PRISONERS WITHOUT TRIALS; JAPANESE AMERICANS IN WORLD WAR II. (ROGER DANIELS).   Term Paper ID:28435 Click to get this paper

Essay Subject: Discusses internment in context of U.S. history of prejudice & discrimination.... More...

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Paper Abstract: Discusses internment in context of U.S. history of prejudice & discrimination. Paper Introduction: Roger Daniels, in Prisoners Without Trials: Japanese Americans in World War II, makes clear that the internment of Japanese-Americans was not simply a fluke that was justifiable during wartime. To the contrary, that internment was part and parcel of both the long American history of prejudice and discrimination against minorities in general (Native Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, etc.) and especially against Asian Americans. The argument that the interment was justified because Japanese Americans posed a threat to the security of the United States ignores the fact that Italian Americans and German Americans were not rounded up and placed in internment camps. This was true despite the fact that Germany and Italy were enemies in World War II along with Japan. The racism of the Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. Two-thirds of them wereAmerican citizens who might have expected to be protected by thatcitizenship and the laws of the land, but they were not. The question, however, is whether slavery and genocide arestandards by which to assess the relative goodness or evil of the actionsof the government of the United States. Theauthor also notes that what happened once to one group of Americans in onecrisis could well happen to another group in another crisis. Daniels carefully and passionately presents the background and factsof this episode of racism and places it in its historical context. In other words, the governmentwhich interned Japanese Americans during World War II is the samegovernment which forty years later determined that the internment wasunjustified and was instead an action based on racism and politics. When Chinese immigration stopped, Americans found it easy to shifttheir racial prejudice to the new immigrants, the Japanese. Work CitedDaniels, Roger. New York; Hill and Wang,1999.----------------------- 6 This was true despite the fact that Germany andItaly were enemies in World War II along with Japan. On one hand, the internment of a group of Americans solely on thebasis of their nationality and appearance had never occurred before in theUnited States. Thegovernment and the people had been discriminating against the Chinese sincethe mid-nineteenth century, when hundreds of thousands of Chinese came tomake money in the Gold Rush, a situation in which the Asian immigrants weregravely exploited economically and legally deprived of their rights. The argument that the interment was justified because JapaneseAmericans posed a threat to the security of the United States ignores thefact that Italian Americans and German Americans were not rounded up andplaced in internment camps. Clearly, it does not excuse orminimize what the United States did to the Japanese Americans to simply saythat it was not as bad as slavery or genocide. The livesof those Japanese Americans were forever altered. Over one hundred thousand Japanese Americans were put in internmentcamps for up to four years, not as the result of some bureaucrat'sdecision, or because of a series of mistakes, but because the President ofthe United States, acting with all the power of the government and withlegal approval, signed a decree implementing such an internment. Prisoners Without Trial. Clearly, those cynics who would minimize the suffering of theJapanese Americans in the camps, or who would discount the claim that theinternment was part and parcel of historical American racism againstminorities in general and Asian Americans in particular, simply are in astate of ignorance about this ugly chapter in American history. The racism of theAmerican government and the people who allowed internment to occur isevident in such a discriminatory decision, for of the three enemies inWorld War II, only the Japanese stood out in appearance from otherAmericans. The claim thatthis was connected to the military security of the United States was anunsupported falsehood which did not justify robbing those citizens of thefreedom, their property, their livelihoods, their dignity, and their trustin the government and the people of the United States. Daniels points out that the internment of 12 , Japanese Americanswas unjustified on military or security grounds and that this finding wasdelivered not by a group of Japanese Americans, not by a civil rightsorganization, but in 1981 by the Presidential Commission on the WartimeRelocation and Internment of Civilians. One could make the argument that the internment of theJapanese Americans was not as evil and cruel and prolonged an injustice asthose which were perpetrated against the African Americans or NativeAmericans. The question of whether the internment was a fluke is also easilyanswered by a study of the history of the United States and itsgovernment's habitual maltreatment of minorities, especially minoritieswhose appearance mark them as "different" from most Americans (i.e., whiteAmericans). For those who would minimize the maltreatment of the JapaneseAmericans in the internment camps, saying that it was not such a terribleexperience, Daniels makes clear that it was indeed terrible. In other words, by the systematic discrimination against AsianAmericans on the part of the government and the acquiescent Americanpeople, the stage had been long set for the internment of the 194 s. Still, theJapanese constituted a minuscule part of the population even when theinternment occurred, so the fear of the Japanese threat to nationalsecurity was still unjustified. Roger Daniels, in Prisoners Without Trials: Japanese Americans inWorld War II, makes clear that the internment of Japanese-Americans was notsimply a fluke that was justifiable during wartime. To the contrary, thatinternment was part and parcel of both the long American history ofprejudice and discrimination against minorities in general (NativeAmericans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, etc.) and especiallyagainst Asian Americans. Had Germany attacked Pearl Harbor, it is unlikely thatsuch internment would have occurred, at least in part because GermanAmericans would not have been as readily identified as Japanese Americanswere. The American government and its mostly white population were eager tostrike out at the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, and, because it would bemany months before the nation was prepared to hit back at the Japanesemilitary, the Japanese Americans provided a quick, safe, and easilyrecognizable target. The JapaneseAmericans were as much as in prison, surrounded by barbed wire, watched byguards, in isolated areas in the nation, and, perhaps worst of all, notknowing if they would ever be allowed to return to their homes and thelives they once lived. Daniels points out that Asians and Asian Americans had been thetarget of racism since the nineteenth century in the United States,beginning with the Chinese and extending into the twentieth century,culminating with the internment of Japanese Americans. Had Germany and Italy been located in Asia, or Africa, meaningthat German Americans and Italian Americans would have appeared "foreign"to Americans, it is likely that German Americans and Italian Americanswould have been locked up in internment camps as well. If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.

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