[redis_mlc]

> we had concentration camps for Japanese people during World War II

I study WW2, and it's important to be factual.

The correct term is internment camps. Japanese-Americans usually lost their property, but the purpose was to locate them in central locations, not to re-educate or liquidate them, as our enemies did to the Allies.

For that time in history, it could be argued that the decision made sense. Japanese subs did shell the US mainland, and Japanese-Americans in Hawaii did help a Japanese aircrew try to escape after Pearl Harbor. Japan planned to return to Hawaii after Midway to occupy Hawaii.

I think using the term "moral high ground" is not helpful for a number of reasons. However, the US did rebuild the world economy after WW2, mostly to prevent it from becoming aligned with the Soviet Union. Most of the world's national borders are descended from WW2.

As leading historian Dr. Victor Davis Hanson says, "[WW2 was German and Japanese soldiers machine-gunning unarmed civilians by the tens of millions.]"

[p_l]

That's what concentration camp is for. To concentrate and control.

There were separate death camps (sometimes combined) that involved direct train-to-killing-field pipelines, and most concentration camps involved work in horrible conditions, but that's because of further goals above relocation.

[redis_mlc]

Not in the US.

[wan23]

That some concentration camps in other countries were also death camps is entirely the point. They are not the same thing, but they're just one step removed. In fact, thousands of people died in the American camps even though there was not an official policy of extermination.

[jstarfish]

Camps are a very whitewashed aspect of US history. Look at the forced marches and internment of Native Americans, POWs at Andersonville or anybody unfortunate enough to be in the custody of Joe Arpaio.

We have a nasty habit of creating scenarios where death is an inevitable consequence without it being the official policy.

[Stupulous]

From some light research, it looks like 120,000 Japanese-Americans were put in these camps for 2-3 years and 1,862 died. In the country at large, if I'm reading this [1] right, 1,459,000 people died outside of the camps in the US, which had a population of 136,700,000. That's a ~1% base death rate per year, which would account for ~2/3 of these deaths in a year.

This could be investigated further; was the average length of imprisonment less than a year, were the causes of death different than in the larger population, did economic conditions and racism increase the base death rate among Japanese-Americans in the first place, was the age distribution different among those the US bothered to move to camps, pushing their base rate lower?

Evidently people died because of these camps, and it is incredibly likely that many of those deaths were racist hate crimes committed by US employees on US citizens. Even that aside, it was very much wrong it imprison innocent civilians on the basis of their race. 'Thousands died' does seem like a substantial overstatement when the only number I can find is less than 2,000 (it's from the US, so it may be biased). Probably a few hundred died as a result of these camps, mostly from disease.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsus/VSUS_1943_2.pdf

[wan23]

That's true. If you count the Alaskan camps [1] you get another 118 American citizens who died in U.S. government camps, which would put us at 1980 dead - leaving us 20 short of thousands. I stand corrected.

[1] - https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/02/21/516277507...

[Stupulous]

I had not heard of the Aleutian internment, and it is clear that the evacuation was mismanaged and the people were mistreated. It's honestly horrific. They were on the front, so it doesn't read as much like racism, but it could have and should have been handled orders of magnitude better.

I'm not pedantically quibbling over whether it was 1980 or 2000 who died. I'm saying that if you took a random sample of 120,000 people at the beginning of 1943 and checked back at the end, 1,300-1,400 would have died. That leave hundreds, not thousands, who died in internment that wouldn't have died otherwise. These are arguable numbers, as I stated above, but they have more substance than I think you're implying.

Additionally, the US invested considerable resources into keeping these people alive. There were on-site hospitals, and not like the ones in Auschwitz where people were held until they died. These camps shouldn't have existed, but they were completely different animals from death camps and are not just a step away.

[pyuser583]

Remember, many Japanese were paroled, with a good many serving in the armed forces.

I’d be interested to know how many of the 120k were released. And of those who died, who many died “on parole.”

[pyuser583]

They’re not a step away from each other. Numerous countries, including those with strong norms against mass murder, intern suspected enemy sympathizers in times of war.

During the Gulf War (1992) the UK interned Iraqi citizens in the UK, just as they did with German citizens in WWII.

That was not a step away from mass murder.

[_jal]

Is the point that the murder happened in a nicer climate?

This is the same rhetorical slight-of-hand people use to ignore Guantanamo. One tends to learn more about the speaker than the topic.

[SkyBelow]

>That's what concentration camp is for. To concentrate and control.

The problem is that these words have taken on entirely different meanings that perhaps what they once meant and there are those who take advantage of that disparity. When people hear about concentration camps, they think death camps, even if that isn't specifically what the word once meant.

There are many such ways to twist words like this and rarely do I find them being used for positive reasons. It is like when someone lists all the large name chemicals in a vaccine. They might be factually correct, but what is the chance they are doing that to scare people who have a misunderstanding of chemicals thinking that large name means harmful chemical?

[p_l]

The most famous concentration camp was for all practical purposes a combined one (when people talk of Aushwitz they generally conflate a pretty big complex of camps together).

It doesn't change the part where concentration camps were modeled after British and US approaches of dealing with "undesirables"

[throwanem]

Victor Davis Hanson says a lot of things, including that Iraq II was a good idea - he was a minor but still fairly significant public relations voice in the neoconservative bloc that pushed that war into existence, to the enormous detriment of US interests in the Middle East and worldwide.

As a classicist he's tolerable, if no more than that; in any century where the years count up instead of down, the man seems entirely at sea.

[JumpCrisscross]

> using the term "moral high ground" is not helpful for a number of reasons

The U.S. had a global nuclear monopoly for several years. It didn’t abuse it. That’s a hell of a high ground.

[monocasa]

The US is the only country to have used nuclear bombs in anger, and that was during it's nuclear monopoly.

[JumpCrisscross]

> used nuclear bombs in anger

Using a new weapon to end an existing war is one thing. Using a new weapon to start new wars is another. That delineation is independent of one's judgement of the weapon per se. They're both bad. But one is worse than the other.

The U.S. had the opportunity to go on a mission of global military conquest. There was military support for nuclear war with Russia and China. The United States didn't do that, and I think that's a unique and admirable trait.

[monocasa]

Would you apply the same reasoning to any other country that used nukes to "end an existing war"?

[JumpCrisscross]

> Would you apply the same reasoning to any other country that used nukes to "end an existing war"?

Yes, using nukes defensively is less bad than using it to start a war. That doesn’t mean I support the use of nukes.

WWII was unique in starting with no nukes and ending with them. We also didn't yet understand the long-term ramifications of the weapon's use.

[monocasa]

So which conflicts since WWII would you OK the "defensive" use of nuclear weapons?

[redis_mlc]

Yes, that's a fact. I can't tell whether you approve of that or not, but here's the background.

After the failure of the Treaty of Versailles at the end of of WW1, resulting in WW2, the Allies learned that unconditional surrender was needed to prevent future wars.

The Japanese military command preferred that their troops never surrender.

So the 2 options the US had were:

1) Curtis LeMay would use 10,000 bombers to napalm those cities, and every last village in Japan.

2) Use 2 nuclear weapons and demand a surrender. The military commanders in Washington debated the ethics of using such weapons, so this wasn't done lightly.

Having studied this over a period of years, #2 makes the most sense to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay

[monocasa]

Except the Japanese didn't have the context to know the implications of the nuclear bombs. And the contemporaries noted that it was the Soviet declaration of war and invasion of Manchuria that forced their hand. The use of atomic bombs was superfluous.

[ngold]

That is an often overlooked part of the equation. If I remember correctly, Japan was a week or two away from being split in two like germany.

And Japan and the Soviet Union had been at each others throats since before there was a Soviet Union and Japan thumped the tsar.

I am sure Japan did not want to surrender under a Soviet flag that was looking for 50 years of retribution.

In a strange way it was an American coup to get peace signed before Russia started stripping the place down to the bone.

[jacquesm]

You are conflating extermination with concentration.

[0134340]

>For that time in history, it could be argued that the decision made sense. Japanese subs did shell the US mainland, and Japanese-Americans in Hawaii did help a Japanese aircrew try to escape after Pearl Harbor. Japan planned to return to Hawaii after Midway to occupy Hawaii.

It could also be argued that it made sense to do the same for Germans since we had a minority of Germans siding with Hitler and even holding Nazi rallies before we got involved in WWII. We weren't exactly good arbiters of fairness when it came to race either.

[catalogia]

There were American companies inclined towards blacklisting German Americans at least. FDR made it illegal for them to do that with Executive Order 8802, probably because German Americans were such a large portion of the population that blacklisting them (let alone interning them) would have threatened the war effort.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_8802

Note that in Hawaii, Japanese-Americans were a significant portion of the local population, about one-third. Of the 150k+ Japanese-Americans living in Hawaii, only 1,200 to 1,800, or about 1%, were interned. On the mainland US where they were a smaller portion of the population, far more Japanese Americans were interned. This discrepancy probably comes down to a matter of practicality again; one third of the population is just too many to intern.

[goat_whisperer]

I believe that US citizens of German descent were actually placed in internment camps during WW2. I don't think it was at the same scale as Japanese citizens but it did happen.

[catalogia]

A very small number did, relative to their portion of the population (which was large.)

Anti-German sentiment was certainly present in America and the UK during the world wars. In response to Anti-German sentiment, the British royal family anglicized their name during WWI, changing it from House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to House of Windsor. In America, German Americans largely stopped speaking German in public (German was the second most common language in America and was spoken particularly often in Pennsylvania, remnants of which can still be seen today in "Pennsylvanian Dutch" culture.) However, treating German Americans as severely as Japanese Americans were treated, at least on the mainland, was probably too impractical to be considered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Americans#The_apparent_...