70 Years Ago Today

Today, February 19^th, 2012 marks 70 years since Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which allowed military personnel to round up Americans of Japanese Decent and place them in concentration camps. Well known actor George Takei was placed in one of these camps as a child and was later interviewed about it:

Without so much as charges Americans of Japanese decent were rounded up, put onto trains, and hauled to concentration camps where they spent years behind barbed wire under the watchful eyes of machine gunners standing in surrounding guard towers.

What’s even more disgusting is what Takei explains regarding the questionnaires prisoners were required to fill out when it became apparent a labor shortage existed in the United States. After being imprisoned for a year the prisoners were asked if they would take up arms in defense of the United States and if they would swear allegiance to the United States while forswearing allegiance to the Japanese Emperor. The second question was a catch-22 because it insinuated that the prisoners, many of whom were born in the United States, had sworn an other to the Japanese Emperor and thus justifying their detention. I’m glad to hear Takei’s parents refused to take up arms in defense of the United States or swear allegiance to this country. Nobody should take up arms in support of tyrants and those held in the concentration camps were getting a front row seat to tyranny in action.