tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post5579653088551756475..comments2024-02-11T09:55:50.468-08:00Comments on The Eastside View: Back to the blog…Charles Sherehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10480432901356490235noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-63723785512978402282016-03-10T17:05:56.587-08:002016-03-10T17:05:56.587-08:00Well said. And I should add that the attendants at...<i>Well said. And I should add that the attendants at the site, both National Park staff and volunteer, understood and spoke to your point. </i>Charles Sherehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10480432901356490235noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-59191314539463361142016-03-10T10:26:22.210-08:002016-03-10T10:26:22.210-08:00Today, we tend to condescend to our elders who liv...Today, we tend to condescend to our elders who lived through the horrors of World War II and its aftermath.<br /><br />It seems naive to us today to think that people feared their ethnic Japanese fellow citizens. But we must recall that the beginning of America's entry into the war was an attack on Pearl Harbor. Our government, and most Americans, fully expected a full-scale invasion by the Japanese on our Western Continental shores. Would the Japanese living in America identify with and embrace the invaders? Could they be capable of spying on us? These seem idiotic questions today, but they were very real to Americans in 1941. <br /><br />In retrospect, we scorn our government for deciding to drop the first atomic bombs on cities. But we forget how terrible the first invasion of the Japanese homeland was, in Okinawa. The Japanese were prepared to defend their homeland without regard for their own life; some have estimated that a full-scale ground invasion of Japan could have cost as much as a million lives, a third of them our own boys. Would it have been better to stage a "demonstration" of the bomb to the Japanese? But no one knew the enormity of the devastation these weapons would create. It wasn't until John Hersey's long article "Hiroshima" came out in The New Yorker, later, that we would understand what we had done. <br /><br />The Japanese in Manzanar were courageous and civilized beyond any expectation. We now are shamed by what we did. But we must understand the context. People often act in irrational ways, and during wartime, irrationality is never in short supply. That's the lesson of Manzanar--not the familiar "multi-cultural relativity" nonsense--but that we must weigh facts and information, instead of acting on impulse and fear.Curtis Favillehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06213075853354387634noreply@blogger.com