Quote Originally Posted by Drageuth View Post
Eeehhhhhh, while the Japanese internment camps are definitely a blight on American history, I wouldn't even begin to compare them to Nazi Germany's extermination camps or labour camps. One was a knee-jerk reaction to a shitty situation by a nation that doesn't have a great history treating minorities, and the other was a series of camps that systematically overworked, starved, and slaughtered millions of people.

Shitty thing to do, yes. Comparable to concentration camps, no. I would actually venture a tiny bit further and say that the residential schools in Canada are a more apt comparison, if you feel like pulling up something from North America.
I didn't mean to imply the methodology was comparable to Germany's less practical methods, but the treatment in some of those camps was hardly civilized, and there were numerous deaths, even if that was not the sole purpose.
But given some of the strong anti-Japanese sentiments disseminated at the time--many of which are prevalent even today--I don't think it a far stretch to presume that if atom bombs came cheaper, the Japanese death toll might have been closer to the Jewish death toll.
Murderous racism is murderous racism, regardless of scale.
(I wasn't able to find the "Be a chap, kill a Jap" poster on Google, but both my Grandfather--who fought at the Battle of the Bulge--and History teacher had one)