American Fear

The fear and hate being spewed over us by Donald Trump, the man the majority of those Republicans polled want to see become the next president, can be heard in the echoes of history. For a country founded by people fleeing religious persecution and an oppressive British king, some of us want to build a wall to keep Mexicans out of our country, and ban all Muslims from coming in because we are afraid. The attacks in San Bernardino and Paris by radical Islamic terrorists have shaken us all. We are engaged in a different kind of war with an enemy that festers from within, and can strike any time in any place during the course of our daily lives. But reacting out of fear and prejudice make us complicit with the enemy we want to defeat.

Many immigrant groups have suffered discrimination just because they were different or posed an imagined threat. Our history is littered with actions and beliefs we may find hard to understand today. In the mid 1850s there was the American Party, known as the Know Nothing movement. It wanted to keep America pure by ending the influence of Irish Catholics and other immigrants. The Know Nothings fed off fears that the Irish and German immigrants were hostile to American values and were controlled by the Pope. The movement had a short life. In 1882, The Chinese Exclusion Act was signed into law. It prohibited all immigration of Chinese laborers. It was only suppose to last ten years. It was renewed, and then made permanent in 1902. It wasn’t repealed until 1943.

World War II also brought fear and bigotry to an official level with the treatment of Japanese Americans and European Jews who were being systematically murdered by the Nazis. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 in February, 1942. It allowed regional military commanders to designate “military areas” from which they could excluded anyone they saw fit. This allowed the government to forcibly round up between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry living on the west coast, including American citizens, and ship them to internment camps. This included whole families. They spent several years in the camps living in small, poorly constructed shacks where families of six were forced to live in a twenty by twenty-four foot “apartment”. All this because they were Japanese, and it was the Japanese who attacked us. Sound familiar?

Prejudice and the action and inaction of political leaders was never more serious and consequential then the United States’ reaction to the Holocaust. Author Jay Winik’s book “1944 FDR And The Year That Changed History” tells the story of how the United States government had first hand evidence of Hitler’s Final Solution that was killing thousands of Jews by the hour, and did little or nothing to stop it. Roosevelt felt defeating the enemy took priority over diverting resources to bomb the concentration camps, and the rail lines used to deliver cattle cars full of humans to the gas chambers. Survivors of the concentration camps later said they heard U-S bombers flying over the camps on their way to nearby targets. They prayed the Americans would bomb the camps allowing them to possibly escape, or even die, rather then be murdered by the Nazis. Anti-semites in our own State Department actually limited the number of visas it issued to Jews trying to flee certain death.

Building walls and keeping Muslims and Syrian refugees out of the country is to react out of fear. Trump, who is a master of self promotion, will prove to be the just another buffoon who thinks by stirring fear we will defeat the enemy. For a man who claims to be so smart, I have yet to hear any specific, sensible ideas on how to deal with any of the serious issues facing the country. Yet, he is the leading candidate to be the Republican nominee for president.

These terrorists are a serious threat to our way of life. They want us to be afraid. They want us to be distracted by wildly aiming at the wrong targets. Americans need to learn the lessons of history, and look to leaders who offer real solutions. Buying more guns and closing borders is an irrational reaction. No one ever succeeded by being afraid.