Not long after the Japanese surprise attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, voices in the United States began calling for the removal and imprisonment of all people on the West Coast of all people having Japanese lineage. Overall, the justification given for this action was that feeling a stronger loyalty to the Japanese Empire than to the United States, Japanese-Americans presented an unacceptable threat to American security.

The legacy of the Japanese internment camps has never been fully settled in the United States, particularly here on the West Coast. You can still find arguments for and against them, and several were located here in Washington state. Officially the U.S. government issued a formal apology and reparations to interned Japanese-Americans in 1988, but the controversy has not ended. Trivia: George Takei, who played Lt. Hikaru Sulu on Star Trek and has more recently been known as a meme-generating machine, grew up in an internment camp and became interested in acting by watching the people who live-translated English-language films into Japanese during camp film screenings.

You can find a brief history of the internment here (http://www.pbs.org/childofcamp/history/). However, what I would like you to focus on is this Washington Post op-ed from February 12, 1942 (Fifth Column.pdf in the attach), in which Walter Lippmann argues for the necessity of interning Japanese-Americans (Japan had launched the unprovoked and devastating attack at Pearl Harbor not long before on December 7, 1941). In it, he describes Japanese-Americans as a fifth column, which is a term for a group that aids an attacking force by undermining the defending country or territory from within. 

Your task, as with previous materials, is to unpack the geopolitical narratives that make up Lippmann's argument. How does he portray the nature of the risk in a spatial sense? How does he justify containing this risk by preemptively imprisoning people who have committed no crime? To be successful here you will have to look past the surface of some of his arguments and put yourself in the place of a contemporary reader anxious about the state of American security in the wake of Pearl Harbor, looking for a sense of security.

As always, the strongest papers will not comment on the morality or necessity of internment, but try to pull out the geopolitical images, discourses, and narratives that drive the argument for internment. You are also best-served focusing on spatial metaphors and imagery. 

If you'd like additional material, here is a link (https://www.viki.com/videos/214042v-why-we-fight-war-comes-to-america?locale=en) to an episode from the 1942 American propaganda film Why We Fight - part of which we watched earlier in the course - that focuses on the period running up to the Pearl Harbor attack (most relevant material begins around 42:00); here is a 1942 cartoon (dr. seuss.gif in the attach) by Theodore Seuss Giesel, better known as Dr. Seuss, that appeared on your midterm exam.