Analysis: All Quiet On The Western Front

They were given tags for each person and luggage while being deported to camps. The novel mentions- “And their number was 70917. They no longer had a name. Just a number.” While in the camps Hiroko and the Tanaka family faced many problems. They found that their basic needs went unfulfilled. Many fell sick with measles, dysentery, and diarrhoea, cholera and so on owing to the extremely bad conditions of food, water, clothes and shelter in the camp. People died because of the lack of medical supplies and even the most basic like anaesthesia was used only for the most extreme of cases. In the camps, the morale of the people fell into an all time low. Their spirits were crushed and many of the older generation spiralled into depression. Some even

The older people had had their homes lost, land sold, possessions forced away. They had had respectable jobs stripped off from them just because they were of Japanese descent. And they were living in camps surrounded by barbed wires and soldiers like some kind of criminals. Dejection and bitterness was bound to run high. As for the youth, all their lives they had always pledged their allegiance to the American flag, they had celebrated the 4th of July with glee, and they had stood proudly as they sang their national anthem. They had felt one with the American soil and now the soil had failed to protect them. Considering all except their looks, they were American to the core. They started to have doubts and disappointments. Weren’t they American citizens too? Did it matter where their ancestors came from? Did their blood matter more than their individual choices? Was racism really cause enough to strip someone of their right to choose? Many of such thoughts may have passed through their minds but they were helpless. The government had spoken and so had the people. “Damn Japs” is what they were called. Later, however, when it came down to it, many of them enlisted in the army to fight for America. Many of the Japanese Americans must have had relatives and friends on the other side in Japan. It is quite heart-breaking

People from various ethnicities are moving and have moved, settled and become citizens of countries other than their ancestors’. Even today, there is discrimination based on looks and the parent country just as the Japanese Americans were discriminated against, although in different ways. Today, people struggle with identity problems and the problem of nationality. Like Oliver Goldsmith, there are few who claim to be citizens of not of any country, but citizens of the world. There are several who adopt and choose a country to be their own and call it their own. There are still many who consider nationality on the terms of mere physical attributes, cultures, languages, religion and so on. Today is a jumble of pandemonium. And most individuals do not even realize it. Nationality itself is a doubtful entity, for nations are only political boundaries divided by abstract lines that do not really exist. If stripped to its basest, the concept of nations is another variation of the Self and the Other all over again. Trump’s America holds high the banner of “Make America Great Again”. But for whom? The whites? Ban outsiders and Mexicans? It would do everybody good to remember that America originally belonged to the Native Red Indians and the 16th Century Puritan white “outsiders” came, conquered and took over the land. It is the concept of the Self and the Other over and over again; a vicious