Mike Maharrey on the oppression of regular Americans during WWII:
For most Americans, the debate over indefinite detention provisions written in the National Defense Authorization Act plays out primarily as an academic exercise. The average Joe walking down Main Street U.S.A. simply doesn’t worry about armed government thugs snatching him up, throwing him in the back of a van and hauling him off to some camp somewhere.
But one Washington state senator plunged into the NDAA fray with much more than academic, political or rhetorical interest. For Sen. Bob Hasegawa, indefinite detention without due process is personal.
His family lived it.
Hasegawa’s parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, along with their entire community, spent three years living in barrack shacks behind barbed wire and armed guards at Minidoka Internment Camp in southern Idaho, not knowing if, or when they would ever get out.
Their crime?
Japanese ancestry.
The moral of the story is: don’t be a member of any minority group the state may at some future point oppress. Or, get rid of the state. Read the rest of his article here.
