American Concentration Camps, Then and Now

When human beings are framed as a national security threat, barbed wire is the next logical step. But unlike during the Japanese internment, today there’s high-level political resistance.

By Harry Blain

July 04, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -  In our history textbooks, “Japanese internment,” as it’s carelessly called, features as a mistake, blunder, or brief departure from constitutional piety following the trauma of Pearl Harbor. 

The summary detention of 120,000 people of Japanese descent — around 80,000 of whom were American citizens — can be more accurately described as one of the worst officially-sanctioned crimes in the country’s history. But it was a crime with many authors, and many ugly subplots that even civil libertarians have buried. 

Above all, this dark episode, for all its distinctiveness, exposes the deeper weaknesses of our much-vaunted democratic checks and balances — weaknesses that are now being exploited in remarkably similar ways. 

The Politics of Euphemism

In 1942, the Army insisted that Japanese-Americans were not going to “concentration camps,” but instead “relocation centers.” The main supervisor of the camps, War Relocation Authority (WRA) head Dillon Myer, continued to resist the label in the 1970s, while the state of Arkansas still retains the original euphemism for its Register of Historic Places. 

As with the current debate surrounding American concentration camps, the straightest talkers were historians: especially Roger Daniels in Concentration Camps USA: Japanese Americans and World War II (first published in 1971) and Michi Weglyn in Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps (first published in 1976). 

The basic defense was also the same: We aren’t Nazis. We might not be giving them lawyers, trials, or any indication of when they might be released, but we are giving them food, water —  even toys! 

It’s hard to make this kind of argument without the sterilizing language. As Orwell put it after vividly describing what terms like “pacification” and “transfer of populations” meant in practice: “Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”