Mike Ishii, director ofTsuru for Solidarity, pen an article revealed in The Seattle Times84 years after Executive Order 9066, we’re repeating historywith a reminder that historical past doesn’t disappear just because time has handed. Eighty-four years after the U.S. authorities forcibly eliminated and incarcerated Japanese Americans throughout World War II, Ishii argues that the circumstances that made that injustice attainable are re-emerging. What as soon as was justified as nationwide safety is once more being invoked to normalize mass detention, racialized suspicion, and the erosion of fundamental rights, significantly towards immigrants and refugees.
Drawing from the lived reminiscence of Japanese American incarceration, Ishii connects the previous to the current via the work of Tsuru for Solidarity, a grassroots motion led by survivors and descendants of the camps. He describes how elders who as soon as lived behind barbed wire now stand in solidarity with migrants held in trendy detention facilities, recognizing acquainted patterns of worry, dehumanization, and silence. The language might have modified, and the targets could also be completely different, however the logic stays the identical: when a society permits complete communities to be handled as threats slightly than human beings, injustice turns into coverage.
The article in the end serves as each a warning and a name to motion. Ishii insists that remembrance with out duty is empty, and that honoring the victims of Executive Order 9066 requires greater than memorialsit calls for resistance to its trendy echoes. By listening to those that endured incarceration and heeding their warnings right this moment, he argues, we nonetheless have an opportunity to interrupt the cycle. History, he reminds us, shouldn’t be repeating itself by chance; it repeats when folks select consolation over conscience and fail to behave when it issues most.
Pressenza New York