At 03:34 PM 8/28/97 PDT, John Smith wrote: ...
Keep in mind too that we should try not to rely too much on hindsight. Camps like Manzanar were relatively benign. But instead of a Japanese American, consider a Jew in Poland. He's in the same situation. Hindsight tells us that maybe he'd do better to drive off the cops and then try to escape before they come back. Few Jews anticipated that the internment they were sent to was going to be any worse than how it turned out for the Japanese Americans. So if you want to say that the Japanese was not justified in shooting because the camps were likely to be safe, the same would apply to the Jew. ...
I didn't find out about the Japaneese concentration camps until after I saw the karate kid and had it explained to me. As I had most of my high school career ahead of me at the time, that much info should have made me aware of the lessons covering them in my various high school history classes. Nearly every history class I have had has either stopped sometime around the end of the civil war, stayed in Oklahoma, stopped around WWI with the United States held as the hero of the event, or glossed over the entire Japaneese concentration camp story. And I thought my teachers were fairly open minded. And we fault the Germans and Japaneese for not owning up to thier wartime misdeeds. Incidently, I didn't know that many Jews were turned away from the united states borders during WWII either until an article came out about it in one of the weeklies.