and the Soviet Union because it considered Jews and Slavs subhuman. The Japanese stormed through China and other Asian outposts in the conviction that they were a superior people and that Americans, as a decadent and mongrel people, could do nothing about it.

Meantime, this country was busy imprisoning 120,000 of its citizens of Japanese ancestry in concentration camps and plunging into a war against racial hatred with a Jim Crow military. The American war effort was undermined repeatedly by race riots — whites attacking blacks at a shipyard in Mobile, white servicemen beating up Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles, to name two examples.

So no, it is not a stretch to call that war a race war.

It ended on August 15, 1945. V-J — Victory over Japan — Day was when the surrender was announced, the day of blissfully drunken revelry from Times Square in New York to Market Street in San Francisco. But for all practical purposes, the war had actually ended nine days before — 70 years ago Thursday — in a noiseless flash of light over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. One person who survived — as least 60,000 people would not — described it as a “sheet of sun.”

The destruction of Hiroshima by an atomic bomb — Nagasaki followed three days later — did not just end the war. It also ushered in a new era: the nuclear age. To those of us who were children then, nuclear power was what turned Peter Parker into a human spider and that lizard into Godzilla.

It was also what air-raid sirens were screaming about when the teacher told you to get down under your desk, hands clasped behind your neck. We called them “drop drills.” No one ever explained to us how putting an inch of laminated particle board between you and a nuclear explosion might save you. None of us ever thought to ask. We simply accepted it, went to school alongside this most terrifying legacy of the great race war, and thought nothing of it.

The world has seen plenty of race wars — meaning tribalistic violence — before and since 1945. Ask the Armenians, the Tutsis, the Darfurians. Ask the Congolese, the Cambodians, the Herero. Ask the Cherokee. The childish urge of the human species to divide itself and destroy itself has splashed oceans of blood across the history of the world.

The difference 70 years ago was the scope of the thing — and that spectacular ending. For the first time, our species now had the ability to destroy itself. We were still driven by the same childish urge. Only now, we were children playing with matches.

This is the fearsome reality that has shadowed my generation down seven decades, from schoolchildren doing drop drills to grandparents watching grandchildren play in the park. And the idea that we might someday forge peace among the warring factions of the planet, find a way to help our kind overcome tribal hatred before it’s too late, has perhaps come to seem idealistic, visionary, naïve, a tired ’60s holdover, a song John Lennon once sang that’s nice to listen to but not at all realistic.

Maybe it’s all those things.

Though 70 years after a flash of soundless light blasted away 60,000 lives, you have to wonder what better options we’ve got. But then, I’m biased.

You see, I have grandchildren playing in the park.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, FL, 33132. Readers may contact him via email at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)

Photo: Artūrs Gedvillo via Flickr