Republicans are banning books about historical truths their own leaders have apologized for
On a recent outing my wife and I took in a touring exhibit from the Smithsonian Institution titled “Righting a Wrong.” Within the modest confines of a single room at the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul, the exhibit conveyed an epic tragedy: the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants as suspected traitors during World War II.
The exhibit made clear that not one such person was ever proved to be disloyal. To the contrary, more than 30,000 Japanese Americans served in the U.S. military during the war. Those who remained inmates in our country’s de facto concentration camps formed communities with their own newspapers, sports teams and arts programs.
The national disgrace of Japanese incarceration has long been acknowledged through bipartisan consensus. In 1976 the Republican President Ford revoked Franklin D. Roosevelt’s executive order that had authorized the wartime imprisonment. Twelve years later, an even more conservative Republican president, Ronald Reagan, signed into law a bill authorizing reparations payments to the 60,000 formerly incarcerated people of Japanese descent who were still alive. One of the displays in the Smithsonian exhibit quotes Reagan at the signing ceremony:
“Yet no payment can make up for those lost years. So, what is most important in this bill has less to do with property than with honor. For here we admit a wrong; here we reaffirm our commitment as a nation to equal justice under law.”
But earlier this month a small school district in Wisconsin delivered the latest example of two interwoven threats to history: the purging of books that dare to gaze critically into the American experience and the mobilization of right-wing zealots on local school boards.
On June 13, a school board committee in the Muskego-Norway district in the exurbs of Milwaukee turned down a request from educators there to teach Julie Otsuka’s novel about the Japanese incarceration in an advanced-placement English class for 10th-graders. The reasons largely boiled down to complaints that the book, “When the Emperor Was Divine,” is not even-handed. That excuse brings to my mind an observation from the Holocaust survivor, novelist and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, “Neutrality helps the oppressor. Never the victim.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/op-ed-republ ... 53338.html
Why I bother to post, the people who need to read this, wont.