A Curious Cage: Part Three
"MARCH 4TH, 1943. This will probably be one of the last letters I shall write to you before going into internment ...."
[Peggy Abkhazi's journal was an extension of the correspondence she kept prior to the Second World War with Roderick and Muriel MacKenzie of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, who were her best friends and became her benefactors after the war. Their initial letters had to be destroyed during the Japanese invasion of China in case heedless gossip about mutual friends resulted with inadvertently serving the enemy.]
".... [Or] rather to the Civil Assembly Centre, to give the correct and official designation. You'll remember that the Japanese adore giving fancy names to things, and they have the naive belief that if you call a thing by some other name, the nature of the thing itself is thereby changed."
Peggy Abkhazi,
A Curious Cage: Life in a Japanese Internment Camp, 1943 - 1945,
ed. S. W. Jackman with an afterword by Katherine Gordon:
Page 51; © 1981, Sono Nis Press, Victoria.
Peggy's criticisms of this Orwellian Truth-Speak are a bit rich ...