On Friday June 21st in response to the Chattanooga shooting of a Marine Recruitment center some of you might have heard about General Wesley Clark’s statement on an interview with MSNBC He was asked by the host “How do we fix self-radicalized lone wolves domestically?” His response was “during WWII If someone supported Nazi Germany at the expense of the United States, we didn;t say that was freedom of speech, we put him in a camp, they were prisoners of war.” also saying “If these people are radicalized and they don’t support the United States and they are disloyal to the United States as a matter of principal, fine. It’s their right and it’s our right and obligation to segregate them from the normal community for the duration of the conflict. And I think we are going to have to get tough on this.” Perhaps the most important part of the interview was his statement “ The United States should revive World War II style internment camps for disloyal Americans”
Let’s be very clear about the Japanese Internment Camps on USA soil during WWII, which where the imprisonment of citizens for doing nothing wrong. Sound familiar? Just to revisit history because if we ignore it, it merely repeats itself. Shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor the FBI raided homes of first generation Japanese Immigrants and froze the assets of anyone connected with Japan. This was a direct violation to the Constitution. Personal property was confiscated and considered contraband and never returned. But what is not discussed is the pre-emptive acts months before the bombing on July 26th 1941 Many Japanese citizens already had their assets frozen. Next they were asked to sign a national registry swiftly followed by the forced abandonment of their homes and businesses and move to internment camps which were originally Assembly centers built for animals including the infamous Manzanar War Relocation Center. These facilities were inhumane and still covered in feces from the animals recently removed. While the Japanese worked in subhuman conditions on barren land one of the party lines the US Government fed to the public was this was to protect them from hostility and violence toward the Japanese. Again sounding familiar? Up to 127,000 Japanese were unlawfully held prisoner, and considering the number of Fema camps thanks to Rex 84 in the United States ranging anywhere between 600-800 maybe more with each being able to house around 20000 people for a total around 2 million people how much should we turn a blind eye to General Wesley Clark’s statements.
Let’s also look at a HR 2899 introduced by Mr. McCaul in June of this year entitled the “ Countering Violent Extremism Act of 2015 or the CVE Act” The job of battling Extremism will be in the hands of a new position as mentioned under Establishment section a “ There is in the Department an Office for Countering Violent Extremism. THe Head of the Office shall be the Assistant Secretary for Countering Violent Extremism, who shall be appointed by the Secretary.” And similar in tone with David Cameron’s speech earlier last week this bill boils down to a legal form of Thought Police. Let’s look closer and go to the Responsibilities section of this new position
Section A – Identifying risk factors that contribute to violent extremism in communities in the United States and potential remedies for Government and non- Government.”
For this all seeing position who determines what qualifies as a risk factor and what would the potential remedies be.
Next we have section
(D) “Ensuring relevant information, research, and products inform efforts to counter violent extremism.”
(E) Developing and Maintaining a Department-wide strategy guiding policies and program to counter violent extremism” Part of that strategy is “Including a plan to leverage new and existing Internet and other technologies and social media platforms to counter violent extremism” “Establishing a counter messaging program to craft strategic counter messages”
Wasn’t it Joseph Goebbels that said “ It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle.”
Again what will be determined as extremism, where does the line begin in end. And with that I remind us to look at Canada which has come under recent scrutiny by the UN Human Rights committee over their Anti-Terrorism Act C-51 which was passed into legislation in June of this year which was in response to deadly attacks in 2014 to military personnel supposedly linked to terrorist organizations sound familiar to Chattanooga? It essentially empowers the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) to engage in blatant human rights by denying due process to people placed on their no-fly list and instated a new criminal offense of “advocating terrorism” which completely negates the notion of free speech.
Skip forward and we have David Cameron’s speech who aims to pre-empt radicalization by focusing at it’s supposed route course ideology. But who will determine what ideologies are acceptable and what ones aren’t. Was his ideology that permitted him to bomb Syria without Parliamentary approval after being previously rejected an acceptable ideology and what message does that send.
The point is that across the globe we are seeing similar sentiments and legislation from international governments and we need to all pay attention even to interviews on MSNBC by people like Wesley Clark.
