[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.