Surprisingly High Support for WWII Internment of Japanese Americans Today
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The subsequent graph shows support today for FDR’s executive order 9066 (though FDR is not mentioned in the question) that “created military exclusion zones during World War II and allowed for the forcible relocation of Americans of Japanese descent to internment camps”, by selected demographics. The YouGov survey does not break out Asian responses. We’d include them if we could! The sizable chunk of the sample, 29%, who responded “not sure” are excluded:
Here are the explicit approval percentages with disapproval and not sure responses combined together for the residuals:
They’ll never throw us in internment camps. It’s not who we are. It’s who we were, but we’re ashamed of it and we won’t do it again. Right, kiddos? Right? Kids?! Hello?!
English
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Japanese Americans and Japanese are “boring” and “uncool”. Same with Germans and German Americans. They are not “vibrant” like Blacks, Hindus, Muslims, Hispanics etc… So it is cool.
We’re getting over such dated concepts as a presumption of innocence and the right to trial and coming to appreciate the essential justice of collective guilt, racial responsibility, etc.
Hitler was ahead of his time.
I’m not sure interment was necessary, but I find the typical moralizing about it to be extremely superficial and political in nature.
Some protest the Japanese were loyal. Well, their numbers were small due in part to the exclusion act, but what if they had been half the population?
Of course, no one ever brings up the Dutch and other civilians that the Japs interned, many of whom died. LKY narrowly escaped a mass execution according to his memoirs.
Anyway, the internment of Japanese civilians ranks very low among the various war crimes of the US. Of all the people claiming to be victims nowadays, it makes me saddest when Japanese-Americans do it, especially the young ones.
But given the date and the gist of the other questions it´s prolly not the Japanese who should worry.Replies: @Hugo Silva
In the case above, the Japanese are the bad guys because they do bad stuff. If Americans do likewise, they are likewise bad, no?
No. The Japanese do it because that's who they are, they like it and they deserve whatever bad happens in return. The Americans do it because they have no other valid choice. They regret it, afterwards, and are doing it for a higher purpose anyway; democracy, not oil.
If you play this game really well, not only can you do, or, at least, justify bad stuff and remain good, the very fact that you are willing to imperil your goodness shows how good you are.
*whatever the flavor
The question is that the Japanese-Americans had American citizenship but unlike the German-Americans and the Italian-Americans were treated has if they were enemy aliens.Replies: @Curle
There were people at the time who saw the whole episode for what it was, and often it isn't who you'd expect looking at pop history. J. Edgar Hoover-not exactly a shrinking violet when it came to either civil rights violations or casual racism-was opposed to the internment of Americans of Japanese background, viewing it correctly as a waste of time and effort born of hysteria.
(Hoover also opposed the Huston Plan, partly because of Nixon's attempt at a power grab, but also because he understood the rapidly changing political culture of America around 1970. He accepted the methods he'd used for decades were going to go the same way as Jim Crow or pre-birth control sexuality, unlike Nixon.)
So, yeah, this was definitely not one of the prouder chapters in American history. One can accept that while keeping it into perspective, and one can also be proud of this response.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young-Oak_Kim
"There are no Japanese or Koreans here, only Americans."
Robert Kuok witnessed similar things too he notes in his memoirs..Replies: @nebulafox
The high Hispanic support is interesting.
A while back, it was leaked in a Target (retailer) memo that Hispanic employees “may say ‘OK, OK’ and pretend to understand, when they do not, just to save face.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2359206/Targets-offensive-document-telling-managers-speak-Hispanic-employees-leads-lawsuit-employees.html
My best guess is something similar is going on.
Some protest the Japanese were loyal. Well, their numbers were small due in part to the exclusion act, but what if they had been half the population?
Of course, no one ever brings up the Dutch and other civilians that the Japs interned, many of whom died. LKY narrowly escaped a mass execution according to his memoirs.
Anyway, the internment of Japanese civilians ranks very low among the various war crimes of the US. Of all the people claiming to be victims nowadays, it makes me saddest when Japanese-Americans do it, especially the young ones.Replies: @nokangaroos, @Fluesterwitz, @Hugo Silva, @Buzz Mohawk, @nebulafox, @showmethereal
– Given the USG still fully backs the looting of German churches (Germany had to freaking buy back the Gospel Book of Heinrich der Löwe from the proud heirs of the one who, erm, liberated it) I can´t say I´m too surprised.
But given the date and the gist of the other questions it´s prolly not the Japanese who should worry.
I'd like to see the Germans demand restitution of assets by legal means, to see if the American authorities apply the same standards to German and American looting , or openly declare that spoils are for the winnners and the Germans have no right to keep spoils because they're losers!Replies: @nokangaroos
it surprises me (though i suppose it shouldnt) that the very relevant fact of ‘american’ japanese nationals assisting their co-ethnics during pearl harbor is largely omitted from the discussion of the internment camps
Fun fact: a full one third of jap-Americans at the time were not citizens of the U.S. It would have been suicidal not to keep them in check.Replies: @Hugo Silva, @Servant of Gla'aki
Japanese are leaving America en masse to go back to Japan, their population has decreased rapidly, soon there won’t be a japanese american, and that’s a good thing.
That's what I read anyway.
No, they call them re-education camps. You know … places where you can concentrate.
Once upon a time Japanese Americans were doing well in the Hotel Industry in parts of the USA. New incoming Indians from the Caribbean bought them up cheap. That was the start of the motel Potel Patels and their later domination of the American hospitality industry. Some of them are good but some are arrogant scumbags.
Americans could have had nice, clean, polite Japanese running many of their hotels. But the internment gave us Indians a foot in the door, now Americans enjoy arrogant cheap mercantile White-hating Gujrati Indians running their shitty hotels with cockroaches. Murica, thau always marchest to the Third World! Hell yay!
Also a long time back, someone mentioned here on Unz about how, many Jews bought up Japanese American businesses on the cheap during those days (Murica, thau always marchest to the Third World! Hell yay!)
But when Japanese Americans were paid compensation later, it came from the pockets of all American tax payers! Nice.
German Americans faced a lot of heat in WW1 forced to rename their street-names, forced to stop speaking German. Yet today’s murica worships Blacks and Jews. Allows millions of America hating, West hating and White hating (many Hindus are of that type) immigrants to come in and take over.
Murica your destiny was third World, there was no other way out for you. Wooo hooo. USA USA USA!!!
The powers that be also were aware of the Niihau Incident right after PH.
Fun fact: a full one third of jap-Americans at the time were not citizens of the U.S. It would have been suicidal not to keep them in check.
Japanese internment makes a lot more sense, when viewed within that context.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niihau_incident
Some protest the Japanese were loyal. Well, their numbers were small due in part to the exclusion act, but what if they had been half the population?
Of course, no one ever brings up the Dutch and other civilians that the Japs interned, many of whom died. LKY narrowly escaped a mass execution according to his memoirs.
Anyway, the internment of Japanese civilians ranks very low among the various war crimes of the US. Of all the people claiming to be victims nowadays, it makes me saddest when Japanese-Americans do it, especially the young ones.Replies: @nokangaroos, @Fluesterwitz, @Hugo Silva, @Buzz Mohawk, @nebulafox, @showmethereal
The problem is mixing morality*-based and realist arguments. Realizing that in some situations things need to/will be done that are distasteful but deemed necessary will lead to the recognition that the other side will act the same, thus leads to either ‘relativism’ or the need to demonize your opponent.
In the case above, the Japanese are the bad guys because they do bad stuff. If Americans do likewise, they are likewise bad, no?
No. The Japanese do it because that’s who they are, they like it and they deserve whatever bad happens in return. The Americans do it because they have no other valid choice. They regret it, afterwards, and are doing it for a higher purpose anyway; democracy, not oil.
If you play this game really well, not only can you do, or, at least, justify bad stuff and remain good, the very fact that you are willing to imperil your goodness shows how good you are.
*whatever the flavor
the ethnic Japanese population in the USA is in decline, only a few thousand Japanese immigrants per year , extremely low fertility rate among japanese americans .
There was more than one moving piece in the Japanese and Japanese American internment program. One was naked desire to steal property from the internees. Not a zero sum, but not the biggest part. Another was plain racism. Also not zero, but not the biggest part. Part was real fear of allowing saboteurs easy access to destroy important facilities, etc. If all the Japanese had been in Colorado or Oklahoma, maybe there would not have been as much concern. Another was the very real (and not discussed) possibility of pogrom carried out against Japanese people by other Americans, and allowed to occur by the police and local government. It is not insane to opine that internment likely saved a lot of Japanese lives.
When Corregidor fell and the Bataan Death March ensued and the word of atrocity got out, do you think that mobs might well have formed in San Diego, Long Beach, San Francisco, etc?
The US Government has done many horrible things all over the country and world, and continues to do so today. Japanese internment was not honorable, but was not among the worst.
Japanese in Hawaii were not interned because all real estate was owned by Anglos. Sabotgage? No, their labor was more important and real. Japanese were ALLOWED equal protection and thus the right to acquire real estate on the West Coast because they received protection from Imperial Japan. That protection was in the form of: “Any nation that treats Japanese like coolies will be bombed out of Asia.” And they did when necessary to prove the point. After Pearl Harbor, the deal was off. Order 9066 was nothing but a revocation of the equal status and a land grab. Worries of sabotage by those in the know is... come se dece ... fake news.The Bataan Death march was in RESPONSe to the execution of Order 9066.Replies: @anon
Pratt and Romney bring up the Japanese and Standard Oil and the money-grubbing shysters on Wall Street funding the Japanese military a hundred twenty years or so ago which then attacked the Russians and when the Russian Navy responded the Japanese went back Jack and did it again, wheels turning round and round and I’m about to read Elvis Costello’s book on the War in the Pacific during the Second World War — The Pacific War 1941-1945 — and the USS Panay in China might have been protecting the Standard Oil barges in China in 1937 and the Japanese blasted it all to Hell back then and who was this Pratt that was so involved in Standard Oil and Exxon and Chevron are going back Jack do it again.
Low-grade Pynchonesque stuff cause I’m pressed for time and somewhat sleep deprived.
Ashes to Ashes — David Bowie:
Ashes to Ashes — lyrics by David Bowie:
The shrieking of nothing is killing, just
Pictures of Jap girls in synthesis and I
Ain’t got no money and I ain’t got no hair
But I’m hoping to kick but the planet it’s glowing
Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence 1983 Trailer HD | David Bowie:
The Jones Gang down at the bar ain’t forgetting the Second World War and that guy from Pink Floyd ain’t forgetting the day the Tiger tanks broke free and the price of a few ordinary lives.
Escape From WWII Will Be Difficult But We Must Do It
I would be interested in the (dot) Indian-American view of this. I’m sure the woke academic sorts infesting our universities love to pile on about what an an ugly chapter of white supremacy this was, etc. Then we should ask them how they feel about India interning 10,000 Chinese-Indians during the 1962 war. And how they didn’t release all of them until 5 years after the war ended, or apologize or offer compensation (unlike the racist Yanks). I’d love to hear their thoughts!
I suppose the Chinese and Filipinos living in the US probably thought interning the Japanese was a good idea if too lenient. They probably would have wanted camps more like Mauthausen than Manzanar.
Since Japan didn’t have any major ‘victories’ after Pearl Harbor interning US Japanese proebably wasn’t necessary but that was not a given. When US casualties started to really rise in 1945 as the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa raged having Japanese Americans walking down the streets of San Francisco probably wouldn’t have been a good idea.
Haven’t the Japanese Americans that are the descendant of the first wave mostly assimilated?
That’s what I read anyway.
Japanese are seen as white adjacent so who cares what happened to them. After all, it’s not like they were forced to drink from a separate water fountain.
Reading through some of the comments here, I sense that there are still quite a lot of apologetic attitude or excuses for the atrocity of internment among many commenters here: whataboutism, relative morality, “no big deal”, “re-education camp”, …
This is the same types of slippery slope reactions that allow the American politics and “democracy” to be kidnapped by the special interests and liar classes: “no big deal”, “always like that”, “what can you do”, …
Meanwhile, the rotting process of the society continues and accelerates…
I’m against the internment of the Japanese on the grounds that it made that queer George Takei the queer he is today. I bet his jap daddy would have beat his ass harder than any man since if pappy Takei hadn’t been concerned with getting shot by camp guards.
Also, obligatory fuck FDR.
In Trump vs. Hawaii, the precedent of Korematsu (the internment case) was before the court. (Indirectly, but close enough.) This was finally the opportunity to overrule Korematsu. That magic, crucial word, “Overruled!” John Roberts criticized Korematsu, but then wrote that Korematsu was “overruled by history.” That was the majority opinion. Korematsu, that is, the legality of the internment of potential terrorists, remains the law of the land. I just thought I would point this out to you 74 million potential terrorists. Justice Jackson, dissenting in Korematsu, said that the decision would lie about, like a loaded weapon, ready to be fired in time urgent need.
Most people really have no clue about that internment beyond the usual Howard Zinn propaganda, so this poll is just as close to worthless as a lot of other polls. A poll that directly asked if persons deemed by the US government to be insurgents or rebels should be interned in the Current Year would be more relevant.
Some protest the Japanese were loyal. Well, their numbers were small due in part to the exclusion act, but what if they had been half the population?
Of course, no one ever brings up the Dutch and other civilians that the Japs interned, many of whom died. LKY narrowly escaped a mass execution according to his memoirs.
Anyway, the internment of Japanese civilians ranks very low among the various war crimes of the US. Of all the people claiming to be victims nowadays, it makes me saddest when Japanese-Americans do it, especially the young ones.Replies: @nokangaroos, @Fluesterwitz, @Hugo Silva, @Buzz Mohawk, @nebulafox, @showmethereal
The matter with the internment of Japanese-Americans isn’t the internment of civilians, internment of Enemy civilians was routine and everybody did it during WWII.
The question is that the Japanese-Americans had American citizenship but unlike the German-Americans and the Italian-Americans were treated has if they were enemy aliens.
Fun fact: a full one third of jap-Americans at the time were not citizens of the U.S. It would have been suicidal not to keep them in check.Replies: @Hugo Silva, @Servant of Gla'aki
And arresting only the Japanese citizens would have been fully legitimate, the problem is that American citizens of Japanese descent were treated the same way that Japanese citizens.
But given the date and the gist of the other questions it´s prolly not the Japanese who should worry.Replies: @Hugo Silva
Since the German Government didn’t went to court to demand restitution of the Gospels we don’t know the positions of the US Government on assets looted by American forces.
I’d like to see the Germans demand restitution of assets by legal means, to see if the American authorities apply the same standards to German and American looting , or openly declare that spoils are for the winnners and the Germans have no right to keep spoils because they’re losers!
... which is a peculiar legal position as is;
whereas in Germany if you own anything a Jew fancies that was at any one time (allegedly) owned by a Jew, it is not enough to be able to prove your ancestors bought it legally.
Both "legal" practices go beyond the London Declaration which, like the Benes Decrees etc., is still in force. Who do you think you are shitting, Itzig?
Why not intern the Germans and Italians?
Fun fact: a full one third of jap-Americans at the time were not citizens of the U.S. It would have been suicidal not to keep them in check.Replies: @Hugo Silva, @Servant of Gla'aki
Yeah, whereas 90 percent of Americans, have never heard of that incident.
Japanese internment makes a lot more sense, when viewed within that context.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niihau_incident
Some protest the Japanese were loyal. Well, their numbers were small due in part to the exclusion act, but what if they had been half the population?
Of course, no one ever brings up the Dutch and other civilians that the Japs interned, many of whom died. LKY narrowly escaped a mass execution according to his memoirs.
Anyway, the internment of Japanese civilians ranks very low among the various war crimes of the US. Of all the people claiming to be victims nowadays, it makes me saddest when Japanese-Americans do it, especially the young ones.Replies: @nokangaroos, @Fluesterwitz, @Hugo Silva, @Buzz Mohawk, @nebulafox, @showmethereal
As I once described on another blog here, my first big boss was a Japanese American man named Eddie who had lived as a boy in one of the internment camps. This might be a boring story, so I will insert the more tag here:
Eddie was a wonderful man in charge of 50 to 100 of us US Forest Service crew members. We all knew he had lived in a camp.
Under Eddie’s leadership, we worked in the Rocky Mountains cutting trees, thinning forests, puting out hot spots at forest fires, building trails and doing whatever else was asked of us. It was a valuable experience for me before college.
One evening, a few years later, I was invited to go to the home of a local Buddhist and chant “Nam Myōhō Renge Kyō .” There on the living room floor, chanting with everyone else, was Eddie, my old boss. I didn’t know it before, but Eddie was a Buddhist.
It fit.
He went from boyhood in an internment camp to a very good career and leadership position with the United States, the very government that had put him and his parents in the camp during the war. He was a very positive, peaceful, friendly man, and a great boss to us rugged, young Americans there at the time. He showed no negativity at all.
I just want to express my agreement that this internment was not the equivalent of what others went through in Europe and Asia. Not at all.
The Pearl Harbor incident directly influenced mainlanders who wanted to incarcerate Japanese Americans. How many Japanese would have worked to undermine the war effort is unknown. I would guess there would have been very few. They served with distinction in Europe. They were not put in a position to be battling Japanese.
Some protest the Japanese were loyal. Well, their numbers were small due in part to the exclusion act, but what if they had been half the population?
Of course, no one ever brings up the Dutch and other civilians that the Japs interned, many of whom died. LKY narrowly escaped a mass execution according to his memoirs.
Anyway, the internment of Japanese civilians ranks very low among the various war crimes of the US. Of all the people claiming to be victims nowadays, it makes me saddest when Japanese-Americans do it, especially the young ones.Replies: @nokangaroos, @Fluesterwitz, @Hugo Silva, @Buzz Mohawk, @nebulafox, @showmethereal
I get where you are coming from, and I do agree that the internment program is pretty small fish compared to other stuff the US has done (the Philippines), let alone what other participants in WWII did. But I’d rather avoid resorting to putting America and Imperial Japan in the same conversation, morality-wise. Might make for an effective argument in the moment, but weakens your whole.
There were people at the time who saw the whole episode for what it was, and often it isn’t who you’d expect looking at pop history. J. Edgar Hoover-not exactly a shrinking violet when it came to either civil rights violations or casual racism-was opposed to the internment of Americans of Japanese background, viewing it correctly as a waste of time and effort born of hysteria.
(Hoover also opposed the Huston Plan, partly because of Nixon’s attempt at a power grab, but also because he understood the rapidly changing political culture of America around 1970. He accepted the methods he’d used for decades were going to go the same way as Jim Crow or pre-birth control sexuality, unlike Nixon.)
So, yeah, this was definitely not one of the prouder chapters in American history. One can accept that while keeping it into perspective, and one can also be proud of this response.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young-Oak_Kim
“There are no Japanese or Koreans here, only Americans.”
Oh, yeah. In Japanese occupied Malaysia, kampung dwellers would just head for the hills whenever they came, so they could loot in peace and not cause problems, and girls were dressed up as boys to avoid gang-rapes. This happened regularly for years on end. And this came from a culture of cruelty that permeated the IJA: regular soldiers got the crap beaten out of them or judo tossed for having one bootlace loose, so they enjoyed having people they could have at their mercy for once. LKY’s succinct comparison to the Mongols, both in martial ability and brutality, speaks volumes.
And at the end of the war, if anything, it got worse. Just ask elderly people or US soldiers who remember Manila or Okinawa in 1945. The Japanese troops knew they were doomed and took out their frustration on the civilians.
PS:
There were a couple of dictators in postwar Asia-Park Chung-Hee in South Korea and Suharto in Indonesia-who served with the IJA during the war, and it definitely showed in their approaches to governance.
Ironically, you could make a case for Park, a non-Japanese, being the most successful IJA officer of all time, if we judge by the impact in imparting IJA values. South Korea became a hyper-militarized, ruthlessly efficient place, down to schoolteachers behaving like army noncoms, and this was part of what spurred on the economic boom. The IJA theorists of the 1920s were very big on having a “total war” society, purged of anything that could inhibit state interests, but they had to deal with faulty constitutional structures until the late 1930s, and then they went out and lost WWII. Korea’s obviously nothing like that anymore, but a couple of decades is still more than 7 years, if that.
https://youtu.be/ogpdEn2IHPASo, he gets shot at. His aides carry out his beloved wife (who was later pronounced dead). After a brief period of chaos, he gets back to the lectern and finishes the speech (1:47 mark in the clip). That guy was a Mentsch.https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/20/5.16_Coup_Park_Chung-hee.jpg/1200px-5.16_Coup_Park_Chung-hee.jpgReplies: @nebulafox
Amazing to see the higher support among Democrats.
I'd like to see the Germans demand restitution of assets by legal means, to see if the American authorities apply the same standards to German and American looting , or openly declare that spoils are for the winnners and the Germans have no right to keep spoils because they're losers!Replies: @nokangaroos
Had the looter still been alive there might have been a chance, but the court took the position the heirs were innocent and therefore protected in the possession of their loot.
… which is a peculiar legal position as is;
whereas in Germany if you own anything a Jew fancies that was at any one time (allegedly) owned by a Jew, it is not enough to be able to prove your ancestors bought it legally.
Both “legal” practices go beyond the London Declaration which, like the Benes Decrees etc., is still in force. Who do you think you are shitting, Itzig?
Aung San 😉
Was he IJA? I thought he was an officer in the Manchukuo army.
To show the caliber of the man Park was, here is a footage of an assassination attempt on him:
So, he gets shot at. His aides carry out his beloved wife (who was later pronounced dead). After a brief period of chaos, he gets back to the lectern and finishes the speech (1:47 mark in the clip). That guy was a Mentsch.
https://youtu.be/ogpdEn2IHPASo, he gets shot at. His aides carry out his beloved wife (who was later pronounced dead). After a brief period of chaos, he gets back to the lectern and finishes the speech (1:47 mark in the clip). That guy was a Mentsch.https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/20/5.16_Coup_Park_Chung-hee.jpg/1200px-5.16_Coup_Park_Chung-hee.jpgReplies: @nebulafox
> Was he IJA? I thought he was an officer in the Manchukuo army.
No, you were right, he was with Manchukuo. My bad.
Suharto, for his part, was in a local volunteer army that the Japanese set up, so he wasn’t IJA either.
>To show the caliber of the man Park was, here is a footage of an assassination attempt on him:
Brass. Balls.
When Corregidor fell and the Bataan Death March ensued and the word of atrocity got out, do you think that mobs might well have formed in San Diego, Long Beach, San Francisco, etc?
The US Government has done many horrible things all over the country and world, and continues to do so today. Japanese internment was not honorable, but was not among the worst.Replies: @The Mestizo
wow, where to start?
Japanese in Hawaii were not interned because all real estate was owned by Anglos. Sabotgage? No, their labor was more important and real. Japanese were ALLOWED equal protection and thus the right to acquire real estate on the West Coast because they received protection from Imperial Japan. That protection was in the form of: “Any nation that treats Japanese like coolies will be bombed out of Asia.” And they did when necessary to prove the point. After Pearl Harbor, the deal was off. Order 9066 was nothing but a revocation of the equal status and a land grab. Worries of sabotage by those in the know is… come se dece … fake news.
The Bataan Death march was in RESPONSe to the execution of Order 9066.
No.
ROTFL. One thing for sure, whites are now as sappy as the Japanese Yellow Dogs who were interned.
The US government took away all their property and put them in camps, but many Japanese in the camps were willing to serve in the US military to prove they are patriotic and good people. What a bunch of cucks.
“I fight for a country that holds my family in intern camp.”
Today, Jews slap whites around and spit in their faces, but the priority of whites is to always appease Jews to prove they are not ‘antisemitic’.
Remember how Michael Pence was humiliated by Jews and blacks at the showing of HAMILTON. But he didn’t show anger. No, he just cucked and made mealy-mouthed noises about how he understands.
Sonny was right, something Michael eventually learned.
“Country ain’t your blood.” Only fools are patriotic to America. Be like the Jews who do everything to make America serve them.
Japanese in Hawaii were not interned because all real estate was owned by Anglos. Sabotgage? No, their labor was more important and real. Japanese were ALLOWED equal protection and thus the right to acquire real estate on the West Coast because they received protection from Imperial Japan. That protection was in the form of: “Any nation that treats Japanese like coolies will be bombed out of Asia.” And they did when necessary to prove the point. After Pearl Harbor, the deal was off. Order 9066 was nothing but a revocation of the equal status and a land grab. Worries of sabotage by those in the know is... come se dece ... fake news.The Bataan Death march was in RESPONSe to the execution of Order 9066.Replies: @anon
The Bataan Death march was in RESPONSe to the execution of Order 9066.
No.
The unironic support for internment which likely will be used to intern the posters here is pretty amazing.
The question is that the Japanese-Americans had American citizenship but unlike the German-Americans and the Italian-Americans were treated has if they were enemy aliens.Replies: @Curle
Except the Japanese actually attacked American territory.
Many native Hawaiians might disagree.
Some protest the Japanese were loyal. Well, their numbers were small due in part to the exclusion act, but what if they had been half the population?
Of course, no one ever brings up the Dutch and other civilians that the Japs interned, many of whom died. LKY narrowly escaped a mass execution according to his memoirs.
Anyway, the internment of Japanese civilians ranks very low among the various war crimes of the US. Of all the people claiming to be victims nowadays, it makes me saddest when Japanese-Americans do it, especially the young ones.Replies: @nokangaroos, @Fluesterwitz, @Hugo Silva, @Buzz Mohawk, @nebulafox, @showmethereal
“LKY narrowly escaped a mass execution according to his memoirs.”
Robert Kuok witnessed similar things too he notes in his memoirs..
Yeah – I laugh at the supposed do-gooders who point to South Korea and Taiwan as “examples” to the rest of Asia on how democracy can bring them prosperity. Both became wealthy while under military dictatorships.
The masochistic and self-hating mythology lingers; those willing to do a hour’s grownup reading become fewer as intelligent book-literacy declines in the electronic and short-attention-span age.
The exclusion order applied to about half of Oregon and the State of Washington, all of California and an inexplicable bite of southern Arizona. Those willing and able to leave the zone stipulated in the exclusion order of their own accord and at their own expense were at liberty to do so and about 15,000 chose to do do. (Incidentally, they eventually got the same compensation as the others.)
The camps (relocation centers) had a lower death rate than the population as a whole. Those interned had access to good health care and, unexpectedly, the camps saw a modest population explosion.
Young Japanese-Americans in the camps had better access to higher education than they had enjoyed on the West Coast pre-war; many of them went to Chicago for their education.
In retrospect, the whole issue could have been handled far better but the stance adopted by J.A.C.L., the Japanese-American Citizens’ League, could hardly have been bettered: “Our country, the United States, is at war and we will obey the government’s orders, whether we like them or not.”
This is the same types of slippery slope reactions that allow the American politics and "democracy" to be kidnapped by the special interests and liar classes: "no big deal", "always like that", "what can you do", ...
Meanwhile, the rotting process of the society continues and accelerates...Replies: @Craig Nelsen
Given the half century assault on our history by the popular culture, a bit of defensiveness from white Americans is probably to be expected. That defensiveness, however, is definitely not the cause of our civilization’s “rotting process.” More likely, it is the antidote.
I don’t think it is necessarily that linear: the Philippines was also controlled by a right-wing dictatorship around the same time. Marcos helped plunge a nation that was the second richest in the region next to Japan in 1960 into being poorer than Indonesia today. South Korea, for its part, had seen successful protests to jettison Rhee a year before Park, who himself represented a younger generation army faction, took power.
Furthermore, nothing suggests that political liberalization inhibited economic growth. It was the ’97 Asian financial crisis, the same thing that finally toppled Suharto, that brought an end to the hothouse years, near as I can tell. This isn’t to suggest that developmentarian dictators don’t have their place-our insistence that South Vietnam pull off the trifecta of defense from invasions, political liberalization, and economic growth simultaneously as we withdrew proved (predictably) impossible-but it is important to not fetishize a system of government too much. Ultimately, it is about what fits circumstances at the time.
I’m the furthest thing from a fanatical human rights booster, as my comment history should show. That’s not the job of US foreign policy, and I think the US being a healthy, successful place does a lot more to advance the cause of human rights than any amount of nagging, counterproductive NGOs or drones ever have. But I do think the success of Taiwanese democracy is a very important point to bring up whenever Beijing implies that Chinese culture is somehow incompatible with political freedom. This is an ideological battle: one not helped by American elites that clearly want to be more like China.
One important point to make is that although South Korea and Taiwan were authoritarian states, they were not so authoritarian that people dared not protest (and occasionally get massacred-see Gwangju) or critique the regime. And unlike the modern PRC, by the 1980s, they were getting more free, not less. I think there was a lot of hope that the PRC would head in a similar direction, but in hindsight, this overlooked a lot about CCP ideology. Granted, it’s not like letting our oligarchs help rape “democratized” Russia (something which Beijing has not forgotten about at all) as they simultaneously rentierized the American economy helped the cause of political liberalization, either.
Also the idea that people in the PRC are scared to protest is laughable. Calling for the overthrow of the government is another matter though.Replies: @Twinkie, @nebulafox
Robert Kuok witnessed similar things too he notes in his memoirs..Replies: @nebulafox
The Singaporean Chinese community helped bankroll the KMT, and the Japanese war in China was a bloody, bogged down mess. Needless to say, that factored into the IJA’s decision for a general purge of potential hostile elements.
One thing the IJA did not expect was the degree of ethnic tensions they ran into in Malaya, where deep resentment among ethnic Malays at the prospect of becoming a minority in their own country was widespread. Although the Japanese brutalized everybody, regardless of race, they did tend to trust Malays and Indians more, and weren’t averse to playing ethnic games to keep everybody divided and docile. Postwar Malay national consciousness was a result of the Japanese occupation years, and it’s not hard to combine that with the experiences of the 1950s to understand why Singapore is not part of Malaysia.
Both South Korea and Taiwan only liberalized because they were forced to by the US… Nothing more nothing else. They can’t force the PRC to do so… It is really that simple. You would be surprised… Many mainlanders go to Taiwan to witness the election cycle… Most come away unimpressed… All the hubris and wrangling and backbiting doesn’t make them say “yea I want this”. Most of the ones that do simply migrate… They are allowed to – nobody is telling them they can’t leave (unless they are wanted for corruption).
Also the idea that people in the PRC are scared to protest is laughable. Calling for the overthrow of the government is another matter though.
This culminated in the armed uprising in Gwangju after Park’s assassination, which was brutally put down, further embittering the populace and greatly eroding what support that remained. Eventually, there was a breach, a dissension, among the ruling generals when the designated successor to President Chun, presidential candidate (and the later president) Roh proposed a free election. The latter cut a deal with an opposition leader (Kim Young-Sam) to absorb his support and won the election. In turn, the opposition leader got to run as the incumbent party candidate and become president next (and, after that, dissident Kim Dae-Jung became president).
Although the United States frequently pressured the military rulers to liberalize, that pressure was always very light, because it feared anarchy and North Korean adventurism far greater threats to its interests in the region. The toppling of military rule in South Korea was in large measure internally driven.
True the Singaporean Chinese did certainly back the KMT. But they backed others as well. They just wanted to end Manchu rule more than anything else. But yeah – Japanese didn’t have centuries of resentment toward the Malays and Indians because they didn’t have much dealing with them.. Their main beef was with ethnic Chinese.
Also the idea that people in the PRC are scared to protest is laughable. Calling for the overthrow of the government is another matter though.Replies: @Twinkie, @nebulafox
There was considerable resistance to military rule in South Korea after President Park enacted the so-called Yushin Constitution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Republic_of_Korea#Yushin_Constitution
This culminated in the armed uprising in Gwangju after Park’s assassination, which was brutally put down, further embittering the populace and greatly eroding what support that remained. Eventually, there was a breach, a dissension, among the ruling generals when the designated successor to President Chun, presidential candidate (and the later president) Roh proposed a free election. The latter cut a deal with an opposition leader (Kim Young-Sam) to absorb his support and won the election. In turn, the opposition leader got to run as the incumbent party candidate and become president next (and, after that, dissident Kim Dae-Jung became president).
Although the United States frequently pressured the military rulers to liberalize, that pressure was always very light, because it feared anarchy and North Korean adventurism far greater threats to its interests in the region. The toppling of military rule in South Korea was in large measure internally driven.
Also the idea that people in the PRC are scared to protest is laughable. Calling for the overthrow of the government is another matter though.Replies: @Twinkie, @nebulafox
South Korea: see above. Taiwan: had a long democratization process. Although the first direct elections only took place in 1996, by the 1980s, the rudimentary structure of a modern liberal democracy were already being built. And like South Korea, the US had little to do with that.
With the exception of South Vietnam (driven by the controversy of that war-leaving aside the fact that the RVN, while no paragon of republican virtue, was by 1970 significantly more liberal than most of our other allies, let alone the Communists feted by the media), American pressure to democratize remained light during the Cold War years. At best, we’d tell guys like Marcos that we were willing to give them asylum, but nothing more.
In general, people tend to overestimate superpower influence at the expense of local politics for Cold War-era dictatorships. A lot of people seem to think that the US straight up installed Suharto or Allende. That’s just not what happened.
>Also the idea that people in the PRC are scared to protest is laughable. Calling for the overthrow of the government is another matter though.
Again: a noticeable difference between 1980s/1990s right-wing dictatorships elsewhere in the region and the CCP is that the former tended to liberalize as things got better. The latter, if anything, has gotten more strict.
The literal title of a book written by a former U.S. ambassador to South Korea is “Massive Entanglement, Marginal Influence.” That aptly captures the U.S. influence among allied rightist military dictatorships of the times.
The United States was far more concerned with the geopolitical power struggle against the Soviet Union than human rights or democracy through the Cold War years. It was always very careful not to push the military dictatorships too far and only intervened in exceptional circumstances. For example, when the South Korean dissident Kim Dae-Jung was abducted from Japan by operatives of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency in 1973 and was about to be drowned in the sea, the U.S. immediately requested “cease and desist” and only was able to rescue Kim’s life after granting concessions. Likewise, when it discovered that Park had initiated a covert nuclear program in 1975, it hurriedly pushed to have it shut down in return for technical expertise for a peaceful nuclear power program from the U.S. (and, yet, the South Koreans continued their secret program and only revealed it to IAEA in 2004).
Yup. You know where political dissidents in military-run South Korea often went for refuge? The Myeongdong Cathedral. Can you imagine some Chinese dissident today escaping to a Catholic church and not being arrested? The rightist dictatorships in both South Korea and Taiwan might have oppressed dissident groups and movements, but they allowed those groups and movements to exist in the first place! Try starting a religious movement without government approval in China today and see what happens.
As I mentioned above, in Taiwan (and, surprisingly for a country at its development level, also in Indonesia) the blueprint, rudimentary structures needed for democratic government had already been built by the time the Cold War ended: i.e, developed under authoritarian rule. This made the transition to democracy pretty easy, if violent in the case of the latter. The press was free to critique the government, provided it didn’t go after the wrong people too intensely. People could travel abroad without minders and access foreign media with minimal censorship. Popular opinion did increasingly matter in policy-making: for example, the move to include more islanders in the Taiwanese government during the 1980s.
Was it like this in the ROK during the ’80s, too, at least post-Gwangju? I know that Park ran a strict ship, but I don’t know how it was under his successors. If not, how did the necessary institutions develop? If you are trying to stay away from Unz, don’t feel any pressure to respond, BTW.
As for the PRC: while the CCP has never been anything but authoritarian, during the 1980s, there was a general trend in the government to ensure that a Mao-style cult of personality could never develop again, which you’d expect when your leader is a guy who watched the Red Guards cripple his eldest son for life. And even during the Mao years, local party branches often enjoyed a surprising degree of autonomy, with mixed results. (On the one hand, the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution in Guangxi, on the other, the economic growth would have been impossible without it.) Both are being reversed under Xi’s current policies. Xi’s from the generation that grew up under the Cultural Revolution: you’d think that he’d have Deng-esque views on it, but it looks like it is the opposite, that it took a flighty teenage boy and made him into the man he’s become.
I’m not sure it was inevitable that things would turn out this way, but the possibility wouldn’t have been there but for the CCP’s ideology. When I was younger and having a knee-jerk reaction against the Clinton/Bush/Obama-era FP platitudes that have brought so much grief and misery (to say nothing of wasted money and resources) on Americans and foreigners alike, I was dismissive about ideology in general. Not anymore.
Type: Pinochet, not Allende. Point still stands that Chileans are basically reduced to bystanders in their politics. For Pete’s sake, Pinochet helped crush a coup against Allende a couple of months earlier. He acted knowing that Allende’s urban supporters wouldn’t defend the regime, and the reason the Christian Democrats tacitly supported him was because Chile wasn’t Guatemala: they thought the military would return power back.
This is all kind of important stuff, but if someone’s aware of this, they likely believe the US simply paid off some people to change over a century of democratic government. I’m not even a historian, and the shoddiness of it irritates me.
South Korea was different from Taiwan in many ways, and one of the more significant differences was that there was fierce political competition among various Korean factions even before the liberation from Japan, and no one party enjoyed dominance or continuity for long. Indeed, ROK’s first president Rhee wasn’t even the most important or best-known pro-independence activist/politician (that was probably Kim Gu, the last president of the Korean Provisional Government and a rather colorful and strident character).
So even under the various dictatorships – of Rhee, Park, and Chun – interspersed by chaotic phases such as the demonstration-ridden Second Republic, which was brought on by the 4.19 protests (in which police gunned down university students that led to mass uprisings and the resignation and exile of Rhee and his entourage), the 5.16 coup of Park in 1961, the coup under Chun in 1979, the Gwangju revolt in 1980, various dissident and independent groups vied for political influence. Also I would be remiss to forget labor movements, which proved to be rather thorny to all rulers of South Korea once the industrialization began, as well as university students who routinely demonstrated in a highly organized fashion against all manners of grievances from military dictatorships to police abuse, to raising of tuition, or to the sacking of popular professors.
Add the support and the moral authority that the Catholic Church in Korea (which was small but highly elite and influential) lent to various dissidents, South Korea was a veritable and highly combustible mixed stew* of cantankerous organized political movements and groups, which could only be suppressed by the authoritarian regimes for so long. Koreans have always been very difficult to rule over and easily given to factional in-fighting (hence the joke, “Two Koreans, three Churches”). Park probably came the closest to achieving something of a unitary rule in South Korea, and look what they did to him (and his daughter too). Chun never had the (initial) popular support Park enjoyed and, after a period of initial repression, came to walk a rather fine line (including having to relinquish power to his army/coup colleague Roh, who then announced a free election in a surprise move).
*Korean “army base mixed stew,” emblematic of the fiery nature of internal South Korean politics
