In response to the news that various American governors will reportedly "not accept" Syrian refugees, whatever that means, my mind had a silly thought. "If the Pearl Harbor attack had happened a year ago, we'd never accept another Japanese immigrant ever again."
This is not a silly thought because it's not true - of course it's true. On the contrary, it is a silly thought because the American response to the Pearl Harbor attacks was to round up all the Americans of Japanese ancestry and throw them into prison camps that were for all anyone knows identical to Nazi internment caps, minus a gas chamber or two.
America is not a special place where freedom rings; it is a place just like any other, where governments overreact to perceived threats by locking down neighborhoods and putting up walls. And also by sometimes rounding up populations and throwing them in internment camps and punishing war refugees for acts committed by war criminals... Meanwhile, our own government continues to commit war crimes by bombing innocent civilians in faraway lands back to the Stone Age.
We live in strange times, strange and terrible times.
This is not a silly thought because it's not true - of course it's true. On the contrary, it is a silly thought because the American response to the Pearl Harbor attacks was to round up all the Americans of Japanese ancestry and throw them into prison camps that were for all anyone knows identical to Nazi internment caps, minus a gas chamber or two.
America is not a special place where freedom rings; it is a place just like any other, where governments overreact to perceived threats by locking down neighborhoods and putting up walls. And also by sometimes rounding up populations and throwing them in internment camps and punishing war refugees for acts committed by war criminals... Meanwhile, our own government continues to commit war crimes by bombing innocent civilians in faraway lands back to the Stone Age.
We live in strange times, strange and terrible times.
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