Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: midnight Target on June 03, 2002, 04:00:27 PM
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I took this quote from another thread. It is always interesting to hear what the other side of the world was taught about our history.
Then to write about concentration camps in America for the citizens of the Japanese nationality. Then to write about destiny the Italian soldiers in America (last of them have returned home in 1956).
Now Manzanar and the other internment camps for Japanese Americans are well known to us. This was a sad time in our Nation's history and we have compensated those people who were interned and their families in recent years. I had a girlfriend whos parents were interned, and whos family lost everything. Including homes, businesses and a complete set of Samuri armor hundreds of years old.
I have no knowledge of Italian prisoners being kept here. I venture to guess that many wanted to stay after the war. Remember that Italy was no longer an enemy as of 1944.
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hehe the prisoners had it really well in the US. probably the italians didn't want to go back to Italy :)
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This reminds me of a show my old bass player/singer and I used to watch. I don't remember what it was called but it came out in the early 60's, I believe.
Anyway the show would talk about specific battles from WW2 and it would have people that actually faught in the battles say something about them (ok the narator did all the talking I assume he would just tell us what the actual people said)
Anywho, We used to always crack up because there would be some German guy and they'd say Gerhard such and such was a German infantry soldier in 1944 now he sits on his luch break as a fry cook in Orange County California. Or it would be Toshio who used to be in the Japanese navy and is now a tv salesman in New York.
Can you imagin what Bob Smith would have been doing in Nazi Germany after the war or in Yokyo Japan? :eek:
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Well, in fact - it never was in school history books. When I read a wonderfull "Pearl-Harbour" by N. Yakovlev (it happened in 1988) - I was stunned by the fact that Americans did such things to their population :(
95% of Russians are not aware of this sad fact.
It shows you an attitude to WWII in USSR. Soviet history never drew people's attention to "bad things" done by the Allies, or - even late-war "allies" like Finns.
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What did the Russians do with thier Japanese population?
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Raped their women and ate their babies.
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Originally posted by funkedup
Raped their women and ate their babies.
Or vice-versa.
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Originally posted by Boroda
Well, in fact - it never was in school history books. When I read a wonderfull "Pearl-Harbour" by N. Yakovlev (it happened in 1988) - I was stunned by the fact that Americans did such things to their population :(
95% of Russians are not aware of this sad fact.
It shows you an attitude to WWII in USSR. Soviet history never drew people's attention to "bad things" done by the Allies, or - even late-war "allies" like Finns.
That's odd, Baroda, that an event as widely discussed and debated here in America as the internment of Japanese-Americans during WW2 was virtually unheard of by 95% of Soviet Society. It has never been a secret, not even when it happened.
Most schoolchildren are aware of Japanese Internment Camps during WW2 by the 6th grade. They're also aware of our history of slavery, the struggle for workers', womens' and minorities' rights and countless other mistakes we've made over the past 2 or 3 hundred years. We don't hide our mistakes but rather try to learn from them. I'm surprised it wasn't part of the anti-American rhetoric broadcast by the Soviets during the Cold War.
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No more tragic then the internment of powerful American industrialists, in Canada, during the early part of WW2.
The rationalisation at the time was that they were helping the Nazi war machine with financing and materiel.
This in no way justified throwing them in interment camps though.
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Originally posted by Elfenwolf
That's odd, Baroda, that an event as widely discussed and debated here in America as the internment of Japanese-Americans during WW2 was virtually unheard of by 95% of Soviet Society. It has never been a secret, not even when it happened.
Most schoolchildren are aware of Japanese Internment Camps during WW2 by the 6th grade. They're also aware of our history of slavery, the struggle for workers', womens' and minorities' rights and countless other mistakes we've made over the past 2 or 3 hundred years. We don't hide our mistakes but rather try to learn from them. I'm surprised it wasn't part of the anti-American rhetoric broadcast by the Soviets during the Cold War.
Again, I'll try to explain. Soviet official history didn't doubt any allied actions during WWII. I learned about Dresden tragegy from "Slaughterhouse Five", about internment of Japanese - from a detailed book covering Pearl-Harbour attack etc.
We were always told that Allies did right, and did all they could to defeat nazism. That's why I find it so strange and disturbing when Westerners are looking for imaginary Soviet war crimes everywhere, and usually turn to the richest source: German Propaganda Ministry archives :(
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Originally posted by Elfenwolf
I'm surprised it wasn't part of the anti-American rhetoric broadcast by the Soviets during the Cold War.
There were good reasons for that.
First, unlike enormous variety of disparate free sources of informtion in the West, all the information soviet citizens saw came from one source. So even some juicy tidbit could have been unused due to simple oversight.
Second, the soviet propaganda correctly did not go for comprehencive covering of real facts - prefering to stick to few basic points, some of them imaginary. Real life is not easily controllable and can have some unforseen implications - so better not to use it. Also, even negative information is still information and a basis for future conclusions. It was important to keep soviet citizens hostile but no less important was to keep them ignorant.
Third, on this particular issue several nationalities were moved during the WWII on pretext of their cooperation with the enemy. They were dropped into the cattle cars on the few minutes notice and shipped to the middle of inhispitable Kasakhstan deserts. Considerable part of them (like a half) died in the process - mostly women and children, since the men were in the army. Compared to that, what americans did to japanese would have seemed mild. Since the survivors were allowed to return by post-Stalinist government, that communist crime is one of the few that the public was aware of.
miko