The two videos namely the Japanese American Internment of World War II and the Japanese American Internment (U.S. Government Propaganda) center on how United States citizens with Japanese heritage were relocated to concentration camps during World War Two in the year 1942. This was done under the watch of the then president of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt (Siasoco, Ricco, and Ross 1).
The internment of Japanese Americans was triggered by anti-Japanese attitudes by farmers and the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese authorities. As a result, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the internment of Japanese Americans by signing an executive order 9066.
In the executive order, all Japanese Americans were to be rounded up in 10 relocation centers which were supposed to act as internment camps. This led to the evacuation of about 120,000 Japanese Americans to internment camps which were located in Colorado, Wyoming, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, California, and Arkansas. To achieve its objective of relocating the Japanese Americans, a means of communication was necessary in order to reach the victims and to justify the actions of the American government. The propaganda communication means which were widely used were newspaper articles and motion pictures which justified the relocation in the name of national security.
The relocation of Japanese Americans was not justified as it was later established that most of the people who were put in internment camps were American citizens who posed no threat to the security of the American people. The United States government at that time was faced with external aggression and it was not necessary to make its own citizens suffer by concentrating them in camps, but instead, it could have focused more on the external aggression it was facing from several nations including Japan.
The internment camps did not provide the occupants with human conditions, but instead, overcrowding, lack of water, and cooking facilities were the order of the day which increased the suffering of the Japanese American people. There was also discrimination in the camps where leadership positions were offered only to American-born, Japanese and this was a clear violation of the rights of the citizens.
Works Cited
Siasoco, Ricco and Ross, Shmuel. Japanese Relocation Centers. infoplease. 2007. Web.