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Comment by safety1st | Hacker News Reader

This is obviously unfortunate but I think the issue is a lot bigger than Linux. It should serve as a reminder that there are no liberals in war.

The civil liberties you take for granted, in a major war, they will be gone. They will die in one day and it will take decades to get them back if ever. Remember that in WW2 America was throwing Japanese citizens into internment camps and the other side was doing far worse. Things that are unfathomable today but in a war with sufficiently high stakes they will happen again and more.

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Even at war, the USA was still much more "liberal" than Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan: for starters, they didn't put any German citizens / German descendants in a concentration camp.

The Japanese descendants/citizens living in the USA were treated different because of racism. You can argue that having a racist government isn't compatible with being "liberal", but it's a matter of degree. Having a democracy that doesn't allow non whites to vote is still more "liberal" than having a monarchy / dictatorship

> for starters, they didn't put any German citizens / German descendants in a concentration camp

False: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_America...

Define "concentration camp".

If you mean "a place where many of a certain category of people are held", then yes, we did. If you mean "place where many of a certain category of people are held and killed", then no, we didn't.

Technically, the first definition is at least as correct as the second one. But colloquially, the second one is what many people understand.

You cannot compare the camps that German citizens were held in by the US to Dachau.

I actually agree with you that the term “concentration camp” is inflammatory and misleading when applied to the internment camps used to hold Axis citizens and Japanese-Americans. But the comment I was replying to was attempting to draw a contrast between the Japanese internment and the treatment of German citizens, when in fact German and Italian citizens were interned during the war. In fact I’ve actually visited one of the internment camps, in Montana.

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