I see a lot of “woke” people making comments lately about the Japanese Internment camps in the US during WWII as if the camps were still in use today. But when you mention to them that there was also Italian and German Internment camps as well, they get all huffy and start in grumbling about how it’s a lie started by the alt-right Nazis to try to minimize the “crimes against the Japanese in America.” It’s aggravating,

solacekames:

chirudumi:

friendly-neighborhood-patriarch:

were there? I wasn’t aware.

People like the anon are irritating. As someone whose family (two parents, five children) were forcibly removed from Hawaii, re-located and incarcerated in Arkansas and then moved once again and again, incarcerated to California… kindly, shut the fuck up. 

The internment of Germans in WWI and WWII included several thousand Germans – the majority were aliens and only small number were German-Americans. Only Italian aliens were arrested and held in military custody and this represented a few hundred individuals, in total. This was a system put in place in Germany as well where several thousand British and American civilians were interned at the outbreak of the war. The difference was there were no large numbers of resident aliens living in Italy and Germany at the time. But, it isn’t as if the detainment of “enemy aliens” or foreign citizens (of a hostile state) is without precedent. And typically, those who were taken into custody had a precedent for arrest (essentially, for most individuals, the US government was quite assured that they were helping/giving information to the Nazi or Fascist regimes in Germany and Italy).

The real difference is that that the wider German-American and Italian-American communities were not targeted in the way Japanese Americans were. There were some initial restrictions, some arrests and interrogations, a relatively small number of relocation orders, and a small number who were detained for a couple of years but no large-scale internment of an entire population. It was almost entirely restricted to alien/foreign nationals that posed a certain perceived risk. To further talk about the way Japanese-Americans were targeted, orphans under the age of 18 (most of whom were within the ages of 3 – 13) were also sent to the internment camp because they were a perceived threat. As I have already mentioned in implication, 2/3 of the Japanese and UNITED STATES BORN AMERICAN [FUCKING] CITIZENS of Japanese descent was interned during World War II SOLEY based on their shared ethnicity.

Not to mention the fucking racism that Japanese individuals had to face once they LEFT the incarceration camps. Unlike Italians and Germans who are European, Japanese people and families did not have the luxury of being able to PHYSICALLY ASSIMILATE into their environments or homes (if they were even able to return home).

P.S. It’s quite common for the Japanese-American community with internment history to talk about Germans and Italians. Especially some incarceration camps, such as Crystal City, were not purely for people of Japanese descent.

People like the anon desperately want Japanese-Americans to shut up about internment so they can do the exact same thing over again, except to different targets. And we’re not going to shut up.