Never Forget. Never Again.

[thx1138]

http://www.activistpost.com/2012/02/...ience-and.html in the future techniques like internment camps, summary executions etc. will be made obsolete. The ruling elite plan to control all our brains directly. No more messy stuff.

[thx1138]

http://forums.firingsquad.com/t5/Pol...ism/td-p/44553 12 Warning Signs of Fascism

[runningdownthatdream]

http://www.activistpost.com/2012/02/...ience-and.html in the future techniques like internment camps, summary executions etc. will be made obsolete. The ruling elite plan to control all our brains directly. No more messy stuff.

no joke......and these guys are seriously trying to make it a reality:

http://singinst.org/

[Niccolo]

There was a POW camp near where I live during WWII. When the war ended the POWs marched across to the local railway station. A lot of them were crying, because they'd been treated so well, & they didn't want to go back home.

Meanwhile, in Germany ... The White Rose.

[flabbybody]

Beardedone, has George Takei expressed any regrets for Pearl Harbor and the treatment of American GI's in Japanese prisoner of war camps?

No doubt. The treatment of American and British POW's by the Japanese was brutally inhumane. Many Japanese military officers and civilian officials were found guilty of war crimes and executed after the war. But this is not a relevant point in a discussion about our government suspending civil rights for American citizens of Japanese descent

[thx1138]

I don't understand why Takei did this now. Bill Clinton formally apologized about this when he was president. The past cannot be changed so Let sleeping dogs lie.

[sunairco]

Meanwhile in Europe, the US wasn't so squeaky clean after the end of the war and commited attrocities that should have landed Eisenhower before a tribunal. Google "Disarmed Enemy Forces Eisenhower" if you want to see how horrific the states were to the Germans that exceeded the inhumane treatment that the Germans afforded their own camp residents.

There was a POW camp near where I live during WWII. When the war ended the POWs marched across to the local railway station. A lot of them were crying, because they'd been treated so well, & they didn't want to go back home.

Meanwhile, in Germany ... The White Rose.

[Merkurie]

Beardedone, has George Takei expressed any regrets for Pearl Harbor and the treatment of American GI's in Japanese prisoner of war camps?

George Takei is not Japanese.

"Takei was born George Hosato Takei in Los Angeles, California, the son of Fumiko Emily (née Nakamura) and Takekuma Norman Takei, who worked in real estate.[1] His parents were Japanese American. His father was an Anglophile, and named him George after George VI of the United Kingdom, whose coronation took place in 1937.[2][3] In 1942, the Takei family was forced to live in the horse stables of Santa Anita Park before being sent to the Rohwer War Relocation Center for internment in Arkansas.[4] The family was later transferred to the Tule Lake War Relocation Center in California. He and his family returned to Los Angeles at the end of World War II. He attended Mount Vernon Junior High School, where he served as student body president, and Los Angeles High School. He was a member of Boy Scout Troop 379 of the Koyasan Buddhist Temple.[5][6]
Upon graduation from high school, Takei enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley where he studied architecture. Later he attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where he received a bachelor of arts in theater in 1960 and a master of arts in theater in 1964. He attended the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford-upon-Avon in England, and Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan. In Hollywood, he studied acting at the Desilu Workshop.[7] Takei is fluent in English, Japanese, and Spanish."

[BeardedOne]

The point I tried to make earlier is that if the American policy was so wrong, it should be possible to criticise it without likening it to something else. Just stand it up and look closely at it, and say what's wrong with it. Should be easy enough, if it was all that bad.

On this we agree, and I'm sorry if I didn't make myself clear earlier. While there are some similarities, there is no true comparison between the actions of the US as regards the Japanese as was the actions of the Nazis as regards to the Jews, gays, political prisoners.

maybe the star trek guys been sucking to much dick and caught a rare brain disorder,if it wasnt for america hed be stuck in a bath house somewhere licking cum off the towells.

LISA! I'm surprised at this statement, especially from you. If it wasn't for America, George, and others, would have lived normal lives as children of a free nation.

Beardedone, has George Takei expressed any regrets for Pearl Harbor and the treatment of American GI's in Japanese prisoner of war camps?

Good question. I believe George was about five years' old at the time. Maybe you should ask him.

Rounding people up and putting them in internment camps IS fundamentally different than rounding people up and putting them in death camps.

Did either the Jews or the Japanese =know= that's where they were headed?

Just imagine the fear of =NOT= knowing.

Whether the German people knew that their government was intending to gas to death the Jewish family from down the hall, they did know that the government was dispossessing them of their homes property and freedom for the crime of being Jewish and carting them off to their fate.

Your Nissei neighbors are hauled away, leaving their home, their business, their belongings...

I don't understand why Takei did this now. Bill Clinton formally apologized about this when he was president. The past cannot be changed so Let sleeping dogs lie.

Yes, there have been apologies and reparations, from Gerald Ford on up, but the point is not so much to atone for the past as to prevent for the future.

In the end, there is no true justice in a war. Each side is as brutal and unforgiving as another to its enemy. But for a nation to treat its own as an enemy, unproven, is beyond reproach.

[Niccolo]

"In the end, there is no true justice in a war. Each side is as brutal and unforgiving as another to its enemy." - Bearded One.

As you may know, Sir Max Hastings' latest book on WWII is entitled "All Hell Let Loose" - a title that makes me think straight away of something Ralph Peters once wrote, which I paraphrase here: The belief that in war, attrition is inherently negative, is wrong. It is a soldier's job to kill the enemy. Everything else, no matter how important it seems, is secondary. All wars are wars of attrition. (From an essay in "Lines of Fire".)

"But for a nation to treat its own as an enemy, unproven, is beyond reproach." - Bearded One.

On the face of it this seems to be a reasonable statement. But note that it is merely an assertion. As one of my old lecturers used to say, there is no argument here. It would be good if you could come up with one, & explain exactly what you think was so wrong about what actually happened.

We have agreed that there is a difference between how people were treated in the American camps and the Nazi camps. This is an obvious point, but it's worth making nonetheless.

Clearly there is also a difference between how an American or British soldier acting on behalf of his country treated their enemies during WWII, and how other representatives of the American state treated Japanese American internees in the different kinds of camp established in WWII.

As Ralph Peters notes the objective of soldiers on the battlefield, however it is dressed up by politicians and writers, is to kill the enemy. So when you use the expression, "treat its own as an enemy" you need to explain what you mean by that, given how the American military actually treated the Japanese forces in the Pacific theatre. No one used flamethrowers on the internees, and no one dropped nukes on them either.

If you want to consider the rights and wrongs of how American and British troops treated the Japanese (aka the enemy) during WWII, I suggest you read some of the literature written by men who served out there. The horrors endured by British and American troops at the hands of the Japanese is almost beyond belief. That must never be forgotten. A good place to start is George McDonald Fraser's war memoirs: an excellent book by a talented writer. I must also recommend The Forgotten Highlander by Alistair Urquhart. Fraser also wrote the "Flashman" novels btw - they're first rate & I heartily recommend giving them a go - the first novel in the series is a classic.

Btw please don't take this as coming from someone who knows all about the internment camps in America during WWII, who believes that what happened was right (or wrong.) That's not the case at all. I'm not American and although I have spent some time studying WWII from a European perspective, and I'm aware of how some of our troops were treated by the Japanese, what happened within America during WWII is a subject I am unfamiliar with. This is one of the reasons why I would like anyone who actually knows enough about the subject to pass judgement on it, to explain just what went on, and why it was (apparently) so wrong.

In Britain during WWII whole families were split up, and thousands of children were sent miles away from their parents. There were several waves of evacuation; I've actually heard elderly people talk about this still. And I believe there were Germans and Italians who were sent off from the UK mainland to a camp on the Isle of Man, where apparently the conditions weren't too bad, all things considered.

How a nation treats people within its own borders in a time of war - it's an interesting subject, and although undoubtedly a forum like this with its inbuilt limitations isn't really the place to get into it, maybe this thread will serve to pique the interest of the odd passer-by, who'll go off and do a bit of reading in their own time, & think about what happened & why ... you never know.