
It's Fred Korematsu Day: Celebrating a Foe of U.S. Internment Camps - t23
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/01/30/512488821/its-fred-korematsu-day-celebrating-a-foe-of-u-s-internment-camps
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Isamu
>It was an executive order in 1942 that created the system forcing Americans
of Japanese descent to live in internment camps.

Funny how often I see this roundabout way of framing this. They'd rather not
come out and say that FDR, the president, took this initiative. It was a piece
of paper that did this.

Congress, the usual suspect is not to blame. Nobody voted on this. There was
no public debate.

So we tiptoe around calling out FDR, maybe because he is one of our golden
boys.

And we call them "internment" camps, to soften it a bit.

~~~
aarpmcgee
Maybe it is possible that its more an attempt to draw a connection between an
old horror enabled by an executive order, and any new horrors we are seeing
and will see with Trump's executive orders.

~~~
Isamu
They are, but they managed to call out Trump by name. If they were drawing
parallels, they could have just mentioned the executive orders.

They should have called out FDR also but I think they wanted to avoid seeming
to compare him to Trump. After all FDR was a great guy when he wasn't putting
American families into internment camps.

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schoen
A few months ago I randomly came across Fred Korematsu's grave while walking
around the Mountain View Cemetery (which is in Oakland, not Mountain View).
There are some really notable people buried over there.

If you're in the East Bay and would like to go pay your respects:

[http://www.mountainviewcemetery.org/files/7114/7267/1043/201...](http://www.mountainviewcemetery.org/files/7114/7267/1043/2015_MVC_Notables.pdf)

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kartman
Never again is now.

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oh_sigh
Consider this alternate reality: It is exactly like our timeline, but
alternate reality US does not intern it's Japanese citizens during WWII. Some
of those Japanese citizens went on to commit mass murders against civilians.
Other than that, the timeline is the same as possible (US wins, etc).

Would you still feel the revulsion against internment camps as we do in this
timeline?

~~~
madhadron
Of course. White supremacists, sovereign citizen folks, and the like commit
the majority of terrorist acts in the united states, but I don't call for
putting them in concentration camps.

Plus the timeline is implausible. The Office of Naval Intelligence had
declared that the Japanese American population was not a threat to national
security. The solicitor general, Charles Fahy suppressed that information. If
he hadn't died thirty some years before the federal government admitted wrong
doing, he would hopefully be facing serious charges and expect to die in
prison.

I am unaware of an example of concentration camps that was an issue of
security instead of racism.

