Fred Koramatsu
In 1945 the US Supreme court affirmed the conviction of Fred Koramatsu for violating the Exclusion Order issued in 1942 which sent all citizens of Japanese ancestry to concentration camps. Fred, a life long resident of San Leandro, California, was simultaneously excluded from leaving the area; therefore, his only wrongdoing was his ethnicity of birth. Justice Hugo Black writing for the 6 justices who affirmed the conviction, rationalized: “Hardships are a part of war, and war is an aggregation of hardships.”
More than 50 years later, Koramatsu received the Presidential Medal for Freedom, for his courage and persistence in opposing injustice. In accepting the award Fred reminded the nation: “we should be vigilant to make sure this will never happen again.” At Holden we studied the brief Koramatsu filed with the Supreme Court in 2004 urging them to hear the appeals of the Guantanamo detainees challenging the legality of their incarceration. Among the many instances of the misuse of the rubric of “military necessity” to violate civil liberties, Koramatsu quoted a distinguished legal panel reviewing the government response to the Red Scare in the 1920s:
...and we may well wonder in view of the precedents now established whether constitutional government as heretofore maintained in this republic could survive another great war even victoriously waged.”
Questions we wrestled with included:
Why does the Koramatsu case matter to us as Christians?
Why does it matter to us as citizens in 2007?
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This past weekend (March 9-10), Augustana - Sioux Falls hosted the 19th Annual Nobel Peace Prize Forum (NPPF). In cooperation with the Norwegian Nobel Institute, five Midwestern colleges of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (Augustana, St. Olaf College, Augsburg College, Luther College, and Concordia (Moorhead, MN) College) sponsor the annual forum. The colleges, all founded by Norwegian immigrants, sponsor the forum to give recognition to Norway’s international peace efforts and to offer opportunities for Nobel Peace Prize laureates, diplomats, scholars, and the general public to share in dialogue on the dynamics of peacemaking and the underlying causes of conflict and war.
The NPPF theme for this year was Striving for Peace: The Impact of One and honored the 2005 Nobel Peace Laureate Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). During the forum, I had a Holden Village table set up at the "Peace Market" -- a resource area for peacemakers -- with print outs of the various posts to the "God, War, and the Law" blog and invited NPPF particpants to discuss, react, and write about the conversations happening in the village.
The following is an anonymous written reaction to the Presidential War Powers vs. Civil Liberties post:
The War Powers allow for a tyrant, like the one we currently have. The are outdated and should be abandoned.
The last quote is truer than Koramatsu knew: in my opinion we don't have a constitutional government...haven't since the creation of the all important Union at the end of the civil war.
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