> I was just a child of 5 when we were forced at gunpoint from our home and sent first to live in a horse stable at a local race track, a family of five crammed into a single smelly stall.
> After several weeks, they sent us much farther away, 1,000 miles to the east by rail car, the blinds of our train cars pulled for our own protection, they said.
> Armed guards looked down upon us from sentry towers; their guns pointed inward at us; searchlights lit pathways at night. We understood. We were not to leave.
> And it was normal to stand each day in our makeshift classroom, reciting the words to the Pledge of Allegiance, “With liberty and justice for all,” as I looked past the U.S. flag out the window, the barbed wire of the camp just visible behind it.
Reading this description from someone who actually lived it is shattering.
>Let us all be clear: “National security” must never again be permitted to justify wholesale denial of constitutional rights and protections.
Sadly, it already is, just not in an obviously barbarous way.
But The Internment, for all its cruelty, might have been preferable to the alternatives. We don't know whether pogroms would have happened or not, or what might have been done to protect the Takeis once progroms started occurring.
It will be interesting to see, over the next four years, if this insanely hyperbolic overreaction to as mundane a series of events as a Republican calling for increased scrutiny on immigration will actually end up bringing about the events they're pretending they actually believe are imminent.
3 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 25.0 ms ] thread> After several weeks, they sent us much farther away, 1,000 miles to the east by rail car, the blinds of our train cars pulled for our own protection, they said.
> Armed guards looked down upon us from sentry towers; their guns pointed inward at us; searchlights lit pathways at night. We understood. We were not to leave.
> And it was normal to stand each day in our makeshift classroom, reciting the words to the Pledge of Allegiance, “With liberty and justice for all,” as I looked past the U.S. flag out the window, the barbed wire of the camp just visible behind it.
Reading this description from someone who actually lived it is shattering.
Sadly, it already is, just not in an obviously barbarous way.
But The Internment, for all its cruelty, might have been preferable to the alternatives. We don't know whether pogroms would have happened or not, or what might have been done to protect the Takeis once progroms started occurring.
The King Christian of Denmark legend might provide inspiration, even if false. https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10008043