Years ago my highschool English teacher had us read "Night" by Elie Weisel and "Farewell to Manzanaar" by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and asked us to do a dual book report comparing and contrasting the two. You can guess which one of those was the one she added to the curriculum. Here's some takeaways I still have to this day about it.
God bless my English teacher. Years later my sister went on a rant about how she'd gone through her entire education and never heard about the internment camps until George Fucking Takei of all goddamn people talked about it. I tried to think why that was dropped between when she and I went to school and realized I only know about them from my english teacher. If history covered them, we brushed over it pretty quick.
I think it is fair to argue that as fucked up as the Japanese internment camps were, they were not on the same tier as the holocaust. They were fucking concentration camps done out of a combination of either outright xenophobia or greed since huge amounts of land from Japanese Americans was seized in the process....but at the very least they represented something lesser then a campaign of outright mass industrial ethnic cleansing. They were still an evil...but that argument cuts both ways when it comes to comparing our situation to china.
I don't know how bad the situation really is in China...but it seems to me like there should be a high bar to tossing around holocaust rhetoric and I find it a bit too easy and uncomfortable the way (as chomsky put it) Americans seem able to judge China by its actions and ourselves by our intentions.
Years ago my highschool English teacher had us read "Night" by Elie Weisel and "Farewell to Manzanaar" by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and asked us to do a dual book report comparing and contrasting the two. You can guess which one of those was the one she added to the curriculum. Here's some takeaways I still have to this day about it.
God bless my English teacher. Years later my sister went on a rant about how she'd gone through her entire education and never heard about the internment camps until George Fucking Takei of all goddamn people talked about it. I tried to think why that was dropped between when she and I went to school and realized I only know about them from my english teacher. If history covered them, we brushed over it pretty quick.
I think it is fair to argue that as fucked up as the Japanese internment camps were, they were not on the same tier as the holocaust. They were fucking concentration camps done out of a combination of either outright xenophobia or greed since huge amounts of land from Japanese Americans was seized in the process....but at the very least they represented something lesser then a campaign of outright mass industrial ethnic cleansing. They were still an evil...but that argument cuts both ways when it comes to comparing our situation to china. I don't know how bad the situation really is in China...but it seems to me like there should be a high bar to tossing around holocaust rhetoric and I find it a bit too easy and uncomfortable the way (as chomsky put it) Americans seem able to judge China by its actions and ourselves by our intentions.