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February 18, 2006

Executive Order 9066, 64 Years Later.

oday I delivered the keynote address at the Northern California Time of Remembrance gathering in Sacramento. The event commemorates FDR's signing of Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, which launched the episode we now call the Japanese American internment.

I spoke about the importance of remembering not just the legal cases from that era that the government won, most notably the Korematsu case, but also the much larger number of cases that the government lost. Here's a little piece of it:

Milan Kundera, the Czech novelist who in his own life experienced the excesses of both Nazism and Stalinism, put it this way: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." Notice the word "struggle." Memory is a struggle, and it's a struggle because powerful forces want us to forget. The power of government thrives in a culture of forgetting.

And what a moment this is for government power. We are living in a time when the executive branch of our government is claiming truly unlimited and unreviewable power. Unlimited and unreviewable power to run secret prisons in Eastern Europe. Unlimited and unreviewable power to incarcerate people indefinitely at Guantanamo. Unlimited and unreviewable power to use torture in interrogations. Unlimited and unreviewable power to eavesdrop on American citizens.

So on this Day of Remembrance, I want to challenge you to think about the words of Milan Kundera. If the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting, what does power want us to forget?

Being a legal historian, I want to challenge you to think about this question in a specific way: What part of the legal history of the internment does power want us to forget? What part of the legal history of the internment might stand in the way of these new claims of unlimited and unreviewable executive power?

If you're interested, you can download the whole talk by clicking here. (It's a pdf file.)

My talk was followed by a fascinating panel discussion (in which I did not participate) that explored some of the parallels between the government's wartime treatment of Japanese Americans and the experiences of Arabs and Muslims in the United States since September 11, 2001. Especially harrowing were stories about the FBI's incredibly heavy-handed investigation into allegations of terrorists in the Muslim community of Lodi, California.

Posted by Eric at February 18, 2006 10:47 PM

Comments

Posted by: Mario at May 29, 2006 5:21 PM