In college I majored in history and religious studies. It’s a mix that can be exceptionally depressing. Especially when you have courses like Religion and Violence, and for some reason every course for a semester wants to focus on atrocities in history. But to make sense of history, and religion, such a background is needed. Looking at the events that led up to certain atrocities, and the overlooked details is incredibly important to understand the whys and hows.
This meme is missing that background, and by doing so, portrays an argument that simply doesn’t work, and amounts to a logical fallacy (in this case a version of the either/or fallacy). By basing an argument on a false premise, it makes the entire argument collapse, whether the sentiment is correct or not.
Breaking down this meme, the base argument is that we as people have a history of locking up in mass people who are a different perceived race, and the implication appears that such locks ups are based strictly on race. The argument centers around the idea of racism.
The argument doesn’t really work though. We will start from the bottom up. The bottom photo shows a group of children at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School around 1900. The purpose of these sorts of schools was two fold. First, they were meant to assimilate Indian children and youth into American society. Second, they were meant for basic education.
In 1891 this sort of schooling became compulsive. For some, the school was right on reservation, but for many others, it meant being taken from their families and shipped to some far off boarding school. Part of the reason off-reservation schools were set up was strictly to separate the child from their community, which allowed for the assimilation process to take hold easier. The goal was to civilize these children and youth, and strip them of their culture.
The practice of sending Indian children and youth to boarding schools was definitely based on racism, as well as an idea that these children needed to be rescued from a life of poverty and depression. The means of doing that, according to the American government, was to teach them life skills and have them adopt American culture.
During the course of these schools, hundreds of thousands of Indian children would be taken from their homes, stripped of their culture (many would return home unable to speak to their families because they no longer knew their mother tongue), and sadly, abuse ran rampant, and death or serious injury wasn’t uncommon. This was truly an atrocity in our history.
There were some success stories that came out of these schools though. Through this education process, a number of Indian activist would rise out of the system and did untold good for their communities and Indians in general. That was not the intention of the schools, but it was one of the effects that it did have, in which the children and youth took what they learned, and used it to better argue for the rights of Indians. To be clear, that doesn’t excuse anything, but I find it interesting.
But the meme over plays its hand here. Its a minor point, but its a distinction that needs to be made so that the history isn’t muddled. These children were definitely targeted because they were Indian; they were targeted based on their race. And while they were taken from their homes and their families, the context is greatly different. They were shipped off to places of education. They were able to return home. They weren’t deemed criminals or children of criminals. They weren’t placed behind bars, or in fences.
This was an atrocity, but it was so in a very different way, with very different intentions. And I believe the intentions matter because it helps us understand history. If we look at the other three images, we are looking at not just children being locked up, but also adults. We are seeing people who are deemed criminals or as possible enemies. The political reasons are so vastly different that what we are left with is simply a superficial similarity.
I make this distinction because if we are going to look at the atrocity that was these Indian boarding schools, we need to do so from a historically accurate perspective. We need to understand the whys behind them, or we simply won’t be able to understand them at all.
Holocaust
Moving up a photo, to the Jewish children in a concentration camp, we are seeing something different as well. Today, when speaking of being Jewish, it isn’t a racial identity. It can be an ethnic or religious identity, but race generally doesn’t become involved. During the 20th century, as the Nazis came to power, there was a different view.
Today, it is largely acknowledged that race is a biological myth. There is only one race; the human race. But when thinking of race, it is usually based on color; black, red, white and yellow. That is not how the Nazis, nor most of the world saw it at the beginning of the 20th century. Instead, race was also intertwined with a sociopolitical understanding.
Jews were not alone persecuted by the Nazis. Eastern Europeans in general were seen as subhumans, including the Romani, Poles, Serbs, and Russians. The British and French were seen as lower classes that while they had some Aryan blood, it was also mixed with blood from other races. Even southern Germany was seen as being different and not pure. To put it simply, the idea of race was a mess.
While Jews were deemed often the lowest race, and persecuted to a greater extent, they were not alone, and we can’t forget that others also suffered alongside them regardless of race. The Nazis targeted Jews and people of races they thought were inferior, but they also targeted anyone they thought was inferior, including homosexuals and people of various religions such as Jehovah Witnesses. We are talking about much more than race when looking at the Holocaust.
There is another aspect here though. Often it is portrayed as if Nazi Germany was unique in their persecution of Jews; as if what happened during the Holocaust was a sudden surprise. History shows us something much different. What the Nazis were doing was dealing with what was called the Jewish Question. This was a question that arose in Britain in the 1700s because of the Jewish Naturalization Act of 1753, or what is know as the Jew Bill.
To sum this up quickly, in 1745, the
Jacobite rising occurred, where Charles Edward Stuart kicked off a
rebellion in the attempt to have his father placed on the British
throne. As the rebellion occurred, Jews in Britain showed a great
deal of loyalty to the throne, and were responsible for not only
strengthening the stock market, but many volunteered to defend
London. To reward their service, there was an attempt to allow Jews
to become naturalized. The Jew Bill of 1753 passed, even though there
was a lot of opposition, but because of the outburst of antisemitism
that followed, it was repealed a year later.
It is out of
that that the Jewish Question forms. From there it spread throughout
Europe. It began to rise in popularity in Germany around 1843, with
the publication of The Jewish Question by Bruno Bauer. By 1898, the
suggestion in Germany was that Jews should be deported and have a new
state formed for them in Palestine. The idea of deportation was also
how the Nazis first dealt with the Jewish Question.
The Final Solution to the Jewish Question, or simply the Final Solution, arose out of centuries of persecution and antisemitism. The view that the Nazis had wasn’t anything new. Looking at Russia, from 1791-1917, there was the Pale of Settlement, an area where Jews in Russia were basically limited to. Life there was incredibly difficult and persecution was common. Jews there were the targets of pogroms and anti-Jewish riots.
Things were so bad that Baron Maurice de Hirsch created the Jewish Colonization Association that helped mass emigration of Jews not only from Russia, but other Eastern European countries, so they could escape from the widespread persecution they were facing. It was no simple task as the JCA had to fight with other governments, such as the US and Argentina in order to find places for these Jews to escape to, all because anti-Semitism was so widespread.
This history is incredibly
important as the Holocaust was born from this environment. It wasn’t
something overly secret. It really didn’t need to be defended. People
knew what was happening, and most did nothing because they were Jews
and other undesirables. That is not the situation we are in today.
It’s not the environment we are in today.
Internment Camps
Moving over to the Japanese kids in interment camps, we see an example that is much more dishonest. The Japanese in the United States were rounded up and put into internment camps during WWII. This though was not based on race. If we look at internment camps in the United States, we first have to go back to WWI.
On April 6, and again on November 16, of 1917, then sitting president, Woodrow Wilson, issued sets of regulations that put restrictions on German born men, over the age of 14, residents of the US. A year later, those same restrictions, which included having to carry a registration card at all time, was imposed on women as well. And then many of them were placed into interment camps.
When the US entered WWII, the same thing happened. As with WWI, it was the custom to label individuals from countries we were at war with enemy aliens. This did apply to the Japanese, but it also did to Germans and Italians. The enemy alien classification also extended to individuals fleeing those countries, including refugees as well as Jews from Germany.
Along with Germans being interned, others were also placed into POW camps, as well as what amounted to military work camps. These individuals were not deemed appropriate for the military because of possible allegiance to the enemy, but the government wasn’t going to simply let them get out of service either.
The move to move these individuals to internment camps had nothing to do with race, but the fact that the countries they came from were now at war with the US. This is important to realize as the history of these internment camps are often misunderstood and because of that, since there is such a focus on race, those individuals of German and Italian descent are ignored. Their stories aren’t being told, and they are slowly vanishing.
As with Jews though, it wasn’t just children who were locked up. It was entire families who were locked up because of the fact the US was at war. It’s still a travesty, but it needs to be understood in context so that we can actually understand the history and the whys that led up to it. To simply say it was because of race is not historically accurate, and it ignores the many others who faced the same situations.
Illegal Immigrants
Now to the top image. These kids are illegal. That’s true. Their situations differ greatly. I won’t weigh in whether the situation is okay or not. I won’t even get into the question of whether or not race is the motivating factor here, because I don’t think it is as simple as that. And hopefully this post has shown that the pattern of racism that is trying to be portrayed here is simply misunderstood. I’m not saying racism isn’t involved with some people, but I can’t say that is true for all, or even the major force.
What I want to get into is the logical fallacy that this is all built on; a logical fallacy that instantly makes a productive conversation impossible to be had. Most clearly, it is trying to equate people who support locking up the kids in the top photos with, lets be honest here, Nazis. Or at the very least, Nazi sympathizers. There just is no way to really come back to a conversation from there.
As an aside, I have to even object to the word support. I know people who were in favor of detaining migrants who were coming to the southern border. Most also objected to separating the children from the parents, or at least were not comfortable with it. They may not have had another solution in mind, but to say they were in support really isn’t getting to the heart of the matter. Words are important.
Here is the crux of the fallacy though. Just because one supports, to whatever level, the locking up of some children, it doesn’t automatically mean they support any other act that has some general aspect that is similar. It would be similar to saying that if you like chocolate ice cream, then you must also like vanilla, strawberry and pickle flavor ice cream, because they are all ice cream.
Such arguments have to be watched as it alienates others, and prevents further discussion. It can also force a person to take up a position more firmly then they previously would have, simply because they feel as if they are being attacked.
People can approve of locking up of other individuals for a variety of reasons. In the four situations posed in the meme, the reasons for support were quite different, as were the historical environment that each one occurred. To pretend none of that exists does not serve any side, and only drives a wedge further.
