They Called Us Enemy is a graphic novel written by George Takei, a famous actor from Star Trek and one of the japanese people enclosed in the internment camps during World War II as a child. The book is about his experiences in the camp primarily.

The main messages of the book are as follows:

1. People will believe what they want to believe despite all evidence, and this will very often harm vulnerable populations.
2. Democracy only works if everyone is not only allowed to participated, but willingly chooses to do so on a regular basis.
3. Participation in democracy is more than just voting. It is making your voices heard in public.
4. A system can still be a good one, even if it produces an abomination on occasion.

I have a number of personal takeaways myself.

People will find a way to justify hatred for anyone they already hate. American politicians during World War II found an excuse to incarcerate japanese-american citizens in the very fact that they had absolutely no evidence to back up their claim that they were inherently treacherous. Putting aside the dubious logic of someone’s genetic code determining someone’s loyalties to a nation a third of the planet away, the shear refusal to let go of their opinion in the face of clear evidence is disgusting. As I once taught my class over in the matagual valley, there is no shame in being wrong, but refusing to admit when one is wrong in the face of clear evidence to the contrary is the mark of a coward. Only a coward refuses to swallow his pride for the sake of truth, and it seems to me that those politicians of the time were cowards of the worst sort.

But of course, history is not a straight line; to look back in time and laugh scornfully at the sins of our ancestors is to blind oneself to truth just as surely as if one were denying it directly. Technology advances, but mankind remains ever the same. Putting aside the obvious terrorist attacks and genocides, here on American soil we still have stupid camps where we stick people we don’t want. They aren’t Nazi-style concentration camps to be sure, but they certainly do remind one of the Japanese internment camps that I just read about in Takei’s book. It hurts to know that my brothers in faith are being held there, not knowing if they will be able to stay together as a family or if they will be split up. And then there is the fact that Trump actually considered ending birthright citizenship, reminiscent of the laws attempting to revoke the citizenship of the japanese in america, except potentially worse if it is done retroactively.

The book also brings to my attention the precarious nature of life in america. People still hate Jews, Catholics, black people, and asians. Now all that has happened is the priorities have been shifted around and a new one has been added: Muslims, who since the 9/11 attacks have been plagued with association with murderers and maniacs in the minds of americans, and association which I do not envy. Even now, I almost daily stumble upon people on the internet saying the most vile things about Jewish and Catholic people, from persistent accusations of pedophilia to conspiracy theories about us taking over the world or practicing Luciferian rites in our churches and synagogues. And now, with COVID-19 in full swing, anti-asian sentiment has once more reared it’s ugly head, with americans once more attacking chinese-americans in the streets, this time because they believe them to be spreading the disease. It seems nothing has really changed in our nation at all.

On a significantly happier note, I have come out of reading the book loving Quakers even more than I already do. Whenever I hear about them in US history (or even abroad), they always seem to be risking their lives to help people, from protecting the rights of Catholics to worship, to helping slaves escape from plantations into the north, to that one guy Takei mentions who risked his life just to get some books to his fellow citizens. Under the name of The American Friends Service Committee, they were one of the few groups to organize any significant effort to rescue Jews from the concentration camps in Nazi Germany (along with Catholic loyalists under Pope Pius XII and the Nazi double-agent Oskar Schindler), and they did it despite being an entire ocean away in a country that was absolutely apathetic to the cause. They are an example that I believe all americans should follow. I FREAKING LOVE QUAKERS.

I was also asked to give an assessment as to the pros and cons of presenting a story in graphic novel form. I suppose the biggest up-side is the fact that more people are likely to read it. Literacy may be the norm in most parts of america, but even my perfectly literate friends shy away from reading thick text, and like to see images to help them process the information better. My guess is that this was the intent when Takei wrote the thing, so that the message might spread where it needs to go.

The downside is the amount of space that is taken up when presenting information in this manner. There are many reasons why scholarly sources are written the way they are, and one of them is expediency; one can fit far more information on a sheet of paper if one does not need to illustrate each idea (of course this comes at the cost of the reader’s ability to digest said information).

For a fairly linear and concise story like the one Takei was telling, the graphic novel format worked well, making the story easy to digest even for the most casual of readers, and thus allowing its important messages to reach the audiences it was meant to reach. However, if he wanted to give a more detailed account of his life, I would imagine he would switch to a more text-based account.

Anyways, that’s what I got out of the reading

🎝that’s all there is, there isn’t… any more🎝

Hello there! ProfessorZik-Chil here with my next blog post. It’s been a long apocalypse, so to keep our minds off of the current existential dilemma, we will instead turn our attentive to an equally serious but far more normal dilemma fast approaching. Fascism.

Unfortunately, much like its sister term, Nazism, Fascism has lost a lot of its punch as a term over the past ten years or so. This is because the term has been thrown around by both the political left and right as soon as either presents an opinion that the other objects to. For example, conservatives often accuse liberals of being fascists for their support of tax-funded eugenics programs such as planned parenthood, and liberals will in turn accuse the conservatives of being fascists because of their heavy-handed and occasionally brutal policies on immigration, and the unusual number of white supremacists who have claimed affiliation with them in recent years. I’ll get to that latter point in a moment. The point, accusing someone of being a fascist no longer provokes that person to consider if they actually are one, since the term has been applied so broadly. This is a very, very bad thing, because I am of the opinion that as a whole, our nation is actually rapidly hurtling toward that exact form of governance.

The book “it can’t happen here” is about a presidential election in which a candidate who can only be described as a demagogue nearly takes office (I can only assume he doesn’t; I’m only about ¾ through the book). His policies appeal to those who feel that they have been oppressed or overlooked by society, rightfully or no, for his simple promise of immediate relief of their problems, at the cost of their freedom. Anyone who disagrees with him is shouted down as an enemy of the state. Does this sound familiar?

It should. If the professor will forgive me for making such a wild claim, I maintain that fascist ideals have infested both political parties in roughly equal measure, and that the net result is in fact a fascist state in all but name. (I know that I am going to make some statements that my professor will disagree with, so pardon me). Here’s why:

1. First, lets address the proverbial elephant in the room. The Trump presidency hasn’t exactly been a good thing for racial relations. At all. His nativist policies, warranted or not, have made it very difficult on muslims and latin americans in particular within our borders. The fact that we got an ambiguously racist white president immediately after our first black president has emboldened white supremacists, who seem to be popping out of the woodwork now. While he hasn’t encouraged this behavior in his supporters, he hasn’t discouraged it either, making it seem like he is secretly on their side (which he very well might be). The fact that the deportation camps resemble concentration camps hasn’t helped things either. There’s also the large degree of police violence targeting the black community, which has persisted through the last 20 years or so, independent of the presidency, and no president seems to have done anything of note to address the problem. Oh yeah, apparently the prison-industrial complex is still a thing too, which means those cops who are targeting black people specifically for arrest are sending them to a place that will use them for forced labor and condition them to be unable to leave without doing something that will send them right back where they came from. In other words, state-sanctioned slavery is still a thing, and has been a thing for a long time.

2. Far more worryingly, perhaps, is a recent push the president has made to narrow the definition of citizenship so that naturalization is impossible. This is mind-mindbogglingly opposed to just about everything I believe in, and is also an uncomfortably fascist development. It’s also not clear if this will be done retroactively, and if so it raises the question as to who might end up losing citizenship because their ancestors were naturalized citizens.

3. Now on the more subtle things. Executive power has been rapidly growing over the past twelve years, in the name of national security. The most blatant case of this has been the CIA spying on US citizens through deals with manufacturing, software, and social media companies. Putting aside the fact that the CIA is supposed to leave internal affairs to the FBI, it’s also very illegal on numerous levels. In fact, if one takes Roe v Wade seriously instead of just an excuse to legalize abortion, the CIA’s actions violate the implied right to privacy. Keep in mind, this did not start during the Trump presidency, instead originating under Obama.

4. Obama’s presidency is similarly problematic in that it set a very dangerous precedent regarding executive orders. It was definitely well-meaning, and it accomplished something that I genuinely appreciated (the more Catholic citizens here the better, and most mexican immigrants are Catholic), but there’s a catch. Because he used an executive order to completely circumvent congress, and the Supreme Court hasn’t struck it down, it essentially means that presidents now have the ability to do whatever the hell they please without regard for the proper channels. As I predicted back in 2015, this came back to bite the democrats in the butt after the 2016 election as Trump assumed that power for himself. Add to this the fact that the president doesn’t need to go through congress to deploy troops anymore, and you have a nigh-omnipotent executive power.

5. Now for the proverbial donkey in the room. Abortion is a subject that divides people to a dangerous degree, and for good reason. Pro-choice advocates claim that preventing someone from receiving an abortion is a civil rights violation, and unconstitutional. From their perspective, those who are pro-life are holding back the natural progression of the rights of mankind, and oppressing women; they will claim that pro-lifers, by supporting government control over their bodies, are fascist. Libertarians take the middle ground, saying that they are OK with abortion being legal but don’t want their tax dollars funding it so that people who object for religious reasons don’t feel that they are inadvertently enabling murder. The pro-life argument is more dire, however. It draws connections between the modern pro-choice movement and the eugenics movement. The primary connection here is Margerate Sanger, who notably courted eugenics advocates including the Ku Klux Klan to give her ideas traction. Pro-life advocates will point out the somewhat unsettling fact that abortion clinics are much more likely to be set up in communities with large populations of ethnic minorities, and claim that this is a continuing attempt at ethnic cleansing through subtle means (though this could be explained through economic factors such as poverty rates). The fact that Planned Parenthood is state sponsored only adds to the fire. It’s no surprise that pro-life advocates will call pro-choice advocates “Nazis”, without a shred of irony in their voice; as far as they are concerned, each and every clinic is a death camp.

6. Meanwhile, you have the political establishment profiting off of this infighting to allow them to continue to expand their power. Corporate shills such as Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN all work to bend the truth till it snaps in the name of the party line. All of them tell their viewers exactly what they expect to hear, much like the “newspapers” that the Kluxers once used to spread their anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, and anti-african hogwash. It has gotten to the point that it has become impossible to tell true news from fake news, and many have given up entirely on trying to be informed on current events at all. So long as constituent voters are divided on those issues that the established leaders of both the left and the right don’t care about, the established leaders can continues to increase the power of the government without anyone noticing. Sometime soon, we may find that the government has fully consolidated power into a single fascist regime right under our noses, without so much as an election or coup.

7. Now back to the present (yeah, you thought I was going to ignore the plague. you were wrong). As it happens, the recent outbreak looks like it will accelerate all of the issues I pointed out above. We’ve already seen a HUGE rise in anti-asian sentiment within the last month and a half, to near-violent levels. State governments have begun exercising power to keep its citizens safe from the plague (for good reason), closing everything from schools to businesses and churches. Of course, with the withdrawal of businesses comes widespread hunger and desperation, and what does that result in? You guessed it: a one-time gift of cash that may not even get to the people who really need it. If that sounds familiar, that’s because it is one of the main plot points of “it can’t happen here”. Once people get the money, they’ll go on praising the government even as that little bit runs out and they begin starving again. Likewise, with the withdrawal of church services comes a withdrawal of spiritual support. People are built to believe in something, even if that something is nothing at all. But if they have nothing to see, no cross, no prophet, no joyous songs praising God or at least praising themselves for praising Him, their faith waivers and dies. What replaces faith in God? If everything that has happened since the rise of Napoleon is an indicator, the answer is faith in the state, in extreme nationalism, which is the fuel upon which a fascist state runs. The worst part is, frankly, we can do nothing about it. All the steps that are occurring are natural, reasonable responses to the problems at hand, and if I were in charge I would probably take the exact same steps.

8. As if to add insult to injury for those who advocate for the pro-life cause, even though all other major organizations have closed, abortion clinics have stayed open to provide eugenics services on the american tax dollar, despite the fact that they absorb much needed medical resources and present a serious risk of infection potentially greater than that of churches and businesses due to even more extreme proximity and the potential for contagions to spread via contact with contaminated skin (or blood, but I don’t know if it’s blood born or not). Unless they intend to spray every single customer with steaming water or dunk them in disinfectant before they enter the door, I don’t see how they could avoid cross-contamination between customers. Why the government would refuse to close down abortion clinics when they’ve already forced people to starve because of unemployment is beyond me. Unless, of course, the pro-choicers are right and there is a eugenics agenda that the establishment is still pushing.

OK, so, there we go. The original question is, why is the book “it can’t happen here” becoming so popular recently. The reason is because we are living in an age in which fascism is slowly creeping up around us, through the legal system and good intentions, which is a much slower version of what goes on in the book.

Sorry this blog was so long, but I felt that it needed to be said, because for the past 15 years or so I’ve felt like we’ve been living in the bowels of hell and we are only ever sinking deeper.

And there’s nothing we can do about it.

Heyo! No time no type!

So, I was assigned to blog about a photo from the Great Depression. Here it is:

• 

So, a little background about it: The photo is titled Along the Highway Near Bakersfield California, Dust Bowl Refugees. It was taken by photographer Dorothea Lange in the November of 1935. No other relevant information is provided, so we will have to extrapolate from here.

The refugees pictured here are clearly in a desperate situation, one similar to that which I have seen around the escondido transit center for the last four years. The group pictured is a family, or perhaps two families sharing what resources they have with each-other. Given their style of dress it seems that at some point they were part of the middle-lower class, but given that they are cooking on a mini-stove in the middle of nowhere, this appears to be no-longer the case.

In particular, take a look at the woman on the far left. If you look down at her feet, you will see she is wearing high-heels. This choice of attire would make absolutely no sense out of the context of a formerly middle-class family down on their luck. The fact that she owns a pair of high-heels means that at one point she wore them to events, like parties or dances, which require somewhat more formal attire. However, now she is wearing them on unstable ground in the middle of nowhere while waiting for her lunch to be cooked. She likely wouldn’t be wearing these shoes in this particular circumstance unless her more practical shoes had worn out or broken and she hadn’t been able to fix them.

This is particularly striking when you consider that five out of the eight people in the image appear to be of the appropriate age to engage in some low-level job or another; the two men in particular have perfect builds for agricultural or industrial work. Yet, they are here parked in the middle of nowhere, which they wouldn’t be if any of them had some sort of stable job.

Many of these sorts of images were used in order to promote the new deal, and I think this one in particular would have been particularly effective at promoting it. The reason I believe this is because it really demonstrates the exact kind of situation these people are in (desperate for and unable to find work), and also what they used to be like. Middle class people would likely be more sympathetic to a depiction of other middle class people down on their luck, as it is easier to put themselves into their shoes. They would think “What if that was me? What if I was put into a situation where I was barely able to feed my children, even during my physical peak?” And while they might not reach out in a charitable manner (being afraid to give up any of their own funds when their lives are still getting harder because of the depression), they would certainly be willing to attempt to pas laws and approve projects that would help those like the people in the photo. The photo makes the problems that the refugees are facing very real and present to the viewer, and more likely to act.

That’s all there is, there isn’t any more.

With the 2020 election rapidly approaching, one subject has popped up time and time again: poverty. Candidates on both sides claim to be actively fighting against it, but they have very different approaches. As it happens, these approaches reflect similar approaches back in the 1932 presidential race between President Hoover and Governor Franklin Roosevelt. For the purpose of this comparison, I will focus on Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. This is because both seem to have made fighting it a major part of their campaign, and both are diametrically opposed on how to achieve this goal. Also the idea of biden or bloomberg entering office right now seems outright laughable. (My assessment of the modern candidates in this blog does not represent my actual political opinion of the candidates themselves; I find both of their approaches potentially effective if carried out competently).

But first lets discuss the 1932 candidates Hoover and Roosevelt.

In October 5th, 1931, a news article detailing the efforts of a particular philanthropic organization known as the Jewish Philanthropic Society during a pledge drive. Both candidates weighed in on the subject; both of them supported the organization without reservation and praised their contributions to society. However, the wording of their responses where very different.

Hoover’s response was short; he praised them and pointed out how important their efforts were to helping the poor in the absence of jobs. Knowing what I do about Hoover, this demonstrated a very libertarian approach: he did not suggest direct government support for the poor, instead directly stating that private charities were now necessary while jobs were unavailable. Hoover did not believe in using government funds directly; instead, the government was supposed to enact projects that would help society as a whole, which would then improve employment.

Roosevelt, on the other hand, wrote a much lengthier response. One of the first things he mentioned was that the government should be directly involved in solving unemployment. He mentioned how the New York government was actively involved in this manner, but couldn’t properly address the problem. Similar to Hoover, he described the Society as very necessary given the current situation, but his wording seemed to imply that they should be necessary in the first place if the national government were doing its job (at least how he saw it).

Now to the 2020 election. According to the website “Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity”, both candidates are very active in their effort to confront the issue. It should be noted that neither candidate has embraced the libertarian hands-off approach that Hoover advocated, and indeed both of their policies show much more similarity to those of Roosevelt. But the philosophy behind their approaches is very different.

Similar to Hoover, Trump doesn’t believe in direct aid. Instead, he advocates for policies that will create jobs. His idea is that if he can increase the number of jobs available he can give the poor enough of a foothold to be able to advance themselves. His approach seems to be to provide the necessary methods by which someone might advance themselves if they have the ambition to do so, and to that end seems to be having some success. In fact, my economics professor from last year pointed out that Trump has indeed succeeded in reducing the poverty rate significantly; he even stated that there was an unforeseen side-effect of the ratio of black and female unemployment increasing during his presidency, indicating that they are doing better even comparatively speaking to those who are typically privileged. In many ways he can be seen as a much more active version of the passive Hoover.

Bernie’s position, on the other hand, is to directly address the rather top-heavy nature of our national economy. Notably he intends to tax wall street heavily, claiming (accurately) that they possess much more money than they would ever be able to use in their lifetime, money which would be better spent on social welfare programs, particularly providing free college tuition and socialized healthcare. Rather than increasing citizens ability to climb out of the safety net, his approach is to raise the safety net much higher than it currently is. In a bizarre way, however, his position on the education is weirdly similar to that of Trump’s, but far different in execution. Trump supports lower-level education to help lower-class individuals apply for entry-level jobs (thus allowing them to afford higher-level education and self-advancement), while Bernie supports making it possible for everyone to afford higher education, provided they have a job to support themselves financially. Both support social mobility at least in that regard. Bernie also supports an increase in the minimum wage to $15, which would reduce the amount of jobs available but increase the ability of those with entry level jobs to support themselves. His economic philosophy mirrors that of Roosevelt in that both favor more direct intervention in the economy on the behalf of citizens, though Bernie takes it a bit farther than Roosevelt.

That’s all I feel like writing right now. I hope you enjoyed reading!

Heyo! Prof Zik-Chil here with my first blog post. (I’m not actually a professor; this is just the alias I use on the internet in general; dress for the job you want as they say.) Death in a Promise Land is a book by Scott Ellsworth on a bloody massacre committed in Tulsa, on the black community there. Something for the Professor Watts to note is that the book is actually available via biblio.csusm.edu in it’s entirety; the next class should be encouraged to check it out there in order to save money.

The primary cause of the massacre, in my opinion, is the extremely lax attitude which the police force had toward mob and vigilante violence. No police force worth its commission should ever allow something so disgraceful in their own city. Prior to the attacks, multiple cases occurred where the police either did not take enough action to prevent mob violence, or failed to do anything at all to address it. Purportedly there was at least one instance where the police actively participated in vigilante violence themselves. Allowing this sort of thing in the city sets a dangerous precedent.

There was also the widespread racial violence in other cities in the state of Oklahoma, which almost certainly helped to normalize the idea of killing members of other races (particularly black people).

Another major contributing factor was the massive degree of segregation between Greenwood (the black section of Tulsa) and the rest of the city. It is much harder to sympathize with people you rarely see in public, which likely contributed to ill feelings on both sides.

The role of the media shouldn’t be downplayed either. A neo-liberal (what we would call “conservative” today) news station, the World, seemed to be constantly dehumanizing people of all types and egging on and condoning mob violence.

That is what I got out of the document, in any case.

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

• Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
• Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

• Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
• What topics do you think you’ll write about?
• Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
• If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.