Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Internment of Japanese-Americans

1. If I were a Journalist in 1942, I could write a very controversial story by comparing the internment camps to what Hitler was doing to the Jewish people and how hypocritical we were being, or I could side with the Japanese-Americans and create a story about how wrong it was to put the Japanese-Americans forcibly into camps, which would be violating their civil rights as Americans in the first place. They were not found guilty of anything and were being stereotyped and discriminated against. If we were placing Japanese-Americans in internment camps, why not the German-Americans? It was only because the panic of the time that made the President do this. There was no killing or torturing or any sort in these camps, but the feeling of getting shipped away from your family and placed into these cramped camps probably felt the same. We were fighting Germany to get these Jewish people out of the camps in Germany, but meanwhile we had people of our own trapped in camps as well!
2.  I probably wouldn't do this because people back in the 1940's had a different view of discriminating and saying offensive things like racial slurs. It was a different time period and the government just wanted the people to feel safe, and wouldn't want people to feel like any kind of Japanese person deserved to be around us. The government used propaganda of the Japanese to make a certain hatred of Japanese people in America, so the story wouldn't make people too happy because they wanted to hear about how bad the Japanese were, even if they were American because they could be aiding the Japanese. 

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