It starts with words
We are in the moment where we can choose to support the slide to violence, to ignore it, or to stop it.
It’s the last Sunday in March - Easter, for those who celebrate it, falls on this calendar day this year. Turning the page to April seems always to bring a sigh of relief, making it through another winter, and anticipation of more growth. Everything is new and fresh, and possibility and potential dominate the day.
Evenings are still chilly, and therefore good for reading. I’ve been reading a lovely biography of Eleanor Roosevelt (thanks Mom!), and a novel that captures part of the same historical period (Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, by Jamie Ford). The novel describes the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II, and the biography explains the Roosevelts’ bitter arguments about it. Both narratives provide windows into the mindsets of fear, xenophobia, and racism (German and Italian Americans were never sent to camps) that created this blot in our country’s history.
And those windows show us language much like that being used today, in particular in the former president’s campaign. In 1941 and 1942, the Roosevelts argued about whether stripping Japanese citizens (thousands of whom were born in the U.S.) of their properties, businesses, and homes was too much an echo of the horrors occurring in Europe. Could we fight on as the purported savior of democracy and human rights while conducting atrocities at home? Mrs. Roosevelt insisted not; President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. Suddenly, streets were full of Americans of Japanese ancestry, carrying what they could, headed to “relocation centers,” guarded by soldiers, penned in by barbed wire.
In order to conduct this type of operation, people have to be convinced that national origin is such a major determinant of behavior that it is best to “preventatively” imprison their neighbors and friends based on nothing other than nationality. Unfortunately, our long history shows this is all too easy to do. Substitute gender, queerness, skin color, age, ability, or any other “identity” for national origin, and the recipe is the same: dehumanize, depersonalize, demonize. Construct an “enemy,” and take what is then “justified” action.
Now we have one presidential campaign bragging about how many of our neighbors, co-workers, and friends they will incarcerate if re-elected - based only on national origin and immigration status, and using the most toxic dehumanizing language imaginable. The campaign uses the same dehumanizing strategy against its political opponents, and to refute the criminal charges faced by its candidate.
It never starts with violence, camps, and terror. It starts with words and images, preparing the ground for action. We are there; we are in the moment where we can choose to support the slide to violence, to ignore it, or to stop it.
I choose to do everything I can to stop it. I hope you will, too, and I am grateful for your company in this critical effort.
Information from the National Archives on Executive Order 9066:
https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/japanese-relocation
News coverage of the former president’s plan to place immigrants in detention camps:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-plans-sweeping-undocumented-immigrant-roundups-detention-camps-report-2023-11-11/