An excellent book to read in this regard is In Defense of Internment by Michelle Malkin.
She shows that based on what was known at the time there were real security threats from Japanese American citizen groups within the US. It was not just racial paranoia; people really were out to sabotage us.
Furthermore she shows that, contrary to the popular image, internment was not a simple matter of rounding up Japanese Americans at gunpoint and herding them into concentration camps as the Nazis did with their victims. The comparison between American internment camps and Nazi concentration camps is often made, but there is no similarity upon closer examination.
|