Speaking on Behalf of Political Detainees in the United States B Y L A U R A C O U LT E R
The internment camp loomed in the distance: a bleak, spare outpost surrounded by fences crested with concertina wire. The mother curled an arm around her daughter and brushed stray hair from the child’s face, her belly churning with fear. Looking at her husband, she saw the defeat, the despair sapping the light from his eyes. They had been rousted from their beds that morning before it was light; the soldiers forced them at gunpoint into their clothes, told them that they could take only what they could carry. Their son, only 5, had begun to cry, and the father quickly hushed him. And now at last here was the camp, the tar-papered barracks lined up like sentinels. As they drew closer, they could see the guards in the watchtowers, machine guns slung on their shoulders. A scene from Germany during the Nazi reign of terror? Or from the Soviet Union, as it shriveled in Stalin’s iron grip? No.The country was the United States, the year 1942, the family Japanese-American. Between December 7, 1941, when the Japanese military bombed Pearl Harbor, and the end of World War II, more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were interned in camps in six Western states and Arkansas despite the total lack of evidence of even a single case of Japanese-American espionage. The camps lacked heat and air conditioning; the barracks’ construction was flimsy and without plumbing or cooking facilities of any kind. Food was rationed sparingly, at a daily expense of 48 cents per internee. Sand and snow came
through the cracks of the barracks; the sleeping quarters were overcrowded. This is a troubling chapter in America’s past: the wholesale detention of individuals based solely on ethnicity and shadowy inferences of subversive activity. Although the goal was isolation—as opposed to the Nazi purpose of extermination—American internment camps resulted in the dehumanization of the Japanese-American community and the loss of businesses worth millions of dollars, as well as starvation and the spread of infectious diseases, suffering, and humiliation. What is telling, looking back at this era, is the nearly wholesale silence on this issue from the rest of the nation. There are no tales of Christians reaching out to the Japanese Americans in their neighborhoods. There are no recorded anecdotes of Christians circulating petitions demanding fair treatment for those detained. Perhaps some Christians labored unseen for their neighbors, and human history has forgotten them; I hope this is the case. But certainly the bulk of us turned the other way and pretended that nothing was happening. Today Americans in general and Christians in particular are faced with a similar opportunity to act. Several hundred Muslim men have been secretly detained at prisons and detention centers throughout the United States and in Guantanamo Bay. For the most part these men are spirited away in secrecy, their friends and family prevented from dis-
PRISM 2004
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