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semi-automatic history: US concentration camps and Krasnov's ignorance [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-07-02
In 1942, the U.S. government forcibly removed more than 110,000 ethnically Japanese people from their homes and sent them to internment camps in remote parts of the country. 2/3s were US citizens.
Register Communists, not guns.
Historians call it “willful ignorance” when Germans said “we didn’t know” as their neighbors disappeared. But Americans do know. About the raids. The camps. The mass deportations. Silence now isn’t ignorance. It’s complicity. #WeKnow #HistoryIsWatching
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has ignited a firestorm of criticism, from both the left and the right as well as the mainstream media, for calling US immigrant detention centers "concentration camps." To her credit, Ocasio-Cortez has refused to back down, citing academic experts and blasting the Trump administration for forcibly holding undocumented migrants "where they are brutalized with dehumanizing conditions and dying." She also cited history. "The US ran concentration camps before, when we rounded up Japanese people during World War II," she tweeted. "It is such a shameful history that we largely ignore it. These camps occur throughout history." Indeed they do. What follows is an overview of US civilian concentration camps through the centuries. Prisoner-of-war camps, as horrific as they have been, have been excluded due to their legal status under the Geneva Conventions, and for brevity's sake.
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In addition to Japanese and some Germans, a smaller number of Italians and Italian-Americans were also imprisoned during World War II. So were the indigenous Aleuts of Alaska, who were forcibly evacuated before their villages were burned to the ground to prevent any invading Japanese forces from using them. Nearly 900 Aleuts were imprisoned in abandoned factories and other derelict facilities without plumbing, electricity or toilets; decent food, potable water and warm winter clothing were in short supply. Nearly 10 percent of the detainees died in the camps. Others were enslaved and forced to hunt fur seals.
During the early years of the Cold War, Congress passed the Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950 over President Harry Truman's veto, which led to the construction of six concentration camps that were meant to hold communists, peace activists, civil rights leaders and others deemed a threat in the event the government declared a state of emergency. The act was upheld by the Supreme Court during the McCarthy/Red Scare years but in the 1960s the high court ruled that provisions requiring communists to register with the government and banning them from obtaining passports or government employment were unconstitutional. The camps, which were never used, were closed by the end of the decade.
www.commondreams.org/…
Gemini:
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