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> This was almost identical to what Roosevelt had done earlier Really? This is an insane claim. Sending people to be murdered in concentration camps is the sam

by wwtrv 5y ago

> This was almost identical to what Roosevelt had done earlier Really? This is an insane claim. Sending people to be murdered in concentration camps is the same as relocating people to relatively well provisioned camps where they were treated relatively fairly (even though it still wrong)?

newlognevrytime 5y ago
A while ago I was following George Takei on twitter, and he tells stories in which he does not make it sound like anyone was well provisioned nor treated relatively fairly. Personally, I feel yours is the insane claim. Go read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Americans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America... and think of how well you are going to provision prisoners during a war. I'm not going to measure which one is worse, nor will I call them identical, but I feel you are making light of an ugly moment in US history.
- deleted 5y ago
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adrian_b 5y ago
You do not know about what you are talking. Both Roosevelt and Antonescu have ordered a collective punishment for an entire ethnic group as a consequence of facts proven only for a few members of those group, i.e. a few agents recruited by the Russians from the Romanian Jews, respectively a few Japanese from Hawaii who provided assistance for the attackers of Pearl Harbor. In both cases, the collective punishments were not intended to cause any death, but in fact in both cases there were many premature deaths, which nonetheless cannot be directly attributed to Roosevelt and Antonescu but to those who were in charge at much lower levels. Obviously, leaders like Roosevelt and Antonescu should have been able to predict the consequences of their orders. With "Sending people to be murdered in concentration camps" you confuse Romania with Germany. In fact when Hitler asked all its allies to give him their Jews, to do what you say, Antonescu refused, unlike, for example Horthy, who has accepted Hitler's request and gave the Jews from the part of Romania occupied by Hungary to Germany. This is another example that "an all-too-willing Nazi accomplice" is an incorrect expression when applied to Antonescu. There is no doubt that the Jews sent to the Romanian concentration camps suffered a lot, but had they been sent to Germany for the "final solution", that would have been much worse. Also, the punishment of the Jews was not very different from what others suffered at the same time. Antonescu increased a lot the punishments even for various petty crimes. For example many Romanians were sent to labor camps for "disturbing the peace", e.g. by singing too loud and annoying thus the neighbors. After the WW2, it is likely that most Jews from Romania had relatives who had lost their properties or their lives or had suffered while in concentration camps, but the same was true for most of the ethnic Romanians or for any other kinds of citizens. I was born in Romania and most of my maternal family relatives have been sent by the Russians to labor camps in Siberia during the 1940/1941 winter, half of year after the Soviet Union invaded Romania. Both my maternal grand-grandfathers have been murdered in the labor camp. While the tragedy of the Jews during WW2 is very well known and some of their organizations have received significant material compensations for that, there have been millions of people in Eastern Europe who have had exactly the same fate like the Jews, but very few still remember that and they had never been compensated in any way. There is also little doubt that the fact that both Roosevelt and Antonescu were able to decide such identical collective punishments, without much hesitations, shows that both had some racial prejudices, so both considered the Japanese, respectively the Jews, as some kind of lesser humans, who do not deserve to be trusted so much and who do not have the same rights for justice as the "normal" people. Nevertheless, both Roosevelt and Antonescu have also done actions that benefited most of the people whose leaders they were, so they both must be analyzed taking into account both their defects and their qualities.

by wwtrv 5y ago

newlognevrytime 5y ago

A while ago I was following George Takei on twitter, and he tells stories in which he does not make it sound like anyone was well provisioned nor treated relatively fairly. Personally, I feel yours is the insane claim. Go read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Americans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America... and think of how well you are going to provision prisoners during a war. I'm not going to measure which one is worse, nor will I call them identical, but I feel you are making light of an ugly moment in US history.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

adrian_b 5y ago

You do not know about what you are talking. Both Roosevelt and Antonescu have ordered a collective punishment for an entire ethnic group as a consequence of facts proven only for a few members of those group, i.e. a few agents recruited by the Russians from the Romanian Jews, respectively a few Japanese from Hawaii who provided assistance for the attackers of Pearl Harbor. In both cases, the collective punishments were not intended to cause any death, but in fact in both cases there were many premature deaths, which nonetheless cannot be directly attributed to Roosevelt and Antonescu but to those who were in charge at much lower levels. Obviously, leaders like Roosevelt and Antonescu should have been able to predict the consequences of their orders. With "Sending people to be murdered in concentration camps" you confuse Romania with Germany. In fact when Hitler asked all its allies to give him their Jews, to do what you say, Antonescu refused, unlike, for example Horthy, who has accepted Hitler's request and gave the Jews from the part of Romania occupied by Hungary to Germany. This is another example that "an all-too-willing Nazi accomplice" is an incorrect expression when applied to Antonescu. There is no doubt that the Jews sent to the Romanian concentration camps suffered a lot, but had they been sent to Germany for the "final solution", that would have been much worse. Also, the punishment of the Jews was not very different from what others suffered at the same time. Antonescu increased a lot the punishments even for various petty crimes. For example many Romanians were sent to labor camps for "disturbing the peace", e.g. by singing too loud and annoying thus the neighbors. After the WW2, it is likely that most Jews from Romania had relatives who had lost their properties or their lives or had suffered while in concentration camps, but the same was true for most of the ethnic Romanians or for any other kinds of citizens. I was born in Romania and most of my maternal family relatives have been sent by the Russians to labor camps in Siberia during the 1940/1941 winter, half of year after the Soviet Union invaded Romania. Both my maternal grand-grandfathers have been murdered in the labor camp. While the tragedy of the Jews during WW2 is very well known and some of their organizations have received significant material compensations for that, there have been millions of people in Eastern Europe who have had exactly the same fate like the Jews, but very few still remember that and they had never been compensated in any way. There is also little doubt that the fact that both Roosevelt and Antonescu were able to decide such identical collective punishments, without much hesitations, shows that both had some racial prejudices, so both considered the Japanese, respectively the Jews, as some kind of lesser humans, who do not deserve to be trusted so much and who do not have the same rights for justice as the "normal" people. Nevertheless, both Roosevelt and Antonescu have also done actions that benefited most of the people whose leaders they were, so they both must be analyzed taking into account both their defects and their qualities.