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Prejudice And Similarities Between Pearl Harbor And 9/11

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“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This famous quote by the novelist and philosopher George Santanya exemplifies the problem this country has with immigrants and foreigners. While the focus of certain immigrant groups has changed, the standards by which foreigners under fire are treated has not changed. That is to say, the peoples being discriminated against may change, but there is always a specific group or groups of people that are treated with prejudice, and continue to be discriminated against even by the government of the country they are in. The Japanese were treated outrageously after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. However, this attention has recently been shifted to a new group. After the attack on the Twin …show more content…

Indeed, this was and is a widespread phenomenon after both Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Institutional Discrimination is the denial of opportunities and rights to individuals or groups, resulting from the normal operations of society. Following Pearl Harbor, the Japanese suddenly found themselves in internment camps. They had to get rid of most of their possessions and their property was seized by the American government. Eight hundred Japanese-American volunteers built the biggest national internment camp, Manzanar. There was no insulation, no privacy, and had very tight security. The Japanese-Americans were in these concentration camps from December 1942 to November 1945. After the camps were closed, the people had nowhere to go. Their land taken, most of their possessions gone, and no money. In addition, because of extreme prejudice, they could hardly find any work. Both Italian and German-Americans were also detained at some points during the war, although they were not put in concentration camps. Around 11,000 people of German descent and 3,000 people of Italian ancestry were detained. Many of them were …show more content…

In September 1942, the NAACP's magazine, The Crisis, ran an article titled “Americans In Concentration Camps,” which courageously noted that “Color seems to be the only reason why thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry are in concentration camps. Anyway, there are no Italian-American or German-American citizens in such camps.” (Greene) Fred Korematsu was a Japanese-American who refused to be put into a concentration camp, ignoring an Executive order by Franklin D. Roosevelt, went into hiding. In 1942, he was finally arrested. He took the case all the way to Supreme Court but lost. He was released after the end of World War II, but the conviction on his record was not overturned until

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Mary Matsuda Gruenewald tells her tale of what life was like for her family when they were sent to internment camps in her memoir “Looking like the Enemy.” The book starts when Gruenewald is sixteen years old and her family just got news that Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japan. After the bombing Gruenewald and her family life changed, they were forced to leave their home and go to internment camps meant for Japanese Americans. During the time Gruenewald was in imprisonment she dealt with the struggle for survival both physical and mental. This affected Gruenewald great that she would say to herself “Am I Japanese?

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In the CNN article “Muslim hearings recall my life in internment camps,” Rep. Michael Honda claims that during his experience in internment in World War II, the people were treated like cattles. Regardless of whether they were born in America or patriotic Americans and obeying the law, and providing to the American economy, they were considering at the enemies during the war. Yet, there was no reasonable answer for them to be imprisoned. After 65 years, the devastating event of September 11 happened and the similar experience of Rep. Michael Honda had reoccurred, but this time, it was targeting the Muslim Americans. Honda briefly described his experience during the internment camps in the beginning of the article.

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As opposed to righteous view that America was safeguarding its position in the war, the Japanese American internments were created out of resentment and racial prejudice fostered by other Americans. As the article “Personal Justice Denied” stated, the internments were led by “widespread ignorance of Japanese Americans contributed to a policy conceived in haste and executed in an atmosphere of fear and anger at Japan” (Doc E, 1983). It may seem like a precautionary cause to make internments but there aren’t any other extreme measures for other fronts. Caused by a hatred stirred by media and society’s view, many people disdain the Japanese.

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The government then imprisoned over 100,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps in fear of them becoming traitors. They had also taken any radios and kept them away from the coast. Japanese american men were allowed to fight in the war but only in europe not in the pacific. The japanese americans made supplies for the troops when they were in the camps. The camps were crowded and provided poor living conditions.

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During WWII Japanese-Americans and prisoners of war were sent to camps. Two of those people that were sent to camps were Louie Zamperini and Miné Okubo. Louie Zamperini was drafted to go to war when he was young. He was on a mission to find a missing plane when his own plane crashed in the ocean. He was later captured by the Japanese and sent to a POW camp.

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How would you feel if one day you were told to leave your whole life behind to live in captivity just because people halfway across the world did something wrong? This horror story was all too true for the thousands of Japanese Americans alive during World War II. Almost overnight, thousands of proud Japanese Americans living on the west coast were forced to leave their homes and give up the life they knew. The United States government was not justified in the creation of Japanese internment camps because it stripped law-abiding American citizens of their rights out of unjustified fear.

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“The internment of Japanese Americans in the United States was the forced relocation and incarceration during World War II of between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry who lived on the Pacific coast in camps in the interior of the country.” (Crawford 1). After the attack, the government felt threatened by the Japanese. Therefore, they could not trust any, even the ones living in the United States. Franklin D. Roosevelt issued the relocation of Japanese Americans to internment camps or military camps where they were not allowed to leave.

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When put into the Japanese Internment Camps, Japanese-Americans were held at gunpoint and forced to leave their homes. After they were released from the camps, Japanese-Americans didn’t have a home to go back to. Not to mention the fact that the Nazi Concentration Camps left survivors mentally damaged and some mentally and physically disabled while the Japanese Internment Camps left survivors in a stable condition. In the Nazi Concentration Camps, prisoners were used as test subjects and those who did survive were left mentally or physically disabled. Even then,

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America, unfortunately, has a past stained with the cruel treatment of many different groups of people, from the relocation of American Indians and slavery of Africans in the 19th century. This pattern became evident when the United States issued the forced internment of Japanese-American citizens after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The common denominator of these unconstitutional ransoms of civil liberties lies with racial and ethnic dehumanization. In Mary Matsuda Gruenewald’s book, Looking Like the Enemy, she illustrates the dark injustices with her personal account of Japanese-American internment. Just three months after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066.

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The internment of Japanese Americans during WWII was not justified. After Pearl Harbor, many Americans were scared of the Japanese Americans because they could sabotage the U.S. military. To try and solve the fear President Franklin D Roosevelt told the army in Executive order 9066 to relocate all Japanese Americans living on the West Coast. They were relocated to detention centers in the desert. Many of them were in the detention centers for three years.

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Whilst the Japanese were being sent to the camps, many people on the west coast were hanging racist signs in storefronts and neighborhoods giving the obvious notice that Japs were not welcome. This attitude of hatred is what caused the poor conditions of the internment camps on the west coast, carried out and justified by the idea that the white Americans were better than the Japanese Americans due to the suspicion of espionage. The Japanese Americans were thought of as spies therefor they were thrown into internment camps where the discriminatory attitude of western Americans brought upon their unjust treatment. The pressure of WWII caused the American government to make unecessary precautions in hopes of protecting a nation when they in fact they divided it.

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Japanese internment camps made us question who was really an American and it relates to today’s issues. Internment camps were similar to concentration camps or prison and Japanese-Americans were put into them. Even though they were considered Americans, they were still treated unfairly by other Americans. So who is American?

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World War II was a tumultuous period marked by numerous atrocities, including the internment of Japanese-Americans in the United States and the mass persecution of Jews in Nazi concentration camps. Although these events occurred in different contexts, they both resulted in severe suffering and had lasting impacts on the affected communities. This essay aims to compare the experiences of Japanese-Americans born in internment camps after World War II and Jews in concentration camps during the war, highlighting both their shared struggles and unique circumstances. Both Japanese-Americans born in internment camps and Jews in concentration camps endured significant hardships and human rights violations. In both cases, individuals were forcibly uprooted from their homes and subjected to living conditions that were often deplorable.

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Thesis statement: Though many speculate that the act of dropping the atomic bomb on Japan (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) while not doing so on Europe (Germany and Italy) was racially motivated, racism played little to no role in these bombings. The United States of America and her allies were willing to end World War II at any cost, had the atomic bombs been available they would have been deployed in Europe. In the 1940’s there is no doubt that the United States of America was engulfed by mass anti-Japanese hysteria which inevitably bled over into America’s foreign policy. During this period Japanese people living in both Japan and the United States of America were seen as less that human.

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Another group was soon persecuted after the Chinese immigrants were deported: the Japanese, who had come to work in mines and agriculture on the West Coast. Just as Americans today treat Mexican immigrants, the Japanese were seen as threats to security. A “yellow peril” ensued, and governments proposed pieces of legislation to segregate the Japanese from other American citizens (Brown). The unfair treatment of Japanese-Americans parallels with the current decrees of politicians that immigrants are stealing jobs and are a threat to U.S.

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