Re-location camps

NO. FDR locked up US citizens.

Malkin, Jewish lobby, would like to lock all Muslims, all Arabs, anyone who doesn't support the Jewish lobby.

 

No. American citizens should not be locked up without being arrested for a crime. They should not be arrested merely for being a certain ethnicity.

 

Absolutely not. Who is to say that Chrisians will not one day be profiled?

 

Something similar happened in dear old Australia during the WW1, German born folk were regarded as potential spies and sabotuers.

Many German migrants settled into farming communities and tended to congregate together so as to be close to their churches etc. Loud mouthed boars were at greatest risk of interment. My great, great uncle Herman was one such fool, to the betterment of the community never mind his family (he was a drunkard!). It caused a great deal of grief for the other members of the parish who were keen to do their bit for their new home. They named the parish Gossen because it was a promised land to them. Grandad always felt a bit excluded for the reason when he and several other young men walked and hitched a ride on the train to Gladstone (several hundred miles) to be refused to be allowed to enlist.

Really, it was not so much that they were Germans by birth but that they were farmers...but grandad grieved over it.

There would have been very few Japanese in Australia during the WW2 scene as Australia had the White Australia Policy which excluded most of humanity on racial grounds.

 

More and more is coming out about the same types of camps for German-Americans in WWII.

STORY

 

Interesting how the Japanese were detained but not those of German orientation nor of Italian

I believe perhaps one of the reasons for the detaining of Japanese was point blank----the bombing of Pearl----had the Japanese merely declared war on the US without sneak attacking things would have been different

 

But Germans were - see the link in my post above.

 

Germans were treated as enemies both in Canada and the UK.

I guess you had to be there at the time to understand what was done. It is easy to look back and make a judgement on what was right and wrong.

My wife's family had a Jewish name and officially changed their name just in case Germany succeeded over England!

We had 7 months of daily bombing in East London and virtually lived in the Tube. What would you think about the enemies?

Cheers,

Jim

 

Yes, lots of unfair stereotyping going on. On the other side, my mother's family (Austrian) were considered "German" in Yugoslavia and had to flee to Austria to save their lives because the partisans were lynching whole "German" families and stringing them up on the light poles each night. When they got to the Austrian border, the Nazis considered them "Slavs" (only half-human) because they were coming from Yugoslavia and sent the whole family in cattle cars to a forced work camp in Poland. A few years later, the camp was liberated by the front line troops of the Red Army (professional and disciplined soldiers who were decent people). The people in the camp were told by the Red Army commanders that the Red Army troops that would follow them would consider them "German" and their lives would not be safe. (The Red Army raped and murdered Germans as they passed through as revenge for what the Germans had done on the Eastern Front.) So my mother's family had to travel across Poland toward Austria, through the front lines of the war (sometimes on the retreating German side, sometimes on the front line Red Army side) until they made it to a relative's home in Linz, Austria (nearly in Germany). While in Linz, the endured devastating Allied bombing until nearly the end of the war.

After the war, the U.S. government and other Allied powers wanted to send them back to Yugoslavia (which was now communist under Tito) where they would likely have been executed immediately (and sometimes the women and girls were raped immediately before their deaths) for "leaving their country in the time of need". Fortunately, through a providential series of events, they were able to immigrate to the U.S. even though the U.S. had made it nearly impossible for refugees to immigrate because they were considered undesirable "foreigners."

Looking through some of my grandmother's papers after her death about 20 years ago, I found the old "Ex Enemy Identification Cards" for my mother's entire family. I was a strange feeling to see a picture of your mother as an emaciated 10-year-old girl listed on an official government document as an "Ex Enemy." Especially since my mother's family was so anti-Nazi from the very beginning. Like millions of other people, they were caught up in a whirlwind of suffering and death which they didn't create and couldn't stop. The only thing they could do was try to survive.

Yes. There were also political considerations to consider. I'm not sure FDR could have led the war effort without supporting the internment of the Japanese.

My father wrote a letter to FDR protesting the internment of Japanese Americans, but he was part of a small minority of Americans who protested at the time. It didn't help that there were a few Japanese spies in Hawaii who fed intelligence to Japan regarding the movement of ships in and out of Pearl Harbor.

 

At least some of the internees were members of the Auslands-Organisation, NAZI party members and sometime recruiters, who lived overseas. (According to Thomas Adam in 'Germany and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History').

All of the detainees were released after the war.

 

It is noteworthy that in all of WWII there were no terrorist attacks on the American mainland. Would it have been so had we not locked up the Japanese? We will never know.

I went to college with a Japanese boy whose parents were placed in an interment camp. He told me they were treated well and didn't mind being in the camp.

 

So, will relocation camps be okay when Christians are considered a threat?

 

Keep in mind that prior to the war on President's Day 1939, pro-Nazi German Americans staged a rally at Madison Square Garden. 20,000 people attended and heard speeches mocking President Roosevelt as "Frank D. Rosenfeld", and called his New Deal the "Jew Deal". Any wonder that people thought there may be some internal threat from pro-Nazis in the US?




There were millions of German-Americans, and in the end only 10,000 were interred. So obviously the idea was to inter only those considered to be a threat. From our perspective 70 years later, yep it was a mistake.

Any other American wrong-doing that requires highlighting today?

 

The West Coast Japanese American citizens had MUCH real estate and personal property stolen from them by patriotic Americans. Some signed it over to people they trusted (neighbors) and got it back after the war.

see http://sakumabros.com/ for example.

I was talking with (listening to) Steve Sakuma a couple of weeks ago. Interesting fellow.

 

Patriotic Americans or just opportunists?
How do you know they weren't left-leaning union organizers?

 

There would have been no terrorist activities from the Japanese Americans. Those who were allowed into the military all have extremely good records as soldiers.

On you second comment ... it depended largely on the camps how they were treated.

And as already mentioned the Japanese Americans not only lost years of their lives, wasted in camps, but property, including their homes as well.

 

There is never, ever, under any circumstance justification for interring US citizens on a racial, religious, national origin, or any other group basis.

It is an abhorrent idea, and I would have to hear 'from the horse's mouth' that any citizens interred thusly were happy about it.

It sets a HUGELY dangerous precedent. It is easy to see how non-mainstream Christians could one day be treated in this manner.

 

>Patriotic Americans or just opportunists?

Please explain the difference using example from US history. The economic benefits of US Indian policy or the Monroe Doctrine, for example.

 

I could envision Christians being sent to relocation camps but not because they were considered a threat. The last time a Christian army went forth to conquer territory was in the crusades.