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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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So they were placed in camps, like Japanese in America and like the Palestinians tomorrow.

According to Wikipedia, out of the 100,000+ Japanese interned during the Japanese internment, about 1 % died, which presumably is not that far off from the amount that would have died anyway. Even this is generally considered to be a black mark on American history and particularly on FDR's record; I can only imagine how it would be treated if it had been more like 80 % dead, even if the deaths weren't done directly. And it has been a popular argument that Gaza is a concentration camp/on the verge of megadeaths already before the current operation, if it turned out that 80 % of Gazans were dead (again, for any reason) after the operation is finished... well, it would at the very least create considerable troubles for Israel in the court of global opinion.

The whole idea that "well, the Germans just had to put the Jews in the camps" seems to be based on an assumption that Jews are some sort of a self-evident, ontological evil. The largely assimilated German Jews had not hindered the German WW1 effort in a material way, as far as I know (the revolutions that you refer to, which had both Jewish and gentile participants, happened after the Germans had already lost in the field of battle). Rather more importantly, the vast majority of Jews put to camps weren't German, they were Polish and Soviet Jews that Germans wouldn't have needed to bother one bit with if they hadn't decided to invade half of Europe. Hell, the Germans were specifically procuding Jews from other countries to put in the camps - they were actually temporarily importing Jews to their temporarily occupied territories!

If they started families and have a new life, the isn’t an easy decision, and once old age hits that becomes harder. And do you expect the demented to fill out a complicated holocaust victim compensation plan? This isn’t a reasonable comparison. However, from my hypothesis we would see them remembering their Jewish adolescence and heritage, 100%. But I don’t know how we could measure or catalog such cases which occur in the armchair of an Eastern European home.

When it comes specifically to immigration to Israel, they could bring their families along, and their children - who presumably would be privy to such memories from old-age people - would be the ones hearing such stories and being able to use them to justify immigration. Also, people who would have been, say, 12-18 years old around 1942-1944 would have been 58-66 in 1990, when the fall of the Soviet regime would have presumably allowed freer movement and claims application (was it possible for Soviet block citizens to apply for Holocaust compensation from West Germany anyway?) - hardly the age where most of them would have been demented.

According to Wikipedia, out of the 100,000+ Japanese interned during the Japanese internment, about 1 % died, which presumably is not that far off from the amount that would have died anyway. Even this is generally considered to be a black mark on American history and particularly on FDR's record; I can only imagine how it would be treated if it had been more like 80 % dead, even if the deaths weren't done directly.

American civilians faced no threat from Axis bombers, only a dozen or so died due to enemy action. Had any Japanese-American starved, it was either a hunger strike or a deliberate withholding of food. Meanwhile Japanese in Japan and Germans in Germany had their food supply distrupted by unrestricted bomber and submarine warfare. Even if Germans treated Jews as kindly as Americans did Japanese-Americans, a greater fraction would have died.

This argument reminds me of some who point out that diring the Pacific war a greater fraction of American soldiers captured by the Japanese died in captivity, than Japanese POWs in American custody. Sure, but while the American captors got delivered ice cream, Japanese captors were forced to eat belts and each other. To condemn Japanese for not giving more to Americans than even themselves got seems to be an isolated demand of charity.

The whole idea that "well, the Germans just had to put the Jews in the camps" seems to be based on an assumption that Jews are some sort of a self-evident, ontological evil.

As you point out, even the most righteous among the nations involved in WW2, the US, saw it fit to intern ethnic minority civilians. Minorities were everywhere looked at with suspicion.

As you point out, even the most righteous among the nations involved in WW2, the US, saw it fit to intern ethnic minority civilians. Minorities were everywhere looked at with suspicion.

This was after Japan had declared war on the US. Germany, by contrast, was not going to fight Israel, given that the latter didn't exist at the time. What threat did the various targeted minorities pose to the German people that the Germans did not invite unto themselves by invading the nations where those people lived?