1. the War of 1812 and Mexican-America war are totally irrelevant!! have nothing to do with it ..or the US Muslims....it's ridiculous comparing all of those..... ..and--there is a travel ban on Muslim countries --which is totally sensible..anyway, the war on terror and WW2 are not the same 2. the Constitution is not being trashed--it's interpreted --it is a guide..there are many, many instances where the Constitution is interpreted by courts = see links below--it is a guide to be interpreted ..they didn't have internet back then--so it's not in the Constitution--yet Elonis v. U.S. These six lawsuits shaped the internet 3. it was not a dark page of American history..I am not ashamed..they were not tied to chairs and beaten...or given Kangaroo trials 4. ''racist times'' ??!! what does that mean? the term ''racism''/etc means nothing now because of its overuse. List of United States Supreme Court cases involving the First Amendment - Wikipedia Notable First Amendment Court Cases Supreme Court Cases on the Right to Keep and Bear Arms etc to infinity
The Constitution has always been viewed thru the lens of the times, hence you could find slavery, voting rights limitations etc. 'legal' at one time, and not legal later. The document was designed to be flexible enough to change with the times. I suspect that if we were alive a 100 years from now many of us would find how it was being interpreted a surprise, but it would likely reflect the times.
Jefferson said the Constitution should be rewritten every twenty years, to reflect the current state of the Nation.
I could not disagree more with this statement. We are where we are today, because of legal precedents set in the past. The war of 1812 saw the first use of the Enemy Aliens Act, an act which is still on the books, in modified form, today. Ummm, Bronk. That's. The. Point. They were legitimate US citizens with all the rights thereof. Yet, were packed up and shipped off many hundreds of miles away...Without any trial, not even a Kangaroo one.
I moved the the PNW 10 years ago where it happened and no one here would say that the internment of was not a blot on US history. .I would have to disagree with the statement above except for the "ashamed" part.. The internment brought much suffering and property loss. Family separation. Beatings. A woman I know was sent to Minnesota as a child to avoid the camps. All for no gain except to make the Whites feel more secure which was a big part of the justification at the time. IMO, there is no need to feel ashamed if we can admit to a wrong, learn from it and go on. The townspeople that were walked through Buchenwald were ashamed because they "Did not know" according to my dad who was there.
Many things can change when war is afoot. Lincoln suspended habeous corpus and declared marshall law. Many of FDR programs were taken to the Supreme Court and found unconstitutional.(NRA was one I think.) I think we need to view history in the context of its time,It should not be viewed by what we know and believe today. Many only wish to point out things that do not conform to currrent thinking or norms.This is unfair to the participates at the time. It is always good to view things as an opportunity to learn and do things better, not try and muddy history with our prejudices.
you make it sound like they did because of race---the Japanese just sneak attacked the US--it was for security
..again--hindsight is 20/20......hold it--the poster is making the Japanese interment to be about race----how can the War of 1812 Enemy Aliens Act be about race--when we fought the Brits?! ..do you understand the difference there? .
..why would anyone be ashamed of what someone else--many years ago--did??!..the Germans today need not be ashamed of what the nazis did [ no caps intentional ] ...I think of how the Native American culture and nations were destroyed by the whites as being very horrible/terrible/etc--but I am not ashamed by it....the Japanese-American internment was terrible--but I am not ashamed by it...and can clearly see why it happened--in 1941-1945
Partially, it was. The Japanese believed they were Ameratsu's chosen people, and did not like the fact that they were not being treated as equals. You can see this in the Washington Naval Treaty negotiations, where they took umbrage at the 5:5:3 ration. They thought it should be 5:5:5, despite only having naval interests in the Pacific, as opposed to the US & UK having interests in the Atlantic & Pacific.
Kodiak included Japanese, Germans, and Italians in his 200,000 sum. Race may have played a part, but so did greed and jealousy. Still, they all could be construed as enemy aliens. Would they have been locked up if they were not at war with the US?
--''race'' is used so much today, that it means nothing now .....however, it is my understand that there were much, much more German and Italian Americans than Japanese Americans [ 10 times ? ] ..so it would be ludicrous/more difficult to intern that amount
It's seldom noted that the IJN had told their reps at the conference that they would accept the 5:5:3 ratio. This effectively gave them a 2.5:3 ratio in the Pacific against the US and a better ratio against the British, who were more widely spread. We "read their mail" on this. Information can be found in FRUS.
All attacks are sneak attacks. The latest dissections of what happened on that afternoon in Washington (morning in Hawaii) are simply bungles by the Japanese Ambassador. A funeral that morning ran overtime by a long-winded priest, then trouble decoding the message from Tokyo. Had it been delivered at 1:00pm instead of 2:20, it would have made no difference. At any rate, wars are often declared as the ships or men and artillery mass at the border, ready to strike at a pre-arranged moment when a paper hits a desk at some faraway capital. That's how it is done. There was nothing very far out of bounds in the Japanese attack. The entire "sneak-attack" story is just a bit of useful propaganda. The other mostly false narrative is that American/European actions in the far east were the catalyst for Japan making war. They had been preparing for that war since at least 1900. They had no more right to those colonized regions in Asia than the Europeans did. They just wanted them, they needed raw materials to feed their resource-poor nation and expand their industrial growth. They were going to take them. The timing of that has nothing to do with negotiations. The timing was because of the Tripartite treaty with the Axis. Britain, France and the Netherlands were occupied or at war by then. Those European colonies were ripe for the taking, with only America still able to throw a wrench in the gears. The American fleet had to be crippled, and December 1st was when that happened. A long way to say that the jingoism about Japan and Japanese-Americans were just to whip the populace into the mood for war. There was a strong ant-war movement. People didn't want to get involved in another foreign war. Hate is a motivator, and they took it a bit too far when they pointed fingers at American citizens with the wrong background. .
The Europeans were at war, or already occupied in Europe. Their holdings in Asia were going down, if not December 7th, then some other date not far away. The United States was the only power that could interfere with that, and we held the Philippines, another colony they wanted. And note, while did lock up a few Germans and Italians that had clear ties to fascist organizations in Europe, we didn't lock them up in mass incarcerations like we did the Japanese. We also didn't lock up Finns, Romanians, Bulgarians, Croats, Hungarians or any other countries that allied themselves with the Axis powers. Just the Japanese. .