One of the most affecting images in my high school history book for me was of Japanese American Boy Scouts hanging a sign declaring Japanese Americans “Aliens of Enemy Nationalities.” The caption mentioned that the young men themselves were afterwards sent to internment camps. [0]
This image so affected me that I once saw a copy of the book left behind at a coffee shop and had to thumb through it to see it again.
With all the editing of history curricula that states like Florida are doing, I hope it survives. It’s is a dark chapter in American history that wasn’t that long ago.
This page mentions they were forced to sell their land, of course at a much lower price than they would have gotten. They also weren’t allowed to take their pets, which the page says “were destroyed.” [0].
Shameful. This country took its own citizens, locked them up, stole their land and shot their dogs — without a trial.
…of course the US still has officials (police) that act as literal highway robbers, systematically robbing people driving through small towns. With the loot going to local police departments, and local govt/judiciary complicit in the system. Or has the civil forfeiture issue been resolved?
I was surprised to find a Japanese Internment Memorial in my hometown when I moved here. Really proud when I found more about it.
I have no doubt that the internment had local support at the time. More, I suspect I would have been more for the idea than I care to think on. Glad to see we aren't pretending it didn't happen.
One way of fulfilling requirements for some scout ranks is to partake in community service programs, so perhaps they’re running errands for their community by hanging this sign up. It’s a haunting image.
They likely considered themselves Americans (because they were), and did not realize that even third-generation American-born citizens would be considered "aliens" and "enemies" and sent to the camps.
I think I figured it out: If all non-citizens are aliens, then aliens of enemy nationality is a subset of that group. It's defined by aliens that are from a country that is designated as an enemy country. So French aliens are not included, but German and Japanese aliens were.
No, they didn't care about citizenship or where you were from.
> "A Jap's a Jap. It makes no difference whether the Jap is a citizen or not." - — General John L. DeWitt, Commander, Western Defense Command, 1942
> "I am determined that if they have one drop of Japanese blood in them, they must go to camp." — Colonel Karl Bendetsen, Administrator, Wartime Civil Control Administration, 1942
They also didn't really care about German or Italian ancestry, there were millions of such people and almost none were imprisoned. Nearly all Americans with Japanese ancestry were imprisoned, and most were American-born citizens.
That comment is quite the mix of good information and political cheap shot. You could have stopped at the first sentence, or given the people that push for these things the benefit of the doubt, that maybe they believe in what they say and just want to do good whether you agree or not...
But if it were true that the inclusion of such information is, in fact, framed to promote a narrative beyond just the facts, how is it a political cheap shot to point out the distinction, and wouldn't "[stopping] at the first sentence" be bias by omission? I would suggest that "the editing of history curricula that states like Florida are doing" is a political cheap shot if what Florida is doing is putting up firewalls that prevent such narrative propaganda. I think it's worth having a factual discussion about.
George Takei's story is an important story and I highly recommend it to anyone. However, BBC's article is very brief, Takei's been talking about this for years, it's not a new story and there are much better takes on it. I recommend taking the time to search the internet and learn more.
This is such an important bit of history for anyone who’s ever thought George Takei is too liberal or outspoken. His childhood was profoundly shaped by reactionary bigots, and then coming of age as a gay man in that era he had to face another life-altering prejudice. He was phenomenally lucky to be a talented actor and get a huge break but that also means he’s keenly aware of just how much is at stake if that kind of people regain power.
An older friend was married to someone who was held in Manzanar. I drove by with them in the 2000s and the mood was somber. His life got a lot better after the war and he was able to spend most of his retirement fishing off of the coast in San Diego but it’s hard to forget that your home country saw you as a threat even while a child.
> it’s hard to forget that your home country saw you as a threat even while a child.
And it’s the inability to forget that kept a citizenship question off the 2020 census[0], a reminder of the long lasting impact the internment still has on the US.
What does one have to do with the other? Japanese internment was racist because US citizens of one race were being treated differently than US citizens of a different race.
Now, maybe you believe that citizenship shouldn’t be a salient category for treating people differently, but that’s an entirely different argument that has nothing to do with internment.
It’s curious that the NPR article doesn’t take exception with the question on the census that’s actually related to internment, which is dividing up American citizens by race and ethnicity.
Internment started with forcing non-citizens to register with the state. The census question was essentially the same process, but on a national scale.
> There have been 23 decennial censuses since 1790. All but one between 1820 and 2000 asked at least some of the population about their citizenship or place of birth. The question was asked of all households until 1950, and was asked of a fraction of the population on an alternative long-form questionnaire between 1960 and 2000. In 2010, the citizenship question was moved from the census to the American Community Survey, which is sent each year to a small sample of households.
That's not at all true. The citizenship question was removed from the 2020 Decennial Census by the Supreme Court in Department of Commerce v New York (2019) which held the Department of Commerce failed to provide a genuine justification for the decision to add the citizenship question (as required by the Administrative Procedure Act), instead providing a contrived and pretextual explanation.
That was the administrative reason why the question was not permitted. The case was raised to begin with because of fears it would result in undercounting non-citizens, who would be less likely to respond because the don’t trust that the data would remain private. This explanation is outlined in the section called “2020 Census” in the Wikipedia article you linked.
I read it that way too, even if he didn't explicitly say it. Probably because Takei is known to be very vocally anti-Republican or anti-right or pro-left or pro-liberal, not sure of the exact dynamic there. But the comment also said Takei is "liberal" and knows what it's like if "that kind of people" regain power.
To me, it's clearly an anti-Republic or anti-conservative jab, implying that "those people" shouldn't be allowed to regain power, else some poor minority will get put into camps. Using the argument that if Takei says so, it's because he's lived through it, so we should listen to him. Ofc, not to detract from what he went through, it's horrible.
Takei is so silly for not knowing which political party was in power during WWII. Thank God the internet exists to hold him to account for those crazy positions of his, which he so clearly holds that he doesn't even need to say them.
It's not a jab, rather the plain reality of the contemporary political landscape.
Speaking as a non-partisan libertarian - it is a fact that the contemporary Republican party has openly embraced white nationalism. Racism is a type of collectivism, which is attractive precisely because it's a lazy un-nuanced explanation for one's woes. The Republican platform used to have mainstream politicians that kept those urges in check, and while perhaps pundits courted those urges with dog whistles and the like on talk radio, they could still be said to have distance from the mainstream party. But part of Trump's "edginess" was openly saying what "couldn't be said", and so the dam holding it back has burst. This certainly does not mean that all Republicans are white nationalists, nor does it imply that Republicans with power will automatically enact white nationalist policies. But open white nationalism does now form a significant part of the mainstream Republican party.
Now since I must include an analogous analysis of the other political sports team, lest some partisan respond with "no that's not true and even if it is the other party is the same or worse" - It is certainly true that there is a large contingent of the democratic party that has openly embraced minority-favoring racism, and that is a terrible thing as well! But for the most part that discourse revolves around inclusionary racism (disadvantaged group #643 needs help) rather than exclusionary racism. We've seen the catastrophic results of exclusionary racism enough times to know where it leads, but it's much harder to know where inclusionary racism leads (apart from stoking more racism in general, these political teams are in ying-yang). Presently, the concrete results seem to be bureaucracy, language policing, and a new proto-religion to repeated if one occupies a politically sensitive position (and it's not clear how this could continue to snowball into society-wide exclusionary racism). These things are certainly not great dynamics, but they're a far cry from bottom-up lynchings and top-down concentration camps.
> It has very little to do with political parties directly, unfortunately those sorts of people tend to fall pretty cleanly into one in particular, at least in the US
FDR was a democrat. Jim Crow laws were put in place by democrats. Democrats filibustered against the civil rights act. Clinton was responsible for mass incarceration which primarily affected minorities. We’re currently witnessing the systemic destruction of minority communities in democrat run cities. It’s odd that Takei thinks that the liberals will do anything but exploit minority groups when in positions of power.
> President Lyndon B. Johnson, although a southern Democrat himself, signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. The evening after signing the Civil Rights Act, Johnson told aide Bill Moyers, "I think we may have lost the south for your lifetime – and mine", anticipating a coming backlash from Southern Whites against Johnson's Democratic Party.[5]
Southern Democrats of 1850s through 1960s were the racist southerners, historically aligned with the Confederacy.
After the Democrats signed the Civil Rights act of 1964, the racists got out of the Democrat's party, and started to align themselves to Republicans. By the 1990s, it has become obvious that Republicans were actively courting this large group and drawing upon them for political power.
In the most recent election, assholes were targeting Chinese, Korean, and Japanese shops in my area with Graffiti, breaking windows, and effectively blaming the Asian community for COVID19. These racists absolutely exist and continue to function today. And its somewhat horrifying to me to see the Republicans actively courting them to pad out their votes and increase their political power. Furthermore, the mainstream Republicans turn a blind eye to it and try to pretend that this crap isn't happening.
That being said, I recognize that anti-Asian hate, while it exists, is kinda minor compared to other ethnic groups. But even in my day to day life today, I'm seeing the racists (and literally those racists shake their anti-Asian signposts at me. Because I'm Asian)
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> It’s odd that Takei thinks that the liberals will do anything but exploit minority groups when in positions of power.
Did you even see the anti-Chinese hateboner of 2020? It wasn't the Democrats.
I'm not even Chinese. But you know, people can't tell that so I kinda-sorta get wrapped up in it. I'm glad that it seems to have died down a bit (at least, in my area of the country), but I'm still surprised at how quickly anti-Chinese hate turned into anti-Asian hate and a problem for everybody.
> After the Democrats signed the Civil Rights act of 1964, the racists got out of the Democrat's party, and started to align themselves to Republicans.
Note that this was the last of several splits between the White supremacists and the Democratic establishment; why this one stuck but others didn’t is that, unlike with, say, the Dixiecrat split in the 1940s, the Republicans actively courted and shaped their message to appeal to the disaffected racists after the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In previous splits, the racists who wanted any influence had always coming slinking back to the Democrats because of structural duopoly and the fact that the Republicans were not welcoming to them. In the 1960s, that changed.
One politician flipped an entire party’s platform? What about the 20 democrat senators who voted against the act and stuck with the party?
A campaign of FUD regarding states rights (the basis of democrats own secessionist arguments) and conservative policies and blindness to continuing racist liberal policies is more likely (including the current president).
To be fair, no one caught the perpetrator who did the anti-Asian attacks in my area. But given the nature of the crime, it was obviously anti-Asian hate.
So now the question is: which party has more anti-Asian hate?
What I can say, is that about the same time, my sister who is a doctor was getting chewed out by her patients who wouldn't believe they had COVID19, they didn't want the "Chinese Doctor" (let alone a "Clinton supporting woman"), and were demanding to get useless ivermectin to treat their symptoms. Because "obviously" my sister being a female doctor proves she's a Clinton supporter or some bullshit like that.
Over, and over again. The anti-chinese hate (and again, we aren't Chinese. But bigots are blind to these issues...) was from people who were prouding proclaiming themselves to be Republican.
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I'm well aware of the anti-Asian hate of the African American community in the 90s too. Back then I will tell you that it was Black people who looked down upon Asians (and I understand the population dynamics associated with the LA Race riots). But 2020 is a different time.
This is absolutely, a right-wing thought process. They blamed China for COVID19 (and Asians who kinda-look Chinese to them, got wrapped up in it). Add on a bit of anti-Clinton misogynists and yeah. Its a pretty obvious which side of the political aisle was causing me, and my family, issues.
And again, I get it. Its not that "All Republicans" do this. But what I'm trying to point out that by ignoring these obvious truths and obvious realities of just 2 or 3 years ago, you're enabling these assholes to be racist again. So its important for me to talk out about it, and its important for the non-Racist Republicans to be aware that these things happened. And that you need to clamp down on the racists in your party.
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And the anti-Chinese protester who was yelling at me to go back to China and leave this country (and again, I'm not Chinese so this is completely insane... but whatever). Okay, I dunno which party he was part of, but I'm _guessing_ he was Republican. Sound like a safe bet?
> These bigots never disappeared. They just are being courted by the Right / Republicans today.
Normally, I’d respond to this with something addressing the chain of events starting with the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and subsequent electoral strategy, but just to mix things up I'll go simple:
This is the reason that when you see rallies of overt racists, or people storming a government building waving confederate flags, or people arguing about, how, akshully, slavery in America was good for the slaves and their descendants should be thankful rather than resentful of it, in the 21st century, they aren’t backers of the Democratic Party.
> It is important history--which is why you shouldn't use it to attack your political opponents by drawing false equivalences, as you just did.
Can you be precise in stating exactly how you believe I did this? My point was simply that Takei has strong views for a reason worth respecting.
> As a brown guy, I certainly didn't feel safer in 2015-2016 when folks tried to turn Trump's ban on refugees from certain countries designated by Obama into a conversation about internment of Muslim Americans.
This is a bit vague, too, since Trump wasn’t in office in 2015 or 2016. Are you referring to the way some of his people cited the internment camps as positive precedents? The problem there certainly doesn’t seem to be the people who believe Japanese internment was wrong.
> Also, I'm skeptical that Americans are even equipped to teach this history in context. Imagine if the shoe had been on the other foot. Japan had a large population of Americans, and America had just launched a surprise attack on Japan. What would imperial Japan have done to those Americans within their borders?
Can you expand this idea? I’m failing to see why that matters in the sense that throughout my life it’s seemed pretty broadly accepted in both parties that we should be freer than WWII-era Japan and Germany.
> As a brown guy, I certainly didn't feel safer in 2015-2016 when folks tried to turn Trump's ban on refugees from certain countries designated by Obama into a conversation about internment of Muslim Americans.
As another "brown guy", I'm absolutely comfortable with this necessary conversation happening. Especially since Trump immediately ramped up forced internment of legal immigrants, some of which we later discovered amounted to literal ethnic cleansing via forced sterilization practices.
The thing that makes me feel unsafe is the fact that this stuff is happening, and has been happening for years, and that by and large people don't talk about and instead ignore it, not the fact that people very occasionally try to use relevant history to shine a light on the shadows under which we still live.
> Also, I'm skeptical that Americans are even equipped to teach this history in context. Imagine if the shoe had been on the other foot. Japan had a large population of Americans, and America had just launched a surprise attack on Japan. What would imperial Japan have done to those Americans within their borders?
This is a really disingenuous presentation of what actually happened, so yes, I agree that you are probably not equipped to teach this history in context, but that doesn't mean everyone is.
What do you mean people don't talk about it? I may be misunderstanding what you mean by "it" specifically, but if you're referring to some sort of targeting of ethnic/religious/racial groups, then it most certainly is being talked about. A lot even, even to the point of many groups pushing back against it because they think it's unwarranted.
"Trump immediately ramped up forced internment of legal immigrants, some of which we later discovered amounted to literal ethnic cleansing via forced sterilization practices."
> Tuesday's report said investigators did not corroborate "allegations of mass hysterectomies." But investigators said they did find "serious issues" regarding medical procedures and policies at the Georgia facility and the conduct of Mahendra Amin, a doctor whom Irwin County detainees accused in 2020 of performing questionable medical procedures, including, in some cases, without the patients' full consent.
White guy immigrant in a "brown" African country here - Politicians doing anything for votes by stoking subtle hate, jealousy and in-group preferences in a voting population don't make a distinction when it comes to skin color, nationality of origin, religion, immigration status or wealth. Those are just convenient tools in their arsenal of divisiveness.
> You're much more likely to encounter someone with an Indian accent on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley than someone with an Appalachian accent.
Yes, because one of those groups is two orders of magnitude larger than the other in number and can't make it to Wall Street or Silicon Valley without a visa that is incredibly expensive to get and explicitly filters for the trifecta of wealth, income, and formal education. That doesn't invalidate racism against against them; it just means that you're not comparing apples to apples.
This is an incredibly disingenuous set of arguments you're trying to make, and you've been called out for it many times before - it's classic flamewar bait, which is against the site rules.
> Literally the very first sentence of the link you cited contradicts what you're saying
> With heavy immigration fueled by U.S. immigration law changes in 1965 and the influx of over 700.000 Indochinese refugees since the Vietnam War ended
Do you think those “Indochinese refugees” were affluent educated professionals?
The 1965 Act actually caused a decrease in the percentage of Asians working in high skill jobs: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/07/12/income-... (“The surge in Asian immigration followed the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965, which favored family reunification, and the end to the war in Vietnam in 1975, which brought in a wave of refugees. One result was that the share of new Asian immigrants working in high-skill occupations decreased from 1970 to 1990, and the share working in low-skill occupations increased.”). It wasn’t until the 1990 H1B changes that this trend reversed.
But these low Asian groups nonetheless did well. In the 1970s, Vietnamese Americans had a poverty rate higher than black Americans. Today, they have a lower poverty rate and higher median income than white Americans.
And even the skilled immigrants during that period didn’t come here with portable “wealth, income, and formal education” as stated above. The class people you’re thinking of—the children of wealthy business people in India and China who send their kids to go to school in America—was virtually non-existent in the 1960s through the 1980. That class is a product of India and China’s exponential growth since the 1990s. Being wealthy before that meant being like my mom’s family in Bangladesh—having land and social status, neither of which was very portable to America.
> I don't know why you are doing this but you're not contributing positively to the site.
Why are you so invested in the myth that Asian Americans are successful in the US primarily because of selective immigration? Why do you want to erase the—well documented—experience of all the Asians who came to the US as refugees or based on family reunification and went from poverty to being middle class or affluent?
Have you ever looked at stats re the Hmong American demographic?
I’m intimately aware of yellow privilege in police stops but would love to see the data on poor Asians being nearly three times more likely to escape poverty than poor whites round these parts.
I don’t think white racists can tell the difference between Hmong and Vietnamese, who have quickly matched other Americans income-wise despite being one of the highest poverty groups in the 1980 census: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/vietnamese-immigrant....
Re: income mobility: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/21/17139300/e... (“Among children who grew up in the bottom fifth of the distribution, 10.6 percent of whites make it into the top fifth of household incomes themselves, as do 25.5 percent of Asian-Americans.”)
It is a difficult thing for some people to understand. But sometimes good people can do bad things.
Were most of his policies based on the betterment of the oppressed? Absolutely.
Did he oversee one of the most objectively bigoted things that happened in 1942? Absolutely.
Was Roosevelt a bigot? I do not know.
But, is it fair to say that he was a reactionary bigot? Maybe.
That's the thing about people. They're very, very rarely one thing to the exclusion of all else. Violent racists can be outstanding community members on a very local scale. Extremely inclusive pacifists can be assholes to the people in their lives.
I routinely have to hear from left-leaning friends about how me and my family should be killed. They're completely ok with fantasizing about mass murder since they're Good People and their targets are acceptable. All their eat the richery is extra funny since the worst offenders are well paid programmers. They are of course not in line for the guillotine or the wall. Their comments about Christians are likewise really funny stuff to listen to. Just a constant, unthinking stream of abject bigotry from people who consider themselves openminded. I don't think they realize what they sound like to people outside their bubble.
Yes, it is extremely difficult to believe that you "routinely have to hear from left-leaning friends about how [you and your] family should be killed". It's so comically exaggerated that I must assume you're either trolling or delusional.
Most charitably, my guess is you've developed a persecution complex which has you hearing a comment like (as an example) "the US would be better off if the GOP just disappeared" as "we must murder all conservatives".
Meanwhile, one side of the political spectrum appears more likely to inspire actual politically-motivated violence, and it's not the one you seem to be pointing the finger at:
> In short, our individual-level examination found that among radicalized individuals in the United States, those adhering to a left-wing ideology were markedly less likely to engage in violent ideologically motivated acts when compared to right-wing individuals.
...
> When compared to individuals associated with a right-wing ideology, individuals adhering to a left-wing ideology had 68% lower odds of engaging in violent (vs. nonviolent) radical behavior (b = −1.15, SE = 0.13, odds ratio [OR] = 0.32, P < 0.001). On the other hand, the difference between individuals motivated by Islamist and right-wing causes was not significant (b = 0.05, SE = 0.14, OR = 1.05, P = 0.747). Expressed in terms of predicted probabilities, the probability of left-wing violent attack was 0.33, that of right-wing violent attack was 0.61, and that of Islamist violent attack was 0.62.
Which, of course, is just more data backing up the many many analyses that right-wing violence is by far a greater threat than left-wing violence (this is from 2020):
> Overall, right-wing terrorists perpetrated the majority—57 percent—of all attacks and plots during this period, compared to 25 percent committed by left-wing terrorists, 15 percent by religious terrorists, 3 percent by ethnonationalists, and 0.7 percent by terrorists with other motives.
...
> Our data suggest that right-wing extremists pose the most significant terrorism threat to the United States, based on annual terrorist events and fatalities.
In fact, it's become institutionalized as this point. A recent poll showed that '30% of Republicans agree with the statement, “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.' Alarming? I'd say so.
So, hey, let's pretend for a moment that you are in fact surrounded by crazed lefties that talk to you about exterminating you and your family over your political views. There's one big difference between them and folks on the American right: They're far less likely to actually do anything about it.
Abraham Lincoln supported enshrining slavery in the constitution. Einstein and MLK were serial adulterers. George Washington owned slaves. Let's not even start on Columbus.
There's something about human nature that makes us want to think of influential people as saints but rarely do they live up to that standard. We'd be far better off if we could banish this tendency from society.
Would be it any better to say "non-reactionary bigot"?
I think "reactionary bigot" is just a commonplace phrase often said perfunctorily, but I'm not sure the meaning of the original comment would change if the word "reactionary" was deleted. The argument over the word seems pedantic in the context. The original point is that Takei faced multiple forms of bigotry in his life.
The definition of reactionary is "opposing political or social liberalization or reform".
Whereas internment was a reaction, indeed an overreaction, to the war with Japan, based on the bigoted fear that Japanese-Americans were loyal to Japan rather than to America. Not exactly the same.
Yes, if you are exclusively pedantic, then it is not an exact fit in the meaning. I would argue that the common use of the word reactionary = person who reacts to something inappropriately.
But getting lost in pedantry instead of just moving through common usage when in regular human discourse is useless. There is no reason to walk down that road, other than to obfuscate any point the other person is trying to make behind a smoke screen of pseudo-intellectualism.
Sort of like I tried to do with those last two sentences.
This is a pretty pedantic debate but my reason for using it was that I think a factor in this wasn’t just generic anti-Asian sentiment but also the idea that they were new and challenging the image of the United States as a white country. California politics had a nasty “yellow horde” streak which feels distinct from, say, bigotry directed against native Americans or, in the south, Mexicans which tended to recognize their historical presence, treating them as kind of hapless children needing white guidance rather than invaders.
I think you're trying to make a point other than your sentence's literal meaning, but I'm too distanced from modern domestic US history to know. Can you clarify and elaborate?
The issue is combing reactionary and bigot. The internments were done the watch for Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal coalition - a left leaning political movement that laid the foundations of the modern American welfare state. There were definitely many blatant examples of bigotry in the policies of this movement but they were far from reactionary.
Social issues change over time but the also correlate with otherwise unrelated social/political/economic issues so trying to apply political issues from 80 years ago into the modern era is going to lead to some incongruous positions.
The modern American welfare state was also reactionary and bigoted towards black people and minorities. It’s important to recognize that much of the social programs explicitly excluded people of color and then used their understandeable lower quality of life due to lack of safety nets as a justification for further racism. Black people have bad neighborhoods, but of course black people didnt get government housing assistance to repair anything, because the federal programs for that explicitly excluded them.
And yet the federal housing administration continued to explicitly respect racist homeowner association laws (btw homeowner associations were originally created to enshrine into bylaws that no black people may rent or purchase a property), continued to offer lesser or worse terms, or would broadly consider black people too risky, until congress passed the fair housing act of 1968, decades later.
It was nonetheless the first time the Federal Government prohibited racial/ethnic employment discrimination, and was the first civil rights executive order since Reconstruction.
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson helped found the US and gave the world ideas of democracy. They also both owned slaves, imagined democracy as just for white male landowners, and under nearly any modern interpretation of the power dynamic Thomas Jefferson raped and fathered children with his slaves.
Maybe we should stop pretending these people who did some good things for the country were perfect gods. You can praise their accomplishments while still pointing out their flaws.
I think there is also a obsession with presentism and applying modern morals to the past. It is almost as if the point of historical study is to sit in judgement, opposed to understand how the world worked and changed.
Ask most people what the defining characteristics or deeds of Washington of Jefferson and they respond with the points above.
Are those the most impactful or noteworthy characteristics of those individuals? I don't think so. Perhaps they are interesting context for understanding their other deeds or the human condition, but certainly not the primary impact they had on history.
I've never met anybody who thinks FDR was a "perfect god". Abe or Washington, sure, but no such personality cult exists for FDR. So what are you even responding to? I have not criticized anybody for pointing out FDR's flaws (which were numerous and are widely acknowledged.)
True. But the broader point is that transposing political positions from 100 years ago into modern politics is always verging on anachronism. In many ways the modern American welfare state and the modern Democratic Party both originate in the South through the populist movement and William Jennings Bryan. But consider: does William Jennings Bryan's opposition to teaching evolution in public schools have anything to do with agricultural subsidies or inflationary monetary policy? He very publicly advocated for all of these positions, but trying to bring this association into modern debates about interest rates or public education is a distraction.
Maybe. Hoover was a politically moderate, 54 year old, Stanford educated engineer from the West with a successful career in both industry, and civil service administration? Sounds like a great candidate on paper (honestly sounds better than the current front runners for 2024 at any rate). We often forget that he was actually very successful/effective in every previous post he had served in prior to the Great Depression. Hoover's reputation has been badly tarnished by his response to the Great Depression (which was totally inadequate to the magnitude of the task at hand). He could have and should have done a lot of things differently but instead he made ideologically motivated policy decisions that did not pan out. But to be fair, it is also not entirely his fault that he took office on the eve of the largest global economic catastrophe in history. He would probably be remembered much more fondly had he taken office in place of Harding or Coolidge 8 years prior.
Yeah I too wouldn't describe FDR's coalition as reactionary. As well that coalition was deeply weird. Included the Industrial Labor, Socialists, the old southern Aristocracy and Blacks.
Random observation. The US has almost forgot that before WWII that Pols, Italians, eastern Europeans, Irish, etc were distinct. And Asians were even farther out.
I know for a fact that my silent generation dad feels prejudice against Chinese. Even though he hates it's there. My grandmother was an antisemite though oddly not prejudiced against Mexicans or blacks. That whole family was salt of the earth. And half were unreformed bigots as well.
FDR was the president who had the Japanese Americans removed to concentration camps. He's a hero of the left and one of the presidents who would least likely be described as a "reactionary bigot" in any other situation.
More broadly I object to this very modern attitude wherein people in the past who did things we consider wrong today were evil bigots. Which is not to say they weren't wrong.
It’s ok to praise FDR for the New Deal and also recognise that sending all Japanese people (and not German or Italian people) to internment camps was a bigoted, evil thing to do.
What do you want? For us to say “ah well, that’s just how it was back in the day”? You’re the one incapable of nuance if you want to put everything FDR did into one bucket or the other.
I believe that the only reason most German-Americans were not interned is because they were too large a portion of the population to intern without seriously negatively effecting the war effort.
My evidence for this belief is the fact that Japanese-Americans represented a third of people living in Hawaii, more than 150k of them, yet in Hawaii only ~1800 Japanese-Americans were interned. About 1%. This, despite the fact that Hawaii was closer to the war than the rest of America, and despite the fact that the Niihau incident occurred in Hawaii. Interning a third of the population of Hawaii simply wasn't practical, so in Hawaii they had to exercise much more discretion.
Furthermore, some people believe that Executive Order 8802, which forbade ethnic and racial discrimination in defense industries, was intended more to prevent discrimination against German-Americans and Italian-Americans than against African-Americans. Supposing that is true, it evidences the perception of FDR's administration that discrimination against German-Americans, despite their skin color, was a plausible scenario and would harm the war effort if permitted.
Further evidence for the plausibility of ethnic discrimination against Germans, despite their skin color, is easy to find during WWI. Across America and the UK, German families (including the Royal Family..) changed their names to conceal their German origins. Schools stop teaching German, businesses were renamed, sauerkraut became "liberty cabbage" (freedom fries, anyone?) The Red Cross even forbade people with German last names from joining.
tl;dr: The federal government recognized the potential appetite for discrimination against German-Americans, but forbade this because German-Americans were a very large portion of the population and excluding them would harm the war effort. At the same time the federal government perpetrated discrimination against Japanese-Americans, except they exercised more discretion in Hawaii where Japanese-Americans were a very large segment of the population.
> Interning a third of the population of Hawaii simply wasn't practical
> At the same time the federal government perpetrated discrimination against Japanese-Americans, except they exercised more discretion in Hawaii where Japanese-Americans were a very large segment of the population.
Hawaii, not a US state at the time, was largely occupied by the US military prior to Pearl Harbor. After Pearl Harbor its residents were subject to martial law and their civil rights were suspended. The situation there was not analogous to the situation on the mainland, so I wouldn't use it to draw any conclusions.
> the only reason
Your thesis isn't wildly off-base, but how often is anything done by humans done for one single, solitary reason?
> Hawaii, not a US state at the time, was largely occupied by the US military prior to Pearl Harbor. After Pearl Harbor its residents were subject to martial law and their civil rights were suspended. The situation there was not analogous to the situation on the mainland, so I wouldn't use it to draw any conclusions.
This isn't the reason relatively few Japanese-Americans were interned in Hawaii. Compare it to Alaska. Like Hawaii, Alaska was an incorporated US territory. Japanese-Americans were ordered out of Alaska or interned.
The reason general internment didn't happen in Hawaii is because:
> "The powerful businessmen of Hawaii concluded that the imprisonment of such a large proportion of the islands' population would adversely affect the economic prosperity of the territory.[74] The Japanese represented "over 90 percent of the carpenters, nearly all of the transportation workers, and a significant portion of the agricultural laborers" on the islands.[74] General Delos Carleton Emmons, the military governor of Hawaii, also argued that Japanese labor was "'absolutely essential' for rebuilding the defenses destroyed at Pearl Harbor."[74] Recognizing the Japanese-American community's contribution to the affluence of the Hawaiian economy, General Emmons fought against the incarceration of the Japanese Americans and had the support of most of the businessmen of Hawaii.[74]"
Japanese-Americans were a third of Hawaii's population, so interning them all would have been a disaster for Hawaii's economy and harmful to the war effort. That's why it didn't happen in Hawaii. German-Americans, unlike Japanese Americans, were a very large portion of the population in all states and territories, not just Hawaii. The needs of economy and war obviously wouldn't tolerate the internment of all German-Americans, so it didn't happen.
If you think general internment of German-Americans would have been implausible regardless of population size, because the Germans were white, you need to remember that perception of race has never been a rational matter. During WWI, Germans were racially 'othered' in the UK and US by assertions off Germans being "asiatic Huns" and similar nonsense. Nevermind that you couldn't visually distinguish an average German from an average Anglo, racial othering is obviously not bound to rationality. This inclination to racially other the enemy is only tempered by substantial ethnic overlap between the two warring parties. Where there is substantial ethnic overlaps, discrimination will be officially discouraged and resisted because it impairs the war effort (e.g. Executive Order 8802). Where there is little ethnic overlap, racial or ethnic discrimination often become convenient to the government and becomes officially sanctioned.
> This isn't the reason relatively few Japanese-Americans were interned in Hawaii. Compare it to Alaska. Like Hawaii, Alaska was an incorporated US territory. Japanese-Americans were ordered out of Alaska or interned.
What I was driving at, which sort of complements what you quoted, is: what would have been the rationale of sending all those Hawaiian Japanese-Americans to an internment camp in the midwest to be watched over by military police when they were in Hawaii, under martial law, being watched over by military police?
General Delos Carleton Emmons, the military governor of Hawaii, also argued that Japanese labor was "'absolutely essential' for rebuilding the defenses destroyed at Pearl Harbor."[74] Recognizing the Japanese-American community's contribution to the affluence of the Hawaiian economy, General Emmons fought against the incarceration of the Japanese Americans and had the support of most of the businessmen of Hawaii.
The interesting thing is, in a 100% wartime economy with full employment, depriving the economy of the labor of all those other Japanese-Americans in the continental United States was hurting the war effort as well. Not as acutely as tearing a big chunk out of the Hawaiian economy would, but still, not very rational.
> If you think general internment of German-Americans would have been implausible regardless of population size, because the Germans were white, you need to remember that perception of race has never been a rational matter.
I think internment of German-Americans would have been less likely, not implausible or impossible. The differences of Japanese-Americans in terms of dissimilar appearance and less shared culture would have greased the skids of racism, as it were. And yes, it's fair enough to point out that it doesn't always work that way and sometimes really, really similar groups engage in ethnic othering.
Setting aside the historical veracity of this nonsense, are you suggesting that it was appropriate for US citizens to pay the price of that decision because of their ancestry? What is wrong with you?
> You know what's also bigoted and evil? Kamikazi-ing planes into Pearl Harbor.
Yeah, that didn't happen. Japan didn't start using kamikaze attacks until the end of the war, as an act of desperation. It wasn't just, like, a thing they did.
I would say Bataan and PoW camps in SEAsia as well as treatment of mainland Chinese, Korean laborers, etc., are "better" examples of Japanese bigotry and cruelty --at the time. Japan has come a long way since then.
People can praise or criticize FDR for whatever they like. I'm objecting to the name-calling, not the idea that the internment of Japanese Americans was wrong.
Would you not describe the internment of Japanese Americans as reactionary or as bigotry? Which label do you actually disagree with? OP wasn't just mindlessly adding invectives; they used those words for a reason.
Where did OP call "everyone born before 1980 ... an evil bigot"? Where did OP single out FDR as a reactionary bigot? Yes, it was done under his watch, but there were, in point of fact, plenty of genuinely reactionary bigots who supported it at the time. You're lambasting OP for the words you've put into their mouth. Stop.
If you extend your "calling a spade a spade" logic, it will to lead to some ridiculous premise like "everyone born before x year was an evil bigot" where x keeps marching forward year after year.
Wow, I don't think I've ever seen anyone dial a strawman argument to 11 quite like you just did. Nobody was talking about FDR until you hamfistedly brought him up in a reply to a post (indirectly) lamenting a period of history rife with racism. Prejudice was rampant all across the "political spectrum", but prevalence is not a measure of justice or humanity. Nor does any individual's competency in one area somehow ameliorate their flaws in other areas.
What they did is the literal definition of bigotry.
They rounded up as many Japanese-Americans as they could and put them in prisons under heavy guard without any cause other than other people that look like them attacked a military base.
It was objectively wrong then, and it is wrong through all of time.
I believe they actually rounded them up to steal their farms in California. Japanese farms were the most productive back then, and they held almost all the best farms. During the war, they had their land and things stolen by politically connected neighbors.
You yourself are describing the people rounded up as Japanese (yes, with a qualifier). They were people more likely to have loyalty to an enemy state, weren't they? It was certainly a blunt tool; and not an issue I've looked at in detail; but do you expect FDR to have done nothing?
Interesting for me to consider whether UK was right to round up Germans for WWII, rather difficult when that includes the Royal Family, but they did imprison something like 10% of "Germans" living in the UK (I don't know if they were British, just visiting, naturalised, or what).
Right, that got us a long way. Is it OK to have less than 100% certainty before you detain someone? Would you detain one innocent person if it meant keeping 1000 murderers off the street?
If either of those is "yes" then we're just looking at where the line is.
Would you accept imprisonment if you knew it was keeping 1000 murderers off the street?
Do people who support Nazism deserve to get punched? Even if they're innocent of any crimes (a very oft heard sentiment from people who would otherwise say they value the rule of law)?
Nothing about war is OK, but sometimes we have to compromise on what we'd like to happen. I think it's interesting to try and be honest with oneself and ask where the line is.
Would I automatically lock up adults who described themselves as associated with an enemy country, when at war, probably not; but I wouldn't give them every freedom either. Indeed during times of war it is normal to curtail general freedoms. Would I consider it unjustifiable to lock up people who appear to be associated with an enemy country, also probably not. I guess I consider that sometimes it is acceptable, morally, to lock innocent people up ... no justice system could [barring future technology that can provide certainty on past events] ever lock anyone up without such a consideration.
I'm interested if you or others have anything to try and develop my thinking in this area. Thanks.
They were not fucking immigrants! These were people who had lived in the USA their whole lives, with several generations of American citizens in these families. Anyone arguing Japanese internment was just for securing America is the same type of person who would round up trans people or musings Muslims today the same way.
You don't magically stop being an immigrant after a few years. Often it takes several generations to integrate. And particularly so if you form cultural enclaves and remain attached to your country of origin, as tends to be the case with the Japanese.
FDR is an example of how a politician can be called a Socialist in the United States while also being extremely reactionary and push racist policies.
If nothing else, this goes to show how far the scale is tipped in favor of right wing ideas and policies in the states and still is. The fact Biden, a fairly conservative politician, can be called a "Communist" with a straight face is an indictment of the American education system.
The labels don't even mean anything after a while. You can actively be enforcing fascist policies and still be labeled a socialist due to a population wide inability to understand what words mean.
Just to echo what other people said, the people who put American citizens of Japanese descent into prison camps were unambiguously bigots, and a lot of that was based on people wanting to assert that the United States was for white people (contrast with the much softer treatment of American citizens who were ethnically German and Italian).
The fact that some of the political leaders who approved that did other things doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hold them accountable for a venal act – I would argue the contrary since they’re otherwise praised and it’s important to remember that our heroes are not perfect and should not be copied without improvement. One can make similar statements about how, for example, programs like social security or the GI bill were both good for many people of lower class backgrounds but also carefully designed and implemented to benefit black people less than white people.
Those countries didn’t attack directly in full force like the IJN did, by orders of magnitude. European Axis sunk a few American supply ships in international waters aiding their enemies.
There’s also the Niihau incident, which directly informed the response.
Truth is folks then had a tiny fraction of information that we have today—including hindsight. It’s unclear you would do any better in the same circumstances.
Yes, Japan struck first - nobody’s arguing that. My point is that after the United States was formally at war with all of the Axis powers, every American citizen of Japanese descent was forced into prison camps and significant financial loss. That didn’t even happen to all of the German or Italian citizens in the United States at the time, much less American citizens with roots in those countries.
(Also, a few supply ships is whitewashing somewhat – hundreds of Americans traveling on civilian vessels were killed by the German navy and there were dozens of American flagged ships sunk prior to Pearl Harbor. No, not what the Japanese navy did but more than enough to have served as grounds for war if the US wasn’t trying so strenuously to stay out.)
(Was thinking of ships near the US East coast. If you have passenger ships entering a war zone, well then it was understood there were risks.)
The point I was trying to get at was that if you were faced with the same life-threatening decisions you'd likely decide the same. And if different it would only because of random chance. Not because you are smarter or more virtuous than FDR & Cabinet.
Shit, Truman had to decide to drop a nuke on the basis it would save more lives in the long run—with incomplete information. I don't envy those decisions at all.
I don't think it's fair to take what was obviously a phrase that was being spoken in a broad sense, inject your own words into that phrase, and then attack that person for the words you inserted.
He caved to the bigots out of a sense of pragmatism. Same way Abe Lincoln said he'd let slavery continue if it would preserve the union. Or, more recently, Bill Clinton signing the Defense of Marriage Act. He disavowed it later in life, but signed it because he didn't think he had a choice.
If you're in California it is worth visiting Manzanar, an internment camp they have kept as a museum and as witness to this period of U.S. history.
We had a foreign exchange student from Japan with us for 9 months. When the school year wrapped up I rented an RV and the whole family (6 of us including the foreign exchange student) road-tripped around the western U.S. By chance Manzanar showed up as a point of interest in our vicinity and, a little awkwardly, we made it another destination.
I am not sure what our foreign exchange student thought. Perhaps it didn't really register for her — another country and all that. I am not sure how affected I would be if I saw something similar in Japan. It made quite an impression on me and my wife, however.
I grew up next to Manzanar and I don't think it registered with me that we were right next to an internment camp and I never visited until I was in my mid-30s. The only reason I was even in the area is I came back to hike Whitney but it was too crowded so I did Langley and had time to spare. Wish I had been by sooner.
George Takei is a wonderful, intelligent, hilarious, inspirational, talented human being, and it's fantastic to see him receiving so much recognition and love and career opportunity at 65, 75, and now 85 years old.
Instead of Star Trek being the apex of his career or life, it's now just one part of an immensely well-lived life.
I see him as a tragic figure, despite having personally suffered at the hands of the American government, he's somehow become this great apologist for strong central power forcibly enforcing its dictates on unwilling populations.
Can you be more specific about the instances of what you're talking about when you say "strong central power forcibly enforcing its dictates on unwilling populations?"
It's weird how many people have suddenly come out against vaccine mandates, when a bunch of vaccinations have been mandatory for school attendance in most US school districts since before most (all?) of us were born.
People mostly turned against this vaccine mandate because of the degree to which one political party normalized conspiratorial thinking among its base and made opposing it a part of their identity. The left complained about policy but still accepted that policy as necessary, while the right screamed about adrenochrome harvesting and the new world order. One side thought Fauci fumbled the messaging about mask effectiveness, but again, didn't oppose the vaccines or masking or quarantines, whereas the other side claimed Fauci and Biden cooked up COVID in a lab, and still spawn green accounts on HN calling for both to be hanged.
Let's not pretend the opposition to the vaccine mandates in the US was entirely rational. It was mostly a circus of derangement and paranoid delusion. The only question is whether enough time will pass until the next pandemic for culture to have moved on, or if we can just expect half the country to oppose vaccinations on general principle from now on.
I don’t like this strawman argument where anyone that is skeptical about the safety of a barely tested vaccine is put in the same category as people who think the vaccine is made of nanomachines controlled by the La Li Lu Le Lo.
The COVID vaccines went through the same testing and clinical trials as all other vaccines. The accelerated timeline was possible due to advances in research and preparation being done ahead of time.
If you believe otherwise, it's because you listened to the cranks who were controlling the "skeptic" narrative and ignored the evidence to the contrary, because that's where the meme of the vaccines being untested and rushed came from.
“If you don’t believe what I believe, you listened to cranks” isn’t a terribly compelling argument.
They went through the same process yes. That does not make taking a brand new COVID vaccine in the height of a hyper-politicized pandemic the same as taking the for example MMR vaccine that has been used for decades. There are all kinds of reasons to be skeptical of the former more than the latter that need not be driven by crankery, and you’re only undermining your presumed desire to appear on the side of science by suggesting otherwise.
> “If you don’t believe what I believe, you listened to cranks” isn’t a terribly compelling argument.
It's a good thing that isn't the argument I made, then.
>That does not make taking a brand new COVID vaccine in the height of a hyper-politicized pandemic the same as taking the for example MMR vaccine that has been used for decades.
Yes, it kind of does. The vaccine was tested. It's safe. No, that doesn't mean there isn't risk, there is always risk, but risk doesn't mean it could be poison for all anyone knows. There was little reason to be skeptical about it (or any more skeptical than of other vaccines, which is to say not very skeptical) besides giving in to the FUD being spread by the anti-vax crowd telling people it would make them infertile or drop dead of a heart attack after a few days.
> It's a good thing that isn't the argument I made, then.
Well it could perhaps be accused of being a reductive summary, but surely you see how it could have come off like that?
> The vaccine was tested. It's safe. No, that doesn't mean there isn't risk, there is always risk, but risk doesn't mean it could be poison for all anyone knows.
There is a vast bit of difference between no risk and poison for all anyone knows. Safe (as in unlikely to kill you or cause you lasting harm in the short term)? Yes, that’s evident. Worth the risk over the disease for those not at risk? By my reading of the data that’s far from clear. And again comparing 50 years to a few months of data.. I just don’t see how you can’t see the difference.
Again, your position doesn’t resemble anything scientific.
>Again, your position doesn’t resemble anything scientific.
The science can speak for itself. My position isn't even about the science so much as the psychology and politics of risk aversion and paranoia around this specific vaccine. I assume you take flu vaccines, maybe tetanus if you have to travel, or chickenpox. People get vaccinated against Hepatitis B at birth. None of those had 50 years of clinical trials before release, there's a new flu vaccine every year.
People act like pharmaceutical companies never encountered anything like COVID before and just started mixing beakers of random chemicals together in a mad panic and jabbing people on the street with them, but research into coronaviruses and mRNA vaccines was already going on for decades. The infrastructure and science was already there. Technology improved. The vaccine was tested, it went through blind trials, it was approved using the same process as other vaccines.
And this is the scientific position, which you could easily avail yourself of. Science isn't the reason people don't trust this specific vaccine, because science doesn't support that fear.
While George Takei will always have a special place in my Star Trek heart, I cannot look to him as an example of goodness since he admitted to having sex with underage boys in his Howard Stern interview several years ago.
It's crazy to me that the twitter-sphere was so happy to overlook his own admitted past because he was on their "side".
I don't think that's accurate, as far as I can tell he had one accusation against him which he denied vigorously and which may have been retracted by the accuser. You should at least link to the quote in question, it's rather damaging to someone's reputation.
There's a terrific drama called Bad Day at Black Rock about a veteran trying to give a medal to a Japanese family in a rural town whose son had died in the war. It's less about the internment and more about bigots getting their comeuppance.
My grandfather was a woodworker and worked in construction. When I was ~18 I proudly showed him this fancy Japanese pull saw I had gotten for a woodworking project I was working on. His only comment was "We confiscated so many of those from the people we put in internment camps". Shit just got real.
He was a Marine at Pearl Harbor during the attack, he never really talked about it. I wish I knew him better, but I was always afraid of him growing up. "We don't wake grandpa up when he's napping, he might accidentally kill us."
On the topic of Pearl Harbor, my dad’s uncle was in the Massachusetts National Guard. He was scheduled to get out of the military on December 8th, 1941. He was on a ship from Hawaii to San Francisco when Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7th. His ship was turned around, and he had to serve until the end of the war. He was in the infantry & was storming beaches, including some of the infamous ones like Guadalcanal. His Battalion suffered a 250% casualty rate (aka replacement troops also suffered casualties). By the end of the war, he and one other guy were the only original members left.
I wonder what lessons the United States government has learned from this event.
If a war breaks out between the U.S. and China, what policies (if any) would the government potentially implement differently to its residents of Chinese descent?
We would probably just do what we did with Italian and German Americans during WWII, or Saudi Americans after 9/11.
At the Federal level this means widespread and intensive surveillance to find actual threats. At the social level this would be uncoordinated actions arising from general suspicion and distrust. This would result in small scale outbreaks of violence, boycotts, subtle insistence that on taking an ultra-pro-America stance on most issues.
The War years were not going to be good for the Japanese Americans regardless of Federal policy, but mass internment was the so clearly the wrong policy and there is no reason that we should even consider repeating it. Assuming that everyone is a threat therefore we must suspend haebeus corpus and have them arrested indefinitely for nothing is generally not a great idea.
'Suspension of habeus corpus' (ie unlawful detainment) seems to underline USA's global reach somewhat. Guantanamo Bay (Gitmo) still exists, does it not. I know Biden has sought to empty it.
For the last several decades (my lifetime) it's always seemed that no matter where in the World you might be, if the country is not an enemy of USA, there's a chance you [I mean, a person, not me specifically] could be whisked away to perpetual imprisonment in USA, for something perhaps as trivial as copyright infringement and the local government would just kinda shrug.
Perhaps it's closer to failure to follow due process, rather than habeus corpus.
Maybe that's not a balanced view of USA's projection of soft power. It mirrors the fear some in USA have of rogue cops.
Does it feel to you like the World, or just USA, had improved here? Tribalism seems as strong as ever.
The closest analog is probably the post-9/11 environment, and while, thankfully, no one suggested firing up concentration camps, the rise of racial profiling by both civilians and government was still deeply troubling.
Certain states already explicitly bar Chinese people from owning property or renting property because they’re considered as foreign adversary. Louisiana just passed such a bill, with carve outs for legal immigrants and citizens, and carve outs for residential property. But it explicitly lists China as a nation of origin that is barred from landownership. Other states already have similar laws ready to go.
The trigger for Japanese camps was in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor when a couple Japanese Americans help hide and protect a downed Japanese pilot on one of the Hawaiian islands.
The report was widely published and cause mass hysteria against what was perceived at treacherous Japanese Americans.
Unfortunately, the media really pushed that narrative.
> I wonder what lessons the United States government has learned from this event.
Nothing. There are no regrets there but now that things are stable (kinda), it's a good idea to have remorse to calm down people.
> If a war breaks out between the U.S. and China, what policies (if any) would the government potentially implement differently to its residents of Chinese descent?
That will depend on the perception of the US government for these people, for the popular opinion and for the revenge mentality level of the current ruling class. Remember, this happened very recently. They were all labeled "Oligarchs" whatever that means. They were not oligarchs yesterday or when they bought the properties? But now they are "enemies" so everything is justified as such. And the people applauded!
> "John J. McCloy, former Assistant Secretary of War, today defended the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II as ''reasonably undertaken and thoughtfully and humanely conducted.'' Mr. McCloy, one of the key Government officials who oversaw the relocation program, said he might again support the wartime resettlement of United States citizens because of their national heritage."
It's true that there were actual Japanese government agents operating in the USA at the outbreak of WWII, but they were comparable in number to the German and Italian agents who were also US citizens. An overview of the Japanese government's activities from the Office of Naval Intelligence is here (Office of Naval Intelligence, 1941)
In comparison to internment of 112,000 Japanese-Americans ancestry (and seizure of property), some 11,500 people of German ancestry and three thousand people of Italian ancestry were incarcerated on suspicion of being foreign agents, out of a population of 1.2 million German-Americans and 2.4 million Italian-Americans.
Conclusion: the Japanese internment program was just another example of blatantly racist government policy, of the same kind that motivated Nazi 'master race' thinking. Incidentally, McCloy was also a primarily responsible for the early release of Nazi industrialists from prison in post-WWII Germany.
For someone who suffered from govt overreach, he for some magical reason is very pro govt intervention in people's lives, almost like some kind of Stockholm syndrome.
It seems obviously wrong to incarcerate citizens on the basis of ethnicity. That said, an important part of the discussion that usually isn't discussed at all is the Ni'ihau incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niihau_incident
TLDR: The first thing that happened in WWII for the United States was the attack on Pearl Harbor. The second thing is a Japanese pilot crash-landed on Ni'ihau on his way home from bombing Pearl, and a Japanese immigrant and a couple Japanese-Americans decided to take his side and help him (treason, of course). In the end a couple people were shot.
Edit: I'll add some discussion from below to the top-level comment, I think it improves it.
In a situation where you have no data (hostilities just started), this incident being one of the first things that happen is, in fact, quite striking. And, critically, these people weren't spies or saboteurs. They were rando civilians who, without premeditation or contact with enemy government, decided on the spot to help the enemy. If you were a commander in that war you would rightly find it terrifying. It is, we might say, a bad look.
I bring it up in response to the story because it's an obvious part of the narrative about Japanese internment camps in the U.S. in WWII that is suppressed because it is inconvenient and uncomfortable. That doesn't mean we should ignore it, though.
Obviously, this event makes the actions the U.S. government took look more justifiable. The fact that it happened so quickly after hostilities started is also striking. The idea that Japanese immigrants and Japanese-Americans are more likely to turn against their adopted country than, say, German or Italian immigrants seems more plausible in this light, and that helps understand the decisions made by people in power (in addition to stuff you already know, like Japanese is a very different language to English and culture to American, far more different than either German or Italian, and Japanese people and other East Asians are much more easily visually distinguished, etc.).
And, I will reiterate, in my mind it doesn't justify interning tens of thousands of citizens on the basis of ethnicity. It seems obviously wrong to me, either you're a citizen and you get the same rights as everyone else, or you're not. Discriminating on the basis of ethnicity is...racism? Not quite, but I suppose that's the word people use. It is a stain on the country's history.
A small handful of people aided a Japanese pilot once during wartime, so that's an important part of the discussion as to the forced relocation and detention of—checks notes—125,284 people following the mass theft of most of their possessions?
Naw. Y'all act like there weren't any German or Italian spies and saboteurs in the US during WW2.
Yeah, the Niihau incident and the shelling of a Santa Barbara oil facility by a Japanese sub with a witness (falsely, in retrospect) reporting seeing the sub turning south toward LA and signalling someone on shore after the attack [0], and the subsequent incident where what was later identified to have been a rogue weather balloon triggered war nerves and resulted in substantial anti-aircraft fire on phantom Japanese aircraft over LA [1] were all part of the context of the internment, but while, like the more deliberate propaganda directed by the Nazis against the Jews, they are important if you want to understand the mechanics of how the actions they preceded were seen as justified at the time, they are so distant from anything that might actually remotely justify the action (and, unlike the Nazi propaganda, aren’t themselves an organized part of the action) that there is a very good reason they aren’t highlighted in most discussion of the ethics of the action.
This is a really thoughtful comment, thank you. I agree with everything you've said with one exception, and I appreciate the additional context I didn't know about.
I would say that it is very reasonable to argue that "...they are so distant from anything that might actually remotely justify the action...", but that does not imply that "...there is a very good reason they aren’t highlighted..." is the actual reason Ni'ihau isn't highlighted. I'm still pretty convinced it's because it's inconvenient, awkward, uncomfortable...not because those events and the context they were part of made a bad justification for trampling the rights of 125,000 people.
As I think about it more, the thing I'm stuck on is more like...Ni'ihau and the stuff you mention, and the context that makes for, all make the people involved seem more reasonable, less kind of...crazily racist and afraid...a little less cartoonishly evil. And a lot of people these days don't like that. They want an "other", an enemy that is simple and easy to hate. Clear right and wrong. Red and Blue, D and R, Tory and Labour. And I think that's childish and wrong and bad in almost all circumstances. Pointing out Ni'ihau amidst the self-flagellation about Japanese internment in WWII makes that sort of person look at something he doesn't want to look at, but that he looks at it is good for him and for the rest of us.
I hear you. I think that you're maybe half-right about why it's not discussed. The reason I bring it up is the other half...it's not discussed because it runs counter to the narrative that sells in today's market.
In a situation where you have no data (hostilities just started), this incident being one of the first things that happen is, in fact, quite striking. And, critically, these people weren't spies or saboteurs. They were rando civilians who, without premeditation or contact with enemy government, decided on the spot to help the enemy. If you were a commander in that war you would rightly find it terrifying. It is, we might say, a bad look.
It is not "counter to the narrative." It isn't like people only think that internment was unacceptable because there were literally zero cases of ethnically japanese people doing something to aid anybody who was a japanese resident. It also isn't like people think that internment was done just for the sake of fucking over japanese people. The narrative is that the perceived threat of ethnically japanese americans was massively inflated in the minds of decision makers because of racial prejudice and that the legal system failed to protect the rights of the people who were harmed by this awful decision making.
Japanese Americans (including citizens) were first ordered not to leave the protected areas and then while that order was still active were told that if they stayed in the protected areas (which included huge portions of the west coast) that they'd be interred. They had their property stolen and were forced into terrible conditions (often sleeping in literally barns in the beginning) by virtue of racial prejudice.
Italian and German Americans faced no such situations, despite the ridiculous "oh we have no data so maybe they are threats" argument applying equally well to them.
No. There is no justification to use the bad actions of a handful of a minority as a justification to, without trial, steal the property, destroy the pets, and forcibly remove to a space with inadequate shelter, healthcare, and food, the entire minority populace. That’s exactly the “wow you suck at math vs wow girls suck at math” bigotry taken to a violent conclusion, and should be acknowledged as totally and completely unjustified.
You're making a normative claim ("this is wrong"), and I'm making a descriptive claim ("this is what people back then might have been thinking based on the evidence").
In fact, we make the exact same normative claim in the end (that internment was wrong).
It is not evidence. A handful of a population doing a bad thing isn’t evidence to punish the entire population. That can only exist in the framework of bigotry. Full stop.
Japanese Americans also willingly enlisted into the U.S. military to fight the Japanese. They reportedly fought harder, fiercer, and put on riskier missions. But this wasn’t used as counter evidence against internment. Because again, internment is based on unreasonable, reactionary bigotry, and literally nothing else.
Japanese Americans were typically assigned to Europe and Africa because of fears they would sabotage the Pacific war effort.
Black Americans were commonly assigned as cooks, orderlies, and other roles outside the normal military structure. It's why Black American veterans were largely excluded from the GI Bills after the war.
Folks really don't grok how overtly racist the US could be within living memory let alone further back. Too bad US schools don't teach it adequately and are poised to suppress that history even further of late.
Yeah, people really have a blind spot to how racist the world was and still is. I certainly got a fair bit of this information in my history curriculum.
With teaching, there is always the question of what the priorities are, and what the emphasis is in terms of message.
Out of curiosity, what do you think the lesson students should take away from the Japanese internment is?
Here is the section on it from a standard US history textbook that was posted elsewhere in the thread:
The lesson? A similar lesson to slavery, the Shoah, the Trail of Tears, etc.
"It wasn't bad because it happened to Black folks or Jews or American Indian tribes. 'Never again' shouldn't mean, 'Never again exactly how it was done last time.' It was horrible because they were human beings. It was horrible because folks went out of their way to stop viewing them as human beings. And here are some reasons why people back then (and today) justified these acts, so that when similar conditions arise again—because while history does not repeat, it certainly rhymes—we can learn to recognize and hopefully prevent these atrocities before they start next time!"
That's the lesson I'd love to have taught. That no is perfect. History is the diary of a madman. Learning not just facts but also the motivations/context of historical events, so as a society we can potentially help avoid future problems and move along with less needless suffering.
I think I agree that that's a noble aspiration. I'm not so sure that our modern culture which is so focused on passing judgment as well suited to learning such a lesson with our modern approaches. If you want to understand how the mistakes of History are made, you have to be able to put yourself in the shoes of the people that made the mistakes and understand their biases and blind spots. I feel that one failing is a tendency to set ourselves apart from them and simply condemn opposed to understand and learn. It's not enough to Simply know the Nazis were bad. If you want to avoid their mistakes you have to understand how and why they thought that they were good. If you simply think they were monsters while you are not, you deny the opportunity for introspection on how you could be or become monstrous yourself. Simply judging is insufficient for learning
Learning that Nazis aren't cartoon villains does negate the necessity of choosing to highlight they were horrifically bad in the historical timeline.
Simply judging is indeed insufficient for learning but it is also a necessary component. Otherwise you get folks who even today assert that "slavery wasn't that bad," "the Civil War wasn't about slavery or racism," "I think nationalism is a good thing," and "our race and culture are under attack due to immigration and white genocide."
I'm not making the claim that the conclusion that WWII U.S. governments came to was right (in a moral sense), or correct (in that it was going to reduce the probability of sabotage given their knowledge at the time), I'm making the claim that knowing about Ni'ihau makes their actions make more sense. It is an important piece of context. It allows you to better-understand their state of mind and the state of the world while they were making these decisions.
In Charleston, SC we have a number of local groups that were German-American social clubs that were forced to abandon their native culture and affiliations to appease the mob. You’ll never hear anything of it, there is no care to apologize by dignitaries here that you expect to see during AAPI month for the Japanese.
I wonder why Japanese Americans get this kind of outpouring of support we see in the thread in a way that German Americans would never get, having been shit on for not one but two world wars.
That you’re being currently downvoted for mentioning this fact is itself concerning.
> I wonder why Japanese Americans get this kind of outpouring of support we see in the thread in a way that German Americans would never get
Because nothing like what happened to US citizens of Japanese descent happened directly at government hands to citizens of German descent. German-Americans were not involuntarily interned (aside from people, including US citizens, of Japanese descent, only nationals of enemy powers were involuntarily interned; the only German-Americans who were interned were family members of enemy aliens, and that only because the government chose not to forcibly separate them.) Internment of aliens owing allegiance to an enemy state in a time of war categorically different than doing so to your own citizens based only on ethnicity.
It doesn't look like Japanese internment was under the auspices of the Alien Control program, because [0] refers to, "By the end of the war, over 31,000 suspected enemy aliens and their families, including a few Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, had been interned at Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) internment camps and military facilities throughout the United States."
Whereas I think >100,000 Japanese were incarcerated.
> It doesn't look like Japanese internment was under the auspices of the Alien Control program
The internment of Americans of Japanese descent was under the auspices of the War Relocation Authority: unlike the internment of citizens of Germany, Italy, and other enemy states, which was based on status as enemy aliens (hence “Alien Control Program”), not ancestry. The somewhat sloppy common reference to the former as “Japanese" internment makes the two different programs seem more similar than they were.
> pilot crash-landed on Ni'ihau on his way home from bombing Pearl, and a Japanese immigrant and a couple Japanese-Americans decided to take his side and help him (treason, of course)
Why is that treason "of course"? Seemingly, they were unaware of the events and just tried to help a fellow human being. That should never be treason.
Also, since you bring it up as a response to the story, are you justifying interment camps for specific ethnicity based on one event? Otherwise your comment seems borderline off-topic.
The Wikipedia article linked literally says that they were not "unaware". It's right there in the second paragraph.
> The pilot then told the Haradas about the attack and the two agreed to help him. Nishikaichi and Yoshio Harada overcame a guard and escaped to destroy the plane and papers, then took Niihauans Benehakaka "Ben" Kanahele and his wife Kealoha "Ella" Kanahele prisoner.
You clearly didn't read the article. At first they were unaware of the events but when the pilot explained to the Japanese-speakers that he had just come from bombing Pearl Harbor, they took his side.
If you read the Wikipedia article the situation will become clear.
I bring it up in response to the story because it's an obvious part of the narrative about Japanese internment camps in the U.S. in WWII that is suppressed because it is inconvenient and uncomfortable. That doesn't mean we should ignore it, though.
Obviously, this event makes the actions the U.S. government took look more justifiable. The fact that it happened so quickly after hostilities started is also striking. The idea that Japanese immigrants and Japanese-Americans are more likely to turn against their adopted country than, say, German or Italian immigrants seems more plausible in this light, and that helps understand the decisions made by people in power (in addition to stuff you already know, like Japanese is a very different language to English and culture to American, far more different than either German or Italian, and Japanese people and other East Asians are much more easily visually distinguished, etc.).
And, I will reiterate, in my mind it doesn't justify interning tens of thousands of citizens on the basis of ethnicity. It seems obviously wrong to me, either you're a citizen and you get the same rights as everyone else, or you're not. Discriminating on the basis of ethnicity is...racism? Not quite, but I suppose that's the word people use. It is a stain on the country's history.
On reflection, I think what really grinds my gears is that shaping the public consciousness with lies and half-truths is so effective...
You also have to keep in mind the mood of nation after this attack. The USA lost it's invincibility. At that point in time was by no means assured that the allies would win the war. In fact, we were losing it.
A similar thing happened after 9/11. Xenophobia went rampant, people started to call Islam a "religion of evil" and call for every Muslim in the country to be rounded up and expelled. Politicians called it an existential crisis and wanted terrorist suspects stripped of their Constitutional rights because giving them a fair trial was just too dangerous. The US normalized torture and set up a concentration camp for Muslims. Media was wall to wall propaganda, from "24" to "Courtesy of the Red White and Blue."
I'd also consider the Red Scare and McCarthyism - fear of Communists used as a proxy to harass and suppress Jews and homosexuals and purge them from society.
Every time the US experiences a test of its values it seems to abandon them immediately. The cultural fear and hatred of the other goes too deep.
Still, if one had to plan to land and start a small insurrection, I don't think you could come up with a better place to do it. Niihau is extremely isolated, to the point it is difficult to get there even today.
The impact of American culture to residents was probably close to zero.
I think most people would consider them to be pretty overlapping in most uses. But it sort of doesn't matter, the definition of a word is distinct from its etymology:
> noun
> prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism by an individual, community, or institution against a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized
Haha, yeah I know people use it that way (as I noted). In that particular sentence it seemed wrong because the prima facie contradiction is, well, right in your face.
While George Takei will always have a special place in my Star Trek heart, I cannot look to him as an example of goodness since he admitted to having sex with underage (gay) boys in his Howard Stern interview several years ago.
It's crazy to me that the twitter-sphere was so happy to overlook his own admitted past because he was on their "side".
Why is it so unreasonable to think that immigrants from another country would have conflicting loyalties in a situation of total war between those two countries? That seems pretty human and normal. And in an emergency your rights as a citizen can be curtailed accordingly right? Weren't we all in favor of that during the pandemic? I do agree that it wasn't a nice thing to do of course.
Yes it is unreasonable. Japanese people aren’t a disease that kills the old and the vulnerable, and comparing them to a disease is extremely inappropriate.
It was a war, a spy could do significant damage. And I wasn't comparing them to a disease, the salient fact is the state of emergency, and we all agree that rights can be curtailed during a state of emergency right?
"History shows that curtailment of civil liberties—including the right to free speech, the right to a fair trial, and the right to equal protection under the law—has often followed national crises, particularly the outbreak of war."
Freedom of the Press is often curtailed as well. If Martial Law is declared watch out. It usurps just about everything.
Indeed, some of the suspicion regarding loyalties might have been planted during the Sino-Japanese war when "Issei" Japanese-Americans identified with nascent Imperial Japan: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25591553
Additionally, today, we have agencies who consider Americans enemies of the state, just not in broad strokes, though we do see some semblance when people try to paint certain segments of today's America as being unpatriotic or "divisive" in broad strokes.
There is no question here. And there is no avoidance. If you are worried about spies go and catch them. That is what your 3 letter agencies are paid for. And they're paid a lot. Your amounts to - x percent of people commits crime, blacks commit even more so lets open concentration camps before they do any damage. As already said it is totally disgusting.
That's why it's critical to never elect strong government types like FDR ever again. This is a mar on American history, along with the Drug War that he started.
They’re referring to them as internment camps as to not equivocate the (admittedly bad) camps where Japanese-American citizens were held with the industrialized genocide of Nazi German concentration camps.
Imprisoning Japanese Americans during WWII was very wrong, but it wasn’t anywhere near the abject horror of Nazi concentration camps.
The words are generally synonyms, but I think the distinction is important.
Because in Europe concentration camps are used to refer to Germany's extermination camps for Jews, Prisoners of War and children. So an alternate name needs to be found for a different thing.
> Because in Europe concentration camps are used to refer to Germany's extermination camps for Jews, Prisoners of War and children.
“Concentration camps” existed before WWII, at least back to the Boer War. The US “internment camps” were concentration camps in the usual historical sense.
In the case of the German exterminatiom camps, “concentration camp” was a euphemism.
Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps were two very different places. Extermination camps killed people. Concentration camps are where people lived and were worked to death.
The extermination camps were usually next to concentration camps, where the survivors could live to work in the extermination camp. Some of the confusion is that the complexes are called "concentration camp" like Auschwitz which had 40 individual concentration and extermination camps. Probably because the concentration camps came first and exterimination camps were added on.
Concentration camps and interment camps are synonymous, they mean the same thing. One is not "better" or "easier" than the other, so not sure why it'd matter.
I think/hope most people agree the internment of western Japanese people was abhorrent.
Hypothetically, how many instances of sabotage/war-like acts by Japanese Americans would have to happen before the internments would be justified?
I also wonder how much of a impact the Niihau incident had on the decision to do internments. Literally the first Japanese-Americans that had an opportunity helped a pearl harbor attacker terrorize Niihau.
I want to inform you plainly: the idea that citizens of a country are so broadly more loyal to a different country their parents or grandparents or great-grandparents came from, that you should (without trial) steal their property, destroy their pets, and forcibly move them into a space with minimal healthcare, shelter, and food, is a perception that can only exist in the framework of bigotry and xenophobia. There is a wide swath of the population that would consider this viewpoint unreasonable and uncivilized.
Putting individual people through a trial that they actually committed an act of treason or terrorism at least gives them the rights afforded to them in a court, such as legal representation, the right to hear their charges, the right to appeal decisions, etc. (I also have issues with the actual application of the courts these days, with the pressure of guilty pleas and the like, but theoretically it is better than violating the rights of over 100k people due to being related to someone from Japan without any evidence that those individuals have committed any wrongdoing.)
It's not hypothetical, we've seen in covid, people are more than okay with keeping the majority(not even minorities) population under near house arrest.
If they were fearful for their lives like in WW2 (aka worse than covid), you can easily see why internment camps weren't opposed by the general population.
If you can't see the difference between public health measures meant to curb an infectious disease crisis and race-based concentration camps that resulted in horrifying deprivation and death, you're clearly too ignorant of the history of those issues, and/or too ideologically indoctrinated, to have a reasonable conversation on this topic.
Because the western world discovered the horrors of the Nazi extermination camps--horrors truly beyond anything they could have possibly imagined--and realized that using racism and xenophobia to justify the systematic imprisonment, abuse, and deprivation of a minority might maybe be a bad idea (and certainly a bad look)?
This image so affected me that I once saw a copy of the book left behind at a coffee shop and had to thumb through it to see it again.
With all the editing of history curricula that states like Florida are doing, I hope it survives. It’s is a dark chapter in American history that wasn’t that long ago.
[0]https://www.mrginn.com/uploads/8/5/4/6/85468970/chapter35.pd...