To understand our position, it’s essential to imagine what it felt like to inhabit the Third Reich as a non-Jew in the early 1930s, before Nazism was a universal symbol of pure and essential evil. Germany wasn’t yet an international outcast, and non-Jewish Germans, for the most part, didn’t feel like a nation of demons. In many ways they were not. Concentration camps, now considered primarily sites of genocide, were opened by the Nazis in March 1933 immediately after their accession to power. At first they were used for holding political prisoners and criminals and people were actually released from them on occasion. There’s also no particular reason to think that the Nazi government had any concrete plans to exterminate Jews from the earth when they took power in 1933.
Continue reading Why We Think it is Fitting to Compare BIDs to Nazis
Tag Archives: Japanese-American Internment
Between the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and the HPOA: 95 Years of Anti-Japanese, Anti-Black, Anti-Brown White Supremacism. “GET BUSY, JAPS, AND GET OUT OF HOLLYWOOD”
For instance, a brief discussion in Scott Kurashige’s interesting book The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles1 led us to read up in old LA Times articles on anti-Japanese hysteria in Hollywood in the early 1920s. It seems that in April 1923, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce gave some advice to a bunch of angry white people. The article is here, but the short version is that some Japanese people bought eight lots in Hollywood, four near Bronson and Sunset and four on Tamarind and Gordon, and had the nerve to wish to build some apartment buildings and a church.
The white people got all in a tizzy, you can see one in the image above, and went to the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce screaming for help. The Chamber, as opposed to the presence of non-white people in Hollywood as they are today, directed the howling mob to the City Attorney to seek a restraining order and they also started circulating petitions “urging the residents to agree to restrict the use of land to those of the Caucasian race.”2 They were even inspired to poetry! See after the break for an especially creepy example.
By May of that year things had really gotten out of hand!
Continue reading Between the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and the HPOA: 95 Years of Anti-Japanese, Anti-Black, Anti-Brown White Supremacism. “GET BUSY, JAPS, AND GET OUT OF HOLLYWOOD”
Sundown Towns, Japanese Internment, Opposition to “Right to Rest Act,” All in a Satanic Century’s Work for BID Buddies League of California Cities
Lewis quotes various activists to the effect that “[t]he homeless are not the first marginalized group targeted by the League in its over 100-year history” and “[t]he League has supported sundown towns, Jim Crow laws, Chinese exclusion and Japanese internment.” And it’s true. E.g., look at the LA Times1 on February 16, 1942, where Richard Graves, executive secretary of the League is quoted as saying:
The most obvious advantage to be gained by enactment of such ordinances [including evacuation of Japanese-Americans] is protection of the civilian population…
Continue reading Sundown Towns, Japanese Internment, Opposition to “Right to Rest Act,” All in a Satanic Century’s Work for BID Buddies League of California Cities