Five Surprises About US Internment During World War II

[unhappycamper]

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/29029-five-surprises-about-american-internment-during-world-war-ii



In an undated handout photo from the National Archives, people of Japanese descent line up for a train that will take them to an internment camp at Gila River, Ariz. from the Santa Anita assembly camp in Arcadia, Calif., in 1942. The Supreme Court’s 1944 decision in Korematsu v. United States endorsed an executive order that required 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry to be removed from their homes and confined in detention camps during World War II.

Five Surprises About US Internment During World War II
Saturday, 14 February 2015 10:57
By Jan Jarboe Russell, Truthout

~snip~

Fact One: The arrests of suspected enemies extended far beyond our national borders. Under provisions of the Enemy Alien Act of 1798, the same act that allowed Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama to intern modern-day suspected terrorists, Roosevelt orchestrated the removal of 4,058 Germans, 2,264 Japanese and 288 Italians from 13 Latin American countries - and locked them up around the United States, many in a secret government internment camp located in Crystal City, Texas, an isolated desert town located at the southern tip of Texas, only 30 miles from the Mexican border. His reason? Roosevelt feared security threats from Germans and Japanese in Latin America.

Fact Two: Incredibly, among those taken from Latin America included a small number of Jews who had fled persecution in Germany. In his book, Nazis and Good Neighbors, Max Paul Friedman documented 81 Jews in Latin America who were part of the roundup. One Jewish family - the Jacobis from Columbia - was interned in the camp in Crystal City.

Fact Three: The entire political and military establishment applied pressure on Roosevelt to pursue a vigorous internment policy. The only person close to him who opposed it was Eleanor Roosevelt, who believed the case against immigrants was driven by wartime hysteria. "These people were not convicted of any crime but emotions ran too high, too many people wanted to wreak vengeance on Oriental looking people," she wrote of the evacuation order for the Japanese.

~snip~

Fact Four: One reason for the internment program was to create a pool of hostages to exchange for Americans trapped behind enemy lines in Europe and in the Pacific. FDR created a secret division within the Department of State called the Special War Problems Division, which negotiated numerous prisoner exchanges with Japan and Germany.

[Cooley Hurd]

1. "The only person close to him who opposed it was Eleanor Roosevelt"

THAT'S why she is still my hero to this day.

[Downwinder]

3. One of many reasons.

[OnyxCollie]

2. Fact Six: Like the Bush administration's case for war in Iraq,

the case for internment as a military necessity falls apart under scrutiny.

It did, like Iraq, allow for the overcoming of behavioral constraints through manipulation of social mechanisms to seize resources for the benefit of corporations.