Quote from: JollyGood on March 16, 2020, 11:28:37 AM

I missed this excellent post. The analogies are valid and very good examples about modern day shoring up of support for right wing extremist ideologies coming from the present US administration and looking back at exactly what constituted an enemy by the then US administration during the time of world war two.

You are right, Mike the bank robber is as absurd an example as it can get but under the US administration of that era it was the policy they applied - they imprisoned all Mike's in essence.

Quote from: Cnut237 on March 05, 2020, 02:40:50 PM

Quote from: Spendulus on March 05, 2020, 01:22:42 PM

Another country does in Pearl Harbor, kills thousands of US Citizens, declares war n the US, and is universally understood to be the enemy, but citizens of that country are not the enemy. Since a country is comprised of citizens, I think a lot of people might have a problem with that.

Most citizens are civilians, i.e. non-combatants. We are edging into Geneva Convention territory here.

A kamikaze pilot in a Japanese war plane howling down on a US ship is certainly the enemy.
But what about an 80 year old fisherman from Okinawa who just wants to catch fish to sell in the local market, and live quietly with his family?
What about a teenage pacifist from Kyoto who protests about his government attacking Pearl Harbor?
What about a nurse from Tokyo who twenty years previously emigrated to the US and married a Texan rancher, but never became an official US citizen?

You can't assign guilt to these people, or declare them a threat, just because the pilot was Japanese. That's racism.

In my country there have been attacks on Muslims because people think: Terrorist attack. Terrorists were Muslims. Therefore all Muslims are terrorists. It's the same thing.

To take it to the point of absurdity: imagine a situation where a man named Mike robs a bank. The answer isn't to imprison everyone in the country whose name is Mike.

Well, of course there'd be no need to imprison the Japanese citizens living in the USA. You could arrange to return them to Japan. But given that these people had been in the USA for 20+ years, maybe their alliegence to Japan was very weak.

War is about creating impossible choices and optimizing tragedy and suffering.