[politicket]

That's garbage! NOTHING validates taking AMERICAN CITIZENS who were BORN in THIS COUNTRY and putting them in a prison camp, let alone forcing them to relinquish ALL of their valuables for pennies on the dollar.

Why don't you peruse the website of the museum that my FIL founded - JANM.

BTW - I have no problems with how the US took on Japan (including the firebombings of Tokyo, etc.) - they were the enemies. Also, I understand the sacrifices of war all too well. My 19 year old uncle was killed in action in Germany two weeks before Germany surrendered.

[Ramius]

Yeah, its almost as bad as judging someone based on what you *think* they are saying, without even reading the book.

Maybe we should read the book first, and then discuss the merits of her argument.

[Travis McGee]

So you would have preferred them to be blown to bits in Coventry? Both were cases of protecting the paramount secret of WW2: the broken Axis codes.

Internment sure beats a Nazi bomb on the head, and both Coventry and internment were justified, in order to protect the broken codes, shorten the war by years, and save millions of lives.

[marron]

, let alone forcing them to relinquish ALL of their valuables for pennies on the dollar.

This for me is the telling detail. Not merely that they were rounded up during the hysteria of the opening days of the war, but that their properties were seized and never returned, and their losses were never made whole.

I am no fan of Roosevelt's, and this is another example. The first being his economic ineptitude which turned a stock market crash into a decade of stagnation, the second being his failure to prepare the country for war, despite having two terms of office to see it coming, and respond; the third being his unwillingness to support anti-lynching laws, the forth being the return of jewish refugees to their deaths, the fifth being the internment of Japanese Americans and the failure to compensate them, the sixth being his weakness at Yalta.

In retrospect it is easy to say that the internment was wrong, and that it was a racist response to treat Japanese Americans as enemy aliens. But it was the willingness of young Japanese American men to serve in combat that made the difference in our view of it. Now, in our present situation where we are under attack by muslim fascists, I can see how easy it would be to do the same in this case. I can see how very different has been Bush's response from Roosevelt's, how Bush has bent over backward to avoid stigmatizing people who have not been shown to be enemies.

But I also see another big difference, as muslims seem unwilling to join other Americans in the defense of the country. A few have, to be sure, but never in the numbers that the Japanese Americans did.

We have the WW2 internment as history to look back on, and it is because of this that we are so careful now. We didn't have this history then. That is one big difference. But as I say, it wouldn't take too many more 9/11s before we started aggressive deportations now.