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I'm curious how you suppose armed conflict would have helped Americans of Japanese descent during World War 2. Even in Los Angeles and San Francisco they were
by fancyketchup 13y ago
I'm curious how you suppose armed conflict would have helped Americans of Japanese descent during World War 2. Even in Los Angeles and San Francisco they were a minority, and were viewed with suspicion by much of the rest of society (Americans of German descent mostly gave up speaking and writing in German, despite being a plurality). It would have been almost trivial for the government to eliminate sympathetic feelings in the rest of the population by simply issuing propaganda saying that resistance by Japanese-Americans was actually a guerrilla campaign on behalf of the Empire of Japan.
So then what? Japanese-Americans give up all their possessions and live the hills? Where would they get food, guns and ammunition? After the war, there would be no way for them to reintegrate into society.
As for the Black Panthers, I would argue that images of them carrying weapons in the media did more harm than good to their cause. Today few people remember them as a community service organization and most remember them as a sort of quasi-terrorist death squad. A recent presidential candidate was even intimated to have had some sort of nebulous association with them as a way of tarnishing his reputation (though I hear he won anyway).
So I'm underwhelmed by arguments that guns are going to stop a tyrannical government. They may stop one that is completely inept, but a government with even modest propaganda resources will have no trouble playing one group of citizens against the other. Firearms enthusiasts aren't going to be portrayed as 'freedom fighters' by the media: They will be called 'terrorists' or 'cop killers.'
Not that I'm against gun ownership (though I don't personally own one). I just don't live under the misapprehension that it's going to magically 'solve government.'
- jcrites 13y agoI don't think his point was that firearm ownership by Americans of Japanese descent during WW2 would have been effective. I think his claim was that injustices have happened in America of the sort for which armed resistance is proportional and potentially warranted from the perspective of those whose rights were infringed. > Japanese American internment was the World War II internment in "War Relocation Camps" of about 110,000 people of Japanese heritage who lived on the Pacific coast of the United States. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment