Inside America's Concentration Camps: Two Centuries of Internment and Torture

This is a book that primarily deals with the various internments during World War II. This one covers the full spectrum, though, covering persons of Japanese ancestry, Germans and Italians. Most of what reads about the internment concerns the Japanese Americans so the addition of learning about what happened to the Germans and the Italians is good.This is also a book that deals with factual details but at the same time ties them in to specific examples of what happened to certain people and that alone is quite enough to get one quite angry that America threw civil rights totally to the wind and ignored it's so-called justice system just to get some people they felt were potentially dangerous out of the way.Which, of course, is not a whole lot different from what is happening in today's world.The book starts off examining the way the Native Americans were treated, rounded up and forced onto reservations. The reservations, like the internments, were often on land that was not basically very good. The Native Americans, like the Japanese Americans, were rounded up, not charged with any specific crime, given no defense attorney, subjected to no trial and just forced to move away from their homes under gunpoint. The only major difference is that the reservations were not surrounded by barbed wire, guard towers and Army soldiers and, in some cases, tanks.One thing not pointed out in the book, though, is that the Native Americans were also subjected to biological warfare on the parts of the whites and some of the Native Americans were given blankets which contained smallpox spores.The last part of the book goes into the possibility that such a thing like internment/concentration camps could very well again happen in this country with people's rights totally trampled into the ground. Now, what I will do is to just list some highlights of the book as there is so much information in the book that the review could end up being way too long.Some of the emphasis on the camps or similar things were really the result of big-business, even back to the earliest colonies in the U.S.Some of the things that FDR did in relation to Hawaii that do not appear in other books on this subject.What led up to Executive Order 9066.Life in the various camps and comparisons between the desert camps and the camps built in swamp areas.How the Germans and Italians were treated and how this differed from the way Japanese Americans were treated.How the U.S. turned its back on Jews seeking safety from the Nazis.This is without doubt one of the most valuable informative books on the entire internment process.

This book covers the portion of American history that isn't taught in school. It illustrates another dark side of our country's past that many would just as soon sweep under the rug. The same people screaming about CRT would just as soon ban books such as this. It's a good read. I would advise anyone wanting to learn how supposedly good people can engage in evil acts should read this book and think about how acts delineated in this book could happen again. A great thanks to the author of this book!

The author was prescient when he wrote this book in 2010. Describing an America that we see having come to its worst in 2018, it should be required reading for the handful of sentient people still remaining in this country.. It is definitive and thorough and should make seismic changes in everyone's perspective.

Interesting, as I didn't realize the extend of the isolation of those of Japanese, German, and Italian descent in America during WWII and the preparations for continuing the isolation during the Korean War, et cetera, though apparently not implemented. Even American citizens were sometimes treated worse than enemies captured and sent to the U.S. for interment.

I thought I would read some new things,perhaps original. Unfortunately,this was not the case.You will get the same old-known stories again and again,with the author's warning about the infringement of rights for the American people.Who does not know how the Japanese or the Jews were treated in the USA during WW2?A huge disappointment.

A well researched and well written book by an author who lives in the American South. Many have written about the specifics of things so I will only mention one that I think has implications for today. In the South, the advent of so called "Indian inferiority" had its roots not only in simple greed but the fear and guilt caused by doing terrible things to Africans who were kidnapped and sent to work as property and to the Indians whose property was being absconded with in the name of this or that religious doctrine or metaphor to explain away the fact that people died from simple contact.Think of all Europeans as having to deal with the thought that they were all "Typhoid Mary's" or maybe a sexual predator who refused to admit that he was spreading AIDS out into unknowing communities and the resultant problem of purity and uncleanness and all that meant to a Protestant or a Jacobite Scot who watched men, women and children die simply from being breathed on.Imagine what that Scottish person would think of someone did it to his relatives. What the laws of clan vengeance would mean to an Ulster Scot like Andrew Jackson or the Scots who married Indian women in the South for business purposes. Then think of the slave owner who got malaria from a female slave that he had forced into sexual relations with. Think of the reverse curse of Syphilis that engulfed Europe as a result of their "sins" in the continents of the new world.All of this was encased by Dickerson in one little paragraph where he describes the fear of the Africans and American Indians overwhelming numbers compared to the Europeans in the South. The only answer to his guilt was to eliminate one of the two from the equation by sending them into exile and diaspora. Their justification was that American Indians were naturally inferior and that story went all the way to Michigan and Lewis Cass and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (who couldn't learn the Ojibwa languages and so trashed them as unscientific and chaotic). Schoolcraft married and Ojibwa women to learn the language and study her but then he got religion and divorced his Ojibwa wife and become the resident Indian expert in New York and a Founder of the Natural History Museum and one of the fathers of modern anthropology.It would take a hundred years and the discovery of Quantum Physics and David Bohm to set the record straight about Ojibwa Algonquin language after Cass and Schoolcraft defended their ignorance with slander. It seems that Algonquin was the language Bohm had been searching for to express his recent discoveries in Quantum Mechanics. (See David Peat). The problem that Cass articulated was true but in reverse. English was not capable of expressing the relativity and processes of advanced physics while Algonquin was.Meanwhile Dickerson hits the nail on the head when he said that it was fear, and good old Christian guilt with a dash of greed, that motivated the minority European plantation owners to eliminate the Five Civilized Nations from the American South first by putting them in hellhole concentration camps where they died in droves from dysentery and then on the death march to Oklahoma in the dead of winter where they would have a mountain religion on the plains of Oklahoma. Although they were still a nation and not yet a tribe they were soon confined to poverty and designated government land that made even simple farming an impossibility if you had any family members at all. In between that time the prospered but American Experiments in Social Engineering soon gave the land to the Sooners and confined the Indians to small plots of 144 acres that would be divided by their households on their deaths. Where they had ranches the size of an Oklahoma county they were now on 144 acre "cemetary" plots or as Dickerson says "Concentration Camps." As Dickerson made plain in his response to the Review that challenged this in a British publication, the destruction of Indian Territory and the assignment of Indian Nations to tiny plots of land in NE Oklahoma, in South Dakota and in the SW, did the job of lowering the population just as it was lowered in Germany in the 1940s, in Cambodia in the 1960s and in China's Cultural Revolution.But the Southerners did it because they were sinning, doing bad things, being "bad hombres" to two world groups in the name of profit and as good Christians had the unconscious rage that manifests itself as guilt and activates the fear that justifies terrible things. This is a great book by a fine writer. And that is just the short first part. Wait until you get to the 20th century and the ICE policies that we are now seeing manifest themselves. Ray Evans Harrell Librarian Nuyagi Keetoowah Society