AlterNet: Nationalism's Psychotic Side: "Despite the terrible backdrop of the war, ethnic tension on the pier and back in our neighborhoods was not particularly pronounced. This followed the national pattern. German Americans at the time constituted the largest immigrant group in the U.S., firmly assimilated into the dominant culture. The patriotism of relatively few German or Italian Americans was questioned. Meanwhile, the Japanese Americans of the West Coast were being rounded up and shipped off to grim desert internment camps while I was being indoctrinated by comic books to see the Japanese as bucktoothed savages.

But there wasn't much time to think about all this because U.S. involvement in the war was quite short. Forgotten in President Bush's legitimate criticism of postwar Soviet behavior last week was our own nation's reluctance to enter the war while Hitler's armies conquered France and marched deep into the Soviet Union."

(Via AlterNet.)