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Comment by danabrams | Hacker News Reader

Let me clear that I’m not saying all of the govt actions that took liberties away in wwii were justified or helpful or good. Japanese internment is one of the clearest examples of paranoia that was destructive and did not help the war effort.

But many other actions, from curfews, to govt planning of the economy, a draft, collective bomb shelters in London, etc, clearly did help preserve life and Liberty in the long term.

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> But many other actions, from curfews, to govt planning of the economy, a draft, collective bomb shelters in London, etc, clearly did help preserve life and Liberty in the long term.

A literal interpretation of this (comprehensive) text yields a rather bold claim.

> Japanese internment is one of the clearest examples of paranoia that was destructive and did not help the war effort.

Sure, but it makes the point that just because people claim some measure is for the collective good, doesn't mean we should just take that at face value. Power is easily abused and we should be demanding more transparency and accountability from people who want to impose onerous top-down restrictions for speculative reasons. Instead, we get legions of people shouting down and vilifying those who are expecting more.

But my larger point to the original comment was that wwii may have had an order of magnitude more causalities, but it also came with at least one order of magnitude more disruption. My own grandfather lost over a year of his life to POw camp and walked with a limp for the remain 77 years of his life. His family that were still in Europe on the other hand were systematically rounded up and murdered, their property confiscated, first by the Germans then by the soviets. But he was proud to have made the sacrifices he did to stop fascism in its tracks.

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