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Defending the Indefensible
There are lessons that can be learned from history, and sometimes those lessons can be painful. The ideals of liberty, and all men are created equal are worthy ideas and should be practiced, but they are dependent upon good men and women. Human beings are flawed, so at times liberty and equality is for us and not for them.
During WWII it was not just the Germans, and the Russians that instituted concentration camps. The United States and Canada did as well. There are some interesting parallels between the criteria of the German and the American criteria on who should be interned, and relocated to the camps. There is an important distinction between the fate of those that were interned in Germany, and America. There is however no escaping the fact that the internment, and relocation into the camps of American citizens of Japanese descent was due to racial animus. Sixty percent of the Japanese interned were American citizens.
Major Karl Bendetsen and Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, head of the Western Command, each questioned Japanese American loyalty. DeWitt, who administered the internment program, repeatedly told newspapers that “A Jap’s a Jap” and testified to Congress,
I don’t want any of them [persons of Japanese ancestry] here. They are a dangerous element. There is no way to determine their loyalty… It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen, he is still a Japanese. American citizenship does not necessarily determine loyalty… But we must worry about the Japanese all the time until he is wiped off the map.
On January 2, the Joint Immigration Committee of the California Legislature sent a manifesto to California newspapers which attacked “the ethnic Japanese,” who it alleged were “totally unassimilable. This manifesto further argued that all people of Japanese heritage were loyal subjects of the Emperor of Japan; Japanese language schools, furthermore, according to the manifesto, were bastions of racism which advanced doctrines of Japanese racial superiority.
The manifesto was backed by the Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West and the California Department of the American Legion, which in January demanded that all Japanese with dual citizenship be placed in concentration camps. Internment was not limited to those who had been to Japan, but included a small number of German and Italian enemy aliens. By February, Earl Warren, the Attorney General of California, had begun his efforts to persuade the federal government to remove all people of Japanese heritage from the West Coast.
March 27, 1942: General DeWitt’s Proclamation No. 4 prohibited all those of Japanese ancestry from leaving “Military Area No. 1” for “any purpose until and to the extent that a future proclamation or order of this headquarters shall so permit or direct.”
May 3, 1942: General DeWitt issued Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34, ordering all people of Japanese ancestry, whether citizens or non-citizens, who were still living in “Military Area No. 1” to report to assembly centers, where they would live until being moved to permanent “Relocation Centers.”
These edicts included persons of part-Japanese ancestry as well. Anyone with at least one-sixteenth (equivalent to having one great-great grandparent).
Internment was popular among many white farmers who resented the Japanese American farmers. “White American farmers admitted that their self-interest required removal of the Japanese.”These individuals saw internment as a convenient means of uprooting their Japanese American competitors. Austin E. Anson, managing secretary of the Salinas Vegetable Grower-Shipper Association, told the Saturday Evening Post in 1942:
“We’re charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We do. It’s a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown men. They came into this valley to work, and they stayed to take over… If all the Japs were removed tomorrow, we’d never miss them in two weeks, because the white farmers can take over and produce everything the Jap grows. And we do not want them back when the war ends, either.”
The Roberts Commission Report, prepared at President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s request, has been cited as an example of the fear and prejudice informing the thinking behind the internment program. The Report sought to link Japanese Americans with espionage activity, and to associate them with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Columnist Henry McLemore reflected growing public sentiment fueled by this report:
“I am for the immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior. I don’t mean a nice part of the interior either. Herd ’em up, pack ’em off and give ’em the inside room in the badlands… Personally, I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them.”
The lesson to be learned is racial prejudice, and racial purity determinations were used to confiscate property, and to intern American citizens, and the US government went further by reaching out to South American countries to deport their Japanese, German, and Italian citizens to the United States so they could be placed in the camps, and some did.
It can happen here, and it did happen here.
Click on the link for entire article.
Published in General
Probably some of both. The incongruity of our support with China with our ban on immigration from China (enacted in 1882) led to that law being rescinded in December 1943.
It’s a combination of both ignorance and racial animus. The point of my essay is not that guilt is the issue, it is that at times history contains some hard truths.
These men died while their parents were behind the wire. I hope to God their parent’s received a better notification than one in a mass mail call in the camp.
I have a hard time believing a nation can hate an Asian race because they’re Asian and then volunteer to fight, with your country’s blessing, for another Asian country.
Not all Americans supported the internment, the quotes in my essay from government officials are the ones that should capture our attention. The one sixteenth rule of Japanese ancestry is not something the lettuce growers came up with, although they probably felt emboldened by the Federal officials and the California state government.
A nation can have racial animus and still assist what it percieves to be a racially degenerate nation to advance its interests. It has happened throughout history. Romans would assist Celtic tribe against another Celtic tribe in Gaul even though Romans perceived them as degenerate savages for cultural norms like human sacrifice.
The USA deploying 60 planes and pilots on a volunteer air unit is hardly any different. The USA wanted Japan defeated and there is no major investment in deploying only 60 men for a small training/combat unit in what was perceived to be the secondary theater of the war.
That specification in ancestry is akin to the Nuremberg Laws for mingle schlusen.
Maybe you had to be there.
Here’s something you might find interesting. It’s not well known and often left out of accounts like the OP, but it had a big impact at the time.
Let me know if you’ve ever heard of the Niihau Incident.
http://www.historynet.com/the-niihau-incident.htm
I am in fact I was at university with a member of the Robinson family who to this day takes an active role in the affairs of Niihau. Compared to the thousands interned that had no interaction with the Japanese military this is no more than an interesting anomaly during WWII. Even though we attended a small Catholic university together my chances of ever visiting Niihua will probably never happen. The island to this day is a sanctuary for the preservation of Hawaiian culture, as it was then. The residents had no influence over Hawaii then, or to this day.
Funny because in Ex parte Quirin (that Supreme Court Case) there were 2 German American citizens along with 6 German American residents that were sent by U-Boat to sabotage war industries and yet only 11,500 German-Americans were interred during World War 2.
11,500 German-Americans vs 120,000 Japanese-Americans is quite the difference in outcome, especially considering the fact that the Germans intended to do far more damage than simply destroying some evidence.
It has been standard practice for belligerents to collect and intern enemy civilian nationals. Usually, those people are transported back to their home nations through the coordinated actions of neutral nations or international groups such as the Red Cross. In WW 2, diplomats in Japan were interned at their embassies and subsequently evacuated. Japanese diplomats in the US were accorded the same treatment.
American civilians in the Philippines were imprisoned and treated like prisoners of war. American construction workers captured on Wake Island were imprisoned and killed in 1943. This doesn’t justify any ill treatment of Japanese aliens by the US, but we were under no legal or moral obligation to allow thousands of enemy nationals to remain at liberty. And it was certainly an abuse of the constitution to intern any US citizen, naturalized or native born. But you can see where this leads to the same complications as we have at the border today. What does one do with the native born minor children of Japanese nationals?
Care to answer that question when those “aliens” have came here legally with the intent to become citizens but the bigotry of the populace has pushed for laws that do not allow said “aliens” to become citizens?
I don’t think it was an anti-Asian issue as much as it was an anti-Japanese issue. I think revenge and anti-enemy emotion, more than racism, were at work. Americans were quite concerned about Japan’s invasion of China, and China was getting cut to ribbons by the Japanese and then the Communist revolution under Mao. I often ask people who the fourth ally was, and most people I ask have forgotten that it was Chiang Kai-shek.
The original post and the subsequent discussion have convinced me that the United States was wrong to imprison Japanese Americans who had done nothing wrong. That said, war is hell for everyone.
I do not disagree with your assessment of the brutality of the Japanese in their treatment of interred American citizens. I do think that we are not the only group that were hardened by a war that saw civilians as combatants. I have talked to Germans who survived the fire bombing of Dresden. These are very difficult conversations. I don’t blame the bomber pilots tasked with the mission. I suppose in a sense the survivors on both sides are the ones left that must confront the destruction, and there are no easy answers.
I think this is a key point, we all agree “racism” is bad. But what happens when a nation is the same as a race? Is it still racism, when it is an action against a nationality?
As for the German-Japan thing. The Germans were Europe’s problem. America’s job in the war was to defeat Japan.
I know that Thomas Sowell has mentioned that the Japanese Internment in Canada was longer and perhaps harsher as a comparison to the American situation. I think both only required internment for those living in the West of both countries.
Japanese Internment in Canada: December 7, 1941 – April 1, 1949
Japanese Internment in the US: February 19, 1942 – March 20, 1946
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Canadian_internment
Hong Kong and Malaya were invaded by the Japanese the day after Pearl Harbor.
Many Canadians fought in the Battle of Hong Kong with the death of Brigadier John Kelburne Lawson on December 19th being the highest ranking Canadian soldier killed in action during World War II.
That’s because nothing about the internment camps was racist. It was focused on a nationality, not a race. The nationality of the nation that attacked us. People forget how freaked out and angry Americans were after Pearl Harbor. I’m quite sure if Germany had attacked us German Americans would have been in trouble. The assumption was that there could be loyalty to the enemy nation. It wasn’t fair, but it wasn’t racist. But as we know, everything counts as racism these days.
The progressives were and remain racists although the internment and Chinese exclusion acts were bi partisan. The anti Chinese laws and actions were pure economics driven by the innate human anti market, anti competition, anti change biases which are among the human condition, which remain central to progressive thought. These biases helped keep the world poor and backward for all of it’s history until the Brits and their colonies came along to make change and innovation part of what Goldberg called British Weirdness and what we call American exceptionalism. Progressive thought remains not only racist but deeply reactionary and in all of its forms always has been.
The internment of the Japanese was driven by fear and ignorance, although the anti competition bias that is always present in almost all political organization also played a role. We simply did not understand the Japanese and after Pearl Harbor feared and resented them. However, once removed from the Japanese group culture in Japan and the group think coming from the top, peers, jobs, play, school, Japanese were among the most loyal Americans among ethnic immigrant minorities.
Progressives still dislike Asians, Asians work too hard and are too successful, but if they were going to put any group in concentration camps now it would be conservatives sent to obligatory reeducation courses. That is already happening and you don’t even have to be conservative just un PC.
Given the advantage of 70 years, I would have made different choices.
Some German and Italian nationals were interned.
“In Defense of Internment” by Michelle Malkin provides a different view.
Well, no. The “nationality” of many of the people who were interred was American – they were citizens.
The majority of those interned were American citizens.
About sixty percent of the Japanese interned were American citizens. So without a trial, and no effort to prove individual wrongdoing, they lost their freedom, homes, businesses, and farms.
The internment edicts mandated internment if a person had one great-great grandparent who was Japanese. If calling it racial bias makes people uncomfortable, perhaps ethnic bias would be more palatable.
Regardless to take American citizens’ freedom away due to something they had no control of, the family they were born into, is indefensible.
I should have said “National origin”.
Worrying that someone might have loyalty to their ancestral nation is not unreasonable. Especially if they are only a generation or two removed. But putting citizens in camps without due process is not defensible, I agree. It’s just not necessarily racist.
There’s a couple major distinctions to be made between German/Italian internment and Japanese internment:
We are not mind readers. How could we discern the loyalty of ethnic Japanese in a time of war, even if they were citizens? It’s a dang shame it had to be done, but I think it had to be done and it seems it was relatively humane (which is not to say it was wonderful).
The 1/16th thing was, perhaps, ill-conceived, but there had to be a limiting principle and no one knew where to draw the line. Again, we’re not mind readers. [We have a very similar problem with Muslim immigrants, btw]
I suspect the Japanese Americans who were interned are/were generally more understanding of the action than we are in hindsight. War is hell. Injustices are widespread in a time of war. The best we can hope for is limiting the damage.
And, if there’s fault to be assigned, it’s with the Japanese military leadership for attacking Pearl Harbor. They started it.
Reading comprehension error.
So much of this conversation hinges on some belief that the world is comprised of better people today than yesterday, but as your comment aptly illustrates, we have simply altered our evils to other forms that are more palatable to our modern sensibilities.
In this, I feel we are overly secure in the luxury of time given us. Pax Americana has made us cocky with unearned virtue. As is clear to myself and many others, we are still capable of justifying bad things, so I’m not willing to stroke my ego in assuming I would have or we should have acted differently in a world completely foreign to us.
I have not read that and have only skimmed these 57 comments but it occurs to me, and Ms. Malkin may have touched on this as well, that everyone should go familiarize themselves with The Rape of Nanking and then let’s revisit this discussion through the eyes of that time.
It’s useful as an example of a polemic against those who condemn internment in all cases, but it’s terrible as history — she basically ignores any documentary evidence that doesn’t suit her thesis.
As does the OP.