Ep11 with a Young JAs Panel Addenda - War is Stupid

Orli Matlow, Comedian and Podcast host of 'War is Stupid' joins us to reflect on the ways the Incarceration of 125,000+ Japanese Americans during WWII is one of the awful run-on effects the wars make possible.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

This is History for the Reckoning, a podcast that dives deep into the history that's hard to hear but critical to understand. Season one, American Concentration Camp, the story of World War II Japanese Incarceration. Listeners, thank you for coming on for another episode of the podcast. I'm your host, Spencer Ford. I'm joined today by a very special guest named Orley Matlow. She is the host and producer of a podcast called War is Stupid, which is a sentiment that I could not agree with more. But also there are many effects of war which are incredibly stupid, one of which being the incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II. So, Orly, thank you so much for joining me today.

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here and to dive in to an element of history that um I had not explored as much as I would have liked to. And it was shocking how familiar it felt to me as someone who grew up, yeah, I grew up going to Jewish day school and learning a lot about the Holocaust. And so yeah, my my podcast is called War is Stupid, an anti-war podcast about war. And only every other episode is about Israel and Palestine. Um we got some uh some yeah, palette palette cleansers in between. Um there, but there is an episode uh uh diving into the myth of World War II as the good war. It's now to justify war, people say, like, how could war be stupid when World War II happens? But yeah, war is is not only um a moral and humanitarian catastrophe, but more often than not, it also doesn't accomplish its stated goals. So I I started the podcast um as a response to the discourse around Gaza and the Jewish institutions that raised me, insisting that the the war that would later become a genocide was to save hostages when it was a ceasefire for hostages deal that brought the majority of hostages home. So it's so it's like, dudes, it it it it did, it's not even doing what you say it's not.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

Not even effective, yeah. So in our podcast, we've been pointing out uh one of the effects of World War II, which was wartime hysteria and racism that was already uh existing within the American bureaucracy were engaged to harm this minority group of people known as the Japanese Americans. Uh, but that wouldn't have happened if there wasn't a war happening. Like if there hadn't been a Pearl Harbor, at the very least, those that wanted this kind of thing to happen to their Japanese neighbors couldn't have justified it. And so that's just another way in which war is stupid, I guess, that there can be these knock-on effects that horrible things that speak to the worst of us can be justified by war, and these secondary things can happen that aren't the war itself, quote unquote.

SPEAKER_00 2:54

Exactly. It becomes just a permission structure for horrible things abroad and then horrible things at home, including racist cartoons by Dr. Seuss.

SPEAKER_01 3:06

I imagine we're getting to that. Yeah, so why don't you tell me uh how from your background and the things that you've researched as part of your podcast and the way you've been communicating to a broader audience about the ways in which war is stupid, how does that layer onto uh the work that we've been doing looking into Japanese incarceration?

SPEAKER_00 3:25

Yeah, doing a deep dive into the American anti-Japanese propaganda, I was I was struck by how familiar it felt. Like the visual propaganda used similar tactics to the Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda, like height, which would heighten heighten certain features into the element of the grotesque, like truly the horror movie of the human experience. So in Nazi propaganda, Jews were depicted with overly large and pointy noses, claws instead of hands, portraying them as non-human, to rationalize, not treating them as humans. And and in Nazi propaganda, Jews were depicted as rodents and insects, and and what the US Holocaust Memorial Museum sums up as portraying Jews as an alien race that fed off the host nation, poisoned its culture, seized its economy, and enslaved its workers and farmers. And the the language of aliens was utilized by the United States government um against the Japanese. And in the United States, Japanese people were also drawn to be physically grotesque with you know large buck teeth, which bringing beavers into this for no reason. Like, why are beavers catching strays? Like that, like the the the the Japanese people were the Japanese Americans were innocent, and then so are beavers. They should not have been drawn dragged into this. Oh yeah and then yeah, and the the sharp pointed nails, much much like Jewish claws. They were depicted as apes and gorillas and snakes, so like literal dehumanization uh by depicting people as as animals and rodents.

SPEAKER_01 5:09

All right, so you're saying that you've looked into the physical propaganda produced at the time, or like maybe you can give me like what was the kind of time frame where you saw this rise? Was it not until after Pearl Harbor? Do you have any sense of like when this wave of anti-Japanese propaganda started?

SPEAKER_00 5:25

Or like yeah, the uh I mostly focused on post-Parl Harbor. There was in even some little life magazine issue from December 22nd, 1941. So fresh out of Pearl Harbor had this wild infographic that said like how to tell Japs from the Chinese with a picture of a Chinese man, right? Like the the fact that like World War II was sold to us as it was an anti-racist war for the triumph of of democracy and human rights, where it was like there was uh creepy ass race science happening at home. So like the Life magazine article, it had a Chinese man labeled parchment yellow complexion in comparison to the Japanese earthy yellow complexion. And according to Life magazine, a Chinese person quote, never has rosy cheeks, but a Japanese person sometimes has rosy cheeks. And right, that's just that's stupid.

SPEAKER_01 6:29

That's that's in in the makes you wonder what their source could have possibly been.

SPEAKER_00 6:34

Right. And uh and and so the end goal was obviously okay, we don't have to treat these people as human when uh they when they aren't to us.

SPEAKER_01 6:46

Sure. Uh just out of curiosity, why was propaganda the thing that was interesting to you as an entry point? Like you mentioned you'd seen a lot of it from the Nazi regime toward their Jewish neighbors, but yeah, why is that so significant to you?

SPEAKER_00 6:58

I think yeah, it's so interesting. I came into this work into the anti-war podcast world as a stand-up comedian. And uh yeah, it's a wild the stand-up comedian to anti-war podcaster or pipeline. I just it became just seeing the world through the lens of yeah, enter entertainment and communications, and to think, yeah, but like we've as like someone who venerates the arts, to think that it was yeah, art that also enabled such horrifying abuses.

SPEAKER_01 7:34

Yeah, I guess it's also very interesting to me that you have this background with uh a related atrocity that included camps, forced removal, and awful groupings of people based on what they perceived as race. That's a murky issue, but that there's even a parallel to what happened in the the core United States. So yeah, keep telling me about what you found as you were looking into this.

SPEAKER_00 7:55

Yes, so um another reason why the incarceration was was straight up stupid. Um, so yeah, it was not only a moral and humanitarian catastrophe, but also tactically stupid. Um because as George Takei said in episode one, um, Japanese American soldiers were were turned away uh for from enlisting because of racism. So like that was literally harming the war effort because of racism. So it's like if there's one thing I've learned over the past few years from doing the podcast and from watching the news, it's never underestimate people's racism and and how it gets them to function against their own interests. Yeah. And so we talk about how like there were there was no evidence that Japanese Americans were sleeper cell spies, and and there was a lot of evidence to the contrary. They were active, productive members of the community. So something that I found really interesting in uh the book The Good War, an oral history of World War II by Studs Turkle. I'm just grateful for any opportunity to say the name Studs Turkle because it's an incredible name.

SPEAKER_01 9:12

Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_00 9:13

Yes, it talked about all of the Japanese people who worked in Pearl Harbor. So the Pearl Harbor is associated with Japanese perpetrators, but not Japanese victims. So uh John Garcia, who uh was uh uh in Hawaii and at 16 years old was working on Pearl Harbor Navy Yard and was awoken by his grandmother and went down to work after the bombing, said of Hawaii in the community, if they arrested the ordinary Japanese, there would be no workforce at Pearl Harbor. There were 130,000 Japanese on the islands, no stores, no hotels, nothing. You'd have to shut the city down.

SPEAKER_01 9:53

Oh I think I've heard the number was about 40% of Hawaii had Japanese ancestry. So, like, are you gonna lock up two out of five of every person on an entire island? No, not a chance.

SPEAKER_00 10:04

Right. And then also they presumably suffered from the the bombing that then they were subsequently yeah, set in motion, the the incarceration. So yeah, people yes, the Japanese did Pearl Harbor, but the Japanese Americans obviously didn't. They were on the ground, so they were not in the planes. And then another interesting uh story um that really struck me uh was from a woman named Nancy Arno Harjan, who was uh 13 when the war began, and uh just uh a 13-year-old white woman in California. She had a Japanese woman named May who worked for their family. And in the spring of 1942, after the edicts demanding that all Japanese people in California be sent to the camps, she overheard May telling her mother, like, Mrs. Arno, it's really a concentration camp I'm going to, to which her mother was Arno says, My mother was caught in a bind. She did know that it was wrong. It's for your own good, she said, for your own protection. May was saying, Aha, I thought you had to be protected from us. Now you're telling me I have to be protected from you. And she never saw May again. So even at the time, people knew it was stupid and something to be ashamed of, and that good white people in California rationalized by saying, No, now it's for your own protection, so you don't get hate crimes. So there was an element at the time of people knowing that this was not okay. And then um yeah, another quote from Nancy Arnohar John, she just says, as the war came to an end, I was totally blown away by how quickly our former enemies became our friends and how quickly our former friends became our enemies. I couldn't understand that. I began to ask, what was it all about? So just the the fact that yeah, the war flattens everything and everyone to friends and enemies, that as soon as World War II ended and this the Nazis and Imperial Japan were defeated, then suddenly the Soviet Union became the big bad even after they were they were our best buds and allies 15 minutes ago.

SPEAKER_01 12:34

I guess we were talking before before we started recording this episode about other ways in which the incarceration was just ill-advised, stupid without a better term, things like just a drain on the US economy in a time of war. It's like they had to spend the money to build these camps, they had to transport the people to these camps, they had to house them and feed them. And granted, they did everything they could to make that as cheap as possible, but they still had to do it when they could have been at home, producing economic activity, joining the military, as you pointed out, bolstering their uh wartime production and community assets, but instead we chose to deplete the resources from the entire West Coast of this entire group of very hardworking, loyal American people.

SPEAKER_00 13:19

Stupid. It's just stupid.

SPEAKER_01 13:21

I wonder if there are any other uh axes by which you've examined the ways in which war is stupid that maybe uh you and I can try and piece together the way that applies to the story that I've been telling in this podcast. Like so we've got like the the fiscal way, the financial way. Where are some of the metrics that you've discovered in your research?

SPEAKER_00 13:39

Yeah, the um I I do think uh just the the myth of World War II as um as a human uh humanitarian undertaking is something yeah, because yeah, some yeah at any opportunity, I it's I'm so bummed as someone who grew up loving the musical Annie to then learn that and and the New Deal, to then learn that FDR not only built and operated concentration camps but also turned away boats of Jewish refugees like is is so upsetting. So World War II is now remembered as as the good war that liberated the concentration camps, but not only uh were there concentration camps in America, but the concentration camps existed because the US and the Allies refused to accept Jewish refugees. They they refused to divert resources to even bombing the train tracks that brought prisoners to the concentration camps, claiming it would be a diversion from the war effort, thus admitting that the purpose of the war was was not to help free the victims of uh of Nazi persecution. So, yes, at the time saving the lives of Nazi victims wasn't a goal, it was a distraction, and then only after after the war was won, then they could say, You're welcome, we did this.

SPEAKER_01 15:08

Yeah, I mean, I don't know, it just points to like even if language at the time was being used like, hey, look at us liberating Europe. They use that word a lot. We're out here as liberators who are doing this amazing thing, while at the same time we're locking up this group of over 100,000 American citizens. So, like, yeah, the double standards that violence and hostility make possible are, I'm sure, boundless.

SPEAKER_00 15:31

And the fact that it was a segregated army fighting the white supremacist Nazi regime.

SPEAKER_01 15:39

Yeah, we have an episode coming up about the 442nd and the 100th combat division of the United States Army, which was entirely a segregated Japanese American unit. And they served valiantly, but they did it as an entirely segregated unit. You're right. Like did not have the same standing and the same assumption of loyalty, even like they were segregated partly as this we don't necessarily trust these people, we need to keep them in their own segregated unit. So, yeah, good point.

SPEAKER_00 16:04

Yeah, and so the fact that like World War II probably a combination it a combination of things is why it's it's venerated as as a good war that then serves as justification for for subsequent wars. Um, it's yeah, Steven Spielberg movies showing us how like wholesome and brave these young men are. Um but then it was also the last time that America actually won a war.

SPEAKER_01 16:31

What has come up in your other episodes of like the dimensions of what happens during war that people were like, oh, and here's just something that maybe you haven't considered.

SPEAKER_00 16:39

Yeah, the fact that uh it's straight up creates the conditions for for the next one. Like though it doesn't get talked about enough. Like the only reason why Al Qaeda exists is because they were armed against the Soviets. So it's like the ultimate uh the the cycle of of violence and the and World War II itself only existed because of World War I and the Treaty of Versailles and Germany wanting wanting revenge.

SPEAKER_01 17:07

Okay, yeah, I can find the parallel to Japanese incarceration for that one. I love it because uh as George Decay pointed out in our interview with him that uh there were so many people that had been incarcerated that now felt like maybe I would have even joined the US military before, but now you have completely taken away my trust, you've taken away my freedom, my rights, and they in fact formed like these uh little nationalist Japanese groups within these concentration camps that were like completely uh against anything that the US stood for. Where, I mean, just to say it again, maybe if they just left them alone, these young men might have joined the military. They would have helped. It would have been a great asset to the United States, but we completely radicalized these people by treating them as less than human.

SPEAKER_00 17:49

Yeah, every war sows the seed for conflicts, people seek out revenge either for their own mistreatment or their family's mistreatment. Like the a lot of a lot of groups are are made up of people who were victims of tragedies and then think the response is taking up arms because they were victims of of violence. So if we at any scale say that violence is the answer, then we can't be surprised when it keeps popping up when people keep coming to that conclusion.

SPEAKER_01 18:23

Yeah, we can't be surprised that when new questions arise, they keep using the old tried and true answer. Well, thank you so much, Orly, for coming on and helping us to examine from I'm I would say an outside perspective, but you've really been examining injustices through your podcast. So I do hope that people will check it out and we'll start to dive into the many ways in which war is stupid. And through this podcast, thank you for helping us to shine a light on this way in which uh not only was the incarceration unconstitutional, unjust, but it was also just inane, and there was no justification, and we lost so much in many ways because of it. So thank you again for coming on, Orley.

SPEAKER_00 19:00

Thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_01 19:05

Season one of History for the Reckoning is made possible by support from the JCL Mount Olympus chapter, as well as generous financial support from the Takahashi Family Foundation and the JA Community Foundation. The music was produced by Patrick Coffin. If you want to support the show, follow us on Instagram at History for the Reckoning. Sign up for our newsletter at History for the Reckoning on Substack, where you'll also find the show notes for each episode. Or support us financially through Patreon at patreon.com slash history for the reckoning.