Okay, continuation:
You and I have discussed ad infinitum the issue of American internment of Japanese American citizens. I find it and the vicious racist rhetoric accompanying it in our media and from many government officials a shameful episode in our history.
You have, I believe, (but I mix you up with JDB sometimes, I know; if I do that, or did it above, correct me) offered your theory that the reason they didn't commit treason was that they were incarcerated, and that their incarceration was reasonable. (You never responded to my query about why the Hawaiian JA's who were not interred didn't iyo engage in treasonous behavior.) You've expressed no regrets, no shame, for what our country did, unconstitutionally, to those of its citizens.
(Though I believe you have moved recently to at least acknowledging that "the execution" of the internment of those citizens was less than perfect.)
I'd like to get from you a direct answer to this question, and then maybe from the thread at large a discussion of the interesting question you raise in analogizing it in some respects to a situation that might exist with Iraqi Americans today, or impendingly. I'll post that question separately.
This is a question I'd very much appreciate a direct, responsive reply to:
Why weren't the assets of these American citizens who had never been charged with any crime protected? Their homes, their livelihoods, If it was felt (albeit not by the FBI, Army Intelligence, or the Justic Department) to be necessary for "security" to imprison thousands of innocent families? Was it an appalling injustice in your opinion for them to be impoverished as well as imprisoned? Do you suspect racism to be at the root, based on the rampant racist rhetoric so widespread at the time, and on the fact that it was known that there were hundreds of thousands of Nazi Bund members (the had rallies in Madison Square Garden, for example) and only the tiniest percentage of German Americans, all of them actual suspects, not merely citizens of German descent, were detained? Do you see the treatment of Japanese Americans, the incarceration itself, the harshness of the conditions imposed, and the impoverishment inevitably visited on those families, as shameful and unjust?
Message 20805439 |
