Censored Photographs of FDR’s Japanese Concentration Camps

I have generally heard that isn't true, and it does seem hard to believe the government could hide such an enormous undertaking. People were disappearing, thousands employed to build and staff camps, lots of international coverage, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_for_the_Holocau...

These days there would be satellite pictures of camps, cell phone videos of most of the internment process, reporters and protesters all over the place, etc. It would be impossible to hide.

This is entirely supposition on my part, from someone far too young to have lived through any of it, but I suspect it's less that Japanese Americans looked different, and more that Japan was a non-Christian culture, which made it easier to dehumanize people of Japanese descent.

The Nazis might have been evil but at least they were "like us" in that they shared a common heritage, religion and linguistic root with Americans. Japan, meanwhile, was portrayed in American propaganda as an inscrutable hivemind run by a primitive death-cult.

You can see the same strange mistrust of non-Christian culture applied to Muslims in America today - even though the vast majority in the world are not violent terrorists, many Americans suspect that Islam taints and "radicalizes" the mind with evil in a way that Christianity doesn't.

The United States has never stood for Freedom and Human Rights, this is a country built on the back of enslaved Africans.

The Japanese pre-Cold War were treated unfairly but this pales in comparison to the many hell the Asian region have suffered under Japanese Imperialism.

At least they didn't get gassed like the Jews did. At least they didn't get bayonetted like the Chinese in Nanjing en masse in graves or a military unit performing live surgery on them or forcing hundreds of thousands of young Korean women to sexual slavery.

It didn't help that there was heavy animosity towards Japanese from Chinese & Korean Americans who felt compelled and directly/indirectly suffered as a result of Imperial Japan. There was probably deep desire for schadenfreude that contributed to Japanese Americans downfall.

But all that aside is clearly a small drop in the bucket. The view of Japanese and Asian Americans were explicitly racist. Nazi Germany was bad but the same elements of racial white superiority is a continuing theme even until the late 60s, where African American celebrities were forced to sleep in trailer parks while their white co-actors would lounge in swanky hotels (particularly angering Frank Sinatra).

There has been a miniscule effort from Reagan handing out 20k and an apology for the immense inter-generational trauma directly caused by the USG. There's little apology for Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims. This suggests to me a serious lack of reflection and it's evidenced by the fact that Muslim Americans today are facing a similar treatment.

I love the US but shit like this makes me pause for a bit. However, it still is nowhere near the atrocities committed by Imperial Japan & Nazi Germany. But it's curious to see the stark difference in the way Japanese and German Americans were treated. German Americans weren't sent to interment camps and had their assets seized in the same manner as the Japanese Americans.

All in all, a tragedy and showing that a melting pot we-are-all-americans is a flawed policy-where everyone is American but some less American than others. Canada is no better off as they also had Japanese interment camps and showed little remorse.

Sometimes I wonder as Asian Canadian, are we truly accepted by the mainstream North American society? It makes me question what the Canadian/American dream. I think about just how much easier it is when your skin color matches the mainstream crowd and you don't stand out or have any biases held against you. The Japanese interment camp is just one of those many items that raises existential questions of being in North America, and it's not all that clear whether it's in the rearview mirror seeing how Muslim Americans are being treated today in the West.

I still do think North America is relatively a very accepting and open place. It's hard to fathom such level of integration in Europe or Asia.

Germans are considered "white" I imagine and thus hard to distinguish.