George Takei picture book on his years in internment camps will be published next spring

[ShazzieB]

11. This policy was terrible.

It's true that the reasons our country decided to intern Japanese American weren't much different from the reasons the Germany started imprisoning political dissidents, intellectuals, and other "undesirables" in camps like Dachau. Both were wrong, and both involved serious human rights violations. From what I've read, there were some pretty major differences in the conditions people were subjected to in both cases, and the German prison camps were worse in many ways, but it's not wrong to say that the underlying principles were pretty similar.

This action by our government was a gross violation of human rights, and it would have been a gross violation of human rights even if the Japanese Americans had been housed in 5 star luxury hotels and served gourmet meals. Depriving people of their homes, possessions, jobs, businesses, and personal freedoms without any reason other than suspicion of what they "might" do, based on nothing more than racism, is an abomination, and this was unquestionably a dark chapter in our nation's history.