lessons

Lessons from Manzanar, part 2

Eric SaretskyLeave a comment

Human Rights and the public good

At the visitor center at Manzanar National Monument, my wife and I spoke with a docent about a book of images available at their store There were images that Ansel Adams, the famous photographer of landscapes, had taken of internees over the years. Apparently, another famous portraitist, Dorothea Lange, also had taken a series of images that captured the human pain more succinctly (only such images that reflected positively were published; the others, subsequently, were not released publicly by the Government). Forty years later, after incremental policy reversals and President Ronald Reagan publicly apologizing to survivors and descendants, these sites were turned into monuments to make future Americans remember.  However, racism finds other targets.

 “After the attacks of 9/11, when people angrily singled out people wearing Muslim headscarf”, she said, “it was the Nisei – the children of those who had been in the relocation camps, who defended Americans of Mid-eastern decent.” They did not want the painful lessons of the past to be repeated.  She identified a child’s photograph on display there in the center, from the Manzanar camp, as one who defended a Muslim woman after September 11th. Like the refugees of the last few years who fled civil wars in Libya, from ISIS in Syria, crossing the Mediterranean and interdicted in Greece and Italy, Ukrainian women and children fled the Russian invasion there. With these emigrants joining those who have been resettled in several countries including the United States, the competition for services only gets more competitive. However, these recent immigrants are learning valuable skills to support themselves, notably in healthcare, which after the global COVID pandemic have seen a large need but few new workers among the native born. In the fifty years since Vietnam, Americans of Vietnamese ancestry hold public office. Americans of Philippine ancestry serve in the military and in public services. Americans of Middle Eastern ancestry hold public office. Americans have elected and reelected a black President, Vice President, congressmen and mayors. However, the public is still being persuaded through government institutions and media conglomerates that racism is the single most prevalent problem in America.

Ask the Chief: no one is coming

Eric SaretskyLeave a comment

On social media, a former Green Beret, Scott Mann, succinctly describes veterans’ loss of confidence in the United States Government after the debacle which allowed the Taliban fighters who sheltered the 9/11 terrorist network to retake the country of Afghanistan. If the aim of the United States was to punish an ideology that murdered thousands in the United States, and to convince that ideology’s adherents to abandon those efforts, the cost in lives, injury, emotional and physical suffering over twenty years failed. Changing a fourteen hundred year old culture of Islamic traditions, tribalism, misogyny, and history of repelling foreign invasion by military occupation, electrification, and educating young women was unlikely to be permanent in one generation. It was the same lesson the Soviets learned and the British before them. The lessons that America’s hasty exit left in the minds of adversaries and allies, is that the United States can be defeated when drawn into a long, bloody conflict with facile understanding of its adversaries. It is the historical view that politics at home shifts America’s commitment. With such an eventual outcome, it emboldens her adversaries, economic and military, to convince nations with strategic geopolitical importance to partner with them. While nations like Russia rattle sabers (nuclear weapons, natural gas supplies) against Europe, annex the Crimea region and invade the Ukraine (which has proven to be Putin’s equally bloody miscalculation), Iran continues to develop weapons and relations with regimes that do not favor the US nor its allies; North Korea continues development of nuclear-capable missiles; and China builds bases, militarily-useful seaports and industrial capability globally. It also flexes naval power to remind the United States that it plans to eventually retake Taiwan. The seeds of future conflict with the United States, to support alliances or to defend trading partners, is being sown all the time. Meanwhile the United States military has experienced an internal conflict shifting resources and capabilities to align with societal change in identity- gender, attitudes ( regard for authority, character, politics). Accidents, expensive but short-lived weapon systems, and ethically-challenged members in the officer and enlisted ranks (bribery, sexual abuse, and “loss of confidence” in those chosen to command) reflect deficiencies in training, design, threat analysis, and personnel selection.