Condemnation for thee, but not for me!

    by notAssmin

    17 Comments

    1. ContextEffects01 on

      To be fair, if all you knew about Japan was the Nanjing Massacre and you didn’t know that in a few decades they’d turn their country around to become one of the most peaceful on the face of the Earth, you’d probably support interment camps too.

    2. The sad part is FDR was completely indifferent towards Japanese-Americans. So when his cabinet brought out the Japanese Internment Acts, he signed them because he just didn’t care one way or the other. Still not a great look.

    3. Historybuff250 on

      Are you seriously trying to compare FDR mass incarcerating Japanese Americans for racist reasons to a genocidal scumbag and the guy responsible for a man-made famine? Both are directly responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people while FDR imprisoned 110,000 innocents who were eventually freed. Still bad, but not even close to comparable with a manufactured famine and a literal genocide.

    4. Except that Churchill wasn’t responsible for the Bengal famine at all… Even the most aggressive take would be sayinf
      G that some of his decisions potentially exacerbated the effects of the famine. But the primary factors were: natural disaster, local government, and Japanese invasion.

    5. Treating mass incarnations in internment camps as comparable to actual genocide.

      The average Redditor at its finest.

    6. 1,862 died in Japanese internment camps

      6,000 were born in them

      That’s a death toll of -4,148

      The Bengal Famine killed *millions*, such a stupid false equivalency

    7. Worried-Pick4848 on

      Worth pointing out that very few Japanese died in the internment camps. Which doesn’t excuse our guilt for doing that to them, but does mean that comparing them directly with the Bengal famine and the Soviet pogroms is tacky, to put it mildly.

      I won’t say for a moment that we should have done the internment camps. They were a violation of everything it is to be an American. But at the very least we always intended that the Japanese would walk back out of the camps when the war was over.

      So while we absolutely do need to remember what we did and never do it again, it’s entirely farcical to compare the internment camps to Hitler’s death camps, Stalin’s gulags, or the Bengal Famine. Or to a lot of real world events that had actual significant death toll. It cheapens these other humanitarian catastrophes to have the internment camps lumped in with them.

    8. Blue_Cardigan15 on

      The Japanese interment camps were very bad but are you really going to say it was comparable to two actual intentionally manufactured genocides?

    9. Cosmic_Meditator777 on

      One weird thing I’ve noticed is that the conversation around the Japanese concentration camps starts and ends at the simple fact that they existed; nobody ever talks about what the ethnic Japanese citizens actually went through in there.

    10. I feel like historically versed people already are knowledgeable about FDR. In my experience, every person who learns the history of FDR, sort of knows about the Japanese internment.

      Furthermore, although that incident was horrific and excessively cruel to American citizens, as far as presidents go and as far as WW2 domestic leadership, it’s far better than what the Germans, Japanese, Soviets, Chinese, or british were doing.

    11. 5v3n_5a3g3w3rk on

      The interment camps weren’t that bad, more people came out then went in (more babies were born as old people died)

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