BURN ORDER
The opening episode of Rachel Maddow’s Burn Order introduces an unsuspecting retiree, secret documents, U.S. Navy ships, undercover agents, and a safecracker from San Quentin.
Maddow’s six part podcast series unfolds the story of Japanese internment during World War II, when more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were evicted from their homes and incarcerated because of their ancestry. The podcast centers around the story of the unlikely discovery of a document in the Washington, D.C., National Archives, one that was ordered to be burned and destroyed because of its potential to detail one of the “most disturbing chapters in American history.” Maddow uses this thread to unpack the political, economic, and racial forces that enabled the subjugation of an entire community and to examine how government power was misused.
Burn Order, which was released last December, was taken up at the 57th annual Manzanar Pilgrimage, held last Saturday. Bruce Embrey, chair of the Manzanar Committee, underscored the importance of the podcast for bringing this history to a national audience. He noted that Maddow’s platform has the reach to make sure these stories are told because it is one of the most widely followed podcasts in the country.
This year’s pilgrimage related the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans to present-day immigration policies, particularly the detention and deportation practices of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Embrey also pointed to the role of companies including CoreCivic and Palantir in shaping and profiting from predatory systems and drew a direct line between past injustice and current experiences.
In his written remarks, Embrey praised Burn Order for emphasizing these parallels with clarity and force, highlighting connections in “the role of the state in oppressing immigrants and communities of color, as well as the fragility of our democratic rights.” His message echoed the broader theme of the pilgrimage and of Burn Order that history’s lessons demand engagement in hard times.
Embrey closed with a call to action that drew from the legacy of the Redress Movement, the decades-long effort to secure justice for Japanese Americans incarcerated during the war. He emphasized that the Redress Movement can serve as a reminder that collective effort for a sustained period of time can lead to accountability. Now, he argued, is another moment where we must defend human rights and “come together … and fight like hell for our democracy.”
Embrey praised Burn Order as a “serious and valuable contribution to our efforts to save our democracy.” The series is available at ms.now/burnorder.
