japanese war crimes-- was hiroshima

From: Charles Gray


On Tue, 13 Jan 2004 05:36:18 -0500, Cub Driver
wrote:


Yep. We were pretty darned nice, for the times.

You neglected to mention that the internees were paid compensation and
given an apology. I don't recall that my friend Dick O'Kane got either
from the Japanese who starved and worked and beat him down to 98
pounds in one year.

all the best -- Dan Ford
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see the Warbird's Forum at www.warbirdforum.com
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Or the Korean "comfort women", or the Korean slave workers, or the
American and British Civilians...or the literally tens of millions of
Chinese, filipino's and other's who had the misfortune to be
"liberated" by the Japanese.
Japan, with some exceptions (mostly personal, not governmental) has
a very large policy of forgetfulness with those actions...and in other
cases continues to try to justify them.
Especially egregious is the lawsuits that are dropped because you
cannot get compensation because "it was already settled" in
peacetreaties that never brought the matter up.

I believe that the internment camps were a disgrace, and an
unamerican act, especially as the 442nd was proving its loyalty in
blood.
But to imagine for the slightest moment that that injustice
compares-- can even be compared-- to the wholesale slaughter of
Germany and Japan's brutal occupations and death camps would be absurd
if it wasn't so popular a point of view.
The internment WASN'T comparable to those acts-- but it was a dark
moment in U.S. history because we are, and should be, judged to a
higher standard than the governments that only worshipped brute force.

I would also mention, that although I think the apology did come
too late, it was an act of congress, signed into law by the
president-- so it wasn't simply an apology by any single group, it was
an apology on behalf of the United States, and its' citizens, from our
elected leaders.


The U.S. DID do medical experiments on par with the Nazis. Think of the black
men in the syphilis experiments who were deliberately left untreated as an
example. In several states "mentally deficient" people were forcibly
sterilized. Maybe the U.S. didn't do these sorts of things to as many people,
but we did do it.

Antisemitism WAS rampant in many parts of the U.S. and was one of the reasons
FDR never included saving Jews in Nazi occupied territories. He was afraid he
would lose support for the war.

Having said all this the comparison between Nazi concentration camps and the
Japanese, Italian and German internment camps in the U.S. is uncalled for. For
one thing German internees were allowed to hang up pictures of Hitler. The
inmates of the Nazi camps weren't allowed to post pictures of Churchill, Stalin
or FDR.

Dan, U. S. Air Force, retired