Trump has said that he is now going to unite the country, something he said that Democrats have never done. But he has a strange way of uniting the country . . . he does it by exclusion.
I received an e-mail today from George Takei, like many of you did too. Part of it follows:
Just a few weeks after my fifth birthday, in the spring of 1942, my parents got my younger brother, my baby sister, and me up very early, hurriedly dressed us, and quickly started to pack.
When my brother and I looked out the window of our living room, we saw two soldiers marching up the driveway, bayonets fixed to their rifles. They banged on our front door and ordered us out of the house. We could take only what we could carry with us.
We were loaded on to train cars with other Japanese-American families, with guards stationed at both ends of each car as though we were criminals, and sent two-thirds of the way across the country to an internment camp in the swamps of Arkansas.
For nearly three years, barbed wire, sentry towers, and armed guards marked home. Mass showers, lousy meals in crowded mess halls, and a searchlight following me as I ran from our barracks to the latrine in the middle of the night — in case I was trying to escape — became normal.
So when I hear Donald Trump's transition advisors talk about building a registry of Muslims and his surrogates using the internment of Japanese-Americans as their model, I am outraged — because I remember the tears streaming down my mother's face as we were torn away from our home. And I am resolved to raise my voice and say, loudly and clearly, that this is not who we are.
My mother was born in Sacramento, my father grew up in San Francisco, and my siblings and I were born in Los Angeles. We were American citizens, as proud of our country as we were of our Japanese heritage. But in the fear and mass hysteria of wartime, none of that mattered. When our government allowed hatred and racism to overtake our values, nothing else mattered.
We cannot allow our country to be led down that dark path ever again.
Resistance is not futile.
RESIST!!!
5 Responses to “George Takei Slams Trump Surrogate’s Invoking of Japanese Internment Camps Using Trump’s Own Words”
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RESIST indeed!
Yes, I just looked up that email (which I saved) in case you had not quoted it. Silly me!
My father served in WWII – I can't say he fought because he was soon discharged for debilitating back pain (which turned out to be kidney problems and from which he died less than a year later – and he was a telegrapher anyway), but he would have. I now feel guilty because I have not fought soon enough, hard enough, the right people, in the right way to prevent this from happening. Blind.
RESIST and RESIST and RESIST!
I agree with Bill's comment! Spot on!
RESIST!!!
Thanks, Lynn.
Oh, Higbie is the ass who talked about precedent? Guantanamo will provide the blueprint if the Rump, and Kobach get their way! For him to say that the camps that held Japanese-Americans can be a precedent, is sooo twisted! But, hey, if precedent is allowed, how about putting Fox News in a camp?
I can only tell you that Drumpf surrogate Higbie bringing up Muslim registry after seeing White supremacists bring the Nazi salute to Drumpf in a video TomCat posted yesterday, brought me one step further than the Japanese internment camps, and to the concentration camps my mother's side of the family perished. It may never come to those concentration camps, it may also never come to the likes of internment camps for Muslims, or Mexicans for that matter, but after seeing Drumpf being elected only one thing is certain: many Americans know too little about the not to distant history of their own country, let alone the gruesome, but parallel, history of other Western nations, yet hanker after some glorified version of it and want it to be as great again. Thank goodness for George Takei and many others who will not allow America to repeat its own shameful history, and that of others, and RESIST.