I never stated they were comparable. I just disagree with the fact that the US members got off scot free, and to add injury to insult, there were no confirmed cases of Japanese spies, and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team was the most successful unit in US history, and consisted of purely Japanese-American soldiers, and the US refused to acknowledge that it was in fact a bad action until Clinton, and even then the payments awarded were significantly less than the property loss that the Japanese-Americans suffered due to the interment camps. Whereas there were confirmed cases of Italian and German spies living in the US, and yet there were no internment camps for them. There is also the issue that the fact that the US even conducted this is barely acknowledge in American History textbooks (it got a paragraph in my APUSH textbook).
I mean you brought them up specifically in this debate and suggested they should also have been tried for war crimes. I'm not sure which war crimes you're referring to, because that is an extremely vague area, and international law was quite a bit less available at the time, and when you enforce laws, they generally need to exist. The actual war-crimes that I am ware of are more along the lines of rape/unwarranted executions of prisoners, done by the US, and maybe those deserve additional attention in this conversation.
As an aside, I do agree with you, but I find you bringing up only US history war-crimes(?) in response to German war-crimes to be a completely anti-western sentiment that excludes many greater horrors than US intern camps that legitimately deserve more spotlight in a debate about increasing the scope of the post-WWII trials. For example, they massacred thousands, comfort women, etc. There were actually trials carried out afterwards though, and I'm sure some of the people behind these things were punished, however, this is a great parallel for your argument and demonstrates potentials for double standards that the allies were not held to.
In effect, I think the ICoJ should have considered trying allied war-crimes in an efficient and strict way in the early 50s, because it would have been an effective time to grant it some power, since it has basically become a small influence on politics. I don't disagree with you overall, but I do disagree with using a weak argument to debate this issue.
I know what he's referring to - but bringing up US internment camps as if they were anywhere NEAR close to the Holocaust is either being willingly ignorant of history or intentionally disingenuous.
I learned about this shit in elementary school, middle school, and high school in public school in one of the worst public school systems in the country. Sounds more like you had bad teachers as opposed to us "barely acknowledging" it since we have movies, tv shows, plays, and books about the topic, it's taught in our schools, and you can't even discuss world war 2 or war crimes in general without someone bringing it up.
Totally true, I heard about this repeatedly in middle school and high school from my history teachers, and I also have seen it discussed in music and film at the least. (Kenji by Fort Minor is the song that comes to mind immediately). This is not a topic that is shied away from, unlike the more "standard" war-crimes that the US perpetrated. The only ones that I can think of that were publicized as heavily were the ones perpetrated at Abu Ghraib, and some of the terrible things that were done to Native Americans.
