The Power of One

A couple of weekends ago I visited Jessica (my girlfriend, for that one or two of you still wondering) and we watched one of her favorite movies, The Power of One. It covered a fairly lengthy period of time from the 30s beyond and told the story, based on a true story, of P.K., a boxer cum teacher who taught the Zunis English.
More important, at a time when the black people of Africa were not just treated as sub-human, they were thought of that way, P.K. treated them as *gasp* people. People worth knowing. People worth interacting with. Equals.
The movie made an argument to expand this idea, that we should all treat all other people as equals, worthy of our respect and interaction as co-human beings...not to see them as "the other", but to see them as individuals, capable of being good, bad, or indifferent...capable of great achievements and miserable failures...capable of...well, you get the point.
There was another important, sad, and, I believe, overlooked by historians lesson to take from the movie. That has to do with concentration camps and the treatment of people therein.
Of course, the famous ones are the German ones. Their names are a roll-call of injustice, a litany of indescribable horrors, in some respects a mythology akin to the threat of Vikings coming to take the misbehaving children...something grounded in fact, in horrible, frighteningly true and tragic fact, but still perhaps expanded even beyond the horrific realities as the effects of the tale spread.
The lesser known because they are hidden by collective guilt names include the concentration camps in the U.S. for Japanese descendants during that same war.
Overlooked are the ones set up in Africa by the British, for instance...or in Asia by the French and British and Japanese and Koreans and...well, the list goes on.
Or move further back in our own history for Native Americans in concentration camp. The numbers of them murdered...oh, I am sorry, that is not pc...the numbers of them who died in the prison camps is staggering...so staggering it has been called a deliberate though unsuccessful attempt at genocide by many historians.
But since it was done by us, by the "good guys" it is swept under the pages of history, covered by the glory of Manifest Destiny and Progress and Social Darwinism, the holy trinity that justifies any atrocity, any transgression of human rights, any thought that maybe, just maybe, this country is not so pure as to be tramping around telling others how to live.
Oh, we have our heroes at times. Men of vision like Woodrow Wilson, the man who put forth his 14 Points, campaigned himself literally to death seeking their passage, men who stood for equal rights....but were outnegotiated and found that "self-determination" meant nothing if you were from India or China or Africa or Egypt or Syria or...well, basically if you were not a white European male, then self-determination meant the British, French, Italians, and, to a lesser extent, the U.S. would tell you what you believed and how you wanted to be governed.
Oh, and those who rejected it? Can you say Concentration Camp? Because they learned to real fast.
Check your chronology. This was before WWII. I wonder where Hitler got his ideas? I doubt it was in the concentration camp he was in. Nor did the mass murder of the Armenians for the crime of being Armenians escape his notice. As he said, if people forgot the Armenians, they would forget the Jews.
But I have wandered afield as I so often do.
Concentration camps were emblamatic of all that was wrong with societies in the teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and so forth. The ideas that would let people stand idly by while these existed were not the emblem...they were the problem. Read my next post, then reread this one, and see if any of the ideas sound familiar.