MS Now’s Rachel Maddow is discussing the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II in her new podcast, “Rachel Maddow Presents: Burn Order.”
According to the podcast’s website, this six-part series reveals how an executive order authorizing the roundup of innocent Americans came to be – and a bombshell discovery in the unlikeliest of places that would ultimately expose it all.
Following are descriptions of the episodes:
Episode 1: Safecracker. The bombshell discovery of a report that U.S. government officials had ordered burned has the potential to expose the truth about one of the most radical policy decisions in all of American history. A policy that one young naval intelligence officer desperately tried to warn his superiors was unwarranted and unnecessary.
Episode 2: The Jitters. In the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack, the man in charge of defending the American West Coast has a serious case of the jitters … and a bright, young aide who is busy drawing up plans to target a racial group in America en masse. With the clock running out, lawyers inside the Justice Department mount a furious effort to stop the policy from going into effect.
Episode 3: One Drop. The U.S. military is deployed on the streets of America, tasked with carrying out the mass round-up of innocent immigrants and American citizens labeled by the government as the “enemy” within. Tens of thousands of American families are forced to live in hastily constructed prison camps — enduring inhumane conditions — while government officials scramble to figure out what to do with them all.
Episode 4: “Like an Ordinary American.” A principled politician puts his career on the line to stand up against the authoritarian actions of an emboldened federal government. While Americans largely sit by and watch their fellow Americans rounded up and stripped of their rights, a small group of brave resisters sets out to challenge the aggressive actions of the U.S. government and bring an end to them for good.
Episode 5: Sheep and Goats. As the cases of the four Japanese Americans challenging the U.S. government’s mass incarceration policy arrive at the Supreme Court, a crisis suddenly erupts inside the Justice Department and the War Department as the true motivations behind the policy are now at risk of being revealed. A fierce battle is waged inside the government over whether to disclose the information to the courts, or cover it up.
Episode 6: A Reckoning. An incarceree-turned-researcher and a federal inmate-turned-Harvard-educated lawyer comb through the archives and begin to peel back all of the layers of the government’s program to mass- incarcerate Japanese Americans. With their startling findings in hand, they and the Japanese American community set out to force the U.S. government to directly confront its actions.
Maddow hosted a live conversation with special guests, centered around the themes from the podcast, on Dec. 14 at the Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles. The event was sold out but will be broadcast on Monday, Dec. 29, on Maddow’s MS Now program.
Satsuki Ina, Lorraine Bannai and Frank Abe came to Los Angeles to appear with Rachel Maddow at the Orpheum Theater.
The special guests were:
• Satsuki Ina, author of “The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment and Protest”; producer of the documentaries “Children of the Camps” and “From a Silk Cocoon”; co-founder of Tsuru for Solidarity.
• Lorraine Bannai, director of the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality and professor of lawyering skills at Seattle University School of Law; member of the legal team that successfully challenged Korematsu’s wartime conviction for refusing to comply with orders that resulted in the mass removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast.
• Frank Abe, lead author of “We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration”; co-editor of “The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration”; co-editor of “John Okada: The Life and Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy”; writer of the stage version of “No-No Boy”; producer/director of the documentary “Conscience and the Constitution.”
For more information, go to: www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-presents-burn-order