Never Forget. Never Again.

[onmyknees]

German’s ate soup. Americans did the same thing.

German’s loved music. So did Americans.

Germans had a standing army. So did Americans.

Germans imprisoned their own citizens in special camps based on their ethnicity. So did Americans.

Parallels are parallels.

Germans exterminated their encamped citizens. Americans didn’t.

Did American character, or the character of American democracy, our specific purposes or simple contingency stand between interment and extermination. A question for historians.


Thank you BeardedOne for the original post.

I'm not entirely sure what you're attempting to say here. There are a certain amount of parallels between Mother Teresa and priests who doodled little boys. Both attended church, both ate breakfast, both bended knee to pray. But what's the point of those peripheral parallels? They're meaningless. The significant difference between what the US did to Japanese citizens and what Germans did to Jews was the Nazi's used hate and anti Semitism to fuel German Nationalism and aggression as a justification to invade neighboring countries.

Are you suggesting there's a razor thin line between
Auschwitz and a Japenese internment camp in Missouri in 1943?

[irvin66]

No matter how you look at it, war is hell. Remember what Gandhi said "Nonviolence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man." "Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever."

[trish]

There are a certain amount of parallels between Mother Teresa and priests who doodled little boys. Both attended church, both ate breakfast, both bended knee to pray. But what's the point of those peripheral parallels? They're meaningless.

Yes, parallels by themselves are as meaningless as are divergences. It's what you take to be significant about them that makes them significant. You see a significant difference between what the Germans did and what the U.S. (though I'm unclear just how you're drawing that distinction); whereas sunairco sees a significant parallel between their behaviors...sufficient so as to warrant the use of the word "extermination" in both cases. One of the things I'm suggesting is that man is the measure of all things.

I'm not suggesting that we came up the very brink of perpetrating the exact same horrors as perpetrated by Nazi Germany, and then pulled back at the very last minute. But I am suggesting that we walked a far piece down that same road, turned a blind eye to our own Constitution and placed our own citizens in internment camps for no other reason than Japanese-Americans just might be a security risk, even though German-Americans quite definitely were not. If sunairco is right, we did worse.

We are all just people. We have the strengths and weaknesses of all people. If we are capable of committing our own citizens to internment camps, then we are capable of sending them gas chambers too. We are the only ones who can stand in our way. Therefore it's worth remembering what we did, and reflect on it seriously. That's why I thank BeardedOne for bringing to our attention.