> it’s hard to forget that your home country saw you as a threat even while a child.

And it’s the inability to forget that kept a citizenship question off the 2020 census[0], a reminder of the long lasting impact the internment still has on the US.

[0]https://www.npr.org/2018/12/26/636107892/some-japanese-ameri...

The article doesn't actually state the question, just links to a very large document that probably has it in there but I couldn't find it.

What was the question in particular?

page 11 of https://apps.npr.org/documents/document.html?id=4426784-Plan...

"Is this person a citizen of the United States?"

Thanks!

That's not at all true. The citizenship question was removed from the 2020 Decennial Census by the Supreme Court in Department of Commerce v New York (2019) which held the Department of Commerce failed to provide a genuine justification for the decision to add the citizenship question (as required by the Administrative Procedure Act), instead providing a contrived and pretextual explanation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Commerce_v._New_...

That was the administrative reason why the question was not permitted. The case was raised to begin with because of fears it would result in undercounting non-citizens, who would be less likely to respond because the don’t trust that the data would remain private. This explanation is outlined in the section called “2020 Census” in the Wikipedia article you linked.

What does one have to do with the other? Japanese internment was racist because US citizens of one race were being treated differently than US citizens of a different race.

Now, maybe you believe that citizenship shouldn’t be a salient category for treating people differently, but that’s an entirely different argument that has nothing to do with internment.

It’s curious that the NPR article doesn’t take exception with the question on the census that’s actually related to internment, which is dividing up American citizens by race and ethnicity.

Internment started with forcing non-citizens to register with the state. The census question was essentially the same process, but on a national scale.

> There have been 23 decennial censuses since 1790. All but one between 1820 and 2000 asked at least some of the population about their citizenship or place of birth. The question was asked of all households until 1950, and was asked of a fraction of the population on an alternative long-form questionnaire between 1960 and 2000. In 2010, the citizenship question was moved from the census to the American Community Survey, which is sent each year to a small sample of households.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/18pdf/18-966_bq7c.pdf

It is important history--which is why you shouldn't use it to attack your political opponents by drawing false equivalences, as you just did. Indeed, it is very much in the interest of minorities for people to perceive a sharp distinction between internment of American citizens and e.g. opposition to admitting foreign refugees. As a brown guy, I certainly didn't feel safer in 2015-2016 when folks tried to turn Trump's ban on refugees from certain countries designated by Obama into a conversation about internment of Muslim Americans.

Also, I'm skeptical that Americans are even equipped to teach this history in context. Imagine if the shoe had been on the other foot. Japan had a large population of Americans, and America had just launched a surprise attack on Japan. What would imperial Japan have done to those Americans within their borders?

I want to inform you plainly as a fellow brown guy: the xenophobia and bigotry that is used to intern American citizens who are 2-3 generations out of Japan is the same that shoots Bangladeshi engineers assuming they are Muslim terrorists, is the same that now still treats people with non-European accents as less intelligent and less capable citizens. Bigots don’t make a distinction between illegal immigrants and legal migrants of a certain skin color.

* * *

Have you ever looked at stats re the Hmong American demographic?

I’m intimately aware of yellow privilege in police stops but would love to see the data on poor Asians being nearly three times more likely to escape poverty than poor whites round these parts.

I don’t think racists can tell the difference between Hmong and say Vietnamese: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/vietnamese-immigrant...

Re: income mobility: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/21/17139300/e... (“Among children who grew up in the bottom fifth of the distribution, 10.6 percent of whites make it into the top fifth of household incomes themselves, as do 25.5 percent of Asian-Americans.”)

> You're much more likely to encounter someone with an Indian accent on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley than someone with an Appalachian accent.

Yes, because one of those groups is two orders of magnitude larger than the other in number and can't make it to Wall Street or Silicon Valley without a visa that is incredibly expensive to get and explicitly filters for the trifecta of wealth, income, and formal education. That doesn't invalidate racism against against them; it just means that you're not comparing apples to apples.

This is an incredibly disingenuous set of arguments you're trying to make, and you've been called out for it many times before - it's classic flamewar bait, which is against the site rules.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You’re the one making disingenuous, anti-Asian arguments about selective immigration. That mostly happened after the H1B was created in 1990. But by the 1980 census, Chinese, Filipinos, Japanese, and Indians had already overtaken whites: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED317464.pdf. Aside from some Indian doctors and engineers who came here in the 1970s, those are the descendants of working class Asian immigrants. Vietnamese and Koreans hadn’t yet overtaken whites as of 1980, being recent refugees at the time, but would do so within a generation.

And even today, most Asian immigrants aren’t H1Bs going to work at Google. Remember, family reunification is the primary method of immigration in the US. The folks in the Bangladeshi and Chinese enclaves in Queens aren’t wealthy. But statistics show that these poor Asians vastly outperform whites in economic mobility.

Literally the very first sentence of the link you cited contradicts what you're saying

> With heavy immigration fueled by U.S. immigration law changes in 1965 and the influx of over 700.000 Indochinese refugees since the Vietnam War ended in 1975, the number of Asian Americans grew from 1.4 million in 1970 to 3.5 million, 1.5 percent of the U.S. population, by the April 1980 census and an estimated 5.1 million, 2.1 percent of the U.S. total, as of September 30, 1985.

Please, stop. I don't know why you are doing this but you're not contributing positively to the site.

> Literally the very first sentence of the link you cited contradicts what you're saying

> With heavy immigration fueled by U.S. immigration law changes in 1965 and the influx of over 700.000 Indochinese refugees since the Vietnam War ended

Do you think those “Indochinese refugees” were affluent educated professionals?

The 1965 Act actually caused a decrease in the percentage of Asians working in high skill jobs: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/07/12/income-... (“The surge in Asian immigration followed the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965, which favored family reunification, and the end to the war in Vietnam in 1975, which brought in a wave of refugees. One result was that the share of new Asian immigrants working in high-skill occupations decreased from 1970 to 1990, and the share working in low-skill occupations increased.”). It wasn’t until the 1990 H1B changes that this trend reversed.

But these low Asian groups nonetheless did well. In the 1970s, Vietnamese Americans had a poverty rate higher than black Americans. Today, they have a lower poverty rate and higher median income than white Americans.

> I don't know why you are doing this but you're not contributing positively to the site.

Why are you so invested in the myth that Asian Americans are successful in the US primarily because of selective immigration? Why do you want to erase the—well documented—experience of all the Asians who came to the US as refugees or based on family reunification and went from poverty to being middle class or affluent?

White guy immigrant in a "brown" African country here - Politicians doing anything for votes by stoking subtle hate, jealousy and in-group preferences in a voting population don't make a distinction when it comes to skin color, nationality of origin, religion, immigration status or wealth. Those are just convenient tools in their arsenal of divisiveness.

please elaborate where op drew false equivalencies to attack political opponents

I read it that way too, even if he didn't explicitly say it. Probably because Takei is known to be very vocally anti-Republican or anti-right or pro-left or pro-liberal, not sure of the exact dynamic there. But the comment also said Takei is "liberal" and knows what it's like if "that kind of people" regain power.

To me, it's clearly an anti-Republic or anti-conservative jab, implying that "those people" shouldn't be allowed to regain power, else some poor minority will get put into camps. Using the argument that if Takei says so, it's because he's lived through it, so we should listen to him. Ofc, not to detract from what he went through, it's horrible.

Takei is so silly for not knowing which political party was in power during WWII. Thank God the internet exists to hold him to account for those crazy positions of his, which he so clearly holds that he doesn't even need to say them.

The kind of people to use internment camps against people they find abhorrent. If you think those sorts of people should be in positions of power, I'm not really sure what to tell you. It has very little to do with political parties directly, but unfortunately those sorts of people tend to fall pretty cleanly into one in particular, at least in the US.

I didn't say people who want to put other people into camps should be in power.

> It has very little to do with political parties directly, unfortunately those sorts of people tend to fall pretty cleanly into one in particular, at least in the US

FDR was a democrat. Jim Crow laws were put in place by democrats. Democrats filibustered against the civil rights act. Clinton was responsible for mass incarceration which primarily affected minorities. We’re currently witnessing the systemic destruction of minority communities in democrat run cities. It’s odd that Takei thinks that the liberals will do anything but exploit minority groups when in positions of power.

> President Lyndon B. Johnson, although a southern Democrat himself, signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. The evening after signing the Civil Rights Act, Johnson told aide Bill Moyers, "I think we may have lost the south for your lifetime – and mine", anticipating a coming backlash from Southern Whites against Johnson's Democratic Party.[5]

Southern Democrats of 1850s through 1960s were the racist southerners, historically aligned with the Confederacy.

After the Democrats signed the Civil Rights act of 1964, the racists got out of the Democrat's party, and started to align themselves to Republicans. By the 1990s, it has become obvious that Republicans were actively courting this large group and drawing upon them for political power.

In the most recent election, assholes were targeting Chinese, Korean, and Japanese shops in my area with Graffiti, breaking windows, and effectively blaming the Asian community for COVID19. These racists absolutely exist and continue to function today. And its somewhat horrifying to me to see the Republicans actively courting them to pad out their votes and increase their political power. Furthermore, the mainstream Republicans turn a blind eye to it and try to pretend that this crap isn't happening.

That being said, I recognize that anti-Asian hate, while it exists, is kinda minor compared to other ethnic groups. But even in my day to day life today, I'm seeing the racists (and literally those racists shake their anti-Asian signposts at me. Because I'm Asian)

-----------

> It’s odd that Takei thinks that the liberals will do anything but exploit minority groups when in positions of power.

Did you even see the anti-Chinese hateboner of 2020? It wasn't the Democrats.

I'm not even Chinese. But you know, people can't tell that so I kinda-sorta get wrapped up in it. I'm glad that it seems to have died down a bit (at least, in my area of the country), but I'm still surprised at how quickly anti-Chinese hate turned into anti-Asian hate and a problem for everybody.

> After the Democrats signed the Civil Rights act of 1964, the racists got out of the Democrat's party, and started to align themselves to Republicans.

Note that this was the last of several splits between the White supremacists and the Democratic establishment; why this one stuck but others didn’t is that, unlike with, say, the Dixiecrat split in the 1940s, the Republicans actively courted and shaped their message to appeal to the disaffected racists after the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In previous splits, the racists who wanted any influence had always coming slinking back to the Democrats because of structural duopoly and the fact that the Republicans were not welcoming to them. In the 1960s, that changed.

This is oft repeated, but what’s the evidence? There is a lot of contemporary democrat policies that have devestating effects on minority populations. Eugenecist tendencies among liberals never really ended. Having control over universities and media has helped liberals “whitewash” and project.

> This is oft repeated, but what’s the evidence?

All over the place.

But probably the simplest evidence is Strom Thurmond.

One politician flipped an entire party’s platform? What about the 20 democrat senators who voted against the act and stuck with the party?

A campaign of FUD regarding states rights (the basis of democrats own secessionist arguments) and conservative policies and blindness to continuing racist liberal policies is more likely (including the current president).

> One politician flipped an entire party’s platform?

I think you need to learn the difference between saying something is a simple piece of evidence of an effect and saying it is the cause of the effect.

It was republicans smashing stores in 2020?

To be fair, no one caught the perpetrator who did the anti-Asian attacks in my area. But given the nature of the crime, it was obviously anti-Asian hate.

So now the question is: which party has more anti-Asian hate?

What I can say, is that about the same time, my sister who is a doctor was getting chewed out by her patients who wouldn't believe they had COVID19, they didn't want the "Chinese Doctor" (let alone a "Clinton supporting woman"), and were demanding to get useless ivermectin to treat their symptoms. Because "obviously" my sister being a female doctor proves she's a Clinton supporter or some bullshit like that.

Over, and over again. The anti-chinese hate (and again, we aren't Chinese. But bigots are blind to these issues...) was from people who were prouding proclaiming themselves to be Republican.

--------------

I'm well aware of the anti-Asian hate of the African American community in the 90s too. Back then I will tell you that it was Black people who looked down upon Asians (and I understand the population dynamics associated with the LA Race riots). But 2020 is a different time.

This is absolutely, a right-wing thought process. They blamed China for COVID19 (and Asians who kinda-look Chinese to them, got wrapped up in it). Add on a bit of anti-Clinton misogynists and yeah. Its a pretty obvious which side of the political aisle was causing me, and my family, issues.

And again, I get it. Its not that "All Republicans" do this. But what I'm trying to point out that by ignoring these obvious truths and obvious realities of just 2 or 3 years ago, you're enabling these assholes to be racist again. So its important for me to talk out about it, and its important for the non-Racist Republicans to be aware that these things happened. And that you need to clamp down on the racists in your party.

------

And the anti-Chinese protester who was yelling at me to go back to China and leave this country (and again, I'm not Chinese so this is completely insane... but whatever). Okay, I dunno which party he was part of, but I'm _guessing_ he was Republican. Sound like a safe bet?

What’s the difference of left and “liberal”?

Its about anti-racism.

In the 1940s, the Southern Democrats were the racists. They were the ones who organized anti-Civil Rights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Democrats

These bigots never disappeared. They just are being courted by the Right / Republicans today.

---------

The left / right split is an illusion. Its almost bullshit entirely. It only exists because the USA is a two party system, so you're forced to align with unsavory parts of the country to get things done. That being said, Republicans need to understand who they're drawing their votes from, and absolutely ensure that these racists don't come into power again (as Republicans are playing with fire here)

Like, I get the political reality. The bigots want political power, Republicans do too. So courting them for more votes is a politically savvy move. But its also quite dangerous IMO.

> These bigots never disappeared. They just are being courted by the Right / Republicans today.

Normally, I’d respond to this with something addressing the chain of events starting with the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and subsequent electoral strategy, but just to mix things up I'll go simple:

This is the reason that when you see rallies of overt racists, or people storming a government building waving confederate flags, or people arguing about, how, akshully, slavery in America was good for the slaves and their descendants should be thankful rather than resentful of it, in the 21st century, they aren’t backers of the Democratic Party.

It's not a jab, rather the plain political reality of the contemporary political landscape.

Speaking as a non-partisan libertarian - it is a fact that the contemporary Republican party has openly embraced white nationalism. Racism is straight-up collectivism, which is attractive precisely because it's a lazy un-nuanced explanation for one's woes. The Republican platform used to have mainstream politicians that kept those urges in check, and while perhaps pundits courted those urges with dog whistles and the like on talk radio, they could still be said to have distance from the mainstream party. But part of Trump's "edginess" was openly saying what "couldn't be said", and so the dam holding it back has burst. This certainly does not mean that all Republicans are white nationalists, nor does it imply that Republicans with power will automatically enact white nationalist policies. But open white nationalism now forms a significant part of the mainstream Republican party.

Now, since I must include an analogous analysis of the other sports team, lest some partisan respond with "no that's not true and even if it is the other party is the same or worse" - It is certainly true that there is a large contingent of the democratic party that has openly embraced minority-favoring racism, and that is a terrible thing as well! But for the most part that discourse revolves around inclusionary racism (disadvantaged group #643 needs help) rather than exclusionary racism. We've seen enough catastrophic results of exclusionary racism to know where it leads, but it's much harder to know where inclusionary racism leads (apart from stoking more racism in general, these political teams are in ying-yang). Presently, the concrete results seem to be bureaucracy, language policing, and a new proto-religion to repeated if one occupies a politically sensitive position (and it's not clear how this could continue to snowball into society-wide exclusionary racism). These things are certainly not great dynamics, but they're a far cry from bottom-up lynchings and top-down concentration camps.

> To me, it's clearly an anti-Republic or anti-conservative jab,

Only because the GOP allowed their party to be turned into a Nazi bar:

https://old.reddit.com/r/TalesFromYourServer/comments/hsiisw...

If the folks on that side of the political spectrum don't like it, maybe they should be kicking out the Nazis instead of courting them for votes.

> As a brown guy, I certainly didn't feel safer in 2015-2016 when folks tried to turn Trump's ban on refugees from certain countries designated by Obama into a conversation about internment of Muslim Americans.

As another "brown guy", I'm absolutely comfortable with this necessary conversation happening. Especially since Trump immediately ramped up forced internment of legal immigrants, some of which we later discovered amounted to literal ethnic cleansing via forced sterilization practices.

The thing that makes me feel unsafe is the fact that this stuff is happening, and has been happening for years, and that by and large people don't talk about and instead ignore it, not the fact that people very occasionally try to use relevant history to shine a light on the shadows under which we still live.

> Also, I'm skeptical that Americans are even equipped to teach this history in context. Imagine if the shoe had been on the other foot. Japan had a large population of Americans, and America had just launched a surprise attack on Japan. What would imperial Japan have done to those Americans within their borders?

This is a really disingenuous presentation of what actually happened, so yes, I agree that you are probably not equipped to teach this history in context, but that doesn't mean everyone is.

What do you mean people don't talk about it? I may be misunderstanding what you mean by "it" specifically, but if you're referring to some sort of targeting of ethnic/religious/racial groups, then it most certainly is being talked about. A lot even, even to the point of many groups pushing back against it because they think it's unwarranted.

"Trump immediately ramped up forced internment of legal immigrants, some of which we later discovered amounted to literal ethnic cleansing via forced sterilization practices."

Source?

The only thing that comes to mind is this allegation: https://reason.com/2020/09/15/whistleblower-nurse-alleges-di...

Here's an article on the resulting investigation: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/women-detained-ice-unnecessary-...

> Tuesday's report said investigators did not corroborate "allegations of mass hysterectomies." But investigators said they did find "serious issues" regarding medical procedures and policies at the Georgia facility and the conduct of Mahendra Amin, a doctor whom Irwin County detainees accused in 2020 of performing questionable medical procedures, including, in some cases, without the patients' full consent.

> It is important history--which is why you shouldn't use it to attack your political opponents by drawing false equivalences, as you just did.

Can you be precise in stating exactly how you believe I did this? My point was simply that Takei has strong views for a reason worth respecting.

> As a brown guy, I certainly didn't feel safer in 2015-2016 when folks tried to turn Trump's ban on refugees from certain countries designated by Obama into a conversation about internment of Muslim Americans.

This is a bit vague, too, since Trump wasn’t in office in 2015 or 2016. Are you referring to the way some of his people cited the internment camps as positive precedents? The problem there certainly doesn’t seem to be the people who believe Japanese internment was wrong.

> Also, I'm skeptical that Americans are even equipped to teach this history in context. Imagine if the shoe had been on the other foot. Japan had a large population of Americans, and America had just launched a surprise attack on Japan. What would imperial Japan have done to those Americans within their borders?

Can you expand this idea? I’m failing to see why that matters in the sense that throughout my life it’s seemed pretty broadly accepted in both parties that we should be freer than WWII-era Japan and Germany.

Ah yes, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a well-known "reactionary bigot".

I think you're trying to make a point other than your sentence's literal meaning, but I'm too distanced from modern domestic US history to know. Can you clarify and elaborate?

The issue is combing reactionary and bigot. The internments were done the watch for Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal coalition - a left leaning political movement that laid the foundations of the modern American welfare state. There were definitely many blatant examples of bigotry in the policies of this movement but they were far from reactionary.

Social issues change over time but the also correlate with otherwise unrelated social/political/economic issues so trying to apply political issues from 80 years ago into the modern era is going to lead to some incongruous positions.

The modern American welfare state was also reactionary and bigoted towards black people and minorities. It’s important to recognize that much of the social programs explicitly excluded people of color and then used their understandeable lower quality of life due to lack of safety nets as a justification for further racism. Black people have bad neighborhoods, but of course black people didnt get government housing assistance to repair anything, because the federal programs for that explicitly excluded them.

The same FDR signed Executive Order 8802, forbidding ethnic and racial discrimination in the defense industry and federal government.

And yet the federal housing administration continued to explicitly respect racist homeowner association laws (btw homeowner associations were originally created to enshrine into bylaws that no black people may rent or purchase a property), continued to offer lesser or worse terms, or would broadly consider black people too risky, until congress passed the fair housing act of 1968, decades later.

It was nonetheless the first time the Federal Government prohibited racial/ethnic employment discrimination, and was the first civil rights executive order since Reconstruction.

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson helped found the US and gave the world ideas of democracy. They also both owned slaves, imagined democracy as just for white male landowners, and under nearly any modern interpretation of the power dynamic Thomas Jefferson raped and fathered children with his slaves.

Maybe we should stop pretending these people who did some good things for the country were perfect gods. You can praise their accomplishments while still pointing out their flaws.

I think there is also a obsession with presentism and applying modern morals to the past. It is almost as if the point of historical study is to sit in judgement, opposed to understand how the world worked and changed.

Ask most people what the defining characteristics or deeds of Washington of Jefferson and they respond with the points above.

Are those the most impactful or noteworthy characteristics of those individuals? I don't think so. Perhaps they are interesting context for understanding their other deeds or the human condition, but certainly not the primary impact they had on history.

I've never met anybody who thinks FDR was a "perfect god". Abe or Washington, sure, but no such personality cult exists for FDR. So what are you even responding to? I have not criticized anybody for pointing out FDR's flaws (which were numerous and are widely acknowledged.)

The New Deal coalition included the entire Jim Crow southern democratic establishment.

They weren't the opposition, they were a key part of the coalition.

True. But the broader point is that transposing political positions from 100 years ago into modern politics is always verging on anachronism. In many ways the modern American welfare state and the modern Democratic Party both originate in the South through the populist movement and William Jennings Bryan. But consider: does William Jennings Bryan's opposition to teaching evolution in public schools have anything to do with agricultural subsidies or inflationary monetary policy? He very publicly advocated for all of these positions, but trying to bring this association into modern debates about interest rates or public education is a distraction.

It's interesting to consider the trajectory of ideas/movements.

Lots of professional-class liberals today consider "populism" to be a dirty word. Would they have been Hoover Republicans in that era?

Maybe. Hoover was a politically moderate, 54 year old, Stanford educated engineer from the West with a successful career in both industry, and civil service administration? Sounds like a great candidate on paper (honestly sounds better than the current front runners for 2024 at any rate). We often forget that he was actually very successful/effective in every previous post he had served in prior to the Great Depression. Hoover's reputation has been badly tarnished by his response to the Great Depression (which was totally inadequate to the magnitude of the task at hand). He could have and should have done a lot of things differently but instead he made ideologically motivated policy decisions that did not pan out. But to be fair, it is also not entirely his fault that he took office on the eve of the largest global economic catastrophe in history. He would probably be remembered much more fondly had he taken office in place of Harding or Coolidge 8 years prior.

Yeah I too wouldn't describe FDR's coalition as reactionary. As well that coalition was deeply weird. Included the Industrial Labor, Socialists, the old southern Aristocracy and Blacks.

Random observation. The US has almost forgot that before WWII that Pols, Italians, eastern Europeans, Irish, etc were distinct. And Asians were even farther out.

I know for a fact that my silent generation dad feels prejudice against Chinese. Even though he hates it's there. My grandmother was an antisemite though oddly not prejudiced against Mexicans or blacks. That whole family was salt of the earth. And half were unreformed bigots as well.

People are weird. The past is not the present.

FDR was the president who had the Japanese Americans removed to concentration camps. He's a hero of the left and one of the presidents who would least likely be described as a "reactionary bigot" in any other situation.

More broadly I object to this very modern attitude wherein people in the past who did things we consider wrong today were evil bigots. Which is not to say they weren't wrong.

What they did is the literal definition of bigotry. They rounded up as many Japanese-Americans as they could and put them in prisons under heavy guard without any cause other than other people that look like them attacked a military base.

It was objectively wrong then, and it is wrong through all of time.

They were not fucking immigrants! These were people who had lived in the USA their whole lives, with several generations of American citizens in these families. Anyone arguing Japanese internment was just for securing America is the same type of person who would round up trans people or musings Muslims today the same way.

You don't magically stop being an immigrant after a few years. Often it takes several generations to integrate. And particularly so if you form cultural enclaves and remain attached to your country of origin, as tends to be the case with the Japanese.

I believe they actually rounded them up to steal their farms in California. Japanese farms were the most productive back then, and they held almost all the best farms. During the war, they had their land and things stolen by politically connected neighbors.

http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist9/harvest.html#:~:text=The%20Wor....

>other than other people that look like them

You yourself are describing the people rounded up as Japanese (yes, with a qualifier). They were people more likely to have loyalty to an enemy state, weren't they? It was certainly a blunt tool; and not an issue I've looked at in detail; but do you expect FDR to have done nothing?

Interesting for me to consider whether UK was right to round up Germans for WWII, rather difficult when that includes the Royal Family, but they did imprison something like 10% of "Germans" living in the UK (I don't know if they were British, just visiting, naturalised, or what).

Is it ok to imprison people without cause? No, the answer you are looking for is no.

Right, that got us a long way. Is it OK to have less than 100% certainty before you detain someone? Would you detain one innocent person if it meant keeping 1000 murderers off the street?

If either of those is "yes" then we're just looking at where the line is.

Would you accept imprisonment if you knew it was keeping 1000 murderers off the street?

Do people who support Nazism deserve to get punched? Even if they're innocent of any crimes (a very oft heard sentiment from people who would otherwise say they value the rule of law)?

Nothing about war is OK, but sometimes we have to compromise on what we'd like to happen. I think it's interesting to try and be honest with oneself and ask where the line is.

Would I automatically lock up adults who described themselves as associated with an enemy country, when at war, probably not; but I wouldn't give them every freedom either. Indeed during times of war it is normal to curtail general freedoms. Would I consider it unjustifiable to lock up people who appear to be associated with an enemy country, also probably not. I guess I consider that sometimes it is acceptable, morally, to lock innocent people up ... no justice system could [barring future technology that can provide certainty on past events] ever lock anyone up without such a consideration.

I'm interested if you or others have anything to try and develop my thinking in this area. Thanks.

Wow, I don't think I've ever seen anyone dial a strawman argument to 11 quite like you just did. Nobody was talking about FDR until you hamfistedly brought him up in a reply to a post (indirectly) lamenting a period of history rife with racism. Prejudice was rampant all across the "political spectrum", but prevalence is not a measure of justice or humanity. Nor does any individual's competency in one area somehow ameliorate their flaws in other areas.

It’s ok to praise FDR for the New Deal and also recognise that sending all Japanese people (and not German or Italian people) to internment camps was a bigoted, evil thing to do.

What do you want? For us to say “ah well, that’s just how it was back in the day”? You’re the one incapable of nuance if you want to put everything FDR did into one bucket or the other.

People can praise or criticize FDR for whatever they like. I'm objecting to the name-calling, not the idea that the internment of Japanese Americans was wrong.

Why? Are your sensibilities so delicate that calling a spade a spade is offensive to you?

No, the idea that almost everyone born before 1980 was an evil bigot is stupid

Then it's a good thing no one said that.

You should probably take a break from the internet. There's enough things to get offended about. There's really no reason to start making up new ones.

If you extend your "calling a spade a spade" logic, it will to lead to some ridiculous premise like "everyone born before x year was an evil bigot" where x keeps marching forward year after year.

Where did OP call "everyone born before 1980 ... an evil bigot"? Where did OP single out FDR as a reactionary bigot? Yes, it was done under his watch, but there were, in point of fact, plenty of genuinely reactionary bigots who supported it at the time. You're lambasting OP for the words you've put into their mouth. Stop.

Not everyone. Just the guy who ordered Japanese Americans be sent to internment camps.

Would you not describe the internment of Japanese Americans as reactionary or as bigotry? Which label do you actually disagree with? OP wasn't just mindlessly adding invectives; they used those words for a reason.

You know what's also bigoted and evil? Kamikazi-ing planes into ships + bombing Pearl Harbor.

Japan probably should have thought about possible consequences before doing that.

Setting aside the historical veracity of this nonsense, are you suggesting that it was appropriate for US citizens to pay the price of that decision because of their ancestry? What is wrong with you?

if you know what a kamikazi is, then you know the ones who did that were not the ones sent to the camps. could you say anything more stupid? lol

I would say Bataan and PoW camps in SEAsia as well as treatment of mainland Chinese, Korean laborers, etc., are "better" examples of Japanese bigotry and cruelty --at the time. Japan has come a long way since then.

1 in 3 PoWs in Japanese labor camps would die during WWII: https://www.historyonthenet.com/world-war-two-japanese-pow-c...

> You know what's also bigoted and evil? Kamikazi-ing planes into Pearl Harbor.

Yeah, that didn't happen. Japan didn't start using kamikaze attacks until the end of the war, as an act of desperation. It wasn't just, like, a thing they did.

Japanese, Italians and Germans were declared Enemy Aliens: https://www.thc.texas.gov/preserve/projects-and-programs/mil...

I believe that the only reason most German-Americans were not interned is because they were too large a portion of the population to intern without seriously negatively effecting the war effort.

My evidence for this belief is the fact that Japanese-Americans represented a third of people living in Hawaii, more than 150k of them, yet in Hawaii only ~1800 Japanese-Americans were interned. About 1%. This, despite the fact that Hawaii was closer to the war than the rest of America, and despite the fact that the Niihau incident occurred in Hawaii. Interning a third of the population of Hawaii simply wasn't practical, so in Hawaii they had to exercise much more discretion.

Furthermore, some people believe that Executive Order 8802, which forbade ethnic and racial discrimination in defense industries, was intended more to prevent discrimination against German-Americans and Italian-Americans than against African-Americans. Supposing that is true, it evidences the perception of FDR's administration that discrimination against German-Americans, despite their skin color, was a plausible scenario and would harm the war effort if permitted.

Further evidence for the plausibility of ethnic discrimination against Germans, despite their skin color, is easy to find during WWI. Across America and the UK, German families (including the Royal Family..) changed their names to conceal their German origins. Schools stop teaching German, businesses were renamed, sauerkraut became "liberty cabbage" (freedom fries, anyone?) The Red Cross even forbade people with German last names from joining.

tl;dr: The federal government recognized the potential appetite for discrimination against German-Americans, but forbade this because German-Americans were a very large portion of the population and excluding them would harm the war effort. At the same time the federal government perpetrated discrimination against Japanese-Americans, except they exercised more discretion in Hawaii where Japanese-Americans were a very large segment of the population.

> Interning a third of the population of Hawaii simply wasn't practical

> At the same time the federal government perpetrated discrimination against Japanese-Americans, except they exercised more discretion in Hawaii where Japanese-Americans were a very large segment of the population.

Hawaii, not a US state at the time, was largely occupied by the US military prior to Pearl Harbor. After Pearl Harbor its residents were subject to martial law and their civil rights were suspended. The situation there was not analogous to the situation on the mainland, so I wouldn't use it to draw any conclusions.

> the only reason

Your thesis isn't wildly off-base, but how often is anything done by humans done for one single, solitary reason?

> Hawaii, not a US state at the time, was largely occupied by the US military prior to Pearl Harbor. After Pearl Harbor its residents were subject to martial law and their civil rights were suspended. The situation there was not analogous to the situation on the mainland, so I wouldn't use it to draw any conclusions.

This isn't the reason relatively few Japanese-Americans were interned in Hawaii. Compare it to Alaska. Like Hawaii, Alaska was an incorporated US territory. Japanese-Americans were ordered out of Alaska or interned.

The reason general internment didn't happen in Hawaii is because:

> "The powerful businessmen of Hawaii concluded that the imprisonment of such a large proportion of the islands' population would adversely affect the economic prosperity of the territory.[74] The Japanese represented "over 90 percent of the carpenters, nearly all of the transportation workers, and a significant portion of the agricultural laborers" on the islands.[74] General Delos Carleton Emmons, the military governor of Hawaii, also argued that Japanese labor was "'absolutely essential' for rebuilding the defenses destroyed at Pearl Harbor."[74] Recognizing the Japanese-American community's contribution to the affluence of the Hawaiian economy, General Emmons fought against the incarceration of the Japanese Americans and had the support of most of the businessmen of Hawaii.[74]"

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

Japanese-Americans were a third of Hawaii's population, so interning them all would have been a disaster for Hawaii's economy and harmful to the war effort. That's why it didn't happen in Hawaii. German-Americans, unlike Japanese Americans, were a very large portion of the population in all states and territories, not just Hawaii. The needs of economy and war obviously wouldn't tolerate the internment of all German-Americans, so it didn't happen.

If you think general internment of German-Americans would have been implausible regardless of population size, because the Germans were white, you need to remember that perception of race has never been a rational matter. During WWI, Germans were racially 'othered' in the UK and US by assertions off Germans being "asiatic Huns" and similar nonsense. Nevermind that you couldn't visually distinguish an average German from an average Anglo, racial othering is obviously not bound to rationality. This inclination to racially other the enemy is only tempered by substantial ethnic overlap between the two warring parties. Where there is substantial ethnic overlaps, discrimination will be officially discouraged and resisted because it impairs the war effort (e.g. Executive Order 8802). Where there is little ethnic overlap, racial or ethnic discrimination often become convenient to the government and becomes officially sanctioned.

> This isn't the reason relatively few Japanese-Americans were interned in Hawaii. Compare it to Alaska. Like Hawaii, Alaska was an incorporated US territory. Japanese-Americans were ordered out of Alaska or interned.

What I was driving at, which sort of complements what you quoted, is: what would have been the rationale of sending all those Hawaiian Japanese-Americans to an internment camp in the midwest to be watched over by military police when they were in Hawaii, under martial law, being watched over by military police?

General Delos Carleton Emmons, the military governor of Hawaii, also argued that Japanese labor was "'absolutely essential' for rebuilding the defenses destroyed at Pearl Harbor."[74] Recognizing the Japanese-American community's contribution to the affluence of the Hawaiian economy, General Emmons fought against the incarceration of the Japanese Americans and had the support of most of the businessmen of Hawaii.

The interesting thing is, in a 100% wartime economy with full employment, depriving the economy of the labor of all those other Japanese-Americans in the continental United States was hurting the war effort as well. Not as acutely as tearing a big chunk out of the Hawaiian economy would, but still, not very rational.

> If you think general internment of German-Americans would have been implausible regardless of population size, because the Germans were white, you need to remember that perception of race has never been a rational matter.

I think internment of German-Americans would have been less likely, not implausible or impossible. The differences of Japanese-Americans in terms of dissimilar appearance and less shared culture would have greased the skids of racism, as it were. And yes, it's fair enough to point out that it doesn't always work that way and sometimes really, really similar groups engage in ethnic othering.

You can recognize an action both being a product of its time and being objectively wrong.

I think a good lesson here is that wrongness is not a monopoly owned by just one political ideology.

FDR is an example of how a politician can be called a Socialist in the United States while also being extremely reactionary and push racist policies.

If nothing else, this goes to show how far the scale is tipped in favor of right wing ideas and policies in the states and still is. The fact Biden, a fairly conservative politician, can be called a "Communist" with a straight face is an indictment of the American education system.

The labels don't even mean anything after a while. You can actively be enforcing fascist policies and still be labeled a socialist due to a population wide inability to understand what words mean.

> He's a hero of the left and one of the presidents who would least likely be described as a "reactionary bigot" in any other situation.

those people have a pretty hypocritical and one-dimensional way of looking at history

> More broadly I object to this very modern attitude wherein people in the past who did things we consider wrong today were evil bigots.

but not me, I'm awesome

Yeah actually: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/roosevelt-j....

There were anti-racist people at the time, even in his own cabinet, who resisted the calls for internment.

History can be "profoundly shaped" by more than whoever was President of the United States at the time.

It is a difficult thing for some people to understand. But sometimes good people can do bad things.

Were most of his policies based on the betterment of the oppressed? Absolutely.

Did he oversee one of the most objectively bigoted things that happened in 1942? Absolutely.

Was Roosevelt a bigot? I do not know.

But, is it fair to say that he was a reactionary bigot? Maybe.

That's the thing about people. They're very, very rarely one thing to the exclusion of all else. Violent racists can be outstanding community members on a very local scale. Extremely inclusive pacifists can be assholes to the people in their lives.

Would be it any better to say "non-reactionary bigot"?

I think "reactionary bigot" is just a commonplace phrase often said perfunctorily, but I'm not sure the meaning of the original comment would change if the word "reactionary" was deleted. The argument over the word seems pedantic in the context. The original point is that Takei faced multiple forms of bigotry in his life.

Why would it be better? Internment was a reactionary policy! GGP is raising an objection over labels that are accurate.

> Internment was a reactionary policy!

The definition of reactionary is "opposing political or social liberalization or reform".

Whereas internment was a reaction, indeed an overreaction, to the war with Japan, based on the bigoted fear that Japanese-Americans were loyal to Japan rather than to America. Not exactly the same.

Yes, if you are exclusively pedantic, then it is not an exact fit in the meaning. I would argue that the common use of the word reactionary = person who reacts to something inappropriately.

But getting lost in pedantry instead of just moving through common usage when in regular human discourse is useless. There is no reason to walk down that road, other than to obfuscate any point the other person is trying to make behind a smoke screen of pseudo-intellectualism.

Sort of like I tried to do with those last two sentences.

This is a pretty pedantic debate but my reason for using it was that I think a factor in this wasn’t just generic anti-Asian sentiment but also the idea that they were new and challenging the image of the United States as a white country. California politics had a nasty “yellow horde” streak which feels distinct from, say, bigotry directed against native Americans or, in the south, Mexicans which tended to recognize their historical presence, treating them as kind of hapless children needing white guidance rather than invaders.

I routinely have to hear from left-leaning friends about how me and my family should be killed. They're completely ok with fantasizing about mass murder since they're Good People and their targets are acceptable. All their eat the richery is extra funny since the worst offenders are well paid programmers. They are of course not in line for the guillotine or the wall. Their comments about Christians are likewise really funny stuff to listen to. Just a constant, unthinking stream of abject bigotry from people who consider themselves openminded. I don't think they realize what they sound like to people outside their bubble.

I think you need to find some new friends.

> I routinely have to hear from left-leaning friends about how me and my family should be killed.

Uhuh. Sure you do.

Is it so unbelieveable that people hopped up on self-righteousness might end up behaving like garbage?

Yes, it is extremely difficult to believe that you "routinely have to hear from left-leaning friends about how [you and your] family should be killed". It's so comically exaggerated that I must assume you're either trolling or delusional.

Most charitably, my guess is you've developed a persecution complex which has you hearing a comment like (as an example) "the US would be better off if the GOP just disappeared" as "we must murder all conservatives".

Meanwhile, one side of the political spectrum appears more likely to inspire actual politically-motivated violence, and it's not the one you seem to be pointing the finger at:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2122593119

> In short, our individual-level examination found that among radicalized individuals in the United States, those adhering to a left-wing ideology were markedly less likely to engage in violent ideologically motivated acts when compared to right-wing individuals.

...

> When compared to individuals associated with a right-wing ideology, individuals adhering to a left-wing ideology had 68% lower odds of engaging in violent (vs. nonviolent) radical behavior (b = −1.15, SE = 0.13, odds ratio [OR] = 0.32, P < 0.001). On the other hand, the difference between individuals motivated by Islamist and right-wing causes was not significant (b = 0.05, SE = 0.14, OR = 1.05, P = 0.747). Expressed in terms of predicted probabilities, the probability of left-wing violent attack was 0.33, that of right-wing violent attack was 0.61, and that of Islamist violent attack was 0.62.

Which, of course, is just more data backing up the many many analyses that right-wing violence is by far a greater threat than left-wing violence (this is from 2020):

https://www.csis.org/analysis/escalating-terrorism-problem-u...

> Overall, right-wing terrorists perpetrated the majority—57 percent—of all attacks and plots during this period, compared to 25 percent committed by left-wing terrorists, 15 percent by religious terrorists, 3 percent by ethnonationalists, and 0.7 percent by terrorists with other motives.

...

> Our data suggest that right-wing extremists pose the most significant terrorism threat to the United States, based on annual terrorist events and fatalities.

In fact, it's become institutionalized as this point. A recent poll showed that '30% of Republicans agree with the statement, “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.' Alarming? I'd say so.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2022/01/05/a...

So, hey, let's pretend for a moment that you are in fact surrounded by crazed lefties that talk to you about exterminating you and your family over your political views. There's one big difference between them and folks on the American right: They're far less likely to actually do anything about it.

I’ve never witnessed as much bigotry as when I lived in San Francisco

Abraham Lincoln supported enshrining slavery in the constitution. Einstein and MLK were serial adulterers. George Washington owned slaves. Let's not even start on Columbus.

There's something about human nature that makes us want to think of influential people as saints but rarely do they live up to that standard. We'd be far better off if we could banish this tendency from society.

I don't think it's fair to take what was obviously a phrase that was being spoken in a broad sense, inject your own words into that phrase, and then attack that person for the words you inserted.

He caved to the bigots out of a sense of pragmatism. Same way Abe Lincoln said he'd let slavery continue if it would preserve the union. Or, more recently, Bill Clinton signing the Defense of Marriage Act. He disavowed it later in life, but signed it because he didn't think he had a choice.

Just to echo what other people said, the people who put American citizens of Japanese descent into prison camps were unambiguously bigots, and a lot of that was based on people wanting to assert that the United States was for white people (contrast with the much softer treatment of American citizens who were ethnically German and Italian).

The fact that some of the political leaders who approved that did other things doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hold them accountable for a venal act – I would argue the contrary since they’re otherwise praised and it’s important to remember that our heroes are not perfect and should not be copied without improvement. One can make similar statements about how, for example, programs like social security or the GI bill were both good for many people of lower class backgrounds but also carefully designed and implemented to benefit black people less than white people.

> softer treatment

Those countries didn’t attack directly in full force like the IJN did, by orders of magnitude. They sunk a few supply ships in international waters aiding their enemies.

There’s also the Niihau incident, which directly informed the response.

Truth is folks then had a tiny fraction of information that we have today—including hindsight. It’s unclear you would do any better in the same circumstances.

Yes, Japan struck first - nobody’s arguing that. My point is that after the United States was formally at war with all of the Axis powers, every American citizen of Japanese descent was forced into prison camps and significant financial loss. That didn’t even happen to all of the German or Italian citizens in the United States at the time, much less American citizens with roots in those countries.

(Also, a few supply ships is whitewashing somewhat – hundreds of Americans traveling on civilian vessels were killed by the German navy and there were dozens of American flagged ships sunk prior to Pearl Harbor. No, not what the Japanese navy did but more than enough to have served as grounds for war if the US wasn’t trying so strenuously to stay out.)

(Was thinking of ships near the US East coast. If you have passenger ships entering a war zone, well then it was understood there were risks.)

The point I was trying to get at was that if you were faced with the same life-threatening decisions you'd likely decide the same. And if different it would only because of random chance. Not because you are smarter or more virtuous than FDR & Cabinet.

Shit, Truman had to decide to drop a nuke on the basis it would save more lives in the long run—with incomplete information. I don't envy those decisions at all.

The difference you can speak and be heard. I cannot.

I’m not sure what you mean by that. Why can’t you be heard?

If I try to speak I will be censored by the Y.