I guess I haven’t been a good Trekker because I’ve never read or heard about George Takei’s experience being in an WW2 Japanese internment camp.
I guess learning about it from this TED talk isn’t bad either. I’m glad I live in an era where such events are covered by history textbooks.
I’m also amazed by the wisdom and integrity of George Takei’s father. It also got me thinking about how little we hear about the German and Italian internment camps. Their cases were examined one by one, and wasn’t just a roundup of all German or Italian Americans, which would have been impossible to do, but the ordeal must had been no less traumatizing.
I am looking forward to seeing the musical based on his story, Allegiance, someday.
“Allegiance,” the Broadway musical that starred George Takei in a four-month run last season, will come to movie theaters around the country in a one-night-only December screening presented by Fathom Events, the distributor of alternative cinema content.
“Allegiance” tackles the serious historical subject of the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, in a story loosely inspired by Takei’s childhood. Also starring Lea Salonga (“Miss Saigon”) and Telly Leung, the musical has songs by Jay Kuo with a book by Marc Acito, Kuo and Lorenzo Thione. Stafford Arima directed the production.
Not to mention the fact that it’s unthinkably criminal to round up and an entire race of people and put them in concentration camps based on paranoid feelings.
If there are sleeper agents, you go after them, not the innocents.
It’s bad to try to win wars against your enemies. If you fight them, they win. Do you have a picture of Justin Trudeau as the background of your computer?
Also, given your endorsement of beating up political opponents you don’t like, I don’t think you have any right to try to stand on any moral high ground.
Are you being serious? If you were to look at most times in history, and even most places today, this would be completely normal because most people understand that when you’re fighting a war, you want to win it. The people who won WW2 would laugh at you people.
Although I wouldn’t like it if they did it, if the Taiwanese rounded me up during a war with the West, I would completely understand it because I don’t think they’re that cucked yet, although plenty (including idiot Western lefties) are working on it.
Go to the japanese internment museum, and say that to the people who went through this. This is a low as it gets, whats next, defending the trans Atlantic slave trade because it made economic sense to use slaves for labor.
So wait a second, if Japanese internment is as low as it gets, why did you then bring up the slave trade? Are you saying that the slave trade was not as bad as the internment of Japanese in WW2? What are YOU really saying here?
They were fighting a war. The objective is to win wars. This attitude of yours might be why modern America does actually have such trouble in winning any wars against far less threatening opponents, despite a far greater technological advantage. It would be interesting to see how you guys would fare against a serious opponent again. Hillary’s sabre rattling towards Russia might see you guys with even more egg on your faces.
The slave trade was dumb and didn’t make economic sense; one of the reasons the South lost was because it was an agrarian backwater. It also set up lots of future political problems. Just dumb all round.
I think Andrew is saying that defending interment based on ethnicity is as low as it gets, although the subject being defended is pretty lowsome as well.
In the past I have removed posts of holocaust denier as the mod of the Culture and History sub-forum. Defending rounding up citizens without due process guaranteed by the US constitution is coming pretty close.
We can see why people with prejudice back then might think it’s the only way to do things, but to argue doing so is normal and justified at any point and time in human history is coming close to my red line.
I am not sure what Andrew is saying. Other than wild outbursts of insults, he seems to be having trouble getting his point across.
To argue that our own point in history is the norm is incredibly short-sighted.
Executive Order 9066 came from FDR, a president who is regarded by many (especially on the left) as within the top handful of presidents within history. It came during a time when the US was at war against a huge superpower that had brazenly attacked its territory across the ocean and looked completely unstoppable at the time. Why wouldn’t he have taken those precautions under such conditions? Only people who live in the complete detachment and comfort of modern times could view the world, especially at that time, in such a way and then go on to argue that such a way of viewing the world – despite objectively not being the norm – actually was the norm.
Also, at what point has anyone denied the Holocaust, and what relevance does that have to this particular discussion? Godwin’s Law much?
I asked Andrew to stay on topic and do not engage in personal attacks via private massages the same way I asked you.
The only difference is I do not need to remind Andrew that defending ethnicity-based internment is treading on the no bigotry rule of forumosa’s guildlines.
Norm isn’t the same as justified. It was the norm to slaughter every person in a city that resisted in conquest, doesn’t make it right. Certainly doesn’t mean it’s ok if people still do it today.
We can see why FDR issued the order. However, it was still the wrong thing to do. FDR chose to deal with potential Italian and German Americans agents in a much small scale. There was no reason why he couldn’t have just targeted questionable Japanese Americans as well.
eh, the holocaust was largely also ethnicity-based internments. And there were at least 2 holocaust denier posts in the old forum that I had to remove.
When it comes to the internment of Japanese Americans, I think there are legitimate arguments on both sides. I don’t think it was justified myself, but it wasn’t a simple matter of ethnicity. There were significant numbers of naturalized Japanese who still felt allegiance to the country of their birth, and there were cases of Japanese Americans providing assistance to enemy combatants. Also, the loss of constitutional protections during wartime is pretty standard fare, unfortunately. The abuses of the Patriot Act are a shocking recent example of that.
Again, it’s not an argument that I agree with, but I see no need for censorship here. Hopefully, your “red line” is like Obama’s red line. On the other hand, the way the whole internment thing was handled was pretty shameful–especially how people who were interned lost their property, and were unable to get it back after the war was over.
On the other hand, the way the whole internment thing was handled was pretty shameful–especially how people who were interned lost their property, and were unable to get it back after the war was over.