It’s
been pointed out to me that I’ve been neglecting my blog lately. I found out
the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) has a program for seniors that
lets us take a class for $25. We don’t get credit, and, while we probably don’t
have to do the assignments, I’ve been doing them anyway. The class I’m taking
is a history class, and the assignments are papers. One reason I was excited to
take the class is I wanted to get out of my routine and be around people who
are not part of my generation—not that there’s anything wrong with my
generation, but variety is the spice of life.
It
shouldn’t be a surprise that classes these days are a lot different than those
I took fifty years ago. In the “good old days” lectures were simply that. The
teacher would talk, and we’d take notes. Nowadays the lecture is on PowerPoint,
and we get to watch the occasional film clip on YouTube. The professor is
excellent (and since I can’t flunk, I don’t have to suck up). Alas, he’s
retiring after the next semester.
So
that’s what’s been occupying my time.
Nevertheless,
I came across a book I highly recommend, and I’d like to get the word out.
In
August I saw an obituary in The New York
Times that caught my eye. Isamu Shibayama, an ethnic Japanese detained
after Pearl Harbor died at age 88. During the war, of course, many ethnic
Japanese were put in detention centers, so you’re probably wondering what’s so
special about Mr. Shibayama. What’s unusual about him is he was detained in
Peru, where he and his family lived and where Mr. Shibayama was born in 1930.
The family had emigrated to Peru to work in the cotton industry and had become
quite wealthy, which is probably the reason they were rounded up and, with
2,000 other ethnic Japanese living in Peru, shipped to the United States and
interned in Crystal City, Texas. After the war the U.S. wanted to deport the
family to Japan because they had entered the country “illegally.” More on that
later. While fighting deportation, Mr. Shibayama, still classified as an
illegal immigrant, was drafted in 1952 and served in Germany. After he
completed his service, a helpful immigration official recommended he go to
Canada and re-enter the U. S. from there after which he’d have to wait five
years to apply for citizenship. In 1988 Japanese-Americans who had been
interned were awarded $20,000 provided they were still alive to receive the
money. That only applied to citizens or permanent residents. In 1999 a
coalition of Japanese Latin Americans won reparations of $5,000. Mr. Shabayama
and two of his brothers declined the payment and sued. They lost that suit and
appealed to the Inter-American Commission on Human rights in 2002. Mr.
Shibayama’s brothers are still awaiting a decision.
It
was news to me that the U. S. had citizens from other countries kidnapped and
interned here during the war. But wait, there’s more.
In October
I read a review of Mary Jo McConahay’s The
Tango War: The Struggle for the Hearts, Minds and Riches of Latin America
during World War II and got a copy at the library. The book was an
eye-opener for me. Latin America has a great many strategic materials, from oil
in Mexico to cotton in Peru to tungsten, necessary for armor-piercing weaponry,
in Argentina to rubber (which was a biggie in those days before synthetic
rubber) along the Amazon.
In the early days of
aviation, Italy and Germany started airlines to serve Latin America, shaving
time off land routes that meandered over mountains and often flying where there
were no roads at all. Latin America was largely made up of European immigrants,
many of whom were from Germany and had constructed villages that looked German
and where German was the first language. The Germans, especially the wealthy
ones, would, like the Japanese, become targets for deportation and internment
in the U. S. Both German and Japanese deportees had their property and
businesses confiscated and their assets frozen.
The reason for the U. S.
detaining ethnic Japanese and German deportees was to have prisoners to
exchange for Americans held in enemy prison camps. While to a degree this may
seem justified, many of these detainees, like Mr. Shibayama, knew little about
the countries of their ethnicity and did not even speak the language. How many
of us can speak the language of our forebears unless that language was English?
Another act by the U. S. was to confiscate the passports of people being
relocated to the U. S. unwillingly and then arrest them for entering without
papers! This was all news to me, and I thought I knew history!
The book discusses
American efforts to win the hearts and minds of Latin Americans with the aid of
Walt Disney (successful) and Orson Welles (not so much). J. Edgar Hoover makes
several appearances, mostly fighting for turf against what would become the
CIA. Hoover may well have screwed up what could have been a warning about Pearl
Harbor because he personally did not approve of the extracurricular activities
of a double agent who was code named “Tricycle” because of his ability to bed
two women at once. Ernesto Guevera Lynch, an anti-fascist and father of Che
Guevera, reported on suspicious German activity in Argentina. His reports were
ignored.
Ms. McConahay discusses
the Mexican airmen who ferried aircraft over the Pacific and made bombing runs
over Formosa and Luzon and the Brazilian combatants who fought bravely in
Italy, where they are remembered, and returned to Brazil, where they were
forgotten in no small part because of a government unwilling to share the
limelight with heroes.
As interesting as the war
coverage is, what Ms. McConahay describes after the war is just as intriguing. In
his 1999 Hitler’s Pope: The Secret
History of Pius XII, John Cornwell described the wartime activities of Pius
XII. Ms. McConahay does as well, but she explains that Pius saw the war as a
battle between atheistic communism and fascists who, although they were
anti-Semitic murderers, were not anti-church. (The same approach this
administration is taking with Saudi Arabia—they may be murderous bastards, but
they’re good business partners.) Ms. McConahay says that Pius XI, Pius XII’s
predecessor, condemned Nazi neo-paganism and the “so-called myth of race and
blood” shortly before he died. Pius XII, however, took a different route. The
church set up “Ratlines” to allow Nazis to escape using its network of
monasteries and parishes. Among those who traveled the Ratlines to Latin
America were Joseph Mengele, Adolf Eichmann, and Klaus Barbie.
Ms. McConahay follows the
activities of former Nazis into the 1960s and 1970s, where they proved helpful
to Latin American dictators who set up camps for dissenters, many of whom
“disappeared.”
This is a history book
that’s long overdue.
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