Huh?
Democrat Steny Hoyer wants the United States to pay reparations to Guam for what Guam suffered under the Imperial Japanese during WWII.
What am I not getting here?
World War II reparations, in general, are just wrong. And this is even more wrong than most. We're supposed to pay for what Japan did to Guam? What are the Democrats drinking these days?
A personal story: My mother-in-law's father was a German-born pharmacist here in the U.S. who spent part of WWII in an internment camp in the Pacific Northwest. He lost his business. My mother-in-law and her mother were not put in a camp, but needless to say their existence was difficult. They even changed their last name from a German surname to "Smith."
Funny thing, no one ever seems to talk about the Italians and Germans who were in WWII internment camps. The media and politicians seem to focus exclusively on the Japanese. One might almost wonder if there is some reverse racial prejudice going on here...don't Europeans matter? To my knowledge, no politician has ever looked at paying reparations to my mother-in-law's family. Nor would she expect it, nor should it be paid. Nor should the Japanese have received reparations. I don't understand why the Japanese were singled out to receive large sums of taxpayer dollars when they weren't the only ethnic group who spent time in internment camps.
Hindsight is 20/20, and history as it's lived in real time isn't always perfect. We need to learn from history and move on. The internment camps made sense at a scary time in our nation's history, when we had been attacked on American soil for the first time and didn't know whether more attacks were coming. In this post-9/11 era, I feel all the more sympathetic to the suspicions and anxieties our citizens must have felt after Pearl Harbor.
What's incredibly appalling is that Americans died to free Guam, but that's not enough for Democrat Hoyer, who wants to hand out taxpayer money like candy to the survivors of violence caused by another nation!
Lunacy, sheer lunacy.
posted by Laura @ 11:03 PM
14 Comments:
Laura, you have just hit on one of my all-time favorite gripes! I am at school so I hope I remember to come back to this issue. (Did you know that this is a huge deal in public schools who always have some "poor Japanese, bad Americans" slant on this?)
Dear Laura--
My father was also interned during WWII. He was taken from our farm near Spokane, WA and sent to 4 different internment camps. My mother, brother and I, who were all born in the U.S., were left
behind but subjected to harrassment by the U.S. government.
Please check out this website: www.gaic.info
I am one of the founding members of the GAIC.
Ursula Vogt Potter (my father was Karl Vogt)
Please note: Polite dissent and discussion of varied points of view is welcome.
However, calling others who have posted comments rude names -- or making unfounded slanderous assumptions about their motivations -- is unacceptable in this forum, hence the repeated deletions.
Thank you,
Laura
Ursula, Thank you very much for that interesting link. I have replied to you further privately.
Eric, I'd be interested to hear more about your experiences.
Best wishes,
Laura
Oh, I see. I understand now how your blog works. You can sit at your computer and offer your obtuse opinions but you will delete those remarks who disagree with you. I noticed that everyone who posts is in agreement. Not a very exciting board and it most certainly shows your cowardice.
Dear Asian Panther,
If you had read this blog for any length of time, you would know that some posts do disagree with me, and they are always left up for discussion as long as they don't call names or use foul language. If having standards for discussion is "cowardice," so be it, that's the pleasure of having one's own blog.
Personally, I believe one must be on shaky ground if it is necessary for you to indulge in name-calling or to slander those with whom you disagree, rather than politely stating your points. You might also want to think about the fact that you might be more likely to win others to your point of view through friendly and reasoned discussion.
Best wishes,
Laura
12:22 PM
Let's start over, shall we? I asked you a valid question which you chose not to answer. Instead of discussing the matter at hand you chose to castigate me for using inappropriate blogging etiquette. Now that we have that out of the way, please answer the inquiry I asked of you.
That's right, I saw no point in answering your query earlier as there was no context for my answer, given that I had to delete your entire post. I'd be glad to get back to your question, which was why aren't reparations in order if someone is wrongfully imprisoned.
My answer is twofold: 1) I don't think people were wrongfully imprisoned in the traditional sense of the word. I say this knowing full well that my husband's German grandfather was imprisoned for something as innocuous as listening to a shortwave radio for entertainment. Yes, in one sense it was wrong. He was innocent, he lost his business, and it was a very painful chapter in family history.
Nonetheless, as I said in my original post, hindsight is 20/20. I explained this angle fairly clearly in the post. I have done some research on this and while there were many, many people unfairly imprisoned, in the context of the times there was also some reasonable cause for alarm and precautions. There had never been a war like WWII and certainly never an attack on American soil such as happened at Pearl Harbor. My own grandparents living here near the coast of So. CA feared a Japanese attack. Particularly in the early days of WWII, when much of our fleet had been destroyed and we didn't know what was coming next, we were desperate to protect our country, and it was felt "desperate times call for desperate measures."
Our nation learned a great deal from what happened in WWII and consequently I don't believe we'll ever see a repeat of internment camps (in fact I think as a result we may possibly bend over too far to be careful when dealing with issues related to terrorism). Rather than dividing our nation into "injured legal parties" (how many other situations in our nation's history could be claimed injurious to a particular group, after all? I could think of countless examples), I believe it is more important that we come together as a nation, learn, and move on working for a better future.
2) I don't believe in visiting the "sins of the fathers" on their children, or compensating descendants of internees, in particular. Slavery is another excellent example. There is no sane reason why my family's earnings should go to the descendants of slaves in 2007. Our history was at times tragic -- we need to learn from those times, make sure it never happens again, and move on. Life isn't always fair. There is no reason why my husband's family should receive compensation for the loss of his grandfather's business, 65 years later. That's not fair to current taxpayers, who had nothing to do with what happened in WWII.
As a side issue, while I disagree with reparations, I also object to selective compensation. To date our nation has paid Japanese families but, so far as I know, not those internees of European descent. It's hardly fair to ask my mother-in-law, whose family lost so much, to turn around and hand over her own tax dollars to others who were interned simply because they happened to be of another ethnic group. Very odd reasoning.
Best wishes,
Laura
Laura,
You think reparations were given to the decedents of the Japanese-Americans who were imprisoned? If you did your homework you would know that it was the former prisoners themselves who were compensated.
As for your issue about offering reparations to decedents, I do not agree with that either. I'm a child of a Japanese-American who lived in Poston, AZ. It would not even come to mind that I am owed a dime.
Again, you did not address my question to you about if you were imprisoned simply because of your ethnicity would you be okay with the idea of not receiving restitution for this erroneous incident?
Lastly, I found your point #2 to either be naively based or simply uninformed. How can you say that we have learned anything from our past? As we leisurely sit here and debate these historic issues about racism and wrongful treatment of people from different ethnicities history is repeating itself right this minute!
What about all the hate crimes being hurled at innocent Arab-Americans and Muslim Americans right here in America? Haven't you read about all the vandalizing of mosques, Islamic centers, and various businesses owned and operated by people of Middle Eastern descent? Actually, discrimination against Muslims is on the uprise. And, during this wartime, according to the Red Cross approximately 70-90% of the Iraqis imprisoned have been wrongfully taken?
You'd hope we would have learned from our shameful lessons but reality flies in our faces and continues to ruin our believe in peace and freedom in the United States of America.
I was not clear enough when I said I didn't believe in compensating descendants of internees -- I didn't mean to imply that that had happened, but was speaking of the possibility in a more general context; for instance, the current bill for reparations to Guam includes language to compensate survivors, and the compensation of the descendants of slaves comes up for discussion periodically. Insofar as the matter of compensation for WWII internees may not be "closed" (i.e., because of the groups of people who were never compensated) I was going on the record that I don't believe it should be paid to descendants. In many cases, 65 years after the fact, descendants of internees are the only people left to compensate.
No, I don't believe I should be paid if I were incarcerated in wartime because of my ethnic heritage. I believed that was implicit in my earlier answer, discussing our relatives. I might not have liked it, I might have done everything I could to publicize what happened and work to make sure it didn't happen again, but the "sue first" or "you owe me money" mentality is one of our nation's problems (I say this as someone who has seen too much during years working in support of the court systems).
As for your comments on Muslim hate crimes, I do not have statistics at hand but I certainly don't agree that that is currently a pressing problem in our nation -- to the contrary, we bend over backwards to accommodate those of other faiths. There are countless examples of that detailed on blogs such as Power Line in recent months. I strongly disagree with your general premise. America is, by and large, a just and welcoming nation and for the most part we deal correctly with those anomalies where people have been wrongly treated.
And I am frankly extremely skeptical of the Red Cross's statistics about the Iraq War detainees. Unfortunately I don't have time to do further research on that issue today so I'll have to leave that at that.
Lastly, your family certainly has my sympathy for what your parent went through. Many of us, or our families, share this chapter in our nation's history. Contributing to the historic record -- for instance, Ursula shared a fascinating website where families have recorded their experiences, and I intend to try to research further details on my husband's grandfather's wartime experience -- is, to my mind, a very valuable and educational thing to do to help make sense of the past for the betterment of future generations.
Thank you for an interesting discussion.
Best wishes, Laura
Thank you too, Laura. By the way, I'm J.J. Keep blogging away!
Peace.
Laura:
I still can't get into this too much, but I'm itchin' to do so. Great converstations! For now, I will leave you with a link to something in my blog from three years ago. It is not as good as this conversation here, but I still think you may be interested:
http://ugleenakedguy.blogspot.com/2004/08/my-date-tonight-with-mrs-ugly-naked.html
I might have time later to weigh in on some of my experiences as a teacher.
Good points, Laura. I guess my question would be, is there really any American whose family, at some point in history, hasn't suffered at the hands of those whoe were in power? I don't think so. Americans comprise every ethnic group and as such, every group has had their moments at the bottom of the pile, so to speak. There could never be enough money to compensate - and really, what would money do anyway? I don't believe for a minute it would be salve to any perceived wounding, more likely, given the peculiar foibles of human nature, it would simply assauge some liberal guilt....and make the wallet flush.
btw, I'm a card carrying American Indian. You wanna talk reparations?!
Now that you mention it, Dana, I have a bit of Cherokee ancestry myself. :)
Ugly Naked Guy (what a handle!) thanks very much for that link, that was very interesting. I should check out Malkin's book. I'm intrigued that she addresses the internment of Europeans being relatively overlooked.
Best wishes,
Laura
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