Forums → WEPR → Lincoln vs.FDR

@msterXantos, I don't know where you live, but I kinda have to disagree with you on the fact that I don't think that everyone has been rascist at one point or another.Everything else though could be considered true,but the japanese people from the camps, who were still alive when the first bush got into office got compensated with tons of $$$,along with a sencere apology from the government.

@MsterXantos

Your blatant racism against the Japanese proves that you cannot have a reasonable discussion in this topic. I have no reason to respond to your comments anymore.

@thelistman
first off i'm positive you have been racist before and i am not racist against Japanese i think if there were people who coudl possibly attack my citizens i woudl react the same way now not everyoen shoudl have been

@MsterXantos

"if you know how tricky the Japanese are you don't want to have them buying arms and internally killign the states"

You claimed the Japanese were "tricky" and trying to bring the US down. Do you realize that tens of thousands of Japanese people living in the States joined the US army right after the Pearl Harbor attacks?

You are so racist that you don't even realize it.

I say Lincoln. He revolutionized our country and made it the country we are today.

@superzMcShort

A necessary evil?!?! They cannot surely believe that. Do you think the Jews, gays, Slavs, Gypsies, and mentally handicapped willingly went to concentration camps because it was a necessary evil? No way! I don't believe you in any way.

@thelistman

You also have to realize that a lot of the Japanese who signed up for the military did so in spite of their families and friends and in some cases themselves being put in these camps. I personally have spoken with Japanese Americans who lived through this (the one I talked to went to a camp first, then joined the army) and throughout the whole ordeal the impression I got was that most of them understood why it was being done and thought of it as a necessary evil that they had to endure. Of course this opinion is just based on what I personally have been told and what I have heard, and I recognize that, but it's important that you also recognize that things were different then and were even farther remove from they are now when Lincoln was President and some parts of the Army of the Potomac viewed him as a traitor because of the emancipation proclamation.

@thelistman

Did you not read what I posted where I said people who lived through it conveyed to me that the general feeling was that it was a nessicary evil that they had to endure and for the most part they still loved the United States as a country and many were still behind the war effort and that none of it is my personal opinion (which, since you asked so nicely is that the whole thing was ridiculous, but not any more ridiculous then almost everything that we do for any reason).

On top of that the Japanese Interment camps were similar to the sites on the Holocaust in that groups of people were brought there based on ancestry, but the parallels pretty much stop there. Were they exterminated by the thousands? Were they forced to work long hours without being fed or clothed? Were they deliberately underfed until, at the point of liberation most persons inside looked more like skeletons then people? I am in no way advocating for the interment of an entire culture for (largely) no actual reason, all I'm saying is that the people that I've talked through, who lived through that time period, and were supporters of the United States (included those that were placed at internment camps) could see the reasoning behind it, and for the most part, as far as I can tell, agreed with that reasoning.

@thelistman
as i said before i would not have imprisoned all of them just the newly arrived for safety reasons and i am not racist i just agree that measures needed to be taken to secure the homeland

@SuperzMcShort-
Read The Invisible Thread by Yoshiko Uchida, life in the internment camps sucked, they greatly disliked it. Also, the elderly and young often died because of the limited food and water and heat.

@MsterXantos-
If we wanted to be safe, why stop with the Japanese, why not incarcerate the Germans? Oh yeah, because the Japanese with 138,000 total people barely comprised one-tenth of one percent of all voters, compared to the many millions who could trace their roots to Germany. People were racist against the Japanese, because of Pearl Harbor, FDR jumped on it to garner votes for future elections.

I totally agree with necro. If we treated everyone like the Japanese, we would also have to imprison every German, Italian, Romanian, Slovak, Finn, Bulgarian, Iraqi, Thai, Greek, Macedonian, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Filipino, Albanian, Montenegrin, Serb, Croatian and Hungarian person. Arguably also the Spanish, French, Danish, and Russians who often collaborated with the Nazis.

If you trace everyone's roots back, there would be no one left to fight for the US. It was obviously a racist measure, because the Japanese look different than everyone else.

@necromancer
I know that they sucked (though food was rationed all around the U.S. as you may know, and I'm not surprised that many people died because many people died everywhere before modern medicine really came about with something like a 40% infant mortality rate in 1940), and that they were unfair, and that the laws themselves were racist. However what I've been trying to say this entire thread is that while it may seem a horrible thing to do (which it was) it was at the time supported by the populous and as I've said already in this thread not all the Japanese themselves felt that they were justified (and I'm not saying that was the only opinion or even the prevailing opinion but rather that it did exist which should say something about how the people at the time valued their worth.

Since this is a Lincoln vs. FDR thread though why is this all we're discussing? If you want to do an in depth examination of FDR's actions then shouldn't we be giving the same scrutiny to those of Lincoln? Like the fact that many people think that he only decreed the emancipation proclamation for political reasons himself (namely to keep Europe out of the war and gain political support in the North) or maybe about how he suspended Habeas Corpus so that he could keep himself in power (a decision that has set precedents for all sorts of horrible actions in that the executive branch has taken since then.