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eridani

(51,907 posts)
Tue Feb 23, 2016, 07:03 AM Feb 2016

A mini history lesson about the concentration camps on American soil.

http://www.upworthy.com/a-mini-history-lesson-about-the-concentration-camps-on-american-soil?c=upw1

During World War II, a young boy was forced from his home with his family, placed on a cramped train, and sent to an isolated camp across the country with no knowledge of when he would be able to return home. He and his family were confined to camps for years, solely on the basis of their ethnicity.
This isn’t the story of an inhumane atrocity that happened across an ocean or in another country. It happened on U.S. soil in 1942.

And the young boy in this story is George Takei, the "Star Trek" actor, who was one of more than 117,000 Japanese-Americans detained in U.S. concentration camps during the early 1940s. He talked about his experience on Democracy Now!:

"We had nothing to do with the war. We simply happened to look like the people that bombed Pearl Harbor. But without charges, without trial, without due process — the fundamental pillar of our justice system — we were summarily rounded up, all Japanese Americans on the West Coast, where we were primarily resident, and sent off to 10 barb wire internment camps — prison camps, really, with sentry towers, machine guns pointed at us — in some of the most desolate places in this country: the wastelands of Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, the blistering hot desert of Arizona, of all places, in black tarpaper barracks. And our family was sent two-thirds of the way across the country, the farthest east, in the swamps of Arkansas.
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A mini history lesson about the concentration camps on American soil. (Original Post) eridani Feb 2016 OP
The inner cities are our modern day concentration camps. JonathanRackham Feb 2016 #1
Specious Comparison. CBGLuthier Feb 2016 #2
Yep JonathanRackham Feb 2016 #11
Sigh AxionExcel Feb 2016 #3
So glad you brought this up. yellerpup Feb 2016 #4
Yet FDR is lionized by progressives. n/t MichMan Feb 2016 #5
The New Deal was worth doing anyway eridani Feb 2016 #6
If FDR proposed to expand New Deal programs to include minorities meow2u3 Feb 2016 #7
Because the policies were in place, they could be expanded later n/t eridani Feb 2016 #8
Yup meow2u3 Feb 2016 #9
One of those concentration camps was about 5 miles from where I am right this minute madokie Feb 2016 #10

CBGLuthier

(12,723 posts)
2. Specious Comparison.
Tue Feb 23, 2016, 08:26 AM
Feb 2016

Will government soldiers hunt down those who try to leave? Are families ripped apart? Is land stolen and people forced into the inner city? Are citizens forced to take loyalty oaths?

yellerpup

(12,249 posts)
4. So glad you brought this up.
Tue Feb 23, 2016, 08:54 AM
Feb 2016

This is the first thing I think of when I hear of concentration camps on American soil. Wado.

eridani

(51,907 posts)
6. The New Deal was worth doing anyway
Tue Feb 23, 2016, 09:06 AM
Feb 2016

If you don't have New Deal programs in the first place, you can't expand them later to include minorities.

meow2u3

(24,745 posts)
7. If FDR proposed to expand New Deal programs to include minorities
Tue Feb 23, 2016, 09:18 AM
Feb 2016

The Great Depression would look as if there were no end. Dixiecrats would have cut off their noses to spite their faces the same way teabaggers do now.

FDR had a tough choice: Adopt the New Deal, even if it meant throwing minorities under the bus or expand New Deal programs to include minorities, which would have been the ND's death knell. He chose the former for the sake of putting men (women still were expected to be the homebodies) to work. If he picked the latter, bigoted Dixiecrats in his own party would have voted down the entire New Deal and the Great Depression would have been seemingly indefinite.

madokie

(51,076 posts)
10. One of those concentration camps was about 5 miles from where I am right this minute
Tue Feb 23, 2016, 09:29 AM
Feb 2016

The last tower just went down in the last few years. It's a pox on any and all of us the way the Japanese Americans were treated.

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