Politics & Power Quote by George Takei

Takei’s “You know” is doing real work: it’s a conversational softener that disarms the listener before the line lands like a historical indictment. He’s not kicking down the door with outrage; he’s inviting you into a memory. That choice matters because the subject - American internment camps - is so morally blunt it can trigger defensive reflexes. By sounding casual, he makes the horror harder to dodge.

The phrase “two American internment camps” is a compressed punch of specificity. Not “relocation,” not “wartime measure,” not even “camps” on its own. “American” is the blade: this wasn’t an overseas atrocity or an abstract policy failure; it was domestic, state-sanctioned, and normalized enough to happen twice to one family. The number “two” adds a bureaucratic chill, hinting at transfers, paperwork, routine - the machinery of injustice operating smoothly.

Then Takei pivots: “at that time I was very young.” It’s not a plea for sympathy so much as a trap for the listener’s conscience. If he was “very young,” then the punishment was indiscriminate; whatever rationale people cling to (security, necessity) collapses under the image of a child being processed by the state. Subtextually, he’s also explaining his authority: he’s not borrowing history, he’s carrying it.

Context completes the intent. Takei has spent decades using celebrity as a delivery system for civic memory, especially when America flirts with repeating old scripts in new costumes: surveillance, scapegoating, detention. The line is less autobiography than warning, smuggled in as small talk.