Arminius
10th August 2004, 15:13
The Myth of the American Concentration Camp
Close your eyes and envision a Japanese American internment camp. What comes to mind?
Modern American history books and media portraits have seared universal images into our collective conscience: scared children and frail elderly grandparents trapped behind barbed wire, racist armed guards bullying captives in desolate barracks, prisoners suffering from malnutrition and mistreatment. The cover of Last Witnesses: Reflections on the Wartime Internment of Japanese Americans depicts two young girls peering through red bars, which double as the stripes of a vertically-hung American flag. Two different books titled Behind Barbed Wireone by Daniel S. Davis, the other by Lila Perlshare the same cover photo of a somber Japanese grandfather and two little boys wearing identification tags waiting to be evacuated.
The Philadelphia Daily News asserts that the Japanese-Americans were treated like convicts. And if they breached the compound walls, they were shot. An academic pamphlet on Japanese Americans and World War II claims that camp residents were threatened with isolation, exile, forced labor, public humiliation, and even torture and death.
Many modern critics of the World War II evacuation and relocation refer to the centers and camps as concentration camps, invoking the imagery of the Holocaust. One popular high school textbook describes 110,000 Japanese Americans (sic) forcibly herded together in concentration camps. Author Roger Daniels, defending the comparison of American camps to Nazi concentration camps, sermonizes:
The American camps were not death camps, but they were surrounded by barbed wire and by troops whose guns were pointed at the inmates. Almost all the 1,862 Japanese Americans who died in them died of natural causes, and they were outnumbered by the 5,918 American citizens who were born in the concentration camps. But the few Japanese Americans who were killed accidentally by their American guards were just as dead as the millions of Jews and others were who killed deliberately by their German, Soviet, or Japanese guards.
Source (http://michellemalkin.com/archives/idoifiles/Chapter%209web.doc) (doc)
MOD EDIT:
If youa re interested in the remaining portion of the artilce, please follow the source link. This one was edited for the absurd length of reprinted material.
Close your eyes and envision a Japanese American internment camp. What comes to mind?
Modern American history books and media portraits have seared universal images into our collective conscience: scared children and frail elderly grandparents trapped behind barbed wire, racist armed guards bullying captives in desolate barracks, prisoners suffering from malnutrition and mistreatment. The cover of Last Witnesses: Reflections on the Wartime Internment of Japanese Americans depicts two young girls peering through red bars, which double as the stripes of a vertically-hung American flag. Two different books titled Behind Barbed Wireone by Daniel S. Davis, the other by Lila Perlshare the same cover photo of a somber Japanese grandfather and two little boys wearing identification tags waiting to be evacuated.
The Philadelphia Daily News asserts that the Japanese-Americans were treated like convicts. And if they breached the compound walls, they were shot. An academic pamphlet on Japanese Americans and World War II claims that camp residents were threatened with isolation, exile, forced labor, public humiliation, and even torture and death.
Many modern critics of the World War II evacuation and relocation refer to the centers and camps as concentration camps, invoking the imagery of the Holocaust. One popular high school textbook describes 110,000 Japanese Americans (sic) forcibly herded together in concentration camps. Author Roger Daniels, defending the comparison of American camps to Nazi concentration camps, sermonizes:
The American camps were not death camps, but they were surrounded by barbed wire and by troops whose guns were pointed at the inmates. Almost all the 1,862 Japanese Americans who died in them died of natural causes, and they were outnumbered by the 5,918 American citizens who were born in the concentration camps. But the few Japanese Americans who were killed accidentally by their American guards were just as dead as the millions of Jews and others were who killed deliberately by their German, Soviet, or Japanese guards.
Source (http://michellemalkin.com/archives/idoifiles/Chapter%209web.doc) (doc)
MOD EDIT:
If youa re interested in the remaining portion of the artilce, please follow the source link. This one was edited for the absurd length of reprinted material.