My new book, American Memory Hole: How the Court Historians Promote Disinformation, will officially be released on August 27. It is available for pre-sale now. There was so much hidden history unearthed by researchers Chris Graves, Peter Secosh and myself, that we simply couldn’t put it all in the book. Too many scenes had to be cut.
One figure who comes out looking even more horrid and corrupt than I imagined was President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The man the court historians tell us is our second greatest president, behind only Abraham Lincoln, who turned tyranny into an art form. You will learn about the crimes committed against not only the Japanese- Americans interned in U.S. concentration camps, but German-Americans and Italian- Americans as well. Unlike the Japanese, they received no belated reparations, and court historians don’t even acknowledge that they were sent to the camps. Peter Secosh discovered the U.S. crimes at Okinawa. Okinawa was a Japanese territory, and in April, 1945, only months before World War II ended, U.S. troops landed on the main island there, and in the battle that followed, 94,000 civilians were killed. The U.S. set up concentration camps afterwards, and some 3,000 Okinawans died there.
Survivors of these never publicized camps described the deadly conditions there. Most deaths occurred from starvation and malaria. The conditions were decidedly unsanitary, and little food was provided. It is estimated that around 100,000 were interned in three separate camps. As one elderly survivor recalled, “We had to wait in a long line just to get one onigiri rice ball, distributed each day under the scorching sun. . . . Small kids always had diarrhea.” So many deaths occurred that bodies were buried in a single mass grave. Because of the lack of reliable records, it is almost certain that even more people died than reported. The U.S. still waited three months to release prisoners from the camps, after Japan’s August, 1945 surrender. The camps in fact continued to exist until June, 1946. Remember, the North hanged Henry Wirz, commandant of the South’s Andersonville prison, who couldn’t feed northern prisoners because Union generals had stolen all the food and destroyed the crops.
But the story doesn’t end there. In 1951, the Treaty of San Francisco granted these islands to the United States. The Okinawans’ land and homes were seized at gunpoint and their houses and farms were bulldozed or burned to the ground to make way for dozens of U.S. military bases. 250,000 Okinawans—almost half the population—would be displaced. Some fifty-thousand American troops were stationed on this island that the US military boasted was the “Keystone of the Pacific.” Okinawans were angered by the noisy combat training areas, and learning that American nuclear and chemical weapons were stored on Okinawa, while pollutants from the bases fouled nearby farmland. It won’t surprise readers of my work to learn that thousands of robberies, assaults, rapes, and murders, were committed by U.S. troops there. Okinawa was given back to Japan in 1972, but the American bases remained.
In addition to interning Japanese-Americans, German-Americans, and Italian-Americans, our government also imprisoned indigenous Aleuts in Alaska. Shortly after Japan invaded the area, American naval personnel arrived with orders to round up and evacuate Aleuts to internment camps almost 2,000 miles away near Juneau. The stated purpose of the government’s evacuation order was to protect the Aleuts, who were American citizens, from the dangers of war. In order to prevent the possibility of any occupying Japanese forces using the islands, the Aleuts were forcibly evacuated from their homes, and most of their villages burned to the ground. Nearly nine hundred Aleuts were imprisoned in these “Duration Camps,” which lacked plumbing and electricity, and featured holes in the walls and roofs, along with broken doors and windows and rotted floors.
Women at one of these camps wrote a petition in October 1942, protesting their living conditions: “We the people of this place want a better place to live… We drink impure water and then get sick…We got no place to take a bath and no place to wash our clothes or dry them when it rains…we live in a room with our children just enough to turn around in. We use blankets for walls just to live in private.” The OIA (Office of Insular Affairs) dismissed the women’s concerns, telling them that “under war conditions, they could not expect to enjoy the comforts and conditions as they existed on the Pribilof Islands.” In May, 1943, the U.S. government forced some Aleutian men into literal slavery, warning them they wouldn’t be allowed to go home after the war if they didn’t “volunteer” to harvest seals for the war effort.
Finally released in mid-1945, the Aleuts came home to disastrous conditions. Reports from the OIA revealed that, under the “care” of the occupying U.S. troops, “all buildings were damaged due to lack of normal care and upkeep…inspections revealed extensive evidence of widespread wanton destruction of property and vandalism…contents of closed packing boxes, trunks, and cupboards had been ransacked, clothing had been scattered over floors, trampled and fouled, dishes, furniture, stoves, radios, phonographs, books, and other items had been broken or damaged.” As always, going back to the absolute grifting operation under the Union Army’s General William T. Sherman, lots of valuable property was discovered to be “missing.” It’s a Greatest Generation thing, you wouldn’t understand. In 1988, Congress authorized paying $12,000 each to surviving Aleuts.
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