Great photography, though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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. "
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'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.
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
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.
(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.
THAT is disturbing "logic".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korematsu_v._United_States
"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...
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.
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.
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.
The picture of FDR making an uncharacteristic mistake is part of the whitewash.
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.
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...
[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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
