From Saturday’s Washington Post:
“The earliest vivid memory in my life,” said Kazuo Matsubayashi, “is the day my father was arrested on January 7th, 1943. My mother took me to the police station, where my father and many Japanese men were being loaded on trucks. I remember my father shouting something to us from the back of the truck as it left the compound, but I could not hear what he was saying. Even at the age of less than 6, I felt some invisible force was changing our lives.”
The internment of Japanese Americans? No. Matsubayashi was recalling a shameful and forgotten chapter in American history. From 1942 onward, the United States abducted some 3,000 people of Japanese, Italian and German ancestry from Latin America, shipped them to the United States and placed them in internment camps. These prisoners were never charged with crimes.
Via CalPundit, who notes:
This is why I think it’s important not to romanticize the past: it prevents us from learning from our mistakes. Yes, interning those people was wrong, but it’s different today. Don’t you understand that the world is a far more dangerous place than it was in our parents’ day?
No it’s not. And if in hindsight something was wrong 60 years ago, it’s also wrong today.