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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

It's amazing how many people today don't know we once had concentration camps in the USA and what we put innocent families through.

We almost went there again with arabic Americans after 9/11 via census data.

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There is actually some controversy over using the term "concentration camp" to refer to the internment. From wikipedia:

"Concentration camp" is the most controversial descriptor of the camps. This term is criticized for suggesting that the Japanese American experience was analogous to the Holocaust and the Nazi concentration camps.[90] For this reason, National Park Service officials have attempted to avoid the term.[88] Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes each referred to the American camps as "concentration camps," at the time.[91] When the nature of the Nazi concentration camps became clear to the world, and the phrase "concentration camp" came to signify a Nazi death camp, most historians turned to other terms to describe Japanese internment.

Of course there is "some controversy" about anything that might make our politicians look bad. Sure, the severity was not the same, but it looks like they tried to skip the implications altogether. Internment is not nice, especially when the reason for it is simply hysteria.

Well, going back to the British use of them in the Boer War, I define them as "camps where significant numbers of people die of disease (or worse)." As far as I know, these camps didn't fit that definition, and they most certainly fit the time of war internment word of art.

Note that seizing the property that they were forced to abandon has been said to be another motivation.

It's funny how they have trouble with the word "concentration" when the word I would have trouble with is "camp". Makes it sound like a weekend getaway or fun for the kids.

Concentration "prison" is more accurate. Try leaving and see what happens.

You're using a very restricted form of the word 'camp', in fact a connotation that only arose in the last century or two.

They were most certainly camps. A camp is basically just a temporary shelter.

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Calling all flowers roses would undermine the attributes that make a rose special.

Not the same. No one is trying to take a flower and call it a rose. They're trying to take a rose and say it's not a rose because it doesn't have as many thorns as some other variety of rose.

We did go there after 9-11, we just outsourced the actual camps to other countries.

What do you think the Maher Arar case was about? And that was just the tip of the iceberg. As a nation we have decided that lawlessness and torture are alright if they are inflicted on suspected terrorists. The continued public silence on this issue does not speak well of the moral qualities of the average american.

We didn't go there in a way that's analogous to the camps from the 40s.

We almost went there again with arabic Americans after 9/11 via census data.

Can you source this, please? I don't recall this being suggested by anyone serious.

Gitmo, extraordinary renditions, enemy combatants...don't ring any bell?

>>>We almost went there again with arabic Americans after 9/11 via census data. >>Can you source this, please? I don't recall this being suggested by anyone serious. >Gitmo, extraordinary renditions, enemy combatants...don't ring any bell?

Yes, and none of that implies general roundups, which is what original person asserted.

So, either you're trying to bully the guy who asked because you realize that there were no such suggestions and you don't want to admit it or you didn't understand the question.

And yet, people who don't trust the census and refuse to answer unnecessary questions are considered nutters, even with relatively recent historical evidence that the government can't be trusted.

Well, yes, they're considered nutters because it takes a special sort of person to specifically refuse to answer a question. On one hand you have to distrust the government with the answer to the question they're asking, but on the other you have to trust them not to remember the fact that you refused and hold that against you. It's a weird position to hold, and to a lot of people appears inconsistent.

If you don't trust the government with the census, it would seem more logical to just lie on the very first paper form that they send you. Chances are (very, very good chances) that they'll never send a human being out to check and thus will never know that you lied about whatever question you're uncomfortable answering.

It's one thing to noisily refuse to answer some question in order to raise awareness of some issue you have with the census, but if you think there's a conspiracy or that the government might use the information to round you up in the future, it doesn't make sense to attract any notice. Better to lie low, if you think that's a risk.

I had no idea about this before this article (I'm not American...) - incredible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment

As much as I love to wave the 'Canada is awesome' flag, we've got the same dark spectre looming over our history as well. Pretty shameful.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Canadian_internment

"... At first, it seemed like a big adventure; a long train ride out of the city into the natural beauty of Slocan. Scientist David Suzuki, who was six at the time of the internment, recalls in this clip the duality of the internment experience. He says it was an "enchanted" time when he would spend his days gathering wildflowers, fishing and camping. But, he describes the communal living arrangements as filthy and crowded, his bed crawling with bed bugs. ..." ~ http://archives.cbc.ca/war_conflict/second_world_war/topics/...

Internment deeply effected Dave ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Suzuki to the point he checked his newborn child to see if the eyes had eyelids. Did they look Japanese?

I'm always a little surprised when Japanese people get so excited about America. We nuked them twice, and before that we rounded up anyone that looked Japanese and put them in prison camps.

When the US kidnaps and murders thousands, it's no big deal. When North Korea kidnapped 12 Japanese, it comes up in the news once a week for decades. I don't understand it.

I guess when North Korea starts buying their bonds...

They weren't "prison camps". They had schools on site, sports facilities, etc. Wikipedia notes "Nearly a quarter of the internees left the camps to live and work elsewhere in the United States, outside the exclusion zone." (the zone was the West coast.)

Wikipedia says 20,000 served in the military, mostly in the European Theater for obvious reasons, and I hope you all know of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/442nd_Infantry_Regiment_%28Unit...) which earned a serious reputation and was the subject of a very favorable movie in 1951 (i.e. before the US was particularly enlightened). 7 Presidential Unit Citations (fine in one month, probably for the Vosges mountains rescue operation, that whole campaign was very tough and fought in terrain that has favored defenders for millennia (http://www.amazon.com/When-Odds-Were-Even-1944-January/dp/03...), 21 Medals of Honor, 41 net DCS, 560 Silver Stars all the way down to 9,486 Purple Hearts for a unit of 3,000 men....

Anyway, the point of all of the above is that this was complicated. The simplistic trope of "we threw them in concentration camps like Nazis" just doesn't hold up to even casual examination.

These weren't "camps" they were prisons. Maybe some nicer than others but just try leaving one.

There were also "camps" with barbed wire and towers to watch for people trying to escape so they could be shot.

They interviewed a living survivor of a camp like that on History Detectives where he had painted scenes from the camp on the back of cut up posters.

I am sure there were ranges of camps where more elite families got better treatment.

People also lost their homes/land, their way of life. This was a very bad way to treat anyone, let alone innocent American civilians.

Revisionist history that "it wasn't so bad" is insane.

To be fair, he delivered citations, and you're painting the worst picture that is at all rational. I'd love to see citations defending your point of view as well.

Once something is deemed bad, the most extremely anti-that things are accepted as truth, for no other reason than the complete opposite of wrong MUST be right. Most of the time, it's wrong again, because, as grand parent poster said, things are complicated.

That's like saying Holocaust was quite OK since most Jews survived

They were prison camps due simply to the fact that you were not permitted to leave (without permission). It might have been a gilded cage, but it was still a cage.

I think you're really stretching the definition of prison, e.g. it was also a cage that 25% were given permission to leave.

Why not use internment instead?

Internment is a special case of imprisonment - all internment is imprisonment, but only some imprisonment is internment (when it's done to large groups without a trial).

Yes, but prison, the word we've been discussing up to now, has different and much more loaded connotations than imprisonment.

I know a group of 80+ year old Japanese-American men. During WWII, one was in an internment camp, two served in the US military, and one was visiting family in Japan and was drafted into the Japanese military.

"It's complicated" is about the best explanation I've ever heard.

Well we had some provocation for those bad things that we did. And then when the war ended, we put a lot of energy out to rebuild Japan and make life there massively better than it had ever been before.

The last bit is kind of important.

I may be the exception or not but we spent a fairly large chunk of time talking about it in middle school.

That would be within the last 6-8 years if you are curious.

On the West coast it's pretty common to know a Japanese American family who had a family member, still living, in an internment camp. It's usually not the first thing that gets talked about. It's very real history.

I was in middle school three decades before you, and we did not. Glad to hear that it has changed.

The further something gets in the past, the less direct impact it has on current people, so the less need for hushing up there is.

Unfortunately, that window in the middle is when the talking really needs to happen and when the most revisionism can occur.

We touched on it in middle school as well, in that we all read Farewell to Manzanar, but it never came up again during my schooling. Its a sad part of our history that deserves more attention.

6-8 years would be just post-9/11, so I guess some teachers finally remembered it could be relevant.

Looks like the pre-9/11 folks didn't hear about it so much.

Have you seen or heard how (some/most?) illegal aliens are detained, today? The main difference between that and concentration camps is the illegals have good chance of relatively short stay.

Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me:

http://sundown.afro.illinois.edu/liesmyteachertoldme.php

Worthy read.

Sounds very much like A People's History of the United States (http://www.amazon.com/Peoples-History-United-States-1492-Pre...).

I heard some people talk about the 9/11 thing, but I have not been able to find a good article that describes the hole thing, so I only know bits and pieces.

Does anybody know where I can learn more?

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