It's Fred Korematsu Day: Celebrating a Foe of U.S. Internment Camps

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/01/30/512488821/its-fred-korematsu-day-celebrating-a-foe-of-u-s-internment-camps

by t23 • 9 years ago

120 14 9 years ago

npr.org

kartman• 9 years ago

Never again is now.

schoen• 9 years ago

A few months ago I randomly came across Fred Korematsu's grave while walking around the Mountain View Cemetery (which is in Oakland, not Mountain View). There are some really notable people buried over there.

If you're in the East Bay and would like to go pay your respects:

http://www.mountainviewcemetery.org/files/7114/7267/1043/201...

Isamu2• 9 years ago

It was an executive order in 1942 that created the system forcing Americans of Japanese descent to live in internment camps.

Funny how often I see this roundabout way of framing this. They'd rather not come out and say that FDR, the president, took this initiative. It was a piece of paper that did this.

Congress, the usual suspect is not to blame. Nobody voted on this. There was no public debate.

So we tiptoe around calling out FDR, maybe because he is one of our golden boys.

And we call them "internment" camps, to soften it a bit.

aarpmcgee• 9 years ago

Maybe it is possible that its more an attempt to draw a connection between an old horror enabled by an executive order, and any new horrors we are seeing and will see with Trump's executive orders.

Isamu2• 9 years ago

They are, but they managed to call out Trump by name. If they were drawing parallels, they could have just mentioned the executive orders.

They should have called out FDR also but I think they wanted to avoid seeming to compare him to Trump. After all FDR was a great guy when he wasn't putting American families into internment camps.

rayiner• 9 years ago

Not only that, it was upheld by the Supreme Court 6-3, with all of the majority being FDR appointees. Using the same sort of result oriented handwaving that characterized many a Supreme Court opinion upholding New Deal policies.

It's worth reading the opinion by the way. Pretty much the whole Court admitted internment was racist and wrong. But they had to uphold it so they did.

jefurii• 9 years ago

They were concentration camps, plain and simple. And yes it was FDR. I really like the New Deal but Executive Order 9066 is a big stain on his record.

CalChris• 9 years ago

I'm a huge FDR fan and this is on him. Buck stopped there.

emiliobumachar• 9 years ago

Agree with your main point.

About the "internment" euphemism, I think it is unfortunately mandatory by this point. The previously correct term, concentration camps, was so much overused as an euphemism to death camps that it changed meaning. Most people will assume mass murder when they hear it.

oh_sigh• 9 years ago

Consider this alternate reality: It is exactly like our timeline, but alternate reality US does not intern it's Japanese citizens during WWII. Some of those Japanese citizens went on to commit mass murders against civilians. Other than that, the timeline is the same as possible (US wins, etc).

Would you still feel the revulsion against internment camps as we do in this timeline?

baconner• 9 years ago

Wrong is wrong. Silly hypotheticals don't change basic ethics.

pmyteh• 9 years ago

Not a plausible alternate reality. The UK had draconian detention regulations in WWII (Defence Regulation 18B allowed the detention of citizens without habeas corpus) but even we were weren't daft enough to use it on the entire German-descended citizen population - mainly just our homegrown fascists (and never more than 1000, I think).

No mass murders. Obviously.

tehlike• 9 years ago

Chances of that happening is probably less than chances of school shootings.

madhadron• 9 years ago

Of course. White supremacists, sovereign citizen folks, and the like commit the majority of terrorist acts in the united states, but I don't call for putting them in concentration camps.

Plus the timeline is implausible. The Office of Naval Intelligence had declared that the Japanese American population was not a threat to national security. The solicitor general, Charles Fahy suppressed that information. If he hadn't died thirty some years before the federal government admitted wrong doing, he would hopefully be facing serious charges and expect to die in prison.

I am unaware of an example of concentration camps that was an issue of security instead of racism.

It's Fred Korematsu Day: Celebrating a Foe of U.S. Internment Camps

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