Camp that imprisoned 7000 Japanese Americans could become National Historic Site | Hacker News Reader

Camp that imprisoned 7000 Japanese Americans could become National Historic Site

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85 pointssofixa42 comments

News related to this a few days ago got me thinking that people who want the US Supreme Court to ratify "sensible" mandates and orders coming out of the Executive Branch even if they're legally sketchy should perhaps be careful what they wish for.

Korematsu v. United States which basically upheld FDR's executive order is probably one of the least defensible SCOTUS decisions of all time and definitely one of the worst if you include a few pre-Civil War cases.

ADDED: And, yes, SCOTUS is political too but it should act as at least some degree of check. I'm also not specifically commenting on any particular decision but I've certainly read decisions (as a non-lawyer) that were counter to my personal preference but which seemed the right thing legally.

You don't understand - that won't happen because the good guys are in charge now.

Not sure if you're being sarcastic but it was liberal icon FDR who sent these citizens to prison camps.

Don't worry, he'll get cancelled soon enough. That way, there wont be a problem giving good guy government more power in the future.

I assume the comment (and early downvotes) was related to the fact that one could take this as commentary on SCOTUS shooting down some COVID vaccination mandates (along party lines). Which admittedly is what mostly triggered my thinking about the point.

Liberal in the traditional, economic, sense. On the social scale, he was still a racist and segregation guy ( on par for the times in the US, but segregation caused quite some issues around US troops abroad).

Please don't post unsubstantive comments or take HN threads further into hellish flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. We want curious conversation here.

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

> News related to this a few days ago got me thinking that people who want the US Supreme Court to ratify "sensible" mandates and orders coming out of the Executive Branch even if they're legally sketchy should perhaps be careful what they wish for.

Please explain how science-supported public health measures to control the spread of a deadly infectious disease are similar to imprisonment of a group based on their nationality because they were assumed to be helping the enemy during a way.

You just compared antibiotics and the fear of eclipses.

If institutions can't tell these apart they have already failed...all of them.

SCOTUS is a legal institution that interprets laws given the facts and case in front of them. It is not their job to ratify Executive powers in the absence of Congressional action. They are not, nor should they be, a backup Congress.

> SCOTUS is a legal institution that interprets laws given the facts and case in front of them.

>that people who want the US Supreme Court to ratify "sensible" mandates and orders coming out of the Executive Branch even if they're legally sketchy should perhaps be careful what they wish for.

Yes...based on facts and laws...what are the facts and the laws in each case. Start with the facts, they are pretty simple.

The facts before them, which are provided by the plaintiff’s and defendant’s lawyers who are both charged with providing their best arguments; and according to the laws written by Congress.

This is not a small distinction.

You can read the decisions and there's no shortage of expert commentary on important SCOTUS decisions. If you actually care you're far better off going there than relying on comments from mostly non-lawyers.

The use of facts in the Supreme Court is to determine whether a law is legal, not good policy. The court is a check on legality of the actions of other two branches, not a check on their judgement.

I assume that any mandates re: vaccinations passed by states that roughly conformed to the facts of Jacobson v. Massachusetts would probably not even be taken up by SCOTUS as they would be matters of settled law (and have been effectively held up in more recent cases related to school vax requirements). However, expanding this to OSHA requirements was a bridge too far for (some) justices.

At the time, there was a widespread fear, even among (as someone else mentioned) liberal icon FDR, that there was a significant security risk associated with Japanese-descended Americans. Even so, SCOTUS should have (ideally) said there was no legal case for interning them or (less ideally but better) simply declined to hear the case. It sounds very similar if the legal justification in equally weak. It's not the job of SCOTUS to make up legal reasoning for whatever the other branches of government want to do even if you (or the majority) agree with them.

It should - but it's not so much about a piece of land, it's about what it represents.

As a non-American, the US does still seem to be a 'very patriotic country' - national anthems played for any reason, standing for flags, pledging allegiance to abstract concepts, USA*n chants to fellow americans etc etc.

Not in itself wrong - but always struck me as a bit try-hard on the homogeneity. Darker edge is that it means you (not you specifically, but <i>you</i>) still label people as being "unamerican".

Even in political discourse - there seems to be an abstract "America" (that everybody loves) and then criticism from both sides is couched in terms of how the other side is trying to destroy this great abstract.

I was just thinking of Eileen Gu and the whole balagan when she chose to compete for China. She's a skier. I can't think of any other country that would get so upset that a national would choose to perform sports for another country.

Definitely worth preserving so that people are aware it happened and hopefully prevent it from happening again in the future.

Why should something like this never happen again? War is war. Japan in current day is an ally, so let's discuss the CCP.

Couldn't you say compared to the current modern day Communist Party of China and being as of today 21 Confusion institutes currently located in the United States? Do you think the current Communist Party of China does not have spies and people designed to infiltrate the United States government and the current Republic in various levels? Haven't they even been stealing secrets and intellectual property from governments?

Also, alerts last month from British Intelligence (MI5) regarding infiltration in their parliament?

And lastly, the CIA finally started a division to investigate China as of late last year.

So if you ask me, if there was a large security threat in the United States or Canada for example or any allied nation regarding spies from lets say the CCP, I believe they should absolutely be investigated and potentially put into secure camps regarding national security of a country.

It's not pretty(war isn't pretty), but how else would a military secure foreign threats in their country?

Sources: https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/how_many_confucius_institu...

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/13/chinese-spy-infiltr...

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/china-is-stealing-our...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/cia-china-m...

> So if you ask me, if there was a large security threat in the United States or Canada for example or any allied nation regarding spies from lets say the CCP, I believe they should absolutely be investigated and potentially put into secure camps regarding national security of a country.

Were the people imprisoned there actually a security threat? Were they investigated? Was it before or after they were interred?

I'm no historian expert, but at the time the world was in the middle of World War II and on Sunday, December 7, 1941 there was an event maybe you have heard of called "Pearl Harbor"?

Executive Order 9066 (This post and re: the camps) was signed February 19, 1942.

Every action has a reaction, especially in times of war, no?

And in this case that action was arresting thousands of Americans with no charge, seizing their assets, and then acting like it was necessary.

There was no similar incarceration of German and Italian Americans during WW2. There was no internment of Russian Americans during the Cold War.

This obsession that people have in pretending this was not entirely based on race is getting old.

Asian would be a race, "Japanese" in that case is a nationality - no?

"There was no internment of Russian Americans during the Cold War." -- Last I recall, during the cold war there wasn't thousands of suicide Kamakazee pilots flying planes into a US Navy base and destroying US war ships(Pearl Harbor)?

Japanese didn’t use Kamikaze pilots until much later in the war and were out of resources. They suffered almost no casualties during Pearl Harbor.

Their nationality was American.

Also "asian" isn't a race

> Every action has a reaction, especially in times of war, no?

Yep, but they’re a lot more effective when directed at the enemy, not at your own citizens.

There were thousands imprisoned and it is likely that a few were—amongst so many people, there are bound to be one or two.

However, the vast majority of them were not security threats. The vast majority were patriotic, good citizens, abruptly ordered from their homes and businesses without recourse or future justice. A travesty of American values.

Some young men interred left the camps to fight for the US and returned and were interred again.

Link?

Would love to hear their stories, wow.

Here are a few.

https://www.history.com/news/442nd-regiment-combat-japanese-...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese-American_service_in...

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/442nd-regimen...

If you get a chance to visit one of these camps, it is worth it. Very sobering.

Recommend reading about the Japanese American combat battalion. One of the most decorated units in the history of the US military (including 4,000 purple hearts), and earned while many of their families were unjustly detained in US internment camps.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/442nd_Infantry_Regiment_(Uni...

I think you missed the point about Japanese American internment.

I didn't miss the point, I was replying to the comment above of:

"Definitely worth preserving so that people are aware it happened and hopefully prevent it from happening again in the future."

I think it should be preserved as a reminder to all, and I am not necessarily against this happening again in the future and clearly gave a modern day example of The Chinese Communist Party as an enemy of nations and how something like this could potentially happen again.

Please watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvhVOWwppzM

"My family is Chinese, they are allowed inside - but I am a foreigner and I must sit outside."

You've posted a video of a Chinese restaurant whose management is at the very least xenophobic, or maybe racist. (Assuming the video is accurate.)

And I frown on that, for sure.

But that's light-years away from the US government incarcerating all Americans with Chinese heritage simply because of that heritage.

You're right that it could happen again.

But it would be unConstitutional and racist AF. And that's not the kind of America I want to see. Frankly, it's not the kind of America you should want to see, either. We're supposed to be better than that.

We must remain vigilant against this weakness.

So all American citizens of Chinese descent are CCP spies and should be interned in case of war? What happened to innocent until proven guilty and all the freedom crap in your constitution?

In this interview with David Tennant, George Takei talks about the experiences of living in the internment camps as a child and the lasting impact it had, particularly on his father.

https://podbay.fm/p/david-tennant-does-a-podcast-with/e/1598...

George Takei's recounting of saying the pledge of allegiance ( which is imho a ridiculous thing in itself) and being taught about how free the US is, while literally in a concentration camp, is touching.

They can start by mentioning this history at the FDR memorial in Washington, DC.

Also interesting:

As far as I know the Japanese Americans where forced to sell land they own for close to nothing and where never reimbursed.

Not just land. Bank accounts and personal property were also liquidated under duress.

The think is, at least in some of the US states, there are major benefits for long term land holders (wrt. property tax) and some of the land once owned by Japanese Americans became very expensive (I have heard, as it was in Silicon Valley).

There were reparations paid in 1988 - not saying that it was enough, or should count as reimbursement, but there was some financial acknowledgement.

In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 which officially apologized for the internment on behalf of the U.S. government and authorized a payment of $20,000 (equivalent to $44,000 in 2020) to each former internee who was still alive when the act was passed. The legislation admitted that government actions were based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership."[30] By 1992, the U.S. government eventually disbursed more than $1.6 billion (equivalent to $3,500,000,000 in 2020) in reparations to 82,219 Japanese Americans who had been interned.[29][31]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Liberties_Act_of_1988

Fairly sure that they lost more than $20k. They lost pretty much all of their property and years of their lives. Claiming that there was any meaningful reparation is nonsense.

I think this is a good idea.

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