Censored Photographs of FDR’s Japanese Concentration Camps
anchoreditions.com
anchoreditions.com
Great photography, though.
No, it's real, just not as real as we like to think. Between "imprison people of Japanese ancestry for the rest of the war, then free them" and "imprison people of Jewish ancestry, then kill them", there is a real moral difference. They are both wrong, but they are not equal.
But not to everyone, I'll agree.
(I'm not trying to discredit or diminish the Armenian genocide here, mind you, but rather point out we still have someone who committed genocide by the same terms on American money.)
Turkey, on the other hand, still tries to pretend that the Armenian Genocide did not happen, even prosecuting people who say it did.
We are by no means perfect, but I think nations which are able to acknowledge and learn from the mistakes of their past have a leg up on those that try to pretend everything was great.
The United States government has never acknowledged Native American genocide either.
..and we're still invading their lands and violating treaties with them.
Fact is, there was no future in which they were going to keep their nice things and in which we would be able to get where we are today.
The Nazi's downfall wasn't the genocide against Jews and other "undesirables", for all that that became the basis of punishment for some ex-regime figures after the Nazis were defeated.
Of course, but Germany belongs to the "West", too. I think GP alluded to e.g. human rights in China.
You might like to think so, but you'd be VERY VERY wrong. This year Trump surrogates began justifying their proposal to create a muslim registry by saying that the Japanese Internment gave precedence for their desired actions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: assuming the factual part of your comment is true, it isn't really off topic in an already-highly-politicized thread. I was reacting to what seemed like an injection of partisan politics, but there seems to be a reasonable connection between the two subjects, so we've put this back. The bit about making comments more civil when topics are divisive is still important, so please be mindful of that.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/us/politics/japanese-inter...
Is that a good enough source?
I mean, yes, I agree that we're seeing some extremely worrying signaling from the coming US administration, but it's not actually happening right now... and it would hopefully be struck down by (at least) the Supreme Court. Notwithstanding that, it's extremely worrying that these things are actually popular ideas... which I suppose speaks towards "moral superiority", so point taken.
Well, I suppose you are missing all what happened after September 11 2001, including Guantanamo bay detention camp (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp).
I find it mildly interesting that you both should mention the two somewhat incestuous partners, the US and the UK. (I don't live in either, so I may be somewhat insulated from these things and it's pretty easy to forget this stuff when it's not part of your daily life.)
I'm not going to argue that the Guantanamo situation is in any way a good thing, but at least it's not affecting a billion+ people every day. Obviously it's affecting several thousand people (and their relatives) way worse (individually) than the billion+ people are being affected in China.
Regarding the UK: Yes, it's terrible, but then again the UK population hasn't really experienced any real strife wrt. the powers wielded by its state... yet. That is, the populace at large probably haven't had any hands-on experience of just how badly things can go (Stasi, FSB, etc.). I truly hope it doesn't come to a 1984-type situation in the UK. At least it doesn't exist right now (cf. China). (EDIT: I would say that, post-Snowden, anyone who didn't believe that every nation on earth was spying on their own citizens in whatever way they could was probably being naive... but there are a great deal of people who have no idea who Snowden is.)
Anyway... these are definitely interesting times.
Instead, please post civilly and substantively, and make your comments more civil and substantive on divisive topics, not less. That's the only way we can stave off a downward spiral in this place.
Edit: Actually, since there's evidence that you've violated the rules of this site many times previously, I'm banning your account until we get some indication that you'll stop doing this.
Slowly, real progress has been made, but unevenly distributed, and often with great leaps backwards.
I will leave out my opinion about whether current events reflect a time of progress or one of those great backward leaps.
When it's cited as a precedent to justify a policy proposal, it's pretty clear that lesson isn't being taught effectively, if it's being taught.
Millions of Ukrainians (~10%) died in the artificial famine of 1933, just to enforce compliance with the reforms. Chechens were interned in 1944, and estimated 25-30% of them (or 150-200 thousand people) died in exile. This list goes on and on in USSR alone, who were supposedly good guys and allies.
To all those millions of people, being locked on a farm with dull food and nothing to do and shortages of hot water, would be a nice vacation.
Takes special kind of mental gymnastics to see these cases as equivalent.
Others include:
+ Control of the economy, price controls, rationing, shortages
+ Suspension of most (all?) of the Bill of Rights
+ Wholesale slaughter of civilian populations abroad (so much for "all men are created equal ... with unalienable rights")
But perhaps the most nefarious is the idea that "we all pulled together and sacrificed to defeat the enemy." The government schools teach the children the greatness of our national effort, priming them to accept the destruction of liberty again when the next war comes. The state forever uses a victory in war to foster national pride and patriotism, as if the society made those choices to sacrifice willingly.
Speak out against the war? Prison. Fail to comply with economic controls? Prison. Don't want to fight after being drafted? Execution. Have friends who just happen to belong to the enemy country? You're a spy.
And then the icing on the cake is when the government steals the money to pay for the war through inflation and currency devaluation through the subsequent years.
I'm not saying what Japan did was in any way noble, but it was certainly far from unexpected. The US administration knew the war in Europe was a serious problem if left unchecked, that Britain and its allies would never prevail, but there was considerable resistance to the war.
The attack on Pearl Harbor instantly catalyzed support.
This doesn't even touch on the fact that many American companies were looking at Germany as an important customer, a country spending lavishly to build up its capability, at a time when American companies were struggling.
Politics are complicated. It's rare that any of those involved in a conflict are entirely innocent.
Are you kidding me? So honor was their reason to start a war that eventually caused millions to die?
Edit: wow I'm surprised by the downvotes. Are you (who ever you are) suggesting you do agree with starting wars? I'd be very interested to hear why you disagree with me.
It disgusts me that the world has sat by during recent genocides.
I should add that I'm against starting wars but not against retaliating, even ending the war, if and when required.
Of course, such techniques would have been a tough sell in 2003. (And rightfully so.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-Ba'athification
The argument goes that a more measured policy could still have eliminated most of the bad actors while maintaining a higher level of governance and services.
In Iraq the entire government including the police were basically disbanded without warning which lead to immediate chaos.
Plus the American involvement wasn't out of humanitarian reasons either. They only joined the war after getting attacked by Japan themselves. Which, which since I support retaliatory action if another party has already initiated war, would mean the US followed my stance on war in that regard.
Yes, war causes suffering. It can also prevent suffering. This would only be contradictory if I were for some reason arguing that all war is good, which I most certainly am not.
I would argue that the US did join the war partly out of humanitarian reasons, since the war was precipitated by economic sanctions that were enacted due to Japan's actions in China. But ultimately my argument has nothing to do with their reasons.
Because you are using the sorrow of war to justify the means of war. It's a cyclic argument with each new participant upping the stakes; each time bringing about more suffering.
In the case of the America vs Japan conflict during WW2, America's "humanitarianism" lead to two nuclear bomb being dropped causing around two hundred thousands casualties - many of who suffered long deaths from radiation exposure. Yes it shortened the war, but at what cost? We'll never know which hypothetical scenario would have saved the most lives but it's fair to say that America's involvement did contribute to large scale suffering too.
I have a feeling we might have to agree to disagree on those points though because like most philosophical debates, it's really a question of opinion and perspective rather than something that can be empirically proven. That's not to say I haven't appreciated reading your views on this topic though :)
After Pearl Harbor everything fell into place. Germany and Japan could be tackled not from a diplomatic perspective, or via proxies, but directly.
Also remember that Japan had already conquered large parts of China and trounced Russia militarily, so they were feeling confident they'd prevail in any conflict with the US. At the time the US was in the middle of a poor economic period and its Pacific navy was in sad shape, many warships were simply relics from WWI. It wasn't exactly threatening.
What Japan didn't realize was that the US would not be bullied, and instead would bite back a lot harder than anticipated.
It's a lot like how America assumed Iraq would be a cake-walk, or Afghanistan could be resolved in a weekend.
Let's not forget the context of their imperial ambitions - in the first half of the twentieth century, most of the world was still ruled by empires.
It wasn't that Japan wasn't up to no good, because they were, absolutely destroying large swaths of Asia and committing atrocities so horrifying even German observers were concerned, but that the US leadership needed Japan to attack to get on board versus Germany.
Is that what it's called when we objected to Japan's war of conquest against China? Antagonism? Fine, let it be so. Japan brought doom on themselves.
Japan did bring doom on themselves, but America kept poking the tiger with a stick until America itself got attacked, which was the goal.
The saddest thing about WWII is that the people who started the war, by funding it, were never brought up on charges at Nuremberg. Prescott Bush and Standard Oil made millions off selling fuel to both sides. IBM made the punch-card based catalogue service for the Nazis. Henry Ford's company made tank treads for both allied and Nazi tanks and even built the rails leading to Auschwitz.
The reality is that there were entire industries that actively did everything they could to get that war going, in order to profit from it. People look at Hitler and forget that wars need to be funded.
I don't think Japanese imperialism can really be defended.
Of course, Japanese imperialism was very much inspired by European imperialism in… well, everything. But that doesn't make it right either, merely just as bad.
This makes it sound as if the US only acted to end competition against another Empire. Japan invaded numerous territories for access to resources and committed horrible atrocities while doing so.
The attack on Pearl Harbour may have been preemptive but the only reason for Japan to fear attack from others was due to actions of the Japanese.
Well, that might well have been the case. While World War Ⅱ did put a stop to some horrible things, I don't know if that was because they were horrible or merely because their perpetrators were a threat. I suspect the latter.
Japanese conduct during the 30s was atrocious. They tried playing by the moral code in earlier wars, the US and other Western powers repeatedly reneged on deals and forced Japan to return any possessions.
Don't act like the world would have been A- ok if we had just been ok selling gas to power genocides.
So I don't know if you count that as "little done to stop them". That was what we could do, short of war, and even that helped precipitate war.
The difference is these all took place before the war started. We sell weapons to countries all the time. That doesn't mean we wouldn't stop them if they began committing atrocities that we currently have no knowledge of.
They did in my public school.
> People look at Hitler and forget that wars need to be funded.
Your argument is confused. You point to profiteers (who were funded by the war, not funding the war), but then follow with this.
And do you know why we did that? Was that mentioned? Did they talk about Japan's war of conquest in China or the Rape of Nanking, among a thousand other atrocities?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Events_leading_to_the_attack_o...
Tensions between Japan and the prominent Western countries (the United States, France, Britain and the Netherlands) increased significantly during the increasingly militaristic early rule of Emperor Hirohito ... as part of Japan's alleged "divine right" to unify Asia under Hirohito's rule.[1]
During the 1930s, Japan's increasingly expansionist policies brought it into renewed conflict with its neighbors, Russia and China... In March 1933, Japan withdrew from the League of Nations in response to international condemnation of its conquest of Manchuria and subsequent establishment of the Manchukuo puppet government.[2] On January 15, 1936, Japan withdrew from the Second London Naval Disarmament Conference because the United States and Great Britain refused to grant the Japanese Navy parity with theirs.[3] A second war between Japan and China began with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in July 1937.
Japan's 1937 attack on China was condemned by the U.S. and several members of the League of Nations including Britain, France, Australia and the Netherlands. Japanese atrocities during the conflict, such as the notorious Nanking Massacre.... The U.S., Britain, France and the Netherlands each possessed colonies in East and Southeast Asia. Japan's new military power and willingness to use it threatened these Western economic and territorial interests in Asia.
"At each session of Congress the question of further naval appropriations comes up. The swivel-chair admirals of Washington (and there are always a lot of them) are very adroit lobbyists. And they are smart. They don't shout that "We need a lot of battleships to war on this nation or that nation." Oh no. First of all, they let it be known that America is menaced by a great naval power. Almost any day, these admirals will tell you, the great fleet of this supposed enemy will strike suddenly and annihilate 125,000,000 people. Just like that. Then they begin to cry for a larger navy. For what? To fight the enemy? Oh my, no. Oh, no. For defense purposes only.
Then, incidentally, they announce maneuvers in the Pacific. For defense. Uh, huh.
The Pacific is a great big ocean. We have a tremendous coastline on the Pacific. Will the maneuvers be off the coast, two or three hundred miles? Oh, no. The maneuvers will be two thousand, yes, perhaps even thirty-five hundred miles, off the coast.
The Japanese, a proud people, of course will be pleased beyond expression to see the united States fleet so close to Nippon's shores. Even as pleased as would be the residents of California were they to dimly discern through the morning mist, the Japanese fleet playing at war games off Los Angeles. "
Does any of it excuse the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor?
I think the answer is no, despite my great respect for General Butler.
Many of the things he suggest merely re-align incentives. So if the Senators and Corporate CEOs really think that Japan is a menace to be dealt with, then they should be putting their money where their mouth is, rather than having the moral hazard of benefiting selfishly from unnecessary wars.
>US Ambassador Grew in Japan kept Roosevelt fully advised of her precarious economic situation and urgent need for imports. Chief of Naval Operations (NCO) Stark had warned the president of the danger of imposing an oil embargo on Japan. Stark had "made it known to the State Department in no uncertain terms that in my opinion if Japan's oil were shut off, she would go to war." He did not mean "necessarily with us, but … if her economic life had been choked and throttled by inability to get oil, she would go somewhere and take it … and if I were a Jap, I would" do the same.[1]
You can google many papers about this.
Insane reasoning.
Case in point: Ukrainian Holodomor (genocide by famine) http://www.rferl.org/a/holodomor-ukraine/25174454.html
Edit: also, Chechen and Krimean Tatar deportations, and many many others
(OT question: sarcastic is to sarcasm as sardonic is to ____?)
These were second and third generation "immigrants" living their normal, everyday American lives, torn away from their homes, communities, jobs, schools, churches, friends, and families. The crime isn't in the living conditions at the internment camps, the real horror is that people could be sent to them just for having a great-grandparent that came from Japan to the United States. The real crime is that hardly seventy years later, this internment is largely forgotten, the details are glossed over, and the American public (of which I am, by and large, proud to be a member of) have deluded themselves into thinking it's just another another unfortunate chapter in human history "that wouldn't happen again today" or that "desperate times called for desperate measures" and leave it at that.
https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/massacre-at-featherston/
http://i.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/65751556/pow-deaths-...
I can imagine a section in a future history textbook that went something like this:
"A distinctive feature of the Second World War was the widespread use of 'concentration camps'. These camps allowed belligerents to separate and control groups (usually racially defined) that were considered potentially subversive. In many cases, those interned were put to forced labor in support of the war effort, but in others they were simply kept under military control.
Conditions in these camps were generally poor, but they varied greatly both between and within countries. The Japanese in American concentration camps were subject to undernourishment and forced labor, but relatively few were killed. Things were worse in the Soviet Union, where even the process of transportation to the camps was deadly to large numbers of Volga Germans. The most infamous camps were in German-controlled territory, where millions of Jews and other undesirables were systematically executed, in an event later known as 'the Holocaust'."
You make it sound like they were both more or less the same, just some people were killed in the German ones.
The goal of the German camps was to torture and kill, the American camps was to segregate.
The "camps" part is an unimportant detail - yet you write as if it's the main thing.
The Nazi camps were started for the same reason as the American camps: to contain and control a population believed to be subversive. They were indeed later used as part of an organized genocide, which is very important and makes them far more horrifying on a moral/human level, but it's willful blindness to ignore the deep similarities between a policy of containing and suppressing a racial group, and a policy of containing, suppressing, and exterminating a racial group.
For example if you check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment#History_of_internme...
you will find examples going back more than 300 years, and I'm sure a historian can find even earlier examples.
Internment camps of various kinds happen by EVERY war, not just this one.
> it's willful blindness to ignore the deep similarities between a policy of containing and suppressing a racial group, and a policy of containing, suppressing, and exterminating a racial group.
No, it's willful blindness to think this was unique in any way to WW2. "Camps" is NOT the important or interesting thing about that war, it is an almost trivial detail.
Your framing it that way makes it as if it was something specially important. But in actuality it is a minor footnote compared to what they DID in those camps.
It's like saying "An important note about the 21st century is that humans lived in houses. People in both apartments and individual homes had wide access to cellphones."
You are focusing on the wrong thing.
THAT is disturbing "logic".
"There are some people who think you have to hate them in order to shoot them. I don’t think you do. It’s just business."
"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them. Actually it’s quite fun to fight them, you know. It’s a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot some people."
"The first time you blow someone away is not an insignificant event. That said, there are some assholes in the world that just need to be shot."
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/gen-james-mad-dog-mattis-7-memor...
If so, lets not forget Mattis's approach to things:
Talks to the enemy diplomatically: "I come in peace. I didn't bring artillery. But I'm pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I'll kill you all"
Promotes thinking rather than force from his subordinates: "You are part of the world's most feared and trusted force. Engage your brain before you engage your weapon."
Works well with others: "I don't get intelligence off a satellite. Iraqis tell me who the enemy is."
Rest were just tough talk.
Going to war should not be based on hate. It should be as rational process as possible.
"We are facing another 'ism,' just like we faced Nazism, and fascism, and imperialism and communism," Flynn said. "This is Islamism, it is a vicious cancer inside the body of 1.7 billion people on this planet and it has to be excised." - http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/22/politics/kfile-michael-flynn-a... (apologies for the CNN link, but it's just for the quote).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korematsu_v._United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/442nd_Infantry_Regiment_(Unite...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Inouye#Medal_of_Honor_c...
But of course, for some reason, German Americans weren't interned...
As an aside, WWI conscientious objectors were sent to federal prisons. There they were starved, put into solitary, or physically abused, resulting in some ending up dead. WWII COs were instead sent to camps to do things like farm, fight forest fires, build equipment, etc. in place of service.
I just finished reading The Girls of Atomic City[1] and its a really conflicting story because (totally discounting the moral implications of the atomic bomb) on the one hand it is an amazing story of ingenuity and hard work and everyone coming together with a common purpose (even if most people did not know what that purpose was), but then you find out about how the black workers were treated compared to the white workers and how they weren't even able to serve their country as equals.
If you have a selective memory or perception you can look back and be proud of a lot in our history but I think you have to fully appreciate our highs and lows to really know what kind of country we have.
No, they hate us for our overly zealous anti-communism that drove us to forcefully prop up dictatorships/extremist groups (Panama, Cuba, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, al Qaeda, etc.), and then vacate when things went sour.
Time and time, and time again we did this in the past 60 years, and it's just now coming back to bite us.
One of the few things I look forward to in a Trump administration is isolationism, but his cabinet is both extremely anti-communist and anti-Muslim, so it looks like it's just going to be Carter/Nixon/Truman bullshit all over again.
I thought this contrast between death of Castro and Saudi Arabian king was an insightful example earlier this week: https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/5h2jf7...
What, exactly, counts as "overly zealous" in that context?
Likewise, a great number of deaths at the hand of Communist leaders were due to utter incompetence and mismanagement, such as in China's Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward.
My rule of thumb is that it's basically a bad thing when somebody dies who shouldn't have (if people were fair and compassionate).
OK. Then it's a worse thing when more people die who shouldn't have, right?
During the food cost crisis that preceded the Arab Spring, I and everyone around me in comfortable America ate quite well. If we as a species cared for every human life, such suffering would have been avoided.
"And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’" -Matthew, 25:40
Thanks.
You're welcome.
Please don't treat divisive, inflammatory topics as mere ammunition for trivial internet arguments. That's a common pattern, and it makes discussion both uncivil and unsubstantive.
18 million would be on the high end for the estimated indigenous population of pre-Columbian North America. 90% of those were wiped out by imported diseases before the United States even existed. It would be quite a trick to murder 100 million people based on a starting population of only 1.8 million (not all of whom, or even most of whom, were killed, by any means).
It is not reasonable to blame the United States for things that happened before it existed.
Also, it is pretty much accepted nowadays that killing off indigenous people is a Bad Thing. Unfortunately, the same is not true of communism. There are still plenty of people who think it's a wonderful idea.
2) By the same simplistic reasoning, Americans killed 20-30 million [1] just by themselves. I'm not sure what the totals would look like after adding in the British, French, Dutch, etc. empires.
3) I'm almost certain that that 100 million figure includes revolutions caused as a direct result of imperial powers meddling in the affairs of local populations. E.g. Cambodia [2]. That's the part that's "overly zealous".
[1] http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-has-killed-more-than-20-mill...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_United_States_s...
https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM
PRC: ~77 million. USSR: ~62 million.
" By the same simplistic reasoning, Americans killed 20-30 million [1] just by themselves."
People dying as the result of enemy action in a war is not the same as them being murdered by their own government.
Capitalists want live customers, not corpses.
That is, it's all under guise of "fighting communism", or more specifically, the Russians, which could be believed if they were actually deterred by it and didn't just think the US was a war-hungry power bent on global domination. Well, in the few cases the military action was actually successful instead of turning out to be a national disgrace.
This all seems to trace back to Eisenhower's stiffing aid post-war to Russia and further by the Truman Doctrine. I say that Russia has never had an interest in invading the US, but our ballistic foreign policy has only emboldened them to replace us as the foremost world power.
He postulated that because America was founded on two great crimes - genocide and slavery - and was instilled with the myth that rugged individualism creates success, generations of Americans have been screwed out of the opportunity that they are led to believe is their own, all while blaming themselves for all their misfortune, or others for stealing their opportunity, hence the anger.
I don't know if that cultural trait will ever depart the American psyche.
It helps when you understand that it's mostly stood for the Freedom and Human Rights of white land-owning men. Any improvement from that state had to be fought for every inch of the way, and in no small sense still has to be fought for and protected to this day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_Americans
Sources:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_Americans
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Italian_American...
Also, Germans had been immigrating into the US since the year 1700 and intermarried widely with other groups. So it would be very hard to decide where to draw a line and say someone is "sufficiently German" to be interned.
The Nazis might have been evil but at least they were "like us" in that they shared a common heritage, religion and linguistic root with Americans. Japan, meanwhile, was portrayed in American propaganda as an inscrutable hivemind run by a primitive death-cult.
You can see the same strange mistrust of non-Christian culture applied to Muslims in America today - even though the vast majority in the world are not violent terrorists, many Americans suspect that Islam taints and "radicalizes" the mind with evil in a way that Christianity doesn't.
Even in modern Japan itself ironically enough, it's hard for some people to really picture non-white and non-african Americans as Americans. The word 外国人 (gaikokujin) really only applies to foreigners of European and African ancestry. I believe it's hard for them to picture those Americans as Americans simply because of the image that has been painted of the country.
Sincerely, A non-asian non-african non-white American interested in Japanese culture
I believe it was both - they're two sides of the same coin. Look at the propaganda of the time - the Japanese were portrayed as being fundamentally inhuman in a way that Europeans weren't. The myth of the "inscrutable Oriental" has been around in the West for a very long time, the Japanese mind and morality were considered to be incomprehensible.
That Japanese Americans looked different probably made this xenophobia easier to act upon, though.
Christianity and whiteness are surely connected in the cultural consciousness.
By WWII, my great-uncle, who was one of the younger ones at that bonfire, volunteered at age 40 for the Army Air Corps "because the goddamn Nazis were giving the Germans a bad name." Only time I ever heard him utter a cuss word.
The picture of FDR making an uncharacteristic mistake is part of the whitewash.
[1] I cannot recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Salt_of_the_Earth_(2014_fi... enough if you are interested in this
http://www.naa.gov.au/collection/snapshots/internment-camps/...
The museum at Berrima is a good visit for people interested in war history.
http://www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/exhibition/enemyatho...
Jesus...
"The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken."
— General John L. DeWitt, head of the U.S. Army’s Western Defense Command
Depressing to think this is going to happen again, in some way.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_principles#Principle...
America has done a lot of hypocritical things, but we shouldn't have held back from doing the right thing -- intervening in other countries to stop atrocities -- just because we were also guilty as sin. In an ideal world we'd actually be the pure, benevolent world police we imagine ourselves, but in the real world, confronting atrocities abroad has also made us better at home. Maybe we still have a long way to go, but a lot more Americans would have a problem with interment camps today, after making stopping the Holocaust such an important part of our national identity, than did in the 1940s.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Impounded-Dorothea-Censored-Japanese-... [2] https://www.archives.gov/research/alic/reference/military/ja... [3] https://calisphere.org/exhibitions/t11/jarda/
Orwellian logic. I always found this suspension of rationality particularly disturbing when reading about the internment camps.
However, I provided citations (which I thought made the bar for substantiveness) and believed I was civil. Was I inciting flames by backing up the parent's comment?
I'm not too immersed in US politics, but how likely is such a move? How are they going to determine them (possible suspicion?) and what kind of reaction will the civil society have?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niihau_incident
It's also interesting to note that J. Edgar Hoover was opposed to the interments, but FDR overruled him.
From http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n18/thomas-laqueur/devoted-to-terro...
"Auschwitz seems to overshadow all the other camps. It also captures our attention because we know a great deal about it. ...It was the only death camp (Auschwitz II) that was also a large slave labour camp (Auschwitz I), with the result that tens of thousands of slave labourers, having endured selections, random violence and the death marches, survived to bear witness to genocide."
"Most of those killed in the Holocaust were not inmates in concentration camps."
"Much of what we have come to see as the particular moral debasement of the concentration camps was absent in the death camps."
"[Extermination] camps were grotesquely efficient: Sobibor murdered about a quarter of a million people, a quarter as many as Auschwitz-Birkenau in one three-hundredth of the space and half the time. Precisely because of this efficiency, we know relatively little about the dead. There are only three survivors’ accounts from Belzec, where, between 17 March and late December 1942, 434,500 Jews were murdered. As Primo Levi said, we know little of those who were truly at the bottom."
"Conversely, much of the story of the concentration camps does not overlap with that of the Holocaust. The camp system was a latecomer to the project of genocide. There was no representative of the KL [concentration camps] at the Wannsee Conference [which organised the Final Solution]. It was only after the conference that Himmler decided the camps could play a big role, not primarily as sites of immediate extermination but as reservoirs of Jewish slave labour. Only towards the end of the war, as Wachsmann points out, did the majority of Jews find themselves in camps and only for a few weeks in 1938 were they the majority of registered inmates."
It is the duty of every decent human to fight this sort of tyranny by any means necessary.
People write a comment and think somebody's mind will be changed. Nope, not gonna happen. Just look at comments and replies.
It's just delusional thinking to think that HN is somehow above the fray when it comes to this stuff.
The problem is that invariably the amount of destruction and uncharitable discussion outweighs the constructive and charitable discussion in these threads.
It's always a net loss on these types of threads.
These types of threads always put a stain on the reputation of HN as a place of intelligent conversation. There's some really immoral and despicable lines of thought in this thread.
If you choose not to, the other options listed above are all still valid and valuable ways of participating and contributing to the community. I hope you do!
At least they didn't get gassed like the Jews did. At least they didn't get bayonetted like the Chinese in Nanjing en masse in graves or a military unit performing live surgery on them or forcing hundreds of thousands of young Korean women to sexual slavery.
It didn't help that there was heavy animosity towards Japanese from Chinese & Korean Americans who felt compelled and directly/indirectly suffered as a result of Imperial Japan. There was probably deep desire for schadenfreude that contributed to Japanese Americans downfall.
But all that aside is clearly a small drop in the bucket. The view of Japanese and Asian Americans were explicitly racist. Nazi Germany was bad but the same elements of racial white superiority is a continuing theme even until the late 60s, where African American celebrities were forced to sleep in trailer parks while their white co-actors would lounge in swanky hotels (particularly angering Frank Sinatra).
There has been a miniscule effort from Reagan handing out 20k and an apology for the immense inter-generational trauma directly caused by the USG. There's little apology for Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims. This suggests to me a serious lack of reflection and it's evidenced by the fact that Muslim Americans today are facing a similar treatment.
I love the US but shit like this makes me pause for a bit. However, it still is nowhere near the atrocities committed by Imperial Japan & Nazi Germany. But it's curious to see the stark difference in the way Japanese and German Americans were treated. German Americans weren't sent to interment camps and had their assets seized in the same manner as the Japanese Americans.
All in all, a tragedy and showing that a melting pot we-are-all-americans is a flawed policy-where everyone is American but some less American than others. Canada is no better off as they also had Japanese interment camps and showed little remorse.
Sometimes I wonder as Asian Canadian, are we truly accepted by the mainstream North American society? It makes me question what the Canadian/American dream. I think about just how much easier it is when your skin color matches the mainstream crowd and you don't stand out or have any biases held against you. The Japanese interment camp is just one of those many items that raises existential questions of being in North America, and it's not all that clear whether it's in the rearview mirror seeing how Muslim Americans are being treated today in the West.
I still do think North America is relatively a very accepting and open place. It's hard to fathom such level of integration in Europe or Asia.
What would be the point of such comparison? If it is not to somehow justify the acts committed, then it is, no doubt, to try and make them look insignificant, unnoticeable, that is, to hide them.
And what did the Japanese Americans have to do with Japanese Imperialism?
The only question I have is: So?
Why do you feel the need to compare what the US did to other atrocities? You can always find something worse to compare a bad act to.
Nothing you said changes the fact that what the US did here was just plain wrong, it definitely shouldn't have happened, and we should do everything in our power to ensure it doesn't happen again. If you feel the need to make what the US did look slightly "less bad" by comparing it to other heinous events in the world, it might be worth reflecting on why you feel that need.
Very different things. Neither are good but it's pretty clear which countries were the worse at offenses.
That said, it's chilling to wonder what would have happened if command had ordered the mass execution of the imprisoned. Would the military have had the integrity to refuse the command? I can't imagine that it would have been impossible to find friends or family of the thousands of Pearl Harbor victims who would have been willing to carry out such an order.
YES - I know that most of the folks were american-born-english speaking. But the paranoia against them was that they were all working for the Japanese govt and all secret agents and whatnot. Would have made more sense to try to present info in their "own language".
Stating that you couldn't read the Japanese writing would be PROOF that you are, in fact, a Japanese spy.
That's a blatant attempt to simplify a historical event and manipulate the modern reader.
Please spare me another rehash of how mean we became during the GOD-DAMN SECOND WORLD WAR, when our country and culture were under REAL threat. Please spend that energy examining our modern forms of prejudice and crazy fearfulness.
Also -- Why does no one ever want to rehash the post-war US-Japan relationship? In just a few years we transitioned from vicious, no-holds-barred warfare to a cordial relationship that became delightfully friendly. It's an amazingly positive story that belies the sort of institutionalized racism that some people feel the need to believe in.
If you give FDR credit for things like the New Deal (which were of course advocated by him but passed by the Congress), give him a bit of credit for his executive orders.
> [The internment of Japanese Americans] were ordered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt shortly after Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.[0]
> Executive Order 9066 was a United States presidential executive order signed and issued during World War II by the United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942. This order authorized the Secretary of War to prescribe certain areas as military zones, clearing the way for the deportation of Japanese Americans and Italian-Americans to internment camps. [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
I'm amazed that many (presumably young) people want to wallow in this crap, apparently feeling superior to people who have been dead for decades. You have no reason to feel superior to the generation (and the individuals) who sacrificed so much to confront and defeat Fascism. Quite the opposite. Look around yourself.
It's true that these policies are not made by one individual. But when we're crediting the presidents who merely signed bills passed by the Congress, should we not at least be give the same weight when they sign an executive order?
And I'm amazing that you're here generalizing what "presumably young people" do/think. It's not a matter of trying to feel superior.
Presidents are not good or bad, but rather, commit an array of decisions that lie in the spectrum. The decision to intern innocent US citizens (further regrettably by abusing data handed over by the US Census), unfortunately, lies in the spectrum of bad.
To only revere his positive actions and downplay the bad decisions made during his presidency (the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937 is another one) would be doing disservice to those interested in learning about US history (or history for that matter).
"we learn to associate..." is a bit of a sad phrase. What we have done is experience a great deal of sloppy or propagandized reporting.
FDR's New Deal is a bit of an exception because, in addition to a set of programs, I believe it was purposely coined as a campaign slogan -- as was LBJ's New Society. When the verbiage was specifically created by someone in association with their own efforts it seems reasonable to include the name if it suits the writer's purpose.
Here's a challenge for your Google skills: Can you find a reference to the title "FDR’s Japanese Concentration Camps" anywhere in a historical record? I see plenty of references to the linked article, but nothing older, much less anything from the war or post-war eras.
By the way, I am less bothered by the use here of "Concentration Camps", although I believe that's also propagandistic revisionism. Historically, they were called "Internment Camps." But they were evil and I'm not going defend the camps because they absolutely don't deserve to be defended.
It's ironic to note that photographer Dorothea Lange did much of her work as part of New Deal programs. It would be interesting to hear her opinion on her work being associated with a smearing of FDR.
in/re your amazement -- There's no question that we're talking about what "young people" think. The old people are mostly dead and mostly not commenting on HN. I'm not (or don't intend to be) generalizing about young people as a whole -- I'm generalizing about these Internet discussions, which are frequent and essentially identical.
The near-endless criticism of the way people behaved during those desperate times is graceless and smug. I believe that it IS a matter of trying to feel superior. I think it's impossible for someone born after the War to put all of this into a realistic perspective. We should try to learn, be humble and grateful for the incredible sacrifices of those who went before us.
Having said that, it's certainly legitimate to examine the historical period - to consider the mistakes. What could the US have done to allay fear and preserve security, and also respect the rights of ALL US citizens and residents? That's a big question - that should be approached with respect and seriousness. To start out by blaming FDR for the situation is unproductive and silly.
To be honest, I do understand what you mean. It was a different time (and a time that's difficult for younger people like me to fathom) back then. The US was in a turning point of the century and fear, uncertainty, and doubt affected the decision that led to the internment of Japanese Americans.
I apologize if my criticism is coming off as smug or graceless. I certainly don't intend to, but I do dislike how we in the US tend to gloss over those we've wronged in the past because "times were different." It's fair to say they had their reasons for making those decisions in the past, but also fair to criticize the practice.
As for smearing the legacy of FDR, that is not my goal either. He was clearly an effective president and is consistently ranked as being one of the best US presidents of all time. But all too often we try and frame someone as being categorically good or bad, rather than being somewhere in the middle, which is what most people are.
Trust me, I dislike those who snidely point out MLK's infidelity, Jefferson and Sally Hemings, etc. But we should openly point out these facts and let them be judged as a whole, as a positive influence in US history DESPITE their misgivings, not because they technically didn't have any.
I want to make the point clear that I am not defending the Japanese internment. It was certainly an evil act. One of many evil acts committed by nations around the world. That's what war is -- a sequence of evil acts. On some level, we should be ashamed of all of them.
What I object to is the cowardly labeling of the internment camps as "FDR's" This is a propaganda technique. We've seen it recently used very effectively with Obamacare. The reality is that internment was the result of a complex series of events, concerns, and government actions. If you try to associate it with an individual, I will be strongly suspicious of your motivations.
Read the article. That's who the orders came from.
You are referring to Executive Order 9066 which, incidentally, could not be enforced without subsequent passage of Public Law 503 by Congress. (note: The law was passed unanimously by both the Senate and the House)
We're not talking about something that originated in the FDR White House. It was the result of a long (but fast) government process triggered by the attack at Pearl Harbor. It was a government-wide effort (and certainly a very questionable one.) To label the program as "FDR’s Japanese Concentration Camps" is grotesquely partisan.
Thank-you though, because I did go back and re-read the article. I just now realized that "FDR’s Japanese Concentration Camps" is a phrase written by the article author, as click bait. Sad.
Yes. "On tilt" Nice gentle phrase and a sensible comment.
As I noted above - I just realized that I was basically responding to click bait - so mea culpa.
But that doesn't mean my points weren't legitimate :^)
Finally, I wish someone, someday would start a discussion about our post-war relationship with Japan. I mentioned it in my original message. What happened was so cool. I'm not aware of anything like it in modern history. And it can take a bit of the "evil" sting out of the Japanese Internment history, if you want it to.
I agree with you that our relationship with Japan after the war is pretty fascinating --- I think you could say something similar about our relationship with Germany! My takeaway from that is that we Americans should have a lot more humility about our own role in the world, because countries can turn on a dime from one pole to the other.
But one obstacle you'll have to pursuing that conversation in this thread is that a lot of people will read it as an attempt to downplay the disgrace of American concentration camps. Since those camps were very recently cited by American politicians as a rational for registering Muslims, it's a hot-button issue.
Its easy to look back now and think America was terrible but lets not forget that World War Freaking 2 was happening at the time. If your beloved son just got killed at Perl Harbor you probably would have no issue with this at all. Hell you probably feel like it is not bad enough.
Its just like all these self righteous people who want to call Bush an idiot for the wars. If your Wife, kids, friends were under a pile of cement in downtown Manhattan on 9/11 you would probably have no issue with bombing the f* out of who ever you were told was responsible.
Why does that matter? Does one atrocity excuse another?
> Its easy to look back now and think America was terrible but lets not forget that World War Freaking 2 was happening at the time.
We were much less terrible than the powers we were fighting against. That doesn't mean we didn't also do some terrible things.
Absolutely if they are related. If you witness a guy setting your neighbors house on fire, then he sets the house across the street on fire. Then you committing the "atrocity" of running him over with your car it is excused. And if a couple of his buddies that were with him die in the process its excused as well.
You witness a guy setting your neighbor's house on fire, then he sets the house across the street on fire.
So you find everyone whose eyes are the same color as your neighbor and run over them with your car.
I know we should say that Japanese Americans and Regular Americans are the same that is true for most circumstances but I think that Japanese Americans have a stronger tie to Japan than a non Japanese American has to the 4 or 5 European countries that their ancestors are from.
I'm not saying the rational for locking up Japanese Americans was good or correct but given the circumstances I understand why it happened and the reasons, in my opinion, were not evil or selfish.
Of the Japanese interned by these camps, the majority were United States citizens born in the United States.
> I understand why it happened and the reasons, in my opinion, were not evil or selfish.
The official stance of the US government itself after investigating the camps later was that they were a product of "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership."
I'm trying to say that interning Japanese Americans after entering a war with Japan is closer to punishing a dangerous persons friends then punishing random people that happen to have some unrelated thing in common with the person.
Assume a kids parents are Boston sports fans but moved to Los Angeles and the kid was born in LA. Kid grow up surrounded by Celtics, Patriots, and Red Sox paraphernalia. Kid live in a part of LA that is 99% people from Boston. All kids neighboorhood friends are Boston sports fans. Kid goes to school with L.A. sports fans but they ridicule kid because he is a Boston sports fan. When the Dodgers play Red Sox who is this kid rooting for.
You are committing the fallacy of relative privation.
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla...
> Its just like all these self righteous people who want to call Bush an idiot for the wars. If your Wife, kids, friends were under a pile of cement in downtown Manhattan on 9/11 you would probably have no issue with bombing the f* out of who ever you were told was responsible.
Bush's wife, kids, and friends were not under a pile of cement, and it was Bush who falsely told America that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11.
Yes, grieving people will do irrational things. That is why our leaders have a moral obligation to not manipulate them into doing that.
Relative Privation: Bob: My car got hit by a shopping cart! John: Well that's not bad, it could have been hit by a bus.
Common since: Bob: (Parked his car at a greyhound station and was hit by a bus) John: (Parked his car at a greyhound station and it was hit by a bus) Rick: (Parked his car at grocery store and it was hit by a shopping cart) Sam: (decides to park his car at a grocery store sure it will be hit by a shopping cart but compared to being hit than by a bus its great)
Relative Privation: The Japanese concentration camps were not bad because the Jewish ones had gas chambers:
Common since: The Japanese destroyed China The Japanese destroyed our Perl Harbor The Japanese people may or may not launch a domestic attack To minimzize this threat we will put Japanese in concentration camps sure it goes against our values somewhat but compared to what happened to China simply "not following our values" is fine.
Secondly, by your justification of Japanese Internment, we could say that we should intern all Muslims in the United States because of 9/11, declaration of war by ISIL, and domestic terrorist acts. Or that all German's and Italian's should've been interned by the United States because of American soldiers killed by Axis countries. We should be very aware of the difference between people who come to the U.S. and build a life from themselves versus those who are actively participating in a foreign country. Aside from ethnicity/religion, they are not one in the same.
Also most people recognize Afghanistan as a justified retaliation especially when you consider the number of allies who decided to join in. But Bush was wrong for the Iraq War as it was justified on the flimsiest of 'evidence' and the nation building that happened afterwards was nothing short of a disaster (and that's based on testimonies from people who worked on that project over in Iraq).
Comparing what the Japanese did to China to what the Japanese could to the U.S. I do not think is relative privation but I could be wrong
Oh, that's right. There weren't any! The American government had some unique challenges in maximizing their chances of winning the war against a zealous and absolutely ruthless enemy (Japan). It would have been extremely irresponsible not to at least attempt to neutralize the threat posed by the population of first-generation citizens.
American authorities acted within their rights in making a reasonable effort to neutralize domestic saboteurs or collaborators by interning these people. Of course it's sad that it happened, but remember that battles such as Midway were won through superior intelligence and code-breaking. A single Japanese acting as a spy might have overturned that. It would have been very bad for east Asia had Japan won. They were committing numerous, documented war crimes and would have continued to do so.
The internment of Japanese-Americans is a national disgrace because it harmed the fabric of the entire country, and every citizen living in it: that citizenship being in part defined by the duties and obligations we share to each other, as established by the Founders.
It was a betrayal of our founding principals, which is why every American schoolchild is taught about it.