Eighty-one years ago today (Sunday) President Franklin Roosevelt signed executive order 9066 which incarcerated in concentration camps nearly 120,000 Americans simply because of their race (Asian/Japanese).
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| A Japanese Child holding the barbed wire in an American Concentration camp |
Don't ever think it cannot occur here again.
Freedom requires unyielding vigilance.
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| A Jewish Child in a German concentration camp from the movie the Boy In The Stripped Pajamas. |
Why is FACDL MIAMI chapter giving award to Broward defense lawyers for a Broward case? Those same lawyers will be recognized by the FACDL BROWARD chapter for their defense of Nicolas Cruz. Are there no deserving Miami lawyers?
ReplyDeleteAs terrible a situation as it was, it is completely inaccurate to refer to them as concentration camps, as opposed to internment. There was no forced labor, no medical experiments, no gas chambers, no crematoriums, no death marches, no starvation, no tattooing, no shrinking of heads or making lampshades out of human skin.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, a number of Germans and Italians were also interned, but little mention is made of that.
They were all concentrated together in a camp, I get your point but the term is accurate here.
ReplyDeleteWell said, 12pm. The equivalency and mischaracterization minimizes the horror of Nazi concentration camps. I was not aware about the Italians or the Germans.
ReplyDeleteWhat is not spoken about in detail is not only were these Americans in interment camps but that they lost everything. Their business closed and boarded up. Their homes foreclosed on. After working hard to make a life for themselves, for their children, they walked out with nothing. 1988 they were given 20k each, hardly enough to undue the generations of wealth stripped away when their world was turned upside down.
ReplyDeleteAlso, all of this was Constitutional. To this day Korematsu is still good law. (though his conviction was overturned decades later). Jackson's Dissent Though!
Carmen M. Vizcaino
@12:00
ReplyDeleteThe term "concentration camp" was used way before the Nazis and World War II and is not confined to that situation or deliberate genocidal contexts.
Although the first example of civilian internment may date as far back as the 1830s, the English term concentration camp was first used in order to refer to the reconcentration camps which were set up by the Spanish military in Cuba during the Ten Years' War. The label was applied yet again to camps set up by the United States during the Philippine–American War (1899–1902). And expanded usage of the concentration camp label continued, when the British set up camps during the Second Boer War (1899–1902) in South Africa for interning Boers during the same time period.
The term "concentration camp" or "internment camp" is used to refer to a variety of systems that greatly differ in their severity, mortality rate, and architecture; their defining characteristic is that inmates are held outside the rule of law. Extermination camps or death camps, whose primary purpose is killing, are also imprecisely referred to as "concentration camps".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment
The term "concentration camp" is fully accurate and applicable to Japanese internment and it's not exclusively reserved just for Nazi death camps. Trying to downgrade or mitigate something by saying it wasn't as bad as what the Nazis did is the flipside of people who intemperately make the "Nazi" or "Holocaust" comparison at the slightest grievance.
I think the point is loss of freedom without due process based on race or ethnicity. Not what label you apply to it.
ReplyDeleteWhat startled me when I first read a book about these camps in the 1960s was that the then-Attorney General of California was pushing aggressively for the imternment process to include all Japanese, not just those who, after investigation, could be considered a danger to the US. He later became the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court; you may recall his name --- Earl Warren.
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