May 28, 2008
japanese-american internment and it’s many parallels to the “war on terror”
Posted by sophiew under Food For Thought1 Comment
(If I make this less of an incoherent rant and more of an essay, and find a way to make it relevant to my thesus, i may put this into my paper as a last-minute addendum.)
Okay, so i was looking back on the blog posts and i noticed how many parallels people made in both comments and posts between some point in history and the iraq war/”war on terror”/ 9/11. (Perhaps this just goes to show how repetitive and unoriginal history is getting.)
Anyhoo, so for my project, I researched Japanese-American Internment during World War II. It recently struck me just how similar the motives, goals and fears of the american government were then to how they are now. If I’m not mistaken, until 9/11, we hadn’t had an attack on homesoil since Pearl Harbor. The two attacks have been compared numerous times before. Both attacks were disorienting for the nation and prompted an explosion of paranoia and xenophobia. The nation at both points in time suddenly came to assume that every person with a drop of (in the forties) Japanese or (now) middle eastern blood in them is a bloodthirsty terrorist or a spy. In fact, it was actually blatently said at some point that any Japanese individual was assumed to be a spy. Some time after the the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians sent out a report saying that [and i quote] “not a single documented act of espionage, sabotage or fifth column activity was committed by an American citizen of Japanese ancestry or by a resident Japanese alien on the West Coast.” Yet hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans were evacuated from their homes on the sole basis of race. They were subject to governmental victimization and got many of their constitutional rights taken away because A NEED TO PROTECT THE NATION against the different. *cooooooough gag wheeze* PATRIOT ACT. in both situations it was announced that the innocent have nothing to fear.
*sigh* fear and thusly predjudice is what it comes down to in both of these situations. It’s a good thing that bush isn’t going to be in office for much longer because i wouldn’t actually doubt that the internment camps could make a return. i mean, it’s for the *good* of the nation now, isn’t it?!
May 28th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
ya, i actually focused my project on the similarities in the treatment of the two minorities after the attacks. The government and many Americans had fear of what could happen and with that fear came discrimination. I actually hadn’t thought about the patriot act, and how the reasoning behind it connected so closely to the reaction against the Japanese-Americans.