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In reply to the discussion: I love the new meme: FDR Democrats are hurting the 99% by focusing on Snowden [View all]Bluenorthwest
(45,319 posts)but it was regionally applied, you say 'an entire race of people based solely on their ethnicity and nothing else' but geographic location was a big part of who got sent to camps. Japanese in Hawaii, no internment. On the East Coast, no internment. So why revise that to 'an entire race,based on ethnicity and nothing else'?
"The internment of Japanese Americans was applied unequally as a geographic matter: all who lived on the West Coast were interned, while in Hawaii, where 150,000-plus Japanese Americans comprised over one-third of the population, only 1,200[4] to 1,800 were interned. Sixty-two percent of the internees were American citizens.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the internment with Executive Order 9066, issued February 19, 1942, which allowed local military commanders to designate "military areas" as "exclusion zones," from which "any or all persons may be excluded." This power was used to declare that all people of Japanese ancestry were excluded from the entire Pacific coast, including all of California and much of Oregon, Washington and Arizona, except for those in internment camps."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment
No one is pretending FDR had no flaws, but some pretend the history, intention and parameters of the internment were much different than they really were. It was not the entire population of Japanese heritage, it was not 'ethnicity and nothing else'. It was a large war, Imperial Japan attacked the West Coast several times and was seeking new and better ways to do so. They were doing some horrific shit in China which we did not want to happen here. War,it was fucking all out war. Oregon had civilian deaths from Japanese bomb.
Is this wartime? Do we have lots of brown Muslims in prisons? Did FDR keep people for 'indefinite detentions'? Internment ended before the war ended. When does Gitmo end again?