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Comment by hkt | Hacker News Reader

Just another example of the extreme moral ambiguity of the West. We regularly ignore our own standards around giving people a fair trial when it suits the executive of the day or when some stupid condition applies ("race" in this case, geography and citizenship for eg Guantanamo bay). Not to mention "strategic" alliances with dictators down the years that have usually proven to be murderous. It is sad to think that the myth of our moral superiority has never been anything else.

Great photography, though.

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As someone born in USSR, I have to really disagree. What happened to Japanese-Americans absolutely sucked, but in no way can be compared to how people were treated in USSR, where millions died in camps and on their way to camps.

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.

The struggle for "Western Civilization" or "Western Values" has always been a struggle within our nations, rather than between us and the rest of the world.

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.

> It is sad to think that the myth of our moral superiority has never been anything else.

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.

That proves true the myth of our moral superiority to the Nazi regime, but not the myth of our moral superiority.

To the Nazi regime. To the Communist regimes. To Turkey (Armenian genocide). To Rwanda. To Serbia.

But not to everyone, I'll agree.

Is the Armenian genocide worse than the Trail of Tears, for example?

(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.)

They are fairly similar, however we just don't know much about what happened to Armenians, which doesn't diminish what they endured or how bad things were done to them.

I think most Americans will, at this point, agree that the Trail of Tears was terrible. The National Park Service has an official historic trail covering the route, with many exhibits describing the terrible suffering.

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.

> 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.

They clearly have to some extent. That's why I mentioned the National Park Service trail. More would be better, for sure, but we don't deny it, nor prosecute people who say it happened.

Calling it a genocide is an important acknowledgement in its own right.

That's an argument that the US could handle it better. My argument is simply that some countries handle it qualitatively better than others, and in particular that the US acknowledges and learns from the Trail of Tears in ways that Turkey does not with the Armenian Genocide. These two arguments are compatible.

I would say that our genocide of the indigenous people's of North America was just as bad as either of those.

..and we're still invading their lands and violating treaties with them.

This is a bit misleading, given the documented atrocities that certain Native American tribes committed against settlers.

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.

Yes, some Native American tribes treated the settlers badly too. (Even then, there was conflict within tribes regarding how to deal with whites.) But there was an order of magnitude difference in the amount of violence perpetrated and the amount of harm caused.

The "documented atrocities that certain Native American tribes committed" against INVADERS, you mean? Because it was their land, and the word "settlers" is a way to whitewash what people did to them - and are still doing to them today - which is invasion and genocide.

Hitler cited the US actions against Native Americans in the same breath as the Armenian genocide - as reasons he could eliminate the Jews and suffer no ill effects.

And he would probably have been right, had he not coupled it with a war of aggression against enough of the world to get every major power not in the Axis aligned against it.

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.

> 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.

Of course, but Germany belongs to the "West", too. I think GP alluded to e.g. human rights in China.

I must be missing something, but China is actually doing "bad things" now. The Japanese internment happened ~75 years ago. I like to think that the "West" has progressed since then. (That's not say that everything's just fine and dandy, but there is a clear difference between the West and, say, China today.)

> I like to think that the "West" has progressed since then.

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.

Aren't we still in political moratorium week? How does one flag a comment?

It was ended.

Clearly 'dang needs to remind people of this.

We're looking through all the comments that mention this and replying to all of them when other users haven't already.

To flag a comment you click the timestamp, and then click the [flag] link. There's a small karma threshhold - you need about 30 karma to do so.

Yes, the no-politics experiment has ended (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251), but this comment is not great for HN in any case. When discussing controversial topics, the bar is actually higher for civility and substantiveness, and we need to especially avoid introducing flamewar topics without anything new to say as the guidelines ask of us. We detached this flagged subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13139936.

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.

> assuming the factual part of your comment is true, it isn't really off topic in an already-highly-politicized thread

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/us/politics/japanese-inter...

Is that a good enough source?

Key word: Proposal

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.

"I must be missing something, but China is actually doing "bad things" now. The Japanese internment happened ~75 years ago. I like to think that the "West" has progressed since then."

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).

Don't forget the detention centers for "migrants" (often people fleeing war) and the fact that the UK has now legalised a surveillance state that the stasi would have had erotic dreams about.

You both (parent + grand-parent poster) make good points.

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.

Also keep in mind that the end result could have been very different if United States soil was under attack. Somehow I do not have hard time believing that the people who has comitted large scale genocide on native americans would not to find a "final solution" for the japanese problem

No dispute here over relative merits, but if moral superiority over the perpetrators of the holocaust is all we are aiming for then the bar is frighteningly low.

It might have been different if America had not 110000 people to deal with, but 5000000. It might have found its own final solution for the Japanese. Nazis only got to the final solution quite a bit into the war. There were various plans over the previous years to move undesirable people elsewhere, like Madagascar, etc.

So just because we didn't cause the Holocaust, we are morally superior? That's a pretty low bar and a ridiculous argument, but it says a lot about the American mindset.

I don't appreciate the generalization in that statement.

I'm uncomfortable with some of the arguments being made here, too, but your first sentence is a rather uncharitable spin and your second one reads like a slur (though I'm sure you didn't mean it that way). Please don't comment like this here.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please name one other way you can logically interpret that statement because I certainly see no other meaning whatsoever.

"Please name", followed by an invitation to a pointless meta argument, is a troll trope. That, plus that you didn't acknowledge the civility issue here, makes me worry that you're not interested in using this site in good faith. Please review the links I mentioned.

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.

I find your sentiment somewhat tossed-off, implying as it does that we "regularly ignore" things like Japanese-American internment camps, when in fact we teach them to elementary school children as national disgraces we hope never to repeat.

That is not a component of all curricula in the country. And the idea of a "registry" is a modern day touchy thing.

> when in fact we teach them to elementary school children as national disgraces we hope never to repeat

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.

you wouldn't think so after the rhetoric of the last presidential campaign. We forgot all our lessons of national disgraces.

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