I've recently been visiting some memorials to Japanese Americans, to those rounded up and sent to internment camps during the war, many of them US citizens. Right off the bat, I want to speak about the softness of it all. Even the language is soft, "Camp Harmony" sounding so peaceful and gentle. Back in the day nobody was going to an "internment center," they were going to a relocation area, a place of sorting out, a safe and humanitarian exclusion zone. Given the Japanese culture of the day many probably preferred this kind of soft language, prison being something shameful, an indication that you had done something wrong. Tragically what probably contributed to all the denial, to the soft language, was their own loyalty, their own patriotism, their own integrity. Most people were not dragged off their land kicking and screaming at gunpoint, they were simply quietly escorted onto ferries and trains under nothing more than a signed directive.
Sometimes it's hard to talk about these things going back only a few generations, because those wounds are still fresh, many people are still alive today, and we were at war. I get this never ending backlash of how we shouldn't judge the people of the past through modern eyes and yet I always insist we better start judging because we are actually just like them. If you believe in "never again" when it comes to humanitarian disasters and the violation of people's civil rights then you have to be willing to learn from the past and you have to stop distancing yourself, stop pretending that human nature in the modern world is so advanced, so progressed, that we just know better now.
We know absolutely nothing, in fact we might even be worse then those who came before us. We certainly have more sophisticated propaganda, more tools at our disposal, and a complete lack of awareness of the dangers of big government. Rather then embracing the notion of "never again," we're more likely to point fingers at those others who are all "racists," and proclaim ourselves separate from the sins of the past, more evolved than our ancestors. And we do this all while seizing people's banks accounts, forcing them to inject experimental substances into their bodies, closing down their businesses, and building camps for the non compliant.....
Yep, in 2019 our Governor actually started building covid camps, some of them not too far from Camp Harmony.
Recently I bumped into some "Twitter Christians" which is probably a complete oxymoron, but they were busy mocking and shaming the covid persecuted, denying that it was any big deal, and doing it all with no awareness at all of what individual people may have suffered and actually continue to suffer from the government's response to covid. One "wise" soul decided to try to proclaim, "You mistake inconvenience for persecution."
No more chilling words have ever been spoken. We always manage to rationalize tyranny as something softer than it is, something that only creates a slight inconvenience to certain people so it's no biggee. There is a movie I've long since forgotten the title of, a swashbuckling pirate thing and as the guy is on the gallows about to be hung, this gal cries out from the crowd, "I'm so sorry for all the inconvenience I've caused you!" It's a darkly humorous understatement and he is struggling and sputtering from her words as much as he is from the noose around his neck. All's well that ends well, he is rescued from the gallows at the last moment.
I'm just saying, Oh yes, persecution can be downright inconvenient sometimes.
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