You guys know how I am regarding revisionism and we just had a local Congressman support a bill for Tule Lake internment camp based on skewed facts.
Here's the article:
WASHINGTON — Congressman Doug LaMalfa and a resident of Modoc County both told a House subcommittee Thursday that they support a bill to create a separate and distinct national historic site for a World War II internment camp for Japanese Americans.
The Richvale Republican noted that the 3,700-acre site, adjacent to the Tulelake Airport, is currently a unit of the Valor in the Pacific National Monument, created in 2008, which is otherwise made up of eight Pacific battlefields.
The Tule Lake internment camp was a maximum security facility "where American citizens were held in squalid housing, given inadequate food and medical care and forced to work in unsafe conditions," LaMalfa said
"The events at Tule Lake should be remembered not as valorous, but as a warning that all Americans must respect one another and that the Constitution applies to all citizens during peace and war," La Malfa said.
"Valor was certainly exhibited at Tule Lake, not by soldiers but by the Japanese Americans who maintained their dignity under appalling conditions," he added.
Nick S. Macy, owner of Macy's Flying Service, which operates from the Tulelake Airport, told the Natural Resources subcommittee that he was raised in an internment camp barracks removed and relocated from the original site. He said the residents of the area feel that 940 acres of the site around an existing jail "is sufficient to establish a lesson in history that the wrongs done are never repeated."
National Park Service Associate Director of Workforce and Inclusion Michael Reynolds testified that the site was the largest of 10 sites that interned first-generation Japanese Americans, known as Nikkei, and operated from May 1942 to March 1946. German and Italian prisoners of war were also housed there.
Reynolds said meetings held to discuss the site revealed strong public opinion that the internment site's association with Valor in the Pacific was both "inappropriate, and even offensive."
Now first off, this wasn't a site like Manzanar, where Japanese-American families were relocated, this was a maximum security internment center for Japanese citizens who were loyal to the Emperor and/or had been caught in acts of sabatoge. After the war, the bulk of them were deported to Japan.
Also, there were no Germans or Italians there.
The allegations of poor food, poor medical and poor housing is a flat out fabrication.
The allegations of forced labor is also false, as this was a maximum security facility...no one was allowed out to work.
Add to that, the occasional paperwork error that got a Japanese who was loyal to the U.S. accidently mixed in with the incorrigibles which ended up in that Japanese person being killed by the inmates.
And finally, the Japanese Americans were called Nissei, not Nikkei - dumbasses can't even get that right...
So this just flat-out pisses me off that everyone is so hell-bent on twisting history around.