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I think you're trying to make a point other than your sentence's literal meaning, but I'm too distanced from modern domestic US history to know. Can you clarify

I think you're trying to make a point other than your sentence's literal meaning, but I'm too distanced from modern domestic US history to know. Can you clarify and elaborate?

slibhb 3y ago
FDR was the president who had the Japanese Americans removed to concentration camps. He's a hero of the left and one of the presidents who would least likely be described as a "reactionary bigot" in any other situation. More broadly I object to this very modern attitude wherein people in the past who did things we consider wrong today were evil bigots. Which is not to say they weren't wrong.
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  You can recognize an action both being a product of its time and being objectively wrong. I think a good lesson here is that wrongness is not a monopoly owned by just one political ideology.
- nindalf 3y ago
  It’s ok to praise FDR for the New Deal and also recognise that sending all Japanese people (and not German or Italian people) to internment camps was a bigoted, evil thing to do. What do you want? For us to say “ah well, that’s just how it was back in the day”? You’re the one incapable of nuance if you want to put everything FDR did into one bucket or the other.
  - slibhb 3y ago
    People can praise or criticize FDR for whatever they like. I'm objecting to the name-calling, not the idea that the internment of Japanese Americans was wrong.
    - BaseballPhysics 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - slibhb 3y ago
        No, the idea that almost everyone born before 1980 was an evil bigot is stupid
        BaseballPhysics 3y ago
        Then it's a good thing no one said that. You should probably take a break from the internet. There's enough things to get offended about. There's really no reason to start making up new ones.
        slibhb 3y ago
        If you extend your "calling a spade a spade" logic, it will to lead to some ridiculous premise like "everyone born before x year was an evil bigot" where x keeps marching forward year after year.
        jjulius 3y ago
        Where did OP call "everyone born before 1980 ... an evil bigot"? Where did OP single out FDR as a reactionary bigot? Yes, it was done under his watch, but there were, in point of fact, plenty of genuinely reactionary bigots who supported it at the time. You're lambasting OP for the words you've put into their mouth. Stop.
        nindalf 3y ago
        Not everyone. Just the guy who ordered Japanese Americans be sent to internment camps.
    - jakelazaroff 3y ago
      Would you not describe the internment of Japanese Americans as reactionary or as bigotry? Which label do you actually disagree with? OP wasn't just mindlessly adding invectives; they used those words for a reason.
  - dQw4w9WgXcQ 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - endisneigh 3y ago
      if you know what a kamikazi is, then you know the ones who did that were not the ones sent to the camps. could you say anything more stupid? lol
    - krapp 3y ago
      > You know what's also bigoted and evil? Kamikazi-ing planes into Pearl Harbor. Yeah, that didn't happen. Japan didn't start using kamikaze attacks until the end of the war, as an act of desperation. It wasn't just, like, a thing they did.
    - mc32 3y ago
      I would say Bataan and PoW camps in SEAsia as well as treatment of mainland Chinese, Korean laborers, etc., are "better" examples of Japanese bigotry and cruelty --at the time. Japan has come a long way since then. 1 in 3 PoWs in Japanese labor camps would die during WWII: https://www.historyonthenet.com/world-war-two-japanese-pow-camps https://www.historyonthenet.com/world-war-two-japanese-pow-c...
    - tech_ken 3y ago
      Setting aside the historical veracity of this nonsense, are you suggesting that it was appropriate for US citizens to pay the price of that decision because of their ancestry? What is wrong with you?
  - mc32 3y ago
    Japanese, Italians and Germans were declared Enemy Aliens: https://www.thc.texas.gov/preserve/projects-and-programs/military-history/texas-world-war-ii/japanese-german-and-italian https://www.thc.texas.gov/preserve/projects-and-programs/mil...
  - George83728 3y ago
    I believe that the only reason most German-Americans were not interned is because they were too large a portion of the population to intern without seriously negatively effecting the war effort. My evidence for this belief is the fact that Japanese-Americans represented a third of people living in Hawaii, more than 150k of them, yet in Hawaii only ~1800 Japanese-Americans were interned. About 1%. This, despite the fact that Hawaii was closer to the war than the rest of America, and despite the fact that the Niihau incident occurred in Hawaii. Interning a third of the population of Hawaii simply wasn't practical, so in Hawaii they had to exercise much more discretion. Furthermore, some people believe that Executive Order 8802, which forbade ethnic and racial discrimination in defense industries, was intended more to prevent discrimination against German-Americans and Italian-Americans than against African-Americans. Supposing that is true, it evidences the perception of FDR's administration that discrimination against German-Americans, despite their skin color, was a plausible scenario and would harm the war effort if permitted. Further evidence for the plausibility of ethnic discrimination against Germans, despite their skin color, is easy to find during WWI. Across America and the UK, German families (including the Royal Family..) changed their names to conceal their German origins. Schools stop teaching German, businesses were renamed, sauerkraut became "liberty cabbage" (freedom fries, anyone?) The Red Cross even forbade people with German last names from joining. tl;dr: The federal government recognized the potential appetite for discrimination against German-Americans, but forbade this because German-Americans were a very large portion of the population and excluding them would harm the war effort. At the same time the federal government perpetrated discrimination against Japanese-Americans, except they exercised more discretion in Hawaii where Japanese-Americans were a very large segment of the population.
    - justin66 3y ago
      > Interning a third of the population of Hawaii simply wasn't practical > At the same time the federal government perpetrated discrimination against Japanese-Americans, except they exercised more discretion in Hawaii where Japanese-Americans were a very large segment of the population. Hawaii, not a US state at the time, was largely occupied by the US military prior to Pearl Harbor. After Pearl Harbor its residents were subject to martial law and their civil rights were suspended. The situation there was not analogous to the situation on the mainland, so I wouldn't use it to draw any conclusions. > the only reason Your thesis isn't wildly off-base, but how often is anything done by humans done for one single, solitary reason?
- cpuguy83 3y ago
  What they did is the literal definition of bigotry. They rounded up as many Japanese-Americans as they could and put them in prisons under heavy guard without any cause other than other people that look like them attacked a military base. It was objectively wrong then, and it is wrong through all of time.
  - atlantic 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - ok_dad 3y ago
      They were not fucking immigrants! These were people who had lived in the USA their whole lives, with several generations of American citizens in these families. Anyone arguing Japanese internment was just for securing America is the same type of person who would round up trans people or musings Muslims today the same way.
      - atlantic 3y ago
        You don't magically stop being an immigrant after a few years. Often it takes several generations to integrate. And particularly so if you form cultural enclaves and remain attached to your country of origin, as tends to be the case with the Japanese.
  - ok_dad 3y ago
    I believe they actually rounded them up to steal their farms in California. Japanese farms were the most productive back then, and they held almost all the best farms. During the war, they had their land and things stolen by politically connected neighbors. http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist9/harvest.html#:~:text=The%20World%20War%20II%20evacuation,%2DJapanese”%20owners%20and%20lessees http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist9/harvest.html#:~:text=The%20Wor....
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    >other than other people that look like them You yourself are describing the people rounded up as Japanese (yes, with a qualifier). They were people more likely to have loyalty to an enemy state, weren't they? It was certainly a blunt tool; and not an issue I've looked at in detail; but do you expect FDR to have done nothing? Interesting for me to consider whether UK was right to round up Germans for WWII, rather difficult when that includes the Royal Family, but they did imprison something like 10% of "Germans" living in the UK (I don't know if they were British, just visiting, naturalised, or what).
- willbudd 3y ago
  Wow, I don't think I've ever seen anyone dial a strawman argument to 11 quite like you just did. Nobody was talking about FDR until you hamfistedly brought him up in a reply to a post (indirectly) lamenting a period of history rife with racism. Prejudice was rampant all across the "political spectrum", but prevalence is not a measure of justice or humanity. Nor does any individual's competency in one area somehow ameliorate their flaws in other areas.
- MSFT_Edging 3y ago
  FDR is an example of how a politician can be called a Socialist in the United States while also being extremely reactionary and push racist policies. If nothing else, this goes to show how far the scale is tipped in favor of right wing ideas and policies in the states and still is. The fact Biden, a fairly conservative politician, can be called a "Communist" with a straight face is an indictment of the American education system. The labels don't even mean anything after a while. You can actively be enforcing fascist policies and still be labeled a socialist due to a population wide inability to understand what words mean.
- justin66 3y ago
  > He's a hero of the left and one of the presidents who would least likely be described as a "reactionary bigot" in any other situation. those people have a pretty hypocritical and one-dimensional way of looking at history > More broadly I object to this very modern attitude wherein people in the past who did things we consider wrong today were evil bigots. but not me, I'm awesome
blululu 3y ago
The issue is combing reactionary and bigot. The internments were done the watch for Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal coalition - a left leaning political movement that laid the foundations of the modern American welfare state. There were definitely many blatant examples of bigotry in the policies of this movement but they were far from reactionary. Social issues change over time but the also correlate with otherwise unrelated social/political/economic issues so trying to apply political issues from 80 years ago into the modern era is going to lead to some incongruous positions.
- SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
  The modern American welfare state was also reactionary and bigoted towards black people and minorities. It’s important to recognize that much of the social programs explicitly excluded people of color and then used their understandeable lower quality of life due to lack of safety nets as a justification for further racism. Black people have bad neighborhoods, but of course black people didnt get government housing assistance to repair anything, because the federal programs for that explicitly excluded them.
  - George83728 3y ago
    The same FDR signed Executive Order 8802, forbidding ethnic and racial discrimination in the defense industry and federal government.
    - SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
      And yet the federal housing administration continued to explicitly respect racist homeowner association laws (btw homeowner associations were originally created to enshrine into bylaws that no black people may rent or purchase a property), continued to offer lesser or worse terms, or would broadly consider black people too risky, until congress passed the fair housing act of 1968, decades later.
      - George83728 3y ago

I think you're trying to make a point other than your sentence's literal meaning, but I'm too distanced from modern domestic US history to know. Can you clarify and elaborate?

slibhb 3y ago

FDR was the president who had the Japanese Americans removed to concentration camps. He's a hero of the left and one of the presidents who would least likely be described as a "reactionary bigot" in any other situation. More broadly I object to this very modern attitude wherein people in the past who did things we consider wrong today were evil bigots. Which is not to say they weren't wrong.

Waterluvian 3y ago
You can recognize an action both being a product of its time and being objectively wrong. I think a good lesson here is that wrongness is not a monopoly owned by just one political ideology.
nindalf 3y ago
It’s ok to praise FDR for the New Deal and also recognise that sending all Japanese people (and not German or Italian people) to internment camps was a bigoted, evil thing to do. What do you want? For us to say “ah well, that’s just how it was back in the day”? You’re the one incapable of nuance if you want to put everything FDR did into one bucket or the other.
- slibhb 3y ago
  People can praise or criticize FDR for whatever they like. I'm objecting to the name-calling, not the idea that the internment of Japanese Americans was wrong.
  - BaseballPhysics 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - slibhb 3y ago
      No, the idea that almost everyone born before 1980 was an evil bigot is stupid
      - BaseballPhysics 3y ago
        Then it's a good thing no one said that. You should probably take a break from the internet. There's enough things to get offended about. There's really no reason to start making up new ones.
        slibhb 3y ago
        If you extend your "calling a spade a spade" logic, it will to lead to some ridiculous premise like "everyone born before x year was an evil bigot" where x keeps marching forward year after year.
      - jjulius 3y ago
        Where did OP call "everyone born before 1980 ... an evil bigot"? Where did OP single out FDR as a reactionary bigot? Yes, it was done under his watch, but there were, in point of fact, plenty of genuinely reactionary bigots who supported it at the time. You're lambasting OP for the words you've put into their mouth. Stop.
      - nindalf 3y ago
        Not everyone. Just the guy who ordered Japanese Americans be sent to internment camps.
  - jakelazaroff 3y ago
    Would you not describe the internment of Japanese Americans as reactionary or as bigotry? Which label do you actually disagree with? OP wasn't just mindlessly adding invectives; they used those words for a reason.
- dQw4w9WgXcQ 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    if you know what a kamikazi is, then you know the ones who did that were not the ones sent to the camps. could you say anything more stupid? lol
  - krapp 3y ago
    > You know what's also bigoted and evil? Kamikazi-ing planes into Pearl Harbor. Yeah, that didn't happen. Japan didn't start using kamikaze attacks until the end of the war, as an act of desperation. It wasn't just, like, a thing they did.
  - mc32 3y ago
    I would say Bataan and PoW camps in SEAsia as well as treatment of mainland Chinese, Korean laborers, etc., are "better" examples of Japanese bigotry and cruelty --at the time. Japan has come a long way since then. 1 in 3 PoWs in Japanese labor camps would die during WWII: https://www.historyonthenet.com/world-war-two-japanese-pow-camps https://www.historyonthenet.com/world-war-two-japanese-pow-c...
  - tech_ken 3y ago
    Setting aside the historical veracity of this nonsense, are you suggesting that it was appropriate for US citizens to pay the price of that decision because of their ancestry? What is wrong with you?
- mc32 3y ago
  Japanese, Italians and Germans were declared Enemy Aliens: https://www.thc.texas.gov/preserve/projects-and-programs/military-history/texas-world-war-ii/japanese-german-and-italian https://www.thc.texas.gov/preserve/projects-and-programs/mil...
- George83728 3y ago
  I believe that the only reason most German-Americans were not interned is because they were too large a portion of the population to intern without seriously negatively effecting the war effort. My evidence for this belief is the fact that Japanese-Americans represented a third of people living in Hawaii, more than 150k of them, yet in Hawaii only ~1800 Japanese-Americans were interned. About 1%. This, despite the fact that Hawaii was closer to the war than the rest of America, and despite the fact that the Niihau incident occurred in Hawaii. Interning a third of the population of Hawaii simply wasn't practical, so in Hawaii they had to exercise much more discretion. Furthermore, some people believe that Executive Order 8802, which forbade ethnic and racial discrimination in defense industries, was intended more to prevent discrimination against German-Americans and Italian-Americans than against African-Americans. Supposing that is true, it evidences the perception of FDR's administration that discrimination against German-Americans, despite their skin color, was a plausible scenario and would harm the war effort if permitted. Further evidence for the plausibility of ethnic discrimination against Germans, despite their skin color, is easy to find during WWI. Across America and the UK, German families (including the Royal Family..) changed their names to conceal their German origins. Schools stop teaching German, businesses were renamed, sauerkraut became "liberty cabbage" (freedom fries, anyone?) The Red Cross even forbade people with German last names from joining. tl;dr: The federal government recognized the potential appetite for discrimination against German-Americans, but forbade this because German-Americans were a very large portion of the population and excluding them would harm the war effort. At the same time the federal government perpetrated discrimination against Japanese-Americans, except they exercised more discretion in Hawaii where Japanese-Americans were a very large segment of the population.
  - justin66 3y ago
    > Interning a third of the population of Hawaii simply wasn't practical > At the same time the federal government perpetrated discrimination against Japanese-Americans, except they exercised more discretion in Hawaii where Japanese-Americans were a very large segment of the population. Hawaii, not a US state at the time, was largely occupied by the US military prior to Pearl Harbor. After Pearl Harbor its residents were subject to martial law and their civil rights were suspended. The situation there was not analogous to the situation on the mainland, so I wouldn't use it to draw any conclusions. > the only reason Your thesis isn't wildly off-base, but how often is anything done by humans done for one single, solitary reason?
cpuguy83 3y ago
What they did is the literal definition of bigotry. They rounded up as many Japanese-Americans as they could and put them in prisons under heavy guard without any cause other than other people that look like them attacked a military base. It was objectively wrong then, and it is wrong through all of time.
- atlantic 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - ok_dad 3y ago
    They were not fucking immigrants! These were people who had lived in the USA their whole lives, with several generations of American citizens in these families. Anyone arguing Japanese internment was just for securing America is the same type of person who would round up trans people or musings Muslims today the same way.
    - atlantic 3y ago
      You don't magically stop being an immigrant after a few years. Often it takes several generations to integrate. And particularly so if you form cultural enclaves and remain attached to your country of origin, as tends to be the case with the Japanese.
- ok_dad 3y ago
  I believe they actually rounded them up to steal their farms in California. Japanese farms were the most productive back then, and they held almost all the best farms. During the war, they had their land and things stolen by politically connected neighbors. http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist9/harvest.html#:~:text=The%20World%20War%20II%20evacuation,%2DJapanese”%20owners%20and%20lessees http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist9/harvest.html#:~:text=The%20Wor....
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  >other than other people that look like them You yourself are describing the people rounded up as Japanese (yes, with a qualifier). They were people more likely to have loyalty to an enemy state, weren't they? It was certainly a blunt tool; and not an issue I've looked at in detail; but do you expect FDR to have done nothing? Interesting for me to consider whether UK was right to round up Germans for WWII, rather difficult when that includes the Royal Family, but they did imprison something like 10% of "Germans" living in the UK (I don't know if they were British, just visiting, naturalised, or what).
willbudd 3y ago
Wow, I don't think I've ever seen anyone dial a strawman argument to 11 quite like you just did. Nobody was talking about FDR until you hamfistedly brought him up in a reply to a post (indirectly) lamenting a period of history rife with racism. Prejudice was rampant all across the "political spectrum", but prevalence is not a measure of justice or humanity. Nor does any individual's competency in one area somehow ameliorate their flaws in other areas.
MSFT_Edging 3y ago
FDR is an example of how a politician can be called a Socialist in the United States while also being extremely reactionary and push racist policies. If nothing else, this goes to show how far the scale is tipped in favor of right wing ideas and policies in the states and still is. The fact Biden, a fairly conservative politician, can be called a "Communist" with a straight face is an indictment of the American education system. The labels don't even mean anything after a while. You can actively be enforcing fascist policies and still be labeled a socialist due to a population wide inability to understand what words mean.
justin66 3y ago
> He's a hero of the left and one of the presidents who would least likely be described as a "reactionary bigot" in any other situation. those people have a pretty hypocritical and one-dimensional way of looking at history > More broadly I object to this very modern attitude wherein people in the past who did things we consider wrong today were evil bigots. but not me, I'm awesome

blululu 3y ago

The issue is combing reactionary and bigot. The internments were done the watch for Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal coalition - a left leaning political movement that laid the foundations of the modern American welfare state. There were definitely many blatant examples of bigotry in the policies of this movement but they were far from reactionary. Social issues change over time but the also correlate with otherwise unrelated social/political/economic issues so trying to apply political issues from 80 years ago into the modern era is going to lead to some incongruous positions.

SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
The modern American welfare state was also reactionary and bigoted towards black people and minorities. It’s important to recognize that much of the social programs explicitly excluded people of color and then used their understandeable lower quality of life due to lack of safety nets as a justification for further racism. Black people have bad neighborhoods, but of course black people didnt get government housing assistance to repair anything, because the federal programs for that explicitly excluded them.
- George83728 3y ago
  The same FDR signed Executive Order 8802, forbidding ethnic and racial discrimination in the defense industry and federal government.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
    And yet the federal housing administration continued to explicitly respect racist homeowner association laws (btw homeowner associations were originally created to enshrine into bylaws that no black people may rent or purchase a property), continued to offer lesser or worse terms, or would broadly consider black people too risky, until congress passed the fair housing act of 1968, decades later.
    - George83728 3y ago