Summer has passed.... | Golden Skate

Summer has passed....

CoyoteChris

Record Breaker
Joined
Dec 4, 2004
I wont bore you will all the "Old Man" trips I took this summer but I will share one experience, as a history buff.
I am emotionally effected by places I visit in my travels. The most emotional, physical and metally draining day was trying to see all the Museums and exhibits at Pearl Harbor for instance....
I was riding down to the Reno National Air Races this summer and decided to stop at the Concentration Camp at Tule Lake, CA. My friend Tosh was put in the camp at Gila River were he lost his mother....
He was taken away at gunpoint to a horse stables for five months till his camp was built...He wasnt released till Oct 1946.....The Tule Lake camp looks much as it did 75 years ago.....:(
 

hanyuufan5

✨**:。*
Medalist
Joined
May 19, 2018
:ghug:

Good to hear that they're calling them concentration camps now. When we learned about them in school, they called them internment camps (and also didn't mention them until the third or fourth time we covered WW2). I vaguely remember being furious and asking some kind of question-that's-actually-an-accusation like, "What's the difference between that and a concentration camp?" and the teacher giving me some pat answer about why they were different that I didn't buy for a second. :sarcasm:
 

CoyoteChris

Record Breaker
Joined
Dec 4, 2004
:ghug:

Good to hear that they're calling them concentration camps now. When we learned about them in school, they called them internment camps (and also didn't mention them until the third or fourth time we covered WW2). I vaguely remember being furious and asking some kind of question-that's-actually-an-accusation like, "What's the difference between that and a concentration camp?" and the teacher giving me some pat answer about why they were different that I didn't buy for a second. :sarcasm:

You were and are wise. There were politically correct terms back then, too ....but as any English teacher will tell you, an internment camp is for foreign nationals, like what Switzerland and Japan had (see Steven Spielburg's epic movie, "Empire of the Sun".). A concentration camp is for citizens of one's country. FDR and H. Truman knew that, too. They were not stupid or ignorant. But some are....from the Dayton Daily news..Feb 19th, 2012....."
"Mary Yamano rarely talked about her experiences in the Japanese internment (sic) camps during World War II, but her youngest daughter, Marcie, wrote about the painful chapter in the family’s history for a college paper in the 1980s.
The essay came back with a red “F” and a stinging rebuke from the professor: “You made this all up. This didn’t happen.”"
 

Ducky

On the Ice
Joined
Feb 14, 2018
:ghug:

Good to hear that they're calling them concentration camps now. When we learned about them in school, they called them internment camps (and also didn't mention them until the third or fourth time we covered WW2). I vaguely remember being furious and asking some kind of question-that's-actually-an-accusation like, "What's the difference between that and a concentration camp?" and the teacher giving me some pat answer about why they were different that I didn't buy for a second. :sarcasm:

The only difference I can think of is that the usage of concentration camps is associated specifically to the industrialized killing factories of Nazi Germany, versus internment where people weren't purposely murdered en mass.
 

CoyoteChris

Record Breaker
Joined
Dec 4, 2004
The only difference I can think of is that the usage of concentration camps is associated specifically to the industrialized killing factories of Nazi Germany, versus internment where people weren't purposely murdered en mass.

You are correct that we do associate death camps with concentration camps. But many cultures have used concentration camps without them being death camps. Webster says...
Definition of concentration camp
: a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard —used especially in reference to camps created by the Nazis in World War II for the internment and persecution of Jews and other prisoners
Semantics is everything for governments and people.
Trudeau says dressing up as Aladdin/Genie is "Racist"
Soprano Ms. Caballero says dressing up as Madam Butterfly is "art".
 

Tonichelle

Idita-Rock-n-Roll
Record Breaker
Joined
Jun 27, 2003
The only difference I can think of is that the usage of concentration camps is associated specifically to the industrialized killing factories of Nazi Germany, versus internment where people weren't purposely murdered en mass.

That's definitely how it is taught here in the US, doesn't mean that's the actual definition.

I don't think I learned about the Japanese-American "internment camps" until High School and was shocked that we had that here... and that we denied Asylum to the Jewish people of Europe. However monday morning quarterbacking isn't always fair. We have far more information than what they did at the time. Living in the moment is completely different than sitting back nearly 100 years later with countless hours of research at your fingertips.
 

CoyoteChris

Record Breaker
Joined
Dec 4, 2004
That's definitely how it is taught here in the US, doesn't mean that's the actual definition.

I don't think I learned about the Japanese-American "internment camps" until High School and was shocked that we had that here... and that we denied Asylum to the Jewish people of Europe. However monday morning quarterbacking isn't always fair. We have far more information than what they did at the time. Living in the moment is completely different than sitting back nearly 100 years later with countless hours of research at your fingertips.

Sometimes I wonder if civics and history are taught at all. But you are correct. With historical perspective, In the Hysteria following Pearl Harbor, where even Dr. Seuss joined in, we could forgive FDR locking up Japanese Nationals and not German Nationals. Germans in the US in WWI were after all persecuted. Locking up American citizens, however, and ignoring the supreme court orders in 1944 (by both FDR and Truman) is unforgiveable. As is putting wounded US soldiers coming back from Italy back into the camps.
I do agree with you that death camps and concentration camps are used synonoumously in the US. My wife, that woman who got one B in her life through her PHD, and feels bad about it, was taught nothing about WWII. So sad....those that forget history are doomed to re-live it.
 
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