[kofejnik]

This was appalling and obviously sucked a lot for people who underwent such treatment; however as someone born in USSR I'd say that it was surprisingly humane (hot water not always available) compared to how people were treated in the USSR around the same period.

Case in point: Ukrainian Holodomor (genocide by famine) http://www.rferl.org/a/holodomor-ukraine/25174454.html

Edit: also, Chechen and Krimean Tatar deportations, and many many others

[semiel]

Since these countries (in some form or other) still exist, it's tempting to start making moral comparisons and trying to figure out "which side you should be on". But that's not the most interesting approach, in my opinion. Future historians won't be picking sides, they'll be trying to put it in context, understand the conditions that led to these behaviors, and draw out trends in the period.

I can imagine a section in a future history textbook that went something like this:

"A distinctive feature of the Second World War was the widespread use of 'concentration camps'. These camps allowed belligerents to separate and control groups (usually racially defined) that were considered potentially subversive. In many cases, those interned were put to forced labor in support of the war effort, but in others they were simply kept under military control.

Conditions in these camps were generally poor, but they varied greatly both between and within countries. The Japanese in American concentration camps were subject to undernourishment and forced labor, but relatively few were killed. Things were worse in the Soviet Union, where even the process of transportation to the camps was deadly to large numbers of Volga Germans. The most infamous camps were in German-controlled territory, where millions of Jews and other undesirables were systematically executed, in an event later known as 'the Holocaust'."

[ars]

I know you are trying to be objective and disinterested, but reading you combine the German and American camps as somehow comparable is utterly horrifying.

You make it sound like they were both more or less the same, just some people were killed in the German ones.

The goal of the German camps was to torture and kill, the American camps was to segregate.

The "camps" part is an unimportant detail - yet you write as if it's the main thing.

[semiel]

They are comparable, though, and that's exactly my point. They're not the _same_ by any stretch of the imagination, but it's just a weaker reading of history to refuse to consider themes that were common to the time period.

The Nazi camps were started for the same reason as the American camps: to contain and control a population believed to be subversive. They were indeed later used as part of an organized genocide, which is very important and makes them far more horrifying on a moral/human level, but it's willful blindness to ignore the deep similarities between a policy of containing and suppressing a racial group, and a policy of containing, suppressing, and exterminating a racial group.

[ars]

These are not "themes that were common to the time period". These are themes that are common to human history, this type of camp was not invented then.

For example if you check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment#History_of_internme...

you will find examples going back more than 300 years, and I'm sure a historian can find even earlier examples.

Internment camps of various kinds happen by EVERY war, not just this one.

> it's willful blindness to ignore the deep similarities between a policy of containing and suppressing a racial group, and a policy of containing, suppressing, and exterminating a racial group.

No, it's willful blindness to think this was unique in any way to WW2. "Camps" is NOT the important or interesting thing about that war, it is an almost trivial detail.

Your framing it that way makes it as if it was something specially important. But in actuality it is a minor footnote compared to what they DID in those camps.

It's like saying "An important note about the 21st century is that humans lived in houses. People in both apartments and individual homes had wide access to cellphones."

You are focusing on the wrong thing.

[kofejnik]

Millions of Ukrainians died in the camp and due to artificial famine. How you can compare this to 'hot water is not always available', I can't comprehend.

[ZeroGravitas]

You may want to put quotes round "undesirables" in that last sentence to indicate more clearly that it's not a view held by your hypothetical future scholar or yourself, but rather a term used at the time.

[exolymph]

It's a statement of fact. The regime considered those citizens to be undesirable.

[ComputerGuru]

You could just compare it to the Nazi internment camps for Jews, if finding "worse" conditions is the goal. (I'm being sardonic.)

(OT question: sarcastic is to sarcasm as sardonic is to ____?)

These were second and third generation "immigrants" living their normal, everyday American lives, torn away from their homes, communities, jobs, schools, churches, friends, and families. The crime isn't in the living conditions at the internment camps, the real horror is that people could be sent to them just for having a great-grandparent that came from Japan to the United States. The real crime is that hardly seventy years later, this internment is largely forgotten, the details are glossed over, and the American public (of which I am, by and large, proud to be a member of) have deluded themselves into thinking it's just another another unfortunate chapter in human history "that wouldn't happen again today" or that "desperate times called for desperate measures" and leave it at that.

[vlunkr]

Honestly, I'm not sure I remember this coming up in my high school education, we sort of just pretend it didn't happen. We talked extensively about other inhumane things our country has done, but the Japanese internment is just something my dad probably told me about, being sort of a WW2 buff. I think the fact that we don't talk about it makes it even a little more disturbing.

[lostlogin]

Sometimes events are a little too recent or close to home for some to talk about and this seems to exacerbate things. Down here in New Zealand a WW2 POW camp was established and during some a period of unrest New Zealand guards shot and killed 46 Japanese prisoners. More recently someone ripped out trees that were planted to commemorate the atrocity.

https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/massacre-at-featherston/

http://i.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/65751556/pow-deaths-...

[paublyrne]

Sardonicism. It doesn't come up much.

[ComputerGuru]

Thanks.

[roywiggins]

snark?