I recently finished writing Our Lady of Kaifeng: Courtyard of the Happy Way. It is now undergoing the usual editing process, and it will not be available for sale until next year.
The issues in this novel are intertwined between personal and global concerns. But one question that we try to resolve is: what makes someplace a concentration camp? Is it it just that you're not allowed to leave? What other characteristics do concentration camps tend to have?
The ways of advertising are rather peculiar, and we sometimes get ironic results. This morning, as I was looking at my other blog, Notes from the Pens, an advertisement from the United States Mint appeared in the left sidebar, reading: "Celebrate the Life of FDR." They were trying to sell me gold coins.
It is true that I have been researching FDR. It is also true that I have been researching FDR in conjunction with the word "gold'. But a gold coin commemorating the life of FDR is the last thing I would want to buy. On April 5, 1933 by Executive Order 6102, Franklin Delano Roosevelt confiscated everyone's gold and made the possession of gold coins a criminal offense.
When you make possession of gold coins a criminal offense, then only criminals can possess gold coins. Enter Bonnie and Clyde. Although their crime spree predated the Executive Order by FDR and involved robbing small stores and gas stations, they are best remembered as bank robbers. That is because, whatever their own motives may have been, people were looking for heroes to save them from the tyrant in the White House.
In my upcoming novel, Our Lady of Kaifeng: Courtyard of the Happy Way, the protagonist, Marah Fallowfield, hero worships Bonnie and Clyde.
When Marah is interned in China in 1943 in a Japanese-run camp for enemy aliens, and she complains about not being allowed to buy food on the free market on pain of being shot, the Camp Commandant gently explains to her that President Roosevelt has instituted food rationing in America, too. She may have been stripped of her civil liberties by the Japanese incarceration, but were she to be repatriated in the United States, she might not have any more rights restored to her. That is because, during World War II, there was not a country on either side the conflict that was not in effect socialist and under totalitarian rule.
Look for Our Lady of Kaifeng: Courtyard of the Happy Way on Amazon by January of 2016.
It's a long, long way from the War of 1812 to World War II. Many people who are interested in the one have no desire to delve into the other. The United States of 1942 is such a very different place from the United States of 1812. The biggest difference is the existence of the war machine, fueled by the income tax. And in case you don't think that the purpose of the income tax is to engage in war, listen to Donald Duck. Acting as the mouthpiece of the Federal government, he explains this very clearly.
In this film, an ominous looking radio represents the government, and Donald Duck stands for the ordinary citizen. When Donald hears that his help is needed to defend the country, his first thought is that he should join the militia. using the weapons he has around the house.
But the government explains to him that it does not want his puny weapons. It is planning to build much better weapons using the military industrial complex, and all Donald needs to do is pay his taxes. And it will be easy, because now there is this new simplified form.
Then the government reminds Donald Duck of all the freedoms his tax dollars and the weapons they buy will protect, among these the freedom to worship, and freedom of speech, but notably absent are the right to bear arms or the right to be free from searches and seizures. Economic freedom is not mentioned at all. The government wants to save democracy, but it does not seem to remember that the United States is not a democracy, but rather a constitutional republic. The radio voice lists a new "freedom" unheard of by the Founding Fathers: "the freedom from fear and want."
On April 27, 1942, President Roosevelt said to Congress: "In this time of great national danger, when all excess income should go to win the war, no American citizen ought to have a net income, after he has paid his taxes, of more than $25,000 a year." (Bank, Stark and Thorndike 2008.97)
Is there any doubt that we had a communist in the White House? And why exactly did Walt Disney collaborate with him? The Secretary of the Treasury had wanted the movie short to feature a generic taxpayer. It was Disney who insisted that the average citizen would find it easier to identify with Donald Duck.
Despite the new spirit of Donald Duck, Congress did not quite go along with President Roosevelt's plan in 1942 to put at cap on income at twenty-five thousand, but it did set the tax rate on the highest bracket at 82%, which is pretty close.
A government-financed military and a standing army go hand in hand with the loss of the majority of the rights secured by the constitution and in the bill of rights. The question is: when did the average American citizen become Donald Duck?
REFERENCES
Bank, Steven A., Kirk J. Stark and Joseph J. Thorndike. 2008. War and Taxes. Washington D.C.:The Urban Institute Press.
Many people believe that the war powers of the Federal Government are necessary in order to safeguard free enterprise and that without a government monopoly on the waging of war, we could not have the freedom to deal with one another in arms' length transactions, freely entered into, between and among consenting parties. We are told that our freedom of speech and our freedom of commerce was bought and paid for at the sacrifice of human lives and that military expenditures at taxpayer expense are well worth the price, since they safeguard all our other freedoms. However, we have seen again and again that during an actual war, all those freedoms go by the wayside. During the Battle of New Orleans, for instance, Andrew Jackson put the entire city of New Orleans under house arrest, and under his martial law, which was not lifted even after the American victory, there was no freedom of speech and press, no right to property and no redress for wrongs committed by the government. People were summarily executed, Judges were jailed, and it was a crime to report the news in the papers. And this was not a fluke under Andrew Jackson.
Under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the entire country became an armed camp, where the price of goods was fixed centrally, and you could not buy as much of simple domestic items such as meat or butter as you could afford to buy. You could only have as much as the government thought you should have and no more.
If you'll notice the note at the bottom. you get the real idea behind the ration books. It was not done to make sure that the recipient had enough of everything, out of a humanitarian concern that people during wartime might go hungry. It was, on the contrary, done to prevent ordinary people form having too much to eat.
The first stamps in War Ration Book One will be used for the purchase of sugar. When this book was issued, the registrar asked you, or the person who applied for your book, how much sugar you owned on that date. If you had any sugar, you were allowed to keep it, but stamps representing this quantity were torn from your book (except for a small amount which you were allowed to keep without losing any stamps.) If your War Ration Book One was issued to you on application by a member of your family, the number of stamps torn from the books of the family was based on the amount of sugar owned by the family. and was divided as equally as possible among all these books.
In other words: "If you like your sugar, you can keep it, but we will see to it that in the future you never have any more than we think you should have."
Standing in Line for Food Ration Stamps -- New Orleans 1943
Source: Wikipedia
In 1943, a number of Americans, together with other Allied nationals, were interned in a camp in Shandong Province, China run by the Japanese. One of the greatest sources of suffering for these Americans was that though they did have money, they were not allowed to engage in free trade with the Chinese farmers just outside their camp, in order to buy ordinary foods such as farm fresh eggs. There was enough food available, and they had enough money to buy it, but the transactions were illegal, and hence engaged in on pain of death. For many of these Americans, it was their first experience of food rationing and of being forced into clandestine black market transactions in order to purchase enough to eat. But there was really nothing to complain about to the Japanese in terms of a violation of their civil rights on that account. President Roosevelt had already instituted national rationing the year before! It was just that as expatriates living in China. they were not home to see it.
According to the Wikipedia:
In June 1942 the Combined Food Board was set up to coordinate the worldwide supply of food to the Allies, with special attention to flows from the U.S. and Canada to Britain.
What would Jean Laffite say about that, if he knew? Did the Americans defeat the British at the Battle of New Orleans only to lose their right to buy and sell food freely so the British could have more American grown food to eat?
