Auction of Internment Items Halted After George Takei Intervenes

[MADem]

14. Takei spent his childhood in an internment camp. I can see why he takes this personally.

Listen to his recollections (or read them) here: http://io9.com/george-takei-describes-his-experience-in-a-japanese-int-1533358984

AMY GOODMAN: So, you were born in?

GEORGE TAKEI: Los Angeles.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet, at the age of eight, you were interned?

GEORGE TAKEI: No, at the age of five.

AMY GOODMAN: At the age of five.

GEORGE TAKEI: We came out when I was eight.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about that. What happened?

GEORGE TAKEI: Yes, well, you know, it wasn't just my birth in the U.S. My mother was born in Sacramento, California. My father was a San Franciscan. They were Northern Californians. And they met in Los Angeles, so I was born in Southern California. But there's no north-south divide in our family. We're Americans. We were and are—my parents have passed now, but we were citizens of this country. We had nothing to do with the war. We simply happened to look like the people that bombed Pearl Harbor. But without charges, without trial, without due process—the fundamental pillar of our justice system—we were summarily rounded up, all Japanese Americans on the West Coast, where we were primarily resident, and sent off to 10 barb wire internment camps—prison camps, really, with sentry towers, machine guns pointed at us—in some of the most desolate places in this country: the wastelands of Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, the blistering hot desert of Arizona, of all places, in black tarpaper barracks. And our family was sent two-thirds of the way across the country, the farthest east, in the swamps of Arkansas.

And it's from this experience that, when I was a teenager, my father told me that our democracy is very fragile, but it is a true people's democracy, both as strong and as great as the people can be, but it is also as fallible as people are. And that's why good people have to be actively engaged in the process, sometimes holding democracy's feet to the fire, in order to make it a better, truer democracy.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: If I'm not mistaken, the governor of California back then during the internment process was Earl Warren, who later became a justice of the Supreme Court, perhaps one of the most liberal justices, but he supported those efforts back then.

GEORGE TAKEI: Well, this illustrates the hysteria that ran throughout the country. Actually, Earl Warren was the attorney general of the state of California at that time.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Oh, attorney general, right.

GEORGE TAKEI: He took an oath on the Constitution. He knew the Constitution. But knowing the Constitution and knowing what he was going to do was going to be against the Constitution, his ambition took over. He wanted to be governor. And he ran on the "get rid of the Japs" platform—and won. And as you stated, he later went on to become the "liberal" chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. So, even with the Supreme Court, there is that human fallibility. We—the good people have to be engaged in the process. And that's what's so shameful about the Arizona Legislature, that people like that, people who don't think, people who don't listen and people who do damage to the state get elected and dominate in legislatures.....