RateItAll: The Opinion Network

I hope that people who are commenting on this item don't think that in any way I meant to equate the detention centers (or reloacation camps) to Nazi concentration camps - I have never put the two on the same plane. Nevertheless, I think that the whole episode was shameful on the part of the government, as well as on the part of a lot of Americans who so mistrusted the Japanese that they took such draconian action in the name of security. What a lot of people don't know or realize is that at one point the government also considered doing the same (i.e., relocating) all Germans and Italians who were not native-born in the US as well. Common sense and reality soon set in however, when planners realized there was no way they could house and feed people from those two ethnic groups, who vastly outnumbered the Japanese in the US. There was also a further realization that putting Germans and Italians in camps would drain a lot of precious manpower from war production and from the military manpower pool itself. Nonetheless, at least on the West coast, there were restrictions placed on Germans and Italians (I'm pretty sure that Joe DiMaggio's father, who was a fisherman, for one was not allowed to go out on a boat because it was felt that Italians could be spies, or some such nonsense). Back to the Japanese - it's interesting that many Japanese-Americans (Nisei) voluteeered for the Army, and that the most decorated unit in the Army in WW II was the 442nd Regimental Combat Team (RCT), which earned more than 18.000 individual medals, including one Medal of Honor, 53 Distinguished Service Crosses, and 588 Silver Stars - all while many of their relatives were detained in camps. Talk about racial profiling! The Japanese were an easy target, and suffered through no fault of their own.

Any educated person knows there was a difference between the Internment Camps of the USA and the Concentration Camps of Nazi Germany. Racism/Anti-Semtism played a part in both cases though. Racist paranoia led to this travesty happening here and because of it, we're not doing the same thing with Middle Easterners here in America today. I think this is one of those footnotes in American History we'd just as soon gloss over. It was wrong and we know it and it wont happen again.

One of my pet peeves is the reference to the internment of Japanese-Americans as their having been put in concentration camps. They were not in concentration camps, they were in relocation camps. And this is not a matter of idle semantics. Relocation camps are where you lose many of your civil liberties, years of your productive life and a good deal of dignity. Concentration camps are where you are beaten, ripped away from your family, starved and either executed or worked until you drop. Neither is a point of pride but there is a considerable difference. And it is not a distinction that should be forgotten. Equating what the United States did to its Japanese citizens with what the Germans did to the Jews is like equating abuses by Americans at Abu Ghraib with the abuses perpetrated by the Hussein family or the actions of the insurgents against the Iraqi population. There is simply no reasonable comparison.