Japanese American internment and Guantanamo detention camps
Thesis Statement: This essay seeks to explore how the Japanese-American internment camps and the Guantanamo detention camp defiled democracy by violating the human and legal rights of citizens.
The Japanese-American internment camps were meant to imprison all Americans with Japanese ancestry during the Second World War. The United States government feared that they might be acting as spies or saboteurs sent by the federal government of Japan to spy war preparations of the United States government during the Second World War. However, the Japanese-Americans had not committed any crime; they were all innocent only that Americans worried that they were spying their war missions. The Guantanamo Bay detention camp is a detention facility owned by the United States and was built in 2002 to house all Muslim activists and doubted terrorists arrested by the American forces during missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places.
The dynamic element of the internment of Japanese citizens was fear of Americans, but there was no evidence of spying actions. According to the constitution and international law, this is a violation of democracy because a conviction has to be supported by evidence (Nagata et al., 2019). Internment also defiled human rights because they were overcrowded, and the living conditions were not recommendable.
The cause of confinement in the Guantanamo camp was to detain extremely hazardous people. They arrested Muslims mostly because they view them as terrorists, and no Americans were put there; thus, it violated international law (Velasquez-Potts, 2019). The camp violated democracies because enhanced interrogation tactics were used for detainees to force them to accept they are criminals and were allowed to petition in court.
Conclusively, the detention and internment of non-American citizens was spurred by the fear of terrorism and was a violation of the civil liberties of foreign people and was mainly grounded on hatred and chauvinism supported by the government.
References
Nagata, D. K., Kim, J. H., & Wu, K. (2019). The Japanese American wartime incarceration: Examining the scope of racial trauma. American Psychologist, 74(1), 36.https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2019-01033-0
Velasquez-Potts, M. C. (2019). Carceral Oversight: Force-Feeding and Visuality at Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp. Public Culture, 31(3), 581-600.https://read.dukeupress.edu/public- culture/article/31/3/581/140080/Carceral-OversightForce-Feeding-and-Visuality-at