concordtom said:
BearsWiin said:
concordtom said:
BearsWiin said:
Yogi Bear said:
sycasey said:
Yogi Bear said:
Unit2Sucks said:
This isn't her first rodeo. Again, I'm not accusing her of being a vile anti-semite but I think people are going out of their way to defend her when there is no reasonable basis to do so. All we know is she's made questionable comments in the past and present.
Here's an article from last month: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/02/ilhan-omar-anti-semitic-remarks-aipac/amp
In the 1940's did we hate Germany, Germans, and/or Nazis?
I know how we treated the Japanese, which was pretty terribly
I've never really thought about this before, but I wonder why no one ever questioned why we put Japanese in internment camps, but not German-Americans?
Part of it has to do with the time that Germans had been in America. By WWII they'd largely assimilated, having come many decades earlier. German immigrants were treated with much more suspicion during WWI, when they hadn't been here for quite so long. Part of it has to do with racism, too, since German immigrants in WWI weren't put in internment camps the way Japanese immigrants were in WWII.
Not so fast, my friend,
Not so easily off the hook.
My coworker and friend told me about how his grandfather or great grandfather had come to Montana in the 1880's from Japan. They were in LA by Pearl Harbor, and sent to manzanar.
When they got back, a white family was in their house and they had to start over from scratch.
In the 80's, Reagan gave reparations of like $10,000?
I've looked thru my grandmother's yearbooks in early 30's Concord. There are Japanese kids there. I guess they got sent away as well.
I live in Placer county. Many orchard farmers here were Japanese. They went bye bye, too. Stories in town still shared today. Cause they came back.
These aren't just "unassimilated" foreigners.
They looked different and were easily recognized.
Bingo.
You may have missed the part where I attributed internment to racism. I went back and bolded it so you could see it. Racism is the obvious and easy answer, but there were other factors. Life is complicated.
As for your anecdotal stories, cool. I have them in my family, too; my grandmother's first husband was interned after she went back to Ostmark (she was an American citizen in Nazi Germany during WWII, he was an American citizen in Stockton; guess who went to the camps). It's one of the more disgusting episodes in American history.
You may also have missed my previous posts about how immigration waves generally take three generations for immigrants to assimilate, and for other Americans to accept them.
Fair enough, and apologies. I jumped and hit reply before,I got to that. I bit as soon as I saw you comparing Germans to Japanese. It's FAR easier for a German to integrate than one with darker skin. All a Germn has to do is lose the accent. Meanwhile, my buddy still gets asked about his heritage. And his family has been here since the 1800's?? What a shame!
Tell me about your grandmother being in Germany during WW2. Why was that?
She was born in Vienna 1910, child of WWI and influenza, sent to Switzerland after the war when the food distribution networks broke down and people couldn't get food in the cities (so they sent the children to farms so they wouldn't starve). Ended up spending several years in Switzerland being a governess to a rich family with many younger children. Back in Vienna by 1928, met and fell in love with a much older (early 40's) Japanese-American doctor who was doing some work/research at the university. They were married in Havana in 1930 as he was bringing her to her new home in Stockton CA.
She spends several years in Stockton, and along the way gets her citizenship. Relationship begins to fray as she matures and he gets older - she wants kids, he doesn't. 1937 rolls around, and she goes back to Europe for a modern dance tour (Berlin and environs) and to see family in Austria. Along the way she hooks up with the brother of one of her best friends from childhood who had recently committed suicide - they give each other consolation and comfort, and end up falling in love. She returns to Stockton after several months abroad, unhappy, in love with another man. Spends two years miserable, then decides at the beginning of 1940 that she needs to return to what is now Ostmark in the German Reich to be with this guy whom she loves. Takes a train to NY, gets on a steamer for Hamburg the week before the Phony War ends and Germany rolls over France. She lives with her hubby until he's conscripted into the Wehrmacht and is sent to France for occupation duty. Somewhere along the way he gets her preggo with my mother, who is born in Sept. 1941. US enters war, she's now an enemy alien in the Reich. Gestapo suspects her of being a spy, and she has to report in weekly to the local authorities. Meanwhile, in Stockton, the husband that she left is sent to an internment camp.
Hubby gets sent home from France, discharged because of bleeding ulcers. Doctor neighbor makes sure he's sick every time he has to go back before the medical board so he never has to serve again. She has another child as the Sovs are entering Vienna, and there's an incident in the maternity hospital when Red Cross nurses have to save her from being gangraped by Soviet soldiers. Somehow hubby isn't lined up against a wall and shot. A year later she starts divorce proceedings with her recently-freed husband in Stockton. He dies; officially heart failure, but the family rumor/secret is that he committed suicide from the shame of being served with divorce papers. She goes from wanting to divorce him to wanting to get his estate. She gets it, and after the horrible winter of 1948 when there's nothing to eat in Sov-occupied Austria, she convinces her hubby to come back to America with her. They use dead husband's money to get the family over to NY, then SF, then Klamath Falls, back to Vienna when it seemed too hard to make it in America, then back to Stockton by 1954. She speaks the language; he does not. He's a former Wehrmacht soldier in a country that had just fought the Germans, and gets roughed up regularly at different workplaces until he finds a good job as a master haberdasher/tailor in Stockton where he works for the next 35 years.
Everybody's family has a story or two like this in their relatively recent past; this happens to be my family's story. Big Events like war or famine or industrialization have a way of buffeting and sweeping people around in Zhivago-like ways where they have little if any control over their lives. For many in this country those Big Events are further in the past (since the Civil War the US has been relatively insulated from traumatic Big Events that happen elsewhere - that's one of the big draws for wanting to emigrate to America); for my mother's family, it was WWI and WWII. For the rest of her life my mother would not allow a cuckoo clock in the house, as the cuckoo sound was the alarm that Viennese radio used to warn the people that the Americans and British bombers were on their way, and that everybody should get to an air raid shelter. Sixteen years later, she was an American citizen herself.
