2 ms·
(This is a tangent unrelated to the topic) Three years after this rally, Pearl Harbor happens, which results in the US entering into the already-running World
by peterwwillis 9y ago
(This is a tangent unrelated to the topic)
Three years after this rally, Pearl Harbor happens, which results in the US entering into the already-running World War II.
Virtually all people of Japanese ancestry are forcibly relocated from the West Coast and incarcerated in internment camps - around 115,000 people, 62% of which were US citizens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Americans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
At the same time, "the government examined the cases of German nationals individually, and detained relatively few [11,000 out of the 1.2 Million born in Germany and 5 Million with two German parents]. To a much lesser extent, some ethnic German US citizens were classified as suspect after due process and also detained." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_Americans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_Americans
Of the 695,000 ethnic Italians in the US at the time, only 1,881 nationals were detained. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Italian_Americans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Italian_American...
The justification of rounding up all ethnic Japanese into camps was "we're at war, we will do anything to protect our country". But that same logic was never applied to the Germans or Italians, even though their countries were bigger threats than Japan.
A government commission found the treatment of ethnic Japanese to have been racially motivated, and actually paid reparations to those that were interned. But even so, this practice was never made illegal.
I find this especially interesting since a certain US President seems to have some strong feelings toward certain ethnicities and religions. In the event we went to war with a country with such an ethnicity, we would probably see these camps again, because no law has made it illegal, and there is legal and military precedence for it. It's also a near-certainty that no Supreme Court will go against a President during wartime.