“How could such a tragedy have occurred in a democratic society that prides itself on individual rights and freedoms? … I have brooded about this whole episode on and off for the past three decades, “Milton Eisenhower wrote of the Japanese American internment, a project that he had coordinated at Franklin Roosevelt’s request. Yet Eisenhower’s heirs need puzzle no longer. In George W. Bush’s ceaselessly expanding, everything’s-justified war on terrorism, we can watch the descent from integrity to intolerance step by step.
Mankind has always been predisposed to define danger according to perceived difference — whether in race or dress or spiritual practice. That’s the point made when Kubrick’s Neanderthal male repels Cro-Magnon Man, turning a bone into a weapon in the opening scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey. But American law aims to move us forward from the caves through reason. “The judicial test of whether the government, on a plea of military necessity, can validly deprive an individual of any of his constitutional rights is whether the deprivation is reasonably related to a public danger,” Justice Frank Murphy urged, dissenting from U.S. v. Korematsu (1944).
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