The Four Color Media Monitor

Star Trek veteran George Takei was interviewed by the Japan Times about a new manga book he's scripted, "They Called Us Enemy" which is an illustrated take on his autobiographies about his early life living in internment camps for Japanese in the USA during WW2, but it would seem he's produced this item as a way of attacking Trump's efforts to defend America against jihadists and other violent infiltrators:

Though Takei has for decades shared his experience of imprisonment by the U.S. government, including in his 1994 autobiography “To the Stars,” his graphic memoir released in July this year, “They Called Us Enemy,” aims to appeal to “the young people of today” who will “grow up to be the voters of tomorrow.”

“The reason I chose the manga style of telling this story is because when I was a kid, I loved comic books. At that age you are absorbing all that information … and it remains with you as you grow up,” he says. “By Americans knowing this chapter of American history, we can hopefully develop a generation that will fiercely oppose something like what’s happening on our southern border.”

Takei, a lifelong Democrat, is an outspoken critic of U.S. President Donald Trump on social media on matters such as the treatment of migrants and asylum-seekers who arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border.

“When Trump signed his executive order, which was the Muslim travel ban, tens of thousands of Americans rushed to airports all across the land to protest. … The reaction of the country, to me, was exhilarating — a dramatic difference from when we were incarcerated,” he says. “It took 70 years for that progress to be demonstrated. But we are making progress.”

Many Japanese Americans have drawn parallels between the Trump administration’s executive orders that target Muslims and immigrants and the classification of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans living in the United States during World War II as “enemy aliens.” Hundreds have organized protests across the country, including outside a migrant family detention center in Texas.

If any Japanese descendants in America today are siding with the ideologically-based - which is not the same as race - they're doing a terrible disfavor to themselves and those ancestors who abhorred Japanese fascism. Basically, they're siding with another kind of fascism that would be more obvious to them if they actually read the Koran. Does Takei realize that makes him little better than the Japanese fascists themselves? Or that invasions by evil can take on many forms? It's regrettable he just has to be so political, forcing people like myself who watched Star Trek years before to take his role as Sulu with a grain of salt. His ignorance of the capability of illegal immigrants to commit violent crimes is another letdown.

Because Takei had been incarcerated as a young boy, many of his childhood memories are incomplete or “deceptive” due to his lack of understanding of why they were forced to live behind barbed wire halfway across the country, he explains in “They Called Us Enemy.”

“Roosevelt proved himself to be a fallible human being. He made a dreadful, grave mistake,” says Takei. “But when a president makes a mistake, they are great mistakes. And we, Americans of Japanese ancestry, were the victims of that.”

I'll say his memories are incomplete, just as his approach is deceptive. Is he aware Roosevelt, as I'd noted before, was a Democrat, and that even Germans and Italians deemed security risks in the US were also sent to internment camps? Takei's willingness to conceal such information makes for quite a mistake too - failure to acknowledge a liberal can make mistakes. For some reason, FDR's representing the Democrats doesn't seem to factor in here, nor does his own racism/antisemitism, which makes me wonder what Takei's really getting at.

With his belief that “people can do great things,” Takei’s father instilled in him a lifelong passion for political activism.

Takei, who is openly gay, has publicly advocated for the rights of LGBTQ individuals, African Americans and other social minorities and was one of the earliest supporters of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles.

Personally, I think it's a shame Takei's got to be so political, though what's really infuriarating is whether he committed sex offenses, which he was once accused of over a year ago. Because of this, we may now have to really separate artist from art, and that's not easy when it comes to live action movies and TV (you could argue the same about actor Stephen Collins, who was exposed as a child molestor in 2014, since he had a notable role in the first major Star Trek movie 40 years ago).

There's also suggestions Takei was inconsistent with previous biographies when he crafted this new manga. One of the commentors on the paper's site said:

In George Takei's 1994 autobiography "I Touch the Stars" he describes how his father would borrow a car and take his family out of the Rohwe Internment Camp for picnic's in the Arkansas countryside. I strongly suspect that George Takei did not include this story in "They Called Us Enemy".

And also:

Paragraph 12 :"In this respect 'my father was a very unusual Japanese American'". Wrong! George Takei's father was not Japanese American. In paragraph 11 it clearly states that George Takei's father was born in Japan.

The paper themselves state his father originally came from Yamanashi. It does sound like there may be some discrepancies in this new manga, for propaganda purposes, which apparently trump reality and facts. One more commentor said:

Everyone knows about the internment of Japanese-Americans and Japanese-Canadians during WWII, and everyone knows it was a terrible violation of human rights. We learn about it in high school history class, so it's no secret. There's no denial or cover-up. Governments have admitted the impropriety of it, apologies have been made, and compensation to survivors and their descendants has been paid. So why is George Takei still riding this horse? It's a tired old horse. But I could be wrong.

I figure it has what to do with Trump Derangement Syndrome. To the point where Takei's not willing to ponder whether a Democrat can be absolutely terrible, as FDR was towards the Japanese residents. And he wants this manga to serve as election influencing propaganda? Sigh. It just shows how, if US-European comics can serve bad propaganda goals, so can manga.

Labels: Europe and Asia, islam and jihad, manga and anime, misogyny and racism, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, politics, terrorism, violence