You’re talking as if the Right were a monolith with one shared group of beliefs.
Pat Buchanan has almost NOTHING in common with Jonah (“Liberal Fascism”) Goldberg. Buchanan (like many paleoconservatives) thinks that, in 1939, Hitler was a pretty conventional bad guy, not a bloodthirsty megalomaniac bent on world conquest. Buchanan thinks that Hitler could have been bought off with Danzig and a chunk of Polish territory. Buchanan’s take is that Poland was foolish to try to stare down a much stronger neighbor, and that Britain and France were reckless to promise aid to the Poles. Buchanan thinks the Poles should have faced a sad reality and cut the best deal they could with Germany. IF they had, under the Buchanan thesis, the nightmare of WW2 might have been avoided.
Jonah Goldberg (like most neocons) thinks that Hitler was evil, that he was driven by a left-wing ideology, and that he HAD to be stopped at all cost.
There are vastly different factions on the Right. The fact that different factions disagree on important issues doesn’t mean any one factions beliefs are incoherent.
Certainly they did. The evil that was the Internment Camps was that we rounded up all people of Japanese ancestry, even if they were American citizens.
In the case of Germans and Italians, we only interned those who were citizens of belligerent nations. (So, no German-Americans or Italian-Americans, unless they were close family that elected to go along)
Interning “enemy foreign nationals” was a normal occurrence during wartime. Just about every nation did it.
If the USA had simply interned Japanese Citizens, then it wouldn’t have been such a big deal.
Obviously he was wrong as Hitler didnt stop with Poland. Heck, a lot of Hitler’s rhetoric hints pretty broadly at his ideas and what he was planning to do. Everyone likes to play alternate reality WWII, but frankly Buchanan is full of shit.
Right. Remember, near-hysteria gripped Hawaii and the West Coast at this point; newspapers reported dogs were barking in code to submarines offshore. When that’s regarded as a reasonable thing to print in the news, you’re in completely crazy territory. A lot of that sort of reporting sits unread in newspaper archives, and modern readers coming across it might not understand the context, and thus assume actual shenanigans had really occurred.
Here’s a pretty good story recounting the paranoia on the West Coast following Pearl Harbor. I could see the exact same thing happening today (or 8 years ago, to be more accurate).
You might not be able to tell the Japanese from Chinese but you can definitely tell people of mostly Japanese ancestry from people of European ancestry with a high degree of reliability. Much higher than you can tell people of German ancestry from people of English or Dutch ancestry.
astorian, I already told DanBlather that his post was inappropriate for GQ. Arguing with him about it serves no purpose other than to hijack the thread. If you want to debate this issue, take it to an appropriate forum.
I must point out a bit a history here. Originally, in the US, it was the individual states that decided if a person was a citizen of the state (thus voting rights, Constiutional protections, etc.) and by extension a citizen of the United States. I believe the 14th Amendment shifted who qualified as a citizen from the state to the federal government. Some states accepted Asians as citizens and others did not prior to the federal government taking over that power.
When the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was signed, it prevented any Chinese immigrants from being US citizens. United States v. Wong Kim Ark stated that children naturally born in the US to Chinese immigrants were US citizens as long as their parents were not working for a foreign government and the country that they were citizens of were not at war with the US.
The Immigration Act of 1924 extended the Chinese Exclusion Act and included all Asians, Southern Europeans and Eastern Europeans. So 17 years later, when the internment camps were setup, there was a good chance that most of the adult Japanese were not legally US citizens. The children would have been, but why would you break up families? (That’s a familiar question today with illegal immigration.)
I think I should point a few things out that seems to get ignored when talking about the Japanese internment camps. First, it only effected the western states. If you were Japanese and lived in Chicago, NYC, Boston, etc., you were not put into an internment camp. Second, if you moved to an Eastern state, you were not placed into an internment camp. Third, several people who were in the camps were allowed to leave the camps and get jobs away from the camps. I only bring this up because people tend to think everyone throughout the US was rounded up and placed into a camp where they couldn’t leave at all. As someone pointed out before, the camps probably saved many of lives by cutting down chances of mob attacks and lynchings.
Not really. Americans in 2009 and 01 too are and were too tolerant to be such paranoids. No Muslim Americans except those directly charged with terrorism were interned and there were no lynchings, riots, and so on.
I believe it was a Sikh that was killed. However, that action was done by one lone nut who didn’t know or care that there’s a difference between a Muslim and a Sikh. When has there been a mob action or lynching that involved just one person? So Curtis M. is correct with his statement that there was no attacks on others by masses of people, which on infers from using the examples of lynching and mobs. It was one act by one person, so I think we can say that Americans were quite restrained in their actions since this was the only example people have been able to dig up after eight years.
I really, really think this was posted as a poor attempt at a joke, but in case anyone else reading it doesn’t click the link: it goes to a page from Our Dumb Century: The Onion presents 100 years of headlines from America’s finest news source. The parody newspaper published this book back in 1999 with pseudo-historical “front pages” that were written in the style as if The Onion had been around as long as it claims. IOW, it’s a fake that’s not intended to fool anybody.
I’m not bashing the book, I have a copy and it’s quite funny. Other sample headlines: “Nation’s skies filled with beautiful, black smoke”
The Onion’s piece was possibly influenced by this photograph of a grocery in Oakland (and less likely, but maybe, Harry Nakamura, who served in WWII as a translator for MacArthur and became a grocer after the war). The quote near the end of the article especially calls the photo to mind.
To reiterate DrDeth’s point, the imprisonment of the Germans and Italians during the war was under the Enemy Alien Control Program and applied to non-citizens. There were certainly some cases where those being kept were not a threat, but the overall numbers were fewer and it was not in its intention unjustifiable. It’s a bit closer to what happened in setting up Guantanamo (at least compared to the Relocation Camps). It applied to Japanese citizens as well, and would have been more unfair since they could not become naturalized.
The “Relocation Centers” set up after Executive Order 9066 were wholly unjustifiable, and it’s a little disgusting to see people mention the positive benefit (‘protection’) as if it were somehow relevant. Also, voluntary migration was prohibited after some time, since few states welcomed the Japanese. [See here; Proclamation #4 and #6 from General DeWitt.] Additionally, before they were all shut down, those in the camps were required to sign a loyalty oath, and many of those who didn’t were sent to Tule Lake, the camp for ‘troublemakers’.