May 2016

Here’s a comment made by a certain public official:

“I don’t want any of them here. They are a dangerous element. There is no way to determine their loyalty. It makes no different whether he is an American citizen…”

One might think this was a quote from Donald Trump as he frothed at the mouth claiming all of the Muslims must be turned away from our country.

But no. The comment was attributed to Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, in charge of the military in the western U.S. after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941.

He was commenting on setting up camps in which to move out all of the Japanese, American citizens or otherwise, from California.

To DeWitt, “a Jap is a Jap,” and he went even further. “…We must worry about the Japanese all the time until he is wiped off the map.”

The sentiment of the American public shifted quickly in his favor, no matter how absurd and shrill the statements and it became an episode in our history that is so baffling as to be unbelievable—yet, to our shame, it happened.

Not only that, but when the troops came to round up the Japanese families from their homes, all they could bring with them was what fit in a suitcase. Their personal property (even for American citizens) became forfeit and reverted to the government. Bank accounts were seized and the funds turned over to pay for the resettlement. Their personal belongings were stacked up on curbs for scavengers. These American citizens never got their property back nor were they compensated for the seizures.

But it shouldn’t have been surprising. America, despite its welcoming façade, has had a tradition of degrading outsiders because of religion, language, ethnicity, or political beliefs. The roots of our nation depended on the demeaning, swindling, and killing Native Americans who had tried to hold onto their land, or language, or spiritual beliefs.

We’ve heard this line before, right? “The only good injun is a dead injun.”

Plug in any other ethnic group to that statement and it applied to other episodes in our history.

Waves of new immigrants, legal and otherwise, began arriving in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. First came the Irish who were hated because they were Catholic and of the poor economic class. Signs went up in store fronts: “No dogs or Irish allowed.”

My mother was a little girl in Saginaw, Michigan who remembers seeing a sign on a grocer’s door, and asked her mother what it meant. She said she never forgot that, being unable to understand why she was hated because she was Irish.

Some historians have pointed out the numerous riots that broke out across the country against the Irish Catholics (much of it fomented by the Ku Klux Klan and other supremacist groups). Then came hatred of the Italians and Chinese, Eastern Europeans (mainly Polish) and Jews, and lately Hispanics.

The hate was highlighted in 1939 when a ship, the SS St. Louis, with nearly 1,000 Jewish passengers escaping the Nazis, tried to dock in Havana, Cuba while the people were awaiting approval for American visas. The Cuban government refused and the ship sailed to Miami where it again was refused permission to dock. The ship returned to Europe and about half of the passengers disappeared into the Nazi death camps, although some had managed to find asylum in England.

So the anti-Japanese sentiment was not a great departure from America’s past.

Now we have the same feelings expressed again, the emotions whipped up by Donald Trump and his pals because they have discovered a way of advancing themselves politically by quashing the hopes of the terrorized refugees.

Trump could be using his billions to help humanity, but he has chosen to use his dough to do some play-acting as a presidential candidate. It is a great lark for him to put on this charade for the rest of the political world. He is doing exactly what Ronald Reagan did in 1980—portraying a political figure, a sort-of caricature of a serious person while an odd assortment of underlings actually ran the country after the election.

Trump’s ideas embrace xenophobia as classic Americana. This is reality TV at its ultimate level, a joke on America’s way of life (real life) of which Richie-Rich Trump really knows little.

If Trump got his way with his plans, it would be no surprise if the next step would be “resettling” all American Muslims into “relocation centers,” as part of Homeland Security. It has happened in the past, as we know, including the 1,000-mile death march of Cherokee to desert lands in Oklahoma labeled the Trail of Tears. The Japanese internment was just another in the long list, all with the blessings of many Americans.

Hitler did the same with the Jews and other “undesirables” in Germany that led to the extermination of over 12 million people. Besides Jews, the gas chambers ended the lives of Gypsies, the mentally ill, physically handicapped, homosexuals, Slavs, Russian soldiers and civilians, and an untold number of orphaned children.

These things were always couched in the guise of German national security and so the people went along with it until was too late to stop it which meant a World War was required to put an end to the madness, at least for a while.

Make no mistake. That’s the path we are on right now and the only way off it before it is too late is for true Americans to rise up and denounce and reject any politicians espousing this line of action.

Now that the election cycle truly is underway for 2016 based on the vitriol the candidates are spewing, I am going to be commenting in the next few weeks on today’s politics as viewed through the lens of history.

Some of you won’t like it.

I’ve already heard some disparaging remarks when I suggested television news was show biz not journalism.

So here’s another one:  we say we live in a democracy, but history shows us otherwise.

Just going back to the foundation of the “United States” of America when there were 13 colonies lashed together in a common cause, freedom from English rule.  Through grit and determination, and more than a little help from our friends French King Louis XVI and others of the French nobility, we broke free from the tyranny of the English throne.

In fact, when the Revolutionary War ended and a new government was contemplated, it was assumed there would be a monarchy established here.  But after a decade-long debate under a loosely governed conglomerate of “sovereign” states, it was decided that there would be a parliamentary government minus the noble titles.

The unopposed election of George Washington as president and not king laid the groundwork for modifications to the U.S. Constitution, which were euphemistically-labeled the “Bill of Rights.”

Despite all of our breast-beating, misty-eyed reverence to The Constitution, if one bothered to read the document, it excludes nearly everyone but the rich from having any rights.  Women have no rights at all.  They can’t own property, can’t vote, can’t enter into contracts, and on and on.

Same is true for any man who didn’t own property.  He can’t vote either, nor can he hold office.  Only white property-owning men have what we would call “rights.”

Under the original Constitution, slavery is the law of the land and encouraged as a property issue.  A majority of those who signed the Declaration of Independence and later took part in the Constitutional Convention were slave holders.  Two of our most revered Presidents were slavers—George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Surprisingly, and shamefully true, 13 presidents owned slaves, most even as they served as president.  Before the Civil War, even Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant were slave-holders.

In the Civil War, more than 300,000 Union soldiers died fighting against slavery, but 300,000 Southerners died defending it.  That may sound simplistic, but the outcome is the reality.

And servitude didn’t end with the 14th Amendment, only changed form.  For the past 150 years or so, we have replaced chains with economic bondage.  The masses are beholding to the oligarchs for every aspect of their existence—if the moneyed gentry withdraw their sustenance, those dependent on it become destitute.

The democracy we cherish is an illusion because it goes against everything the rich power brokers desire.   They certainly don’t want us, the unwashed masses to sully their struggle to control the universe.  Our ideals of fairness, equality, and justice are not sustainable accomplishments if the billionaires don’t want it.

More to follow!

The phenomenon of an elderly Jewish East Coast liberal vying for the Democrat Party’s nomination for President of the United States reminds one of another campaign a few years back—well, more than a few.

Eugene McCarthy, the senator from Minnesota, though non-Jewish, and non-Easterner, captured the imagination of the liberals in 1968 by challenging the powerful President Lyndon B. Johnson in an energetic anti-war campaign.

Almost overnight, McCarthy won the hearts and minds of America’s youthful voters—some, as I, voting for the first time in a presidential election.  I liked the way McCarthy stood up to the powers that had cranked up the war in Southeast Asia, primarily Vietnam, creating a mountain of body bags of American soldiers.

The war was problematic from the beginning, and using conscripted teenagers as fodder in a quagmire-style war, was ill-advised to say the least.  Vietnam meant nothing to America except a place to exercise what President Eisenhower warned against—the military industrial complex.

In fact, war profiteers were everywhere, sucking the millions of dollars from the treasury on top of the bodies of young American men.  The war was proving nothing and the world could see it.

McCarthy railed against the war and he was right.  However, a one-issue candidate rarely, if ever, can sustain enough support across the wide-spectrum of the American public’s needs and wants.

For example, McCarthy wanted to solve the problem of racial inequality in housing, by forcing the removal of black families from their neighborhoods into white neighborhoods, although how that could be done never quite got explained.  Of course, that issue alone raised all kinds of problems.  Would white people have to move out of their homes to make room for black families?  Would the government buy homes for black people in white neighborhoods and give them to the families?  And so on.

McCarthy also advised that he would not be opposed to having Communists incorporated into the South Vietnamese government as part of a coalition of political parties.  This was said in the era of the Cold War when our very existence depended on standing up to the Russian Soviet Communists who had nuclear missiles aimed at all of our major cities.  It was Russia who was backing North Vietnam.  It was a Communist army killing American kids.

We are faced with a similar problem today in the Middle East with the challenge of ISIS and other militant armies.

Bernie Sanders is repeating some of the conversation of Eugene McCarthy—which isn’t a bad thing, but it is not a winning message.  He says things that will get everyone cheering (much like Donald Trump does at the other end of the scale).  However, none of Sanders’ proposals would win approval in Congress as it is now constituted.

Even with a Democratic Congress, it is unlikely his ideas would survive what would be a heated debate.   Once again, his proposals are not bad and in fact they are quite “progressive” but change comes slowly.
If he had a Democratic Congress, he might be able to get the health care issue changed over to the originally-fine idea of a one-payer system like Medicare.  Of course, Hillary Clinton would do the same.

McCarthy’s failure was his total lack of ability on foreign policy issues.  At that time in our history, keeping the world from falling into a nuclear holocaust was essential.  The U.S. was faced with challenges in Europe, Asia, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.

At home we had challenges in the civil rights for minorities and women.  Don’t forget, it was a decade when large cities, including Detroit, erupted in rioting and violence.  We are at that point again.

While Eugene McCarthy would have lost the Democratic nomination to Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in the convention, once Kennedy was assassinated, the challenge was filled by the Vice-President and fellow Minnesotan, Hubert Humphrey.

Humphrey was a good man who thought his upbeat personality would be useful in the Johnson administration, but he was shuffled aside most of the time until Johnson decided not to seek reelection.  Even then, he didn’t want to run, but when Kennedy was killed, he became the only man who could reunite the party.

He almost did it, too.  His problem was running against both the foreign policy disastrous legacy of Johnson and the devious and conniving rhetoric of Richard Nixon.  Even at that, had the election been held three weeks later, Humphrey would have won.  Instead, we were stuck with Tricky Dick, an extended war and Watergate.