If this seems a practice only of years long past, consider that today we need merely replace “Japanese-Americans” with “Muslims” for the parallels to emerge.
By George Takei, New York Times
April 28, 2017
Every year since the late 1960s, on the last Saturday in April, there has been a pilgrimage to a place called Manzanar in California, where one of 10 United States internment camps once stood. The annual journeys began as a way to remember those Japanese-Americans who were incarcerated during World War II and to mark a dark chapter in our history. The pilgrimage includes elderly original internees and their families, as well as neighbors of the site, schoolchildren and, since Sept. 11, American Muslims, who see parallels between what once happened and today.
Manzanar is the best known of the camps, because it often made the news during the war owing to unrest, strikes and even shooting deaths. At its peak, the camp held over 10,000 Japanese-Americans inside its barbed wire. Most hailed from Los Angeles, some 230 miles to the south. A vast majority were also American citizens, held without charge or trial for years, for the crime of looking like the people who had bombed Pearl Harbor.[...]
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George Takei spent part of his childhood in the Tule Lake internment camp, the subject of Konrad Aderer’s new documentary, Resistance at Tule Lake. For more information, go to http://www.resistanceattulelake.com/,https://www.facebook.com/ResistanceAtTuleLake/or https://twitter.com/enemyalien?lang=en
Brad and George Takei with "Resistance at Tule Lake" director Konrad Aderer |