I’m not suggesting that it was right the way we treated the American citizens who happened to be of Japanese descent, way back in 1941-45, as we put them in concentration camps.  Indeed, it is my opinion that grave injustices were committed and while we clearly erred on the side of safety, we ran over the Constitution and the rights of those Americans.

What is relevant about recalling that travesty is that it helps us to understand the current attitude toward Muslims in the USA today.  Are you among those who have asked, “How could the horrible American government have treated those poor Japanese like that?”  If so, then you can both anticipate and understand why the decade will come when your grandchildren, fully grown, will watch documentaries on TV about the first decade of the 21st Century, and ask, “How could the horrible American government have treated those poor Muslims like that?”

Let us recognize the fact that ALL people are ethnocentric, which means, ALL people are prejudiced.  (Only a fool claims to not be prejudiced.  Our universities have turned out a lot of fools over the last 40 years.)  Our race and our culture shape our prejudices, become a driving force in our World View.  Our World View allows us to run over principles in order to achieve worthy and acceptable goals.  If our World View is based upon flawed information, it is virtually impossible to arrive at a correct and accurate conclusion.

As a nation and a culture, we are angry about a real attack upon American citizens, and upon our culture.  As a result, we are so angry that our attitude seems to be:  “We frankly don’t give a you-know-what about the rights of Rag-head Terrorists.  We don’t care if they ARE Americans, we don’t care if they DO have rights protected by the Constitution, we don’t care about anything but returning to a comfort zone, and by golly, if a few brown people with names which end in vowels are inconvenienced, tough cookies.”

That is the American attitude in 2002, and it was the American attitude in 1941.

Once you get a person to realize that some hard decisions have to be made, that some eggs are going to be broken in order to make an omelet, etc., it is pretty easy to get them to agree to give up one thing they claim to value in order to get something they cherish even more.  That which we claim to value is Freedom.  That which we really cherish is Security.

Benjamin Franklin discussed this a long time ago.  (You know, one of those old dead white guys whom your professors told us about — the ones who understood so little of our enlightened technological age.)  He said, “Those who are prepared to exchange their freedom for security are deserving of neither.”

Now the fact that there are holes in the government’s position on who did what, and how — holes big enough to fly a 747 through without contact — is irrelevant.  There were clearly those within the US government who, for a plethora of reasons, wanted a war with the Afghans before the 9-11 attacks, and used that incident to achieve a predetermined objective.  Whether they were involved in arranging the attacks will probably never be known.  (But if you believe that your government would not lie to you, you must have a university degree, and probably think you are not prejudiced, as well!)

This is not a popular time to be defending the rights of minorities when we have allegedly been attacked by terrorists from that specific minority.  But we need to remind ourselves that it is the protection of the rights of the minority that sets us apart and above those societies where every perceived enemy may be dragged through the streets by a howling mob, or locked up indefinitely without benefit of due process.

The United States of America stands on the brink of becoming a howling mob, calling for blood revenge rather than for order out of chaos, and freedom based upon law.

At the very least, I hope we’ll quit wondering why those mean old Americans of 1941 tolerated all those terrible abuses of our Japanese neighbors, most of whom just wanted to be good Americans.

© Daniel D. New, Permission to copy, with credits, is hereby granted.-