America’s History of Wartime Persecution of its Own People

by Garikai Chengu, via Global Research.com:

This week marks the tragic anniversary of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s signing of Executive Order 9066, which led to 100,000 Japanese-Americans being forced into concentration camps, on U.S. soil during World War II. 

America has a long history of oppressing its own citizens who originate from nations that Washington is at war with. Modern wartime xenophobic crackdowns have targeted Russian-Americans throughout the Cold War, Vietnamese Americans during the Vietnam war and Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor. Today, American Muslims during the ongoing war on terror are experiencing unprecedented levels of oppression from the state.

Perhaps, one of the twentieth century’s most profound political weapons was the concentration camp, which was invented by the same civilized Westerners that were using that very weapon to spread civilization.

Soon after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed Proclamation 2525, which authorized government raids on Japanese American homes and resulted in the internment of Japanese-Americans in several concentration camps.

Lt. Gen. John L. Dewitt, who ran the internment camps, justified the internment of Japanese Americans before the House Naval Affairs Subcommittee on April 13, 1943:

“A Jap’s a Jap. I don’t want any of them here. It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen, he is still a Japanese. We must worry about the Japanese all the time until he is wiped off the map.”

Japanese Americans held in the concentration camps were used as a cheap labor force to make goods for the U.S. military and they were subject to torture or “enhanced interrogation” as the government calls it nowadays. Internment clearly had nothing to do with public safety, and everything to do with drumming up racist pro-war hysteria.

In American film and media, the widespread image of the Japanese as sub-human created an emotional context which formed a justification for the nuclear bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that instantly slaughtered 140,000 innocent people. Two days after the bombing of Nagasaki, President Truman stated: “The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them. When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him like a beast.”

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