Political Correctness



None to be found here at least not where the Japanese were concerned.

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[deleted]

I trust you're being sarcastic, as "political correctness" is an invention of the 1990's...

There's a horrible danger in viewing history through today's eyes.

I don't act...I react. John Wayne

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I don't know if sarcastic is the right word but I know what you mean and agree.

I was pointing out that times have changed and in many ways for the better.

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I "feel" ya, my friend.

A lot of things HAVE changed for the better.

I don't act...I react. John Wayne

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Some things have gotten better, but how a perceived enemy of this country is regarded isn't one of them. Just look at the scapegoating and hatred directed at Muslims now. It's as bad as it was for the Japanese back then.


"The value of an idea has nothing to do with the honesty of the man expressing it."--Oscar Wilde

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The Japanese were hardly "perceived" enemies in 1944. They were the real McCoy.

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...except for the more than 100,000 US citizens of Japanese descent who were interned in camps during WWII. They weren't the real McCoy...but were treated that way. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese-American_internment

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My point is that things haven't changed when we speak of scapegoating and blanket judgment. We're just as liable to prejudice as we ever were.


"The value of an idea has nothing to do with the honesty of the man expressing it."--Oscar Wilde

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gaywarrior thinks the Japanese were "perceived" enemies in World War II.

What kind of history classes have you taken, gay?

Left wing ones, it sounds like.

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[deleted]

I'm sure you think the inmates of Manzanar were all enemies of the USA too. You'd have been one of the patriots rounding them up and locking the door behind them. Not all Japanese were enemies of the US. Your simplistic black-and-white thinking is what drove the disgusting stereotypes in the first place.

"The value of an idea has nothing to do with the honesty of the man expressing it."--Oscar Wilde

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I'm sure you think the inmates of Manzanar were all enemies of the USA too.


How do you know there weren't a few enemy sympathizers in the mix who needed to be exposed? Answer:you don't.

After we were blindsided at Pearl Harbor there was a lot of confusion and legitimate fear of spies. I've seen documentaries where Japanese Americans stated the internment camps were tragic yet necessary for the security of our nation. My Dad was a sailor in the Pacific theater from '42-45 and he used to tell me we'd have lost that war if today's WIMPY political correctness had been in place back then.

I believe him.

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Depends on what you mean by "political correctness." There probably were, as you say, "a few enemy sympathizers in the mix." So what? Taking away the rights of the many just to capture the few is about as unAmerican as you can get. My dad was a flier in the Pacific during the same time period. He had to bomb targets without worrying who was guilty and who wasn't. We had no such lack of choice in how we treated American citizens who came of Asian families.

What we did then was exactly the same as assuming now that someone with a Latin background must be an "illegal alien." "Round them up," some people say. Well, there are Latino people whose families have been American for longer than some "Anglos." Protecting basic American rights is now and will always be politically and ethically correct, and there's nothing wrong with that.


"The value of an idea has nothing to do with the honesty of the man expressing it."--Oscar Wilde

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Well, once we defeated our deadly ENEMIES, the USA was very magnanimous to them. Back then, we knew how to WIN wars and how to win the peace as well.

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Quite true!

"A real man would rather bow down to a strong woman than dominate a weak one"

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Guys,

We really need to study our country's history and put ourselves in a certain era to really understand what went on. So much of an era goes unreported and, as the old expression says, "History is written by the victors." This is true here. There was no sense of political correctness during WWII, as we understand it. Americans were less aware of other cultures and, largely, viewed any other culture than WASP Middle American as suspect or, in the best of times, merely tolerated. Wartime greatly exacerbated lingering prejudices the "average" American had of people unlike themselves. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese submarines were off Southern California and bombed an oil storage tank outside of Santa Barbara. See the film "1941" about that incident and time. By people who lived in So CA during that time that I got to meet, Americans were deservedly freaked out at the possibility of invasion by the Japanese. Documents now declassified reveal that President Roosevelt was, at first, against forcibly relocating Japanese-Americans to internment camps but many West Coast politicians and industrialists called for their internment. By no stretch of the imagination was it morally or legally right to uproot and entire group of people, strip them of their rights, and hate upon them because of fears. Sound familiar in 2015? But, in an era of great fear and with being attacked so closely, the climate was ripe for dictatorial measures. People forget that, along with the Japanese-Americans, 11,000 Italian-Americans were forcibly removed from their homes and placed in internment camps. The editor of the leading Italian newspaper on the West Coast remained interned for the duration of the war, simply for being a resident alien born in Italy.
The WWII era was the era of such rigid racial segregation that even the armed forces were segregated and African-American soldiers were, largely, prohibited from fighting because their "inferiority" made them good only for service positions. Remember the case of the Tuskegee Airmen? Their story is significant because they had to prove to the US Armed Forces that they were competent soldiers! Imagine that in 2015! Anyone ever hear of the Zoot Suit Riots, the Sleepy Lagoon Case, and the truly horrifying race riot in Detroit in 1943 that almost shut down the city when rural white Southerners flocked to Detroit and worked side by side with Blacks. For this, see "The Dollmaker", with Jane Fonda. As if the racial climate were not bad enough, the US intervened in Latin American countries and rounded up Latin Americans of Japanese ancestry and interned them in American internment camps.

As ugly as America's racial history has been and continues to be, the U. S. was under direct physical threat to it's territory as it not had been since the Civil War. One poster talked about how we "knew how to win the peace". Well, WWII was fought for American survival from what we learned was the genocidal will of Hitler, Tojo, and, to a far lesser extent, Mussolini. All other wars since WWII have not been fought to protect American territory but to protect American economic zones, actual and potential. As superpower, we didn't start the Korean or Vietnam wars but we fought in them to keep those areas well under the sphere of American capitalism, NOT for the freedom of the fighting populations. Every military American action, without exception, since WWII, has been to maintain and/or increase American economic and political dominance in the world. How well can we "win the peace" in those wars when we started most of them and they were about dominance, not territorial protection.

Again, with the film, as with any film, one must be truly aware of what was going on in the US and the world at any given time to understand why films were made the way they were.

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PC is Novocaine for the brain.

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Read up on Bataan before thinking the Japs were deserving of any political correctness.

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Don't forget the 98 Civilian Engineers on Wake Island, who were slaughtered on 07 October 1943.

May G-D Bless them and keep them.








I do hope he won't upset Henry...

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