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.
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.
> 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 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."
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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
"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.
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
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.
+ 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. "
Sure, maybe those maneuvers were provocative, but they do not rise to the same level of responsibility as launching the first actual attack. Japan bears responsibility for taking the bait.
The Japanese had no choice, if they wanted to keep the territory they controlled at the time. They were heavily reliant on imports from the US, and the US imposed an embargo on them.
>US Ambassador Grew in Japan kept Roosevelt fully advised of her precarious economic situation and urgent need for imports. Chief of Naval Operations (NCO) Stark had warned the president of the danger of imposing an oil embargo on Japan. Stark had "made it known to the State Department in no uncertain terms that in my opinion if Japan's oil were shut off, she would go to war." He did not mean "necessarily with us, but … if her economic life had been choked and throttled by inability to get oil, she would go somewhere and take it … and if I were a Jap, I would" do the same.[1]
Does it not matter that we were running those maneuvers largely in response to Japanese aggression in China and the Pacific? Does it matter that the reason we were in tension with Japan was their murder and conquest spree in China?
Does any of it excuse the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor?
I think the answer is no, despite my great respect for General Butler.
It appears that if that was the real reason, then the government of the time wasn't prepared to tell anyone that was the case, going by the General's account anyway.
Many of the things he suggest merely re-align incentives. So if the Senators and Corporate CEOs really think that Japan is a menace to be dealt with, then they should be putting their money where their mouth is, rather than having the moral hazard of benefiting selfishly from unnecessary wars.
After the US et. al. cut off fuel and oil trade. They don't teach you that part in school.
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.
They do teach that in some history classes. I would encourage you to read more about events such as the Rape of Nanking or Comfort Women if you have any concerns about why the Allied nations fought Japan. It was not due to the business interests of Wall Street. There were real world consequences for millions of people due to Japanese aggression and the Japanese were actively threatening numerous sovereign nations.
Tensions between Japan and the prominent Western countries (the United States, France, Britain and the Netherlands) increased significantly during the increasingly militaristic early rule of Emperor Hirohito ... as part of Japan's alleged "divine right" to unify Asia under Hirohito's rule.[1]
During the 1930s, Japan's increasingly expansionist policies brought it into renewed conflict with its neighbors, Russia and China... In March 1933, Japan withdrew from the League of Nations in response to international condemnation of its conquest of Manchuria and subsequent establishment of the Manchukuo puppet government.[2] On January 15, 1936, Japan withdrew from the Second London Naval Disarmament Conference because the United States and Great Britain refused to grant the Japanese Navy parity with theirs.[3] A second war between Japan and China began with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in July 1937.
Japan's 1937 attack on China was condemned by the U.S. and several members of the League of Nations including Britain, France, Australia and the Netherlands. Japanese atrocities during the conflict, such as the notorious Nanking Massacre.... The U.S., Britain, France and the Netherlands each possessed colonies in East and Southeast Asia. Japan's new military power and willingness to use it threatened these Western economic and territorial interests in Asia.
Um, you must also have had a pretty spotty education, because you missed the part where the fuel embargo was to stop the ongoing genocide the Japanese were conducting against China.
Don't act like the world would have been A- ok if we had just been ok selling gas to power genocides.
It's worth noting that China lost 15-20 million people in the war, which is the second highest death toll of all the involved countries, behind the USSR. And the war in China gets very little attention. If you ask people when WWII started, they'll usually say December 7th 1941 (if they're being US-centric) or September 1 1939 (if they remember Poland). Yet the Japanese had been rampaging around China since the early 30s, with very little done to stop them until they made the mistake of provoking a great power a decade later.
Well... the US did stop selling some stuff (steel, rubber, gasoline, and maybe a bit more) to Japan because of what they were doing in China. That was a factor in Japan deciding to go to war with the US.
So I don't know if you count that as "little done to stop them". That was what we could do, short of war, and even that helped precipitate war.
> 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 difference is these all took place before the war started. We sell weapons to countries all the time. That doesn't mean we wouldn't stop them if they began committing atrocities that we currently have no knowledge of.
I guess that can be true, depending on which conflict you're talking about. For instance, we sell Israel weapons all of the time, and one can argue that their entry into Palestine was an "atrocity", however, I'm sure if we were bombarded by missiles as they were that we wouldn't hesitate to enter and clear out a small nation of terrorists either. Obviously their execution could use some work. We're not exactly experts at it ourselves, but war is far more complicated than what you see on TV.
I wouldn't describe Palestinian Territory as "a small nation of terrorists". If the US took an approach other than giving and selling arms (refered to as "aid" at times) to Israel meaningful peace negotiations might be possible.
The areas I specifically had in mind were places like Saudi and Bahrain. Arms sales to Bahrain were briefly restricted/stopped but resumed fairly quickly once news reels stopped appearing.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour was a strategic preëmptive strike, because they knew the US would come after their empire at some point.
I don't think Japanese imperialism can really be defended.
Of course, Japanese imperialism was very much inspired by European imperialism in… well, everything. But that doesn't make it right either, merely just as bad.
> because they knew the US would come after their empire at some point.
This makes it sound as if the US only acted to end competition against another Empire. Japan invaded numerous territories for access to resources and committed horrible atrocities while doing so.
The attack on Pearl Harbour may have been preemptive but the only reason for Japan to fear attack from others was due to actions of the Japanese.
> This makes it sound as if the US only acted to end competition against another Empire.
Well, that might well have been the case. While World War Ⅱ did put a stop to some horrible things, I don't know if that was because they were horrible or merely because their perpetrators were a threat. I suspect the latter.
Japanese imperialism was an attempt to get out from under the boot of US imperialism. The US showed up, forced their nation open to western powers,and spent the next 70 years intimately engaged in all their important decisions.
Japanese conduct during the 30s was atrocious. They tried playing by the moral code in earlier wars, the US and other Western powers repeatedly reneged on deals and forced Japan to return any possessions.
I don't think that's quite fair. It's true that after the arrival of the US, Japan was apparently fed up and changed its approach. But does that make invading and subjugating their neighbours justifiable?
Sort of. If you feel there's a greater power out there that's building up to invade you and your neighbours, forced unity can seem like the lesser of two evils. The US was not super friendly in the first half of the century, Hawaii and the Philippines were both recent military conquest dangerously close to Japan.
> After the US et. al. cut off fuel and oil trade. They don't teach you that part in school.
And do you know why we did that? Was that mentioned? Did they talk about Japan's war of conquest in China or the Rape of Nanking, among a thousand other atrocities?
Japan also forced the hand of the Allied nations by invading other territories. Personally I think Japan forced our hands earlier than that (Invasion of Manchuria was a big geopolitical move IIRC) - it just wasn't apparent at the time.
Don't think the US didn't do everything it could to antagonize the enemy. Japan was repeatedly slapped in the face until it had no choice but to respond to protect its honour.
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.
Japan was "repeatedly slapped in the face" because of their increasing militarization, invasion of China (also Rape of Nanking), alliance with Italy and Germany, desire for control of all of East Asian (the Co-Prosperity Sphere), etc. The US response seems totally reasonable to me.
Correct! Repeatedly slapping Japan was reasonable because of Japan's imperial ambitions, e.g. Taiwan(1895), Manchuria(1905), Korea(1910) etc.
And, England and some other European countries were not 'repeatedly slapped', even though they were also imperialist, may be far longer, may be far worse!
Actually Japan was mandated large amounts of German New Guinea by the Treaty of Versailles and the South Pacific Mandate; Palau, almost all of Micronesia, and parts of Papua New Guinea. Other parts of German New Guinea were ceded to Australia, New Zealand, the US, and Britain. France of course kept their South Pacific colonies.
I mean with deliberate intent to provoke a military response from Japan.
It wasn't that Japan wasn't up to no good, because they were, absolutely destroying large swaths of Asia and committing atrocities so horrifying even German observers were concerned, but that the US leadership needed Japan to attack to get on board versus Germany.
You do realize that Japan, at the time, was run by a highly militarized government that still carried a lot of tradition from the feudal Japan era. Honour was a massive concern.
Also remember that Japan had already conquered large parts of China and trounced Russia militarily, so they were feeling confident they'd prevail in any conflict with the US. At the time the US was in the middle of a poor economic period and its Pacific navy was in sad shape, many warships were simply relics from WWI. It wasn't exactly threatening.
What Japan didn't realize was that the US would not be bullied, and instead would bite back a lot harder than anticipated.
It's a lot like how America assumed Iraq would be a cake-walk, or Afghanistan could be resolved in a weekend.
You're taking his brief argument far too literally. Of course there was more at play than honour alone. However reasons aside, I'd argue your comment is moot as there's never a good reason to start a war.
Edit: wow I'm surprised by the downvotes. Are you (who ever you are) suggesting you do agree with starting wars? I'd be very interested to hear why you disagree with me.
I didn't downvote you but personally I feel conflict can be justified - stopping the Holocaust and defeating the nation that committed genocide and atrocities such as the Rape of Nanking were enough justification without considering the invasion of a huge number of sovereign territories.
It disgusts me that the world has sat by during recent genocides.
Thanks for the insight. I don't disagree your point per se. If war could be accomplished without further harming those citizens then I might agree. Or if war brought about positive change then maybe you could justify the means. But sadly we've seen time and time again that destabilising governments through instigating war - even horrible despotic regiems like the aforementioned - usually ends up with more long term conflict.
I should add that I'm against starting wars but not against retaliating, even ending the war, if and when required.
In the cases of Germany and Japan, we won very thoroughly, and then re-did their government and society very thoroughly. In the case of Iraq, we won very thoroughly, and then decided that we should not re-do their government and society. There may not have been the political will to do anything else, but that turned out to be less than effective at transforming Iraq.
"To date, the U.S. has spent more than $60 billion in reconstruction grants to help Iraq get back on its feet after the country was broken by more than two decades of war, sanctions and dictatorship. That works out to about $15 million a day. And yet Iraq's government is rife with corruption and infighting."
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/much-of-60b-from-us-to-rebuild-i...
I didn't say we didn't spend money. But if you look at what we did to Germany and Japan, the extent of the control of our occupation, rebuilding their government from the ground up for most of a decade, there's no comparison with Iraq. We wanted to have few people there, and not for long. And it didn't work.
I think a big factor in the relative ease of turning Germany and Japan to our side was killing millions of them first, and especially the men of fighting age. Nothing quite says "you should probably not rebel against our occupation" like slaughtering the people who would be fighting, and wrecking entire cities in the process.
Of course, such techniques would have been a tough sell in 2003. (And rightfully so.)
The argument goes that a more measured policy could still have eliminated most of the bad actors while maintaining a higher level of governance and services.
I completely agree with starting wars if it stops the suffering of large numbers of civilians. As it stands, 15-20 million Chinese were killed by the Japanese in that war. How many would have died if the US had not gotten involved?
I understand the point you're making but you are quoting numbers of suffering due to war which defeats the purpose of arguing the suffering saved by going to war.
Plus the American involvement wasn't out of humanitarian reasons either. They only joined the war after getting attacked by Japan themselves. Which, which since I support retaliatory action if another party has already initiated war, would mean the US followed my stance on war in that regard.
How does quoting the suffering of the Chinese at the hands of the Japanese defeat the purpose of arguing the suffering saved by the Americans going to war with the Japanese?
Yes, war causes suffering. It can also prevent suffering. This would only be contradictory if I were for some reason arguing that all war is good, which I most certainly am not.
I would argue that the US did join the war partly out of humanitarian reasons, since the war was precipitated by economic sanctions that were enacted due to Japan's actions in China. But ultimately my argument has nothing to do with their reasons.
> How does quoting the suffering of the Chinese at the hands of the Japanese defeat the purpose of arguing the suffering saved by the Americans going to war with the Japanese?
Because you are using the sorrow of war to justify the means of war. It's a cyclic argument with each new participant upping the stakes; each time bringing about more suffering.
In the case of the America vs Japan conflict during WW2, America's "humanitarianism" lead to two nuclear bomb being dropped causing around two hundred thousands casualties - many of who suffered long deaths from radiation exposure. Yes it shortened the war, but at what cost? We'll never know which hypothetical scenario would have saved the most lives but it's fair to say that America's involvement did contribute to large scale suffering too.
What is wrong with using the sorrow of war to justify the means of war? A thing can be both good and bad. Sometimes war is justified and is a good thing, relative to not going to war. Sometimes war is good because it puts a stop to a bad war. There is nothing contradictory about this.
I get the point you're trying to make but that very statement is contradictory. Something cannot be both good and bad. It can have good and bad effects but overall it cannot coexist in both states simultaneously. And as for why I think it's wrong to use sorrow to justify war; I had already addressed that point about the constant upping of the stakes.
I have a feeling we might have to agree to disagree on those points though because like most philosophical debates, it's really a question of opinion and perspective rather than something that can be empirically proven. That's not to say I haven't appreciated reading your views on this topic though :)
It was attitudes like that, that the US couldn't engage first, which forced the hand of the US leadership. They needed Japan to attack first, so they did everything they could to bring that about.
After Pearl Harbor everything fell into place. Germany and Japan could be tackled not from a diplomatic perspective, or via proxies, but directly.
I'm not actually against sending troops to support allies when war has been thrust upon them. In that kind of situation I'd argue that America wouldn't have started the war even if they did intervene before Perl Harbour as the Germans and Japanese were already at war with most of the rest of the world. It's more the instigation of war I was arguing against rather than retaliation.
No downvote from me, but if Germany hadn't started the war, others should have done so to stop us. (I would have preferred a clean Stauffenberg-style solution, of course.)
> Don't think the US didn't do everything it could to antagonize the enemy. Japan was repeatedly slapped in the face until it had no choice but to respond to protect its honour.
Is that what it's called when we objected to Japan's war of conquest against China? Antagonism? Fine, let it be so. Japan brought doom on themselves.
Japan didn't care about words. Japan cared about things like the US selling Japan fuel even when they were doing all these things, preferring to stay "neutral", then abuptly cutting that off and leaving them scrambling to keep their military running.
Japan did bring doom on themselves, but America kept poking the tiger with a stick until America itself got attacked, which was the goal.
"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
This was appalling and obviously sucked a lot for people who underwent such treatment; however as someone born in USSR I'd say that it was surprisingly humane (hot water not always available) compared to how people were treated in the USSR around the same period.
Since these countries (in some form or other) still exist, it's tempting to start making moral comparisons and trying to figure out "which side you should be on". But that's not the most interesting approach, in my opinion. Future historians won't be picking sides, they'll be trying to put it in context, understand the conditions that led to these behaviors, and draw out trends in the period.
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'."
I know you are trying to be objective and disinterested, but reading you combine the German and American camps as somehow comparable is utterly horrifying.
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.
They are comparable, though, and that's exactly my point. They're not the _same_ by any stretch of the imagination, but it's just a weaker reading of history to refuse to consider themes that were common to the time period.
The Nazi camps were started for the same reason as the American camps: to contain and control a population believed to be subversive. They were indeed later used as part of an organized genocide, which is very important and makes them far more horrifying on a moral/human level, but it's willful blindness to ignore the deep similarities between a policy of containing and suppressing a racial group, and a policy of containing, suppressing, and exterminating a racial group.
These are not "themes that were common to the time period". These are themes that are common to human history, this type of camp was not invented then.
you will find examples going back more than 300 years, and I'm sure a historian can find even earlier examples.
Internment camps of various kinds happen by EVERY war, not just this one.
> it's willful blindness to ignore the deep similarities between a policy of containing and suppressing a racial group, and a policy of containing, suppressing, and exterminating a racial group.
No, it's willful blindness to think this was unique in any way to WW2. "Camps" is NOT the important or interesting thing about that war, it is an almost trivial detail.
Your framing it that way makes it as if it was something specially important. But in actuality it is a minor footnote compared to what they DID in those camps.
It's like saying "An important note about the 21st century is that humans lived in houses. People in both apartments and individual homes had wide access to cellphones."
Millions of Ukrainians died in the camp and due to artificial famine. How you can compare this to 'hot water is not always available', I can't comprehend.
You may want to put quotes round "undesirables" in that last sentence to indicate more clearly that it's not a view held by your hypothetical future scholar or yourself, but rather a term used at the time.
You could just compare it to the Nazi internment camps for Jews, if finding "worse" conditions is the goal. (I'm being sardonic.)
(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.
Honestly, I'm not sure I remember this coming up in my high school education, we sort of just pretend it didn't happen. We talked extensively about other inhumane things our country has done, but the Japanese internment is just something my dad probably told me about, being sort of a WW2 buff. I think the fact that we don't talk about it makes it even a little more disturbing.
Sometimes events are a little too recent or close to home for some to talk about and this seems to exacerbate things.
Down here in New Zealand a WW2 POW camp was established and during some a period of unrest New Zealand guards shot and killed 46 Japanese prisoners.
More recently someone ripped out trees that were planted to commemorate the atrocity.
There was the Niihau Incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niihau_incident where Hawaiians of Japanese descent helped a crashed Japanese pilot. But then ended up killing the pilot.
This is a quote from General John L. DeWitt, head of the U.S. Army’s Western Defense Command. He's basically the guy that convinced the president that this was a good idea. Why we put people like him in power (instead of prison), I'll never understand.
"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."
If so, lets not forget Mattis's approach to things:
Talks to the enemy diplomatically:
"I come in peace. I didn't bring artillery. But I'm pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I'll kill you all"
Promotes thinking rather than force from his subordinates:
"You are part of the world's most feared and trusted force. Engage your brain before you engage your weapon."
Works well with others:
"I don't get intelligence off a satellite. Iraqis tell me who the enemy is."
I think incoming national security advisor Michael Flynn would be a more apt point of comparison:
"We are facing another 'ism,' just like we faced Nazism, and fascism, and imperialism and communism," Flynn said. "This is Islamism, it is a vicious cancer inside the body of 1.7 billion people on this planet and it has to be excised." - http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/22/politics/kfile-michael-flynn-a... (apologies for the CNN link, but it's just for the quote).
What happens if you apply this logic to others? The Philippines right now for example - that tough talk escalated. Or any of the historical examples available. Assuming someone won't do what they say they will do is not a good way to elect a leader.
It's anti-induction. Anti-induction holds that a thing having happened many times before, all else being equal, is evidence that it will happen again. Anti-induction holds that it having never happened before is evidence that it will happen. Just as induction having generally worked in the past indicates, by induction, that it Wil continue to work, anti-induction having generally not worked in the past "indicates", by anti-induction, that it should begin to work now.
It sounds straight out of Doctor Strangelove. He might as well be ranting about how they're stealing our vital bodily fluids. It's just so insane that this guy was given this kind of power.
The most absurd thing I read on here was that they were still subjected to the draft. So that Japanese couldn't be trusted to live in the United States without armed guards, but we can totally give them guns and send them off to fight the enemy?!
Interesting to note, this went both ways: my grandfather was a naturalized German immigrant, and was sent to the Pacific when drafted because he was disallowed from fighting in Europe.
But of course, for some reason, German Americans weren't interned...
I wonder if there is any connection between the internment camps for Japanese people living in the US & the CO camps. Were they both run by the Selective Service? I know, at least, the CO camps were. The government had really botched handling COs in WWI, to the point that it created a lobby group that when WWII broke out they eventually were able to successfully pass the Burke-Wadsworth Bill with a section that created the Civilian Public Service.
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 would be interested to hear the perspective of some of the MP's that had to guard these camps. It would seem like such a waste, not least of which because with the labor shortages and so many other young men serving overseas, to not only be stuck guarding a camp but to be guarding camps full of people who would otherwise be helping to fill those huge labor shortages and support the war effort.
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.
For a country standing for Freedom and Human Rights, this kind of action is appalling. The quotes in the article from officials and three letters agencies stink of utter racism (even though no sabotage operations was ever undertaken).
As someone whose family ancestors were kidnapped to the US and forced to engage in unpaid labor I have to say this country never cared about freedom and human rights. It's all part of the national story designed to make the occupants of this country view themselves as better than the rest of the world.
Yup. It's a facade. Especially during the Carter, Nixon, HW Bush, etc. eras, culminating in Bush Jr's "They hate us for our Freedoms" speech after 9/11.
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.
2) By the same simplistic reasoning, Americans killed 20-30 million [1] just by themselves. I'm not sure what the totals would look like after adding in the British, French, Dutch, etc. empires.
3) I'm almost certain that that 100 million figure includes revolutions caused as a direct result of imperial powers meddling in the affairs of local populations. E.g. Cambodia [2]. That's the part that's "overly zealous".
Counter-examples abound: the US actively suppressed democracy in Latin America and elsewhere when it didn't suit American business interests, hence Guatemala.
Likewise, a great number of deaths at the hand of Communist leaders were due to utter incompetence and mismanagement, such as in China's Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward.
My rule of thumb is that it's basically a bad thing when somebody dies who shouldn't have (if people were fair and compassionate).
Entirely. In the vast histories of famines, for example, there were far more times where food was available and denied to the desperate, than there have been times where there has not been enough food for everybody.
During the food cost crisis that preceded the Arab Spring, I and everyone around me in comfortable America ate quite well. If we as a species cared for every human life, such suffering would have been avoided.
"And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’"
-Matthew, 25:40
18 million would be on the high end for the estimated indigenous population of pre-Columbian North America. 90% of those were wiped out by imported diseases before the United States even existed. It would be quite a trick to murder 100 million people based on a starting population of only 1.8 million (not all of whom, or even most of whom, were killed, by any means).
It is not reasonable to blame the United States for things that happened before it existed.
Also, it is pretty much accepted nowadays that killing off indigenous people is a Bad Thing. Unfortunately, the same is not true of communism. There are still plenty of people who think it's a wonderful idea.
Please don't treat divisive, inflammatory topics as mere ammunition for trivial internet arguments. That's a common pattern, and it makes discussion both uncivil and unsubstantive.
Sure. But the US doesn't care until it thinks it can use the opportunity to threaten the USSR/Russia. And "overzealous" (not sure how I managed to type overly zealous instead) means staging myopic, sometimes protracted wars or military action of dubious to no (or negative) benefit for the American people: Panama (because a corrupt dictator wasn't following orders anymore), Cambodia, Vietnam, and now Afghanistan, Iraq.
That is, it's all under guise of "fighting communism", or more specifically, the Russians, which could be believed if they were actually deterred by it and didn't just think the US was a war-hungry power bent on global domination. Well, in the few cases the military action was actually successful instead of turning out to be a national disgrace.
This all seems to trace back to Eisenhower's stiffing aid post-war to Russia and further by the Truman Doctrine. I say that Russia has never had an interest in invading the US, but our ballistic foreign policy has only emboldened them to replace us as the foremost world power.
> 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.
Distorted exaggeration disrespects everyone. This country has struggled with issues of freedom and human rights, but it has made significant strides, and we should use them as an example of what to work for and what can be achieved.
A Belgian writer once remarked to me that he was surprised when he moved to the United States. Compared to everywhere else, Americans were so angry at each other all the time.
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.
That wasn't the purpose of the war. Here's Lincoln, 1862: "I would save the Union. … If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it."
That only tells us Lincoln's stated values. He doesn't get to dictate the motives of the entire country. I don't think you can legitimately claim that there wasn't a real ideological abolitionist movement, and that many people fought for it.
> For a country standing for Freedom and Human Rights, this kind of action is appalling.
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.
Given the climate of the US right now recurring donations to the ACLU and SPLC (among others) would be be appropriate, I've been encouraging as many people as I can to do so. The SPLC has been a little more directed at hate-groups and racism but I groups that have fought internment and the KKK to be very well funded.
Because Japanese Americans look different from "the average American", while German Americans don't.
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.
This is entirely supposition on my part, from someone far too young to have lived through any of it, but I suspect it's less that Japanese Americans looked different, and more that Japan was a non-Christian culture, which made it easier to dehumanize people of Japanese descent.
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.
Do you really believe that it was because Japan is dominantly a non-Christian culture and not because they look different? No, it was because they weren't white. And America has, for a very long time and even now, been painted as a mostly white and african american culture.
Even in modern Japan itself ironically enough, it's hard for some people to really picture non-white and non-african Americans as Americans. The word 外国人 (gaikokujin) really only applies to foreigners of European and African ancestry. I believe it's hard for them to picture those Americans as Americans simply because of the image that has been painted of the country.
Sincerely,
A non-asian non-african non-white American interested in Japanese culture
>Do you really believe that it was because Japan is dominantly a non-Christian culture and not because they look different?
I believe it was both - they're two sides of the same coin. Look at the propaganda of the time - the Japanese were portrayed as being fundamentally inhuman in a way that Europeans weren't. The myth of the "inscrutable Oriental" has been around in the West for a very long time, the Japanese mind and morality were considered to be incomprehensible.
That Japanese Americans looked different probably made this xenophobia easier to act upon, though.
Fun fact: Japanese Americans in Hawaii were never interned (aside from a select few) because they made up such a large portion of the population that it wouldn't have been practical. Just goes to show that the whole exercise was ridiculous.
You should search FDR's views on Japanese and Jewish immigration and his writings in the 1920's and later. It should make it fairly clear, and reveal his views of Jewish immigration and hence why very few German refugees were accepted. Even during the war it's been revealed he had negative views of Jews and Asians.
The picture of FDR making an uncharacteristic mistake is part of the whitewash.
Twenty-five years earlier, during WWI, my German ancestors were made to swear allegiance to the United States around a bonfire of their German-language books.
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.
A relatively small number of Germans were interned based on specific individual circumstances. This was still unjust in many cases, but I wouldn't call it "similar treatment."
True but they were overwhelmingly Japanese. It appears about 11K Germans and 2K Italians were interned compared to over 110K Japanese, despite there being significantly more Germans and Italians living in the US.
Thank you for posting this, for real, all of these photographs are truly beautiful in their own way. That is, they remind me a lot about Sebastião Salgado's work on portraying human beings in such emotionally harsh conditions [1] (which in fact was quite possibly inspired by people like Dorothea). I don't know what is most disturbing in that page though, the stories behind the photos or the quotes... man, the quotes... :-(
> “They got to a point where they said, ‘Okay, we’re going to take you out.’ And it was obvious that he was going before a firing squad with MPs ready with rifles. He was asked if he wanted a cigarette; he said no.… You want a blindfold?… No. They said, ‘Stand up here,’ and they went as far as saying, ‘Ready, aim, fire,’ and pulling the trigger, but the rifles had no bullets. They just went click.”
— Ben Takeshita, recounting his older brother’s ordeal at Tule Lake Relocation Center, where he was segregated for causing trouble
Bringing "Islamic terrorism" up to a whopping 1.7% of all homicides over the same time period, 75% of which occurred in a single attack by less than 30 people.
And yet, were I to point out that firearms are responsible for the majority of all homicides from 2001-2016, I'd expect you'd have a very different objection to the numbers.
“A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched—so a Japanese-American, born of Japanese parents—grows up to be a Japanese, not an American.”
— Los Angeles Times, February 2, 1942
Depressing to think this is going to happen again, in some way.
The recent speculation about a national registry for Muslims - and what that may look like - makes this even more poignant. The times may have changed, but fear and ignorance have not.
How many such incidents have occurred? How many Muslim people exist in the world? Is it justifiable to violate the civil liberties of a large group (and set the stage for something much worse) when this ratio is quite small?
The Nuremberg trials determined that "deportations and persecutions on racial grounds" were crimes against humanity [1]. I don't understand how FDR's executive order to deport Japanese-Americans to internment camps allowed the Nuremberg judges to punish Nazi members on this charge.
At the end of the day, the problem with hypocrisy are the parts you do wrong, not the parts you do right.
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.
If you want the book from 2006, it's available on Amazon.[1] Most of this material is available on line, from the National Archives or the University of California.[2][3] It's not new.
It may seem frivolous, but the first thing that strikes me when looking at these photos is how well dressed the ordinary people were back then, compared with nowadays when apparently everybody dresses in rags. I can't help but think at some point something went very wrong.
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?
Because former are inhuman and latter a human?
The most jarring part, of course, is that most of "illegal aliens" are rural Mexicans of Native American heritage, being detained in states like Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico, on land belonging to their country not too long ago, and to their ancestors for centuries.
Mexicans in those annexed areas had the choice of relocating to within Mexico's new boundaries or receiving American citizenship with full civil rights. Over 90% chose to become U.S. citizens.
Ukrainians who lived in Crimea got full Russian citizenship too, but I'm not sure if that makes it fair and a done deal for the rest of the Ukrainians.
But I thought my other point was more important. Most Americans are newcomers to the Americas, a few generations tops. Most Mexicans are not, and nobody really asked them before erecting new borders on their lands.
How easy is to repeat the same mistakes from the past! Add some new terminology, change some laws, add more layers ofcomplexity to definitions. And it's done: we can repeat the evils from past and nobody will notice in the present.
Republicans have suggested that the US repeal the Constitutional right of birthright citizenship specifically to allow people born in the US to illegal immigrants to be rounded up and "deported" to their parents' or grandparents' countries of origin.
The entire scope of this discussion involves more that simply arresting and deporting people who sneak into the US illegally - it also includes a movement to redefine American citizenship in terms of generational purity.
Strange how enforcing borders began to be seen as controversial. The explanation that makes the most sense to me is, some people see free movement across borders as a human right, while others view a country as their home, and so should have the right to decide who to let in.
The tragedy is when some people view a country as their home, and so should have the right to kick out other people who also view a country as their home.
"Illegal alien" encompasses everyone from the murderous narcotic kingpin, whom I think we can all generally agree should have little more than a jail cell for a home, to grown adults who immigrated as a toddler, and have only found out when they were much older that it was done without their parents having the right paperwork. It encompasses the queue cutting asshole, and it encompasses the panicked refuge fleeing certain death.
As our application of 'justice' is not perfect, I imagine mass deportation has ended up prosecuting - and even deporting - a few perfectly upstanding, legal citizens. Mistaken identity, misleading evidence, a little racism preventing people from digging a bit deeper... shit happens, and our institutions are made up of fallible people. We're already deporting millions a year - can you tell me with a straight face that not a single mistake will be made? That not a single mistake has been made?
> Strange how enforcing borders began to be seen as controversial
It would be strange, but that never really happened in substantial way. Most of what gets framed that way by one side of the debate is not controversy over the idea of "enforcing borders", but rather:
1. Controversy over whether the particular preferences, limitations, and exclusions of current immigration policy are desirable, and
2. Controversy over whether current and proposed mechanisms for enforcing the current preferences, limitations, and exclusions in immigration policy (which, in the case of proposed mechanisms, often involve creating additional limitations and exclusions, and more rarely additional preferences) are desirable.
This gets generalized into claims that "enforcing borders" has become controversial as a means of avoiding debate over the specific details that are actually controversial.
I am surprised by the same thing. We have a legal process for crossing those borders, and if you circumvent that process you are a criminal. How is that controversial?
Separately, if you believe the process is bad, or borders should be open, or whatever -- by all means, fight for that using the frameworks we have.
So your viewpoint is that, if the law on the books criminalizes an enormous number of people who are not really harming anyone, then one should nonetheless support rounding those people up using whatever means necessary?
I mean, I guess your view is consistent and makes some kind of sense. Selective enforcement of the law is a bad thing in many ways, and in an ideal world there would perhaps be no difference between "technically illegal" and an actually enforced crime. Perhaps disastrous policies like rounding up medical marijuana users, longtime undocumented residents, jaywalkers, "sodomites" before Lawrence v. Texas, miscegenators before Loving v Virginia, etc., etc., would "heighten the contradictions" and force civil society to legislate what it actually wanted to punish.
I'm confused how you could be confused by the opposite viewpoint though. The opposite viewpoint is informed by millenia of the reality of law, which is that laws are often not enforced because they don't make sense, and a zealous enforcement of an existing law can be a radical, destructive break with an informal rule. For those of us who see this as simply part of reality, a given proposal to increase or decrease the enforcement of existing laws must be weighed against its practical effects.
The proposal to enforce the immigration laws is controversial because it will cause an enormous amount of suffering, it solves no real problems, it will weaken the US economy, and it is motivated by racial animus and xenophobia.
All those people participated in breaking the laws they saw as unjust. From Underground Railroad in the 19th century to sitting in white-only sections in the 20th. People hiding Jews from Nazis were actively breaking the law. The founders of the United States broke the British law. Edward Snowden broke the law. Nelson Mandela broke the law. Mahatma Ghandi broke the law. The list goes on and on.
There are illegal aliens in this country because this country let them come in. We let them in so they can pick fruits, landscape our lawns, babysit our children, all at a huge discount.
So yes, we all got financial benefits out of it. Now, suddenly turning around to punish people who we benefited from strikes as hypocritical, to put it politely.
If were are just enforcing the laws now, it would be only fair to write a big fat check to each deportee before sending them on their way.
From an economics point of view, we should allow the free movement of labor (people) because we already allow the free movement of capital (money) across borders. If my understanding is correct, this is one of the pillars of the European Union.
However, I think looking at it as a basic human right is more appropriate. Restricting people crossing borders is simply institutional racism. Countries are granting permission to enter/not enter based on the person's race. If this were any other context, people would be screaming racism. But because it's become so typical over the past 150 years, nobody calls it for what it is anymore.
Because it isn't. What about the DMZ between the Koreas, the Berlin wall, the Taiwan strait? If a country leaves the Schengen area, does their citizens' race change? And which race can stroll into the US without a visa?
Some countries make it easier for people of the right ancestry to apply for citizenship, but it's more complicated than plain racism.
A hundred years ago, border enforcement was extremely controversial. In most places, customs cared about two things - goods, and keeping criminals and people of the wrong skin colour out of their country.
Passport-based travel was introduced in most of Europe as a 'temporary' measure, for the purposes of fighting WW I.
How preposterous. We have rules as a country for who is allowed to enter and stay. There is no country in the world that will allow you to stay illegally.
"...intended to detain non-citizens slated for deportation."
Your statement raises two distinct questions:
Q1) Why are these individuals being detained? Are they visitors to the United States, with a valid visa, merely subject to detention by a bigoted law enforcement agency...or are have they broken one or more existing U.S. laws by overstaying their visa or illegally entering the country?
If the former, then yes, it is shameful and should be addressed immediately.
If the latter, then they are being detained as any anyone would be if they had been accused of a crime and considered a flight risk.
Q2) How are they being detained? Are the conditions considered acceptable by third-party organizations such as the ICRC? Are detainees being provided with adequate food, water, shelter, and medical care? Is there an official timetable for the resolution of their detention? Are the reason(s) for their detention documented and available to advocates?
If any of the above questions have a "no" answer, then again it is shameful and should be corrected immediately.
Beyond that, the United States is not conducting itself in a manner inconsistent with most other nations in the world.
As for Trump and the mythical "rounding up" plans: just stop it.
Seriously.
This kind of hysterical fearmongering is just as absurd as Glenn Beck's "Obama's gonna round up conservatives and put them into FEMA camps" bullshit from a couple of years ago. It is just as unsubstantiated, just as inflammatory, and just as likely to be fought tooth and nail by average Americans.
Any social advocate will tell you that this ain't the 1940s.
Putting the obligatory moral condemnation of our deluded and evil forbears to one side for a moment, one can't help but notice that our darkest and most shameful national mistakes are nevertheless vastly more humane and benign than those of comparable societies. I would hope that episodes such as this inspire in modern Americans, beyond pure disgust, a desire to identify and nurture the national characteristics that enforced such comparative restraint.
Great photography, though.