[PEN-L:8784] Re: Re: Re: STOP! STOP! STOP! Racism

["Michael Hoover" <hoov@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Apologies for extensive quoting but Sandler's comments convey such naivete
(to give him benefit of doubt) and historical innaccuracy that I couldn't
decide what to excerpt...also, I transgress my own 'rule of thumb' - 2
screens and I'm out - with this post...  Michael Hoover

> The following is taken from another list on the history of war:
> From: "Sandler, Stanley DR" <sandlers@xxxxxxx>
> Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 08:29:38 -0400
>         On 25 June, The Wall Street Journal carried an article on the
> contention between those relocated Japanese-Americans who volunteered or
> accepted the draft during World War II, and those who resisted.  The article
> went onto state that the Japanese-Americans "were stripped of their U.S.
> citizenship."  I've looked into the limited resources we have here on the
> subject and can find nothing to this effect.  On the surface, it also seems
> improbable: could an executive order just strip someone of his/her
> citizenship, even in wartime?  And wouldn't Congress have passed legislation
> to restore that citizenship when the Japanese-Americans were compensated in
> the 1980s, if not earlier? If it had, I must have missed it.
> (I know that some gave up their citizenship while interned, but wouldn't
> that simply reinforce the argument that they had citizenship to give up?)
> Would the Japanese-American community have waited until the 1980s for the
> restoration of something so cherished as citizenship?  Would the American
> people even have stood for this for four decades?  After all, many
> Americans, probably a majority in time, came to support strongly the case of
> justice for these innocent people.  As early as 1948, there was a Supreme
> Court ruling (Koremetsu, I think) in their favor. Is there any truth to this
> allegation?  Let's hope not.
> Stanley Sandler
> Henry

The 112,000 Japanese-Americans who were sent to concentration camps during
WW2 as a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing by the US government were
either non-citizens denied eligibility for naturalization  in *Ozawa v
US*/1922  or persons born in this country (about 63% of those imprisoned)
stripped of citizenship under 1798 Enemy Alien Act.  According to then-
California Attorney General Earl Warren, Japanese-Americans were the
"Achilles heel of the entire civilian defense effort."

FDR's 1942 Executive Order 9066 was supported by congressional legislation
in that year and supplemented by Public Law 503 a year later.  Congress
established federal penalties for 'curfew violations' and for refusal to
obey 'evacuation orders.'  The Supreme Court upheld convictions based on
such laws in  *Hirabayashi v US */1943 and *Korematsu v US*/1944 on grounds
that it found no racial discrimination.  In a subsequent case, *Ex parte
Endo*/1944, the court ruled illegal the incarceration  of  persons whose
'loyalty' had been established (US government issued a 'loyalty'
questionnaire to adults in the camps).  One consequence of a person's
'affirmation' of loyalty was government placement in the military draft.

Congress ended prohibitions against Asian immigration and naturalization
in 1952 with the McCarran-Walter Act (formal title: Immigration and
Naturalization Act).  Two years prior, Nevada Senator Pat McCarran had
successfully sponsored the Internal Security Act (also known as McCarran
Act) requiring communists to register with the US government.  The 1952
law retained bias in immigration by means of 'national' quotas that were
not eliminated until 1965, a year in which 150,000 Europeans were allowed
to enter the country but only about 3000 Asians were accorded the same
opportunity.  The McCarran-Walter Act also allowed the US government to
deny visa entry to persons on grounds of 'seditious behavior' (Ernest
Mandel, Isabel Allende, British band New Model Army, and ex-pat Margaret
Randall are but a few denied over the years).

EO 9066 reamained on the books until Gerald Ford revoked it in 1976.
Congress abolished Public Law 503 in the same year.  Fred Korematsu's
conviction was not overturned until 1983 when the government disclosed
that it had suppressed evidence acknowledging that exclusion measures
were unwarranted.  The 1988 decision to 'award' $20,000 pittance to
those who imprisoned included a statute of limitations on seeking
redress that ran out last year.  Meanwhile, the US government did not
acknowledge its kidnapping of approximately 2200 Japanese-Latin
Americans (mostly from Peru) until last year when it agreed to pay a
shameful $5000 to those it had tagged like cattle and used as 'trade
bait' for prisoners of war.


below film is scheduled for PBS program Point of View (POV) next week
on July 6 (Tuesday) at 10:00pm...local affiliates may run POV on
different days and at different times during week scheduled so listers
should check their local listings...*Rabbit in the Moon* shared the
Best Documentary prize at this years Sundance Film Festival...


*Rabbit in the Moon*
Emiko Omori, Director
Emiko Omori & Chizuko Omori, Producers

Recounting of the travails of Japanese-Americans during WWII uses survivors
of the forced relocation camps to tell the story of the hidden outrage of
American history. In the wake of the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December of
1941, thousands of naturalized and second-generation Japanese-Americans
(Nisei) were shunted off to internment camps spread across the U.S., from
Arkansas to Idaho. With families split up and their constitutional rights
trampled, they were forced to exist apart in a country into which they,
ironically, only wished to assimilate. Omori, herself a survivor of the
camps, paints a grim picture of hovels and horrors, rioting at Manzanar and
food shortages, untethered racism, and broken spirits

Visually stunning and emotionally compelling, *Rabbit in the Moon* challenges
the common notion that Japanese Americans willingly uprooted their families
to live in racially segregated concentration camps during World War II. After
decades of silence, former internees speak openly about their acts of protest
and reflect on the psychological toll the camps took on themselves and their
community.  This exceptional documentary unmasks the traditional image of
Japanese Americans as model citizens who quietly complied with government
orders, portraying them instead as active inmates who questioned the system.
Unlike other internment documentaries, this film addresses sensitive issues
seldom discussed within the Japanese American community: the conflict between
the Issei (first) and Nisei (second) generations, the government's
encouragement of informers, and the true story behind the revolt at the
Manzanar Relocation Center, where two young Japanese American men were shot
to death by the U.S. Army.

Most narratives about the World War II internment of Japanese Americans focus
on the internees' silence and patriotism, as proven by their service in
segregated military units like the 442nd Battalion. Emiko Omori offers an
extraordinary alternative perspective, which portrays second-generation
Japanese American, or Nisei, camp survivors not as passive victims or model
citizens but angry, active, critical individuals. The inspiration for the
film is the director's struggle against the silence in her own family
concerning the internment, in particular their amnesia about her mother, who
died soon after her release from camp in Poston, Arizona.

In the process of recovering her memory, Omori interviews former internees,
including her sister, who describe how the camps whittled away the
community's cultural strength and self-esteem and the federal government
maneuvered the rise of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), a
leadership organization which championed unquestioning compliance with the
evacuation and encouraged military service to prove loyalty.  *Rabbit in the
Moon* aggressively overturns the JACL image of Japanese Americans during the
war and brings an end to a generation of silence.  Dissenting voices by
interned Nisei are brilliantly used to renarrate newsreel propaganda films
about the camps. Draft resisters from the Heart Mountain camp speak angrily
about having to prove an American citizenship that was supposed to be their
birthright.  Impressively archived and beautifully photographed.