Today Professor Gregor cited that the current administration and the United States in general suffered from a "failure of nerves". Gregor was responding to the idea that the Bush administration was taking liberal steps to ignore Constitutional rights of US citizens by employing the NSA to use wiretaps and other devices without a warrant.
Gregor cited a time when fascism and totalitarianism posed a greater threat to this country than global terrorism does today, explaining that it was through bold decisions such as the carpet bombing of major cities in Germany and Japan that won the war, despite the millions of innocent civilians killed. Professor Gregor explained that the failure of American foreign policy following World War II can be explained by a failure of nerves: US forces were unwilling to use the atom bomb or attack Communist Chinese bases in Manchuria during the Korean War and they were unwilling to fully commit to a large war in Vietnam. Most blatant of this failure of nerves was the air war over Kosovo, where the Clinton Administration was more concerned with popularity at home rather than effective military action on the ground. The loss of American lives could not be handled because of the reprucussions at home. The top priority of every politician is to be reelected, and this became more evident in US policy abroad since World War II.
Gregor compared the current Bush strategy of liberal bending of Constitutional rights of suspected terrorists or terrorist sympathizers with the Japanese internment during World War II, in which thousands of loyal Americans were removed from their homes on the west coast and placed in concentration camps for the duration of the war. Gregor explained that this was a necessity for national security, and an iron resolve on part of the Roosevelt administration helped win the war.
What? Now I don't know if I had the nerve in lecture at 9 in the morning, but I should have raised my hand and retorted. The internment of Japanese Americans was the first large scale violation of Constitutional rights in the United States; a blatant and racist effort to separate an alien group of Americans because of their ethnic relation to Imperial Japanese forces who were advancing in East and Southeast Asia.
This was done because of the threat of espionage, which was cited as a main reason for the sucess of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. However, there was not one act of espionage recorded throughout the war in both the Continental United States and Hawaii, even with Japanese nationals living in the Hawaiian islands. Clearly, their loyalty to this country was questioned because of their heritage. Many Japanese Americans were eager to prove their alliegance to this country, joining the military and forming the most decorated military unit in the history of the United States. They did this modestly, simply asking that the country recognize that just because they were ethnically Japanese did not make them any less American.
Today we see instances of these Constitutional infractions as a result of Bush's War on Terror. Racial profiling had existed as a policy the Department of Transportation had advocated until Director Norman Mineta, a Japanese American and former resident of an internment camp during World War II, ordered that airlines could not "discriminate on the basis of race, religion, or nationality". All were subject to increased airline security, as it should have been.
Is it a failure of nerves or a reassessment of our own morality that explains the change in American policy abroad and domestically? Gregor remembered being outraged after Pearl Harbor, eagerly waiting until he turned 17 so he could join the military. He asked why he has seen no such response today after September 11th. Were we not outraged by this blatant attack on our country?
I, along with almost every other American, am outraged by September 11th. It was an act of cowardice and infamy, and it remains a defining event in this post-Cold War era. But I realize that we must be cautious with our fight for national security and global freedom. Terrorism seeks to compromise our own values, to create distrust and strife in our own society. We must not allow them to win. With President Bush allowing the NSA to violate our Constitutional rights, he has already done what Al-Qaeda desires: to remove what is American about us as Americans.
President Clinton appologized to Japanese Americans for the grave mistake the United States made sixty years before. Since the end of the war, Congress has worked hard to protect the Constitutional rights of its own citizens, even during times of war. Senator Daniel Inouye, a Japanese American who volunteered to fight during the war and lost his arm, fought to ensure that what had happened to fellow Japanese Americans would not happen again. It was not nerves that led to the internment of Japanese Americans, it was paranoia that was an inevitable result of full scale war.
Our nerves must be even stronger in this day and age, where our own livelyhood is being challenged. But perhaps its a different type of nerve that we must contend with and strive for; not the nerves a nation must stomach as it carpet bombs and destroys city after city in an enemy country, but the nerve to boldly stand by American values when they are challenged, to remain patriotic when the rest of the world despises us, and to speak out against injustice, both domestically and abroad. I see nerves with members of Congress who are outraged with President Bush's expansion of his presidential powers. I see nerves with protesters who are sickened with what is happening in Guantanamo Bay. Nerves protect our rights; without these rights, we cannot exist as a nation. Without these rights, we reduce ourselves to something far less than Americans: we become them, and then we lose.
