On Crimes Against Humanity

The Trump Administration is engaged in them right now. What will you do in response?

Content warning: this post references torture, slavery, and crimes against humanity.

This piece first appeared on my Bluesky in the form of a thread. I have repurposed it here by request. Please share and subscribe if this work is meaningful to you.

I haven't ever really spoken about this to anyone, but when I was litigating the so-called "comfort women" case, I went to the National Archives to obtain and read the testimonies of women and girls who were held in sex slave camps by the Japanese military following their release.

Thereafter, my job was to digest those testimonies, draft them into a Complaint as well as a declaratory judgment motion, and do my best to provide the court with the facts (as well as the legal basis for relief). I have tried for many, many years to forget the things I read.

At the same time, my boss and other attorneys in my firm were litigating the Holocaust slave labor cases against Mercedes and others. As a part of all that work, I spent a lot of time on the Hill and also in Europe to try to drum up international support for our cases.

I have tried for the last 2.5 decades to blot out some of what I was exposed to doing that work-- the stories of the teenage sex slaves who were tortured (I'll spare you the details) for the amusement of soldiers, the brutality, the abuse, the girls & women (some of whom I met as elders), who were forced to service up to 40 soldiers A DAY, who were ranked by race after being kidnapped from their middle schools and town squares and shipped to foreign lands, and then called whores when they returned because the Japanese government said they were voluntary prostitutes.

And that's leaving aside the horrors of the Holocaust slave labor cases, which have been far more documented than what happened to the "comfort women," which to this day remains the largest unremedied crime against humanity against only women, in part because the Bush administration intervened in our case and claimed that because international relations were implicated in the case, it should be dismissed.

They won that argument, despite appeals all the way up to the Supreme Court.

There have been moments in the past 2.5 decades where I have had blowbacks, a kind of PTSD of sorts to the testimonies I read and what it meant to bear witness to horror-- the unspeakable things that human beings can do to each other in the name of power and empire.

Abu Ghraib, for instance, springs to mind.

And while I know that this nation has always been engaged in atrocities-- that it has never ended, just gone underground, that black box sites still exist to this day and that horrendous things are always done in our name-- THIS, RIGHT HERE?

A screengrab from Time Magazine’s article entitled “What the Venezuelans Deported to El Salvador Experienced: Exclusive photos of the arrival of Venezuelan detainees deported from the U.S.

THIS?

A screengrab from the Time Magazine article reading “The intake began with slaps. One young man sobbed when a guard pushed him to the floor. He said, “I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.” I believed him. But maybe it’s only because he didn’t look like what I had expected—he wasn’t a tattooed monster. The men were pulled from the buses so fast the guards couldn’t keep pace. Chained at their ankles and wrists, they stumbled and fell, some guards falling to the ground with them. With each fall came a kick, a slap, a shove. The guards grabbed necks and pushed bodies into the sides of the buses as they forced the detainees forward.”

THIS?

A screengrab from the Time Magazine article reading “Inside the intake room, a sea of trustees descended on the men with electric shavers, stripping heads of hair with haste. The guy who claimed to be a barber began to whimper, folding his hands in prayer as his hair fell. He was slapped. The man asked for his mother, then buried his face in his chained hands and cried as he was slapped again.”

THIS RIGHT HERE?

A screengrab from the Time Magazine article reading “After being shaved, the detainees were stripped naked. More of them began to whimper; the hard faces I saw on the plane had evaporated. It was like looking at men who passed through a time machine. In two hours, they aged 10 years. Their nice clothes were not gathered or catalogued but simply thrust into black garbage bags to be thrown out with their hair.”

AND THIS?

A screengrab from the Time Magazine article reading “They entered their cold cells, 80 men per cell, with steel planks for bunks, no mats, no sheets, no pillow. No television. No books. No talking. No phone calls and no visitors. For these Venezuelans, it was not just a prison they had arrived at. It was exile to another world, a place so cold and far from home they may as well have been sent into space, nameless and forgotten. Holding my camera, it was as if I watched them become ghosts.”

THIS IS BEING DONE BY OUR GOVERNMENT.

THESE ARE HUMAN BEINGS.

Do not look away from it. Do not forget it.

My PTSD is SO LOUD tonight, because I know what these men are experiencing right now is EVEN WORSE THAN THIS.

Someday, someone will take the testimonies of those who survive.

And the deep unremediable cellular shame of what we have done will be utterly uneraseable.

One thing I know, after all the work I've done, is that there is such a thing as hell on earth.

The question we all have to ask ourselves right now is how long we are willing to let this hell continue in our name.

I will save my deepest rage for those who bow and kneel before those who do this, to kiss their rings and promise fealty.

But I will tell you right now that there is no way this will continue if only we the people realize that there are more of us than them, that we have more power than them, and that EVERY HUMAN LIFE DESERVES DIGNITY.

So here is my plea tonight:

RISE UP. Find your voice. Do it together.

And the next time you want to say "we're fucked," I want you to think about the gay barber crying, head shaved, slapped and stripped naked in the name of this nation, and ask yourself if you're really too cynical to even try to fight.

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