InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "I dare you to call me insane."

volksjager (volksjager) wrote in scans_daily,
@ 2009-10-10 08:40:00

Current music:

Cokehole " cocaine may have been a factor"

"my life is like a feather , my duty like a mountain"
This is Kamikaze 1946. It is the last book in the "Families of altered wars" series and deals with the American invasion of Japan "Operation Olympic". For understanding I have included the creators editorial (which were on the inside cover of each issue through out the series) so people can get a feeling for his intentions for the book and his alternate WW2 views :)

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	volksjager 2009-10-10 10:45 pm UTC (link)
	There is no difference in putting ethnic groups of people into camps. Both of those concepts are branches of the same tree. It is a question of degrees. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	(Anonymous) 2009-10-11 12:01 am UTC (link)
	Which is why Louise Brooks fled the thugs of late-Weimar Germany for California, no doubt. Because the two were just the same! =) (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	volksjager 2009-10-11 12:28 am UTC (link)
	Yes, thank god she was not an American citizen of Japanese descent, or it would have been the camps for her. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	toby_wan_kenobi 2009-10-11 01:49 am UTC (link)
	Whoa whoa whoa, hold on a second. Obviously, putting ethnic groups in camps is something both countries did, and there was certainly racism inherent in both decision-making processes, but the Nazi camps were expressly designed for genocide. There is a big difference between putting innocent folks in prison and putting innocent folks to death. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	volksjager 2009-10-11 02:59 am UTC (link)
	Please read this. :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Conference (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

lieut_kettch
2009-10-11 04:06 pm UTC (link)

I still fail to see how this disproves the above poster's point; in fact, it merely reinforces the fact that the goal of the Nazi German government was the total annihilation of the Jewish population of Europe, while the goal of the United States was merely to contain the Japanese-American population in camps to stave off the (ultimately false) threat of espionage and sabotage from within the Nisei community.

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volksjager
2009-10-11 04:32 pm UTC (link)

If you read the entree you might see that the German concentration camps ( this is a phrase coined by the British during the Boer war,when they rounded up the civilian ,non British population) were a process moving from separation to extermination that took 4 years to happen. This was also made into a film called "Conspiracy" that examines this process. These were American citizens with the same rights under the constitution as any other citizen that were totally rode over by FDR and the supreme court. Do you believe there were no examples of miss treatment,and torture in these camps ? Herman Goering at his trial in Nuremberg cited that "the only difference between America and Germany with regards to "undesirables" was a question of degree"

What might have happened if the war with Japan lasted another 13 months with 2 million American casualties ? Would you be able to re integrate Nisei back into American society ?

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	(Anonymous) 2009-10-11 11:45 pm UTC (link)
	it's stupid to compare the japanese internment with the holocaust there not even remotley similar (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	volksjager 2009-10-12 02:10 pm UTC (link)
	Anonymous... (Reply to this) (Parent)

wizardru
2009-10-12 12:16 pm UTC (link)

I'm afraid I don't follow your point, there. Are you suggesting that the concentration camps were originally just started for the purpose of segregation and that they moved to extermination? Because by the time of the Wansee Conference, as that wikipedia article states, the decision to kill 'undesirables' and 'the Jewish Question' had been in full swing for years. Action T4 started in 1939. Concentration camps started in 1937 and were used as forced labor camps first, it's true...but the ultimate goal was to work the people within to death. Dachau was opened in 1933 and people there were dying of overwork, disease and malnutrition long before the war began.

The Japanese Internment Camps in the US were illegal and deplorable. It is a national embarrassment that the US would not formally apologize for until 1988. But the motivations for them and the results of them were far, far different from those of the Nazi Concentration Camps. Like the Soviet Gulags (and one should note that the Soviet re-purposed some of the concentration camps for their own use), the camps were a place to put political prisoners and enemies of the regime for the express purpose of removing them from society and eventually eliminating them.

Read Mary Matsuda-Gruenwald's "Looking like the Enemy" for a good contrast of the two. Her family suffered like any family would suffer from internment...but they did not have their property seized. Her brother (along with other Nisei) served DURING World War II, recruited VOLUNTARILY FROM THE CAMPS. Many camp members were given special exclusions to go to college. Families were permitted to stay together. Was it horribly damaging to the people subjected to it? Yes. Did some people die while in the camps? Certainly.

But there is far more than a question of scale to show the differences between the two. Hermann Goering is hardly someone to quote on the matter; simultaneously being the highest-ranking official within the Nazi regime to personally sign death-camp orders and claiming he wasn't an anti-semite and didn't know anything about the camps until shown his own multiple signed orders at Nuremberg. Goering would say there was no difference...he was desperately casting around for a justification. Canada also interred their Japanese citizens...and afaik treated them worse than America did theirs.

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volksjager
2009-10-12 02:17 pm UTC (link)

"Goering would say there was no difference...he was desperately casting around for a justification"

Goering said the the only difference was a question of "degree". I don't think he looked for justification,he was just calling it as he saw it. Eichmann at his trial pointed out the Allies knew of the camps in Poland as of Sept. 1943 ( the flew a plan from a base in Italy and took pictures. The Allies were careful not to bomb rail lines leading to these places. They believed that it was better to have the resources of men and material tied up in the camps than going to the front lines.

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wizardru
2009-10-12 03:09 pm UTC (link)

Goering bald-faced lied that he was involved until they Nuremberg lawyers produced evidence showing he was lying. At that point, he was trying to convince the tribunal that 'everybody does it', once the 'I had no idea this was happening' and 'I was only following orders' approaches failed.

The camps weren't exactly a well-kept secret. What was happening IN the camps WAS. The Allies didn't believe that the Germans were doing the things they were doing and really didn't have time to investigate. Remember, the camps started back in 1933. But even when the Allies got detailed reports of the Nazi's activities, they rejected them as exaggeration. Though I'm not sure exactly what they could do in the midst of the war that would be different.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_concentration_camp#Allies.27_knowledge_of_the_camp

As it was, when the allies actually discovered what was going on when they liberated the camps, some guards were killed by the US forces in a rage, which was the subject of a disciplinary review, later.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	volksjager 2009-10-12 09:43 pm UTC (link)
	Here is a good book on the debate about "what to do". http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Rescue-Democracies-Could-Saved/dp/0415212499/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1255383721&sr=8-1-spell (Reply to this) (Parent)

	freivolk 2009-10-12 02:54 pm UTC (link)
	You practicly tries to relativaet the Holocaust. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	volksjager 2009-10-12 02:58 pm UTC (link)
	? (Reply to this) (Parent)

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