No wait, not entirely speechless.

"Relocation" is when you buy someone a nice house in the mountains and then truck all of their possessions there.

When you force them out of their homes and then lock them away in barracks behind barbed wire? Um, even if they get to play soccer during the day, that's fucking imprisonment.

Jesus.

I mean, look, it was FUCKING PRISON CAMP, not Camp Granada!

Jesus!

Yay revisionists! Next up, we're going to take a little trip to Dachau, a quiet little day spa for Jews.

jeez, the room isn't BIG enough for me to roll my eyes in...

Holy crap.

In a management plan for the Minidoka FUCKING PRISON CAMP National Monument finalized this week,

There's it's fixed.

(Seriously, that's screwed up.)

Washington, DC — The National Park Service has started using a political loyalty test for picking all its top civil service positions, according to an agency directive released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Under the new order, all mid-level managers and above must also be approved by a Bush administration political appointee.

Well, I guess that explains it.

I am so moving to Canada.

...because your Nation's Parks are the idea breeding ground for terrrists? "Well, they do have a lot of room to run around, and there's plenty of fresh water. We also maintain the toilets on a regular basis."

Um, and 'environmental responsibility' shouldn't be used but people who don't know what the words mean.

(that was supposed to be 'ideal breeding ground'.)


"...and I was just trying to live my bloody life - you know, get from A to B, and do a little shopping - only to find that in fact life is controlled poorly by bits of *bloody*, *bloody* buggery bits of paper. I mean, why can't life just be made a little bit easier for everybody, you know, I mean why do we play bloody taxes? I know, you know, to buy railings to put outside bloody shops so stupid people can't run into the bloody road, but you know, we're not all stupid. We don't all need nursemaiding. I mean, why not have a stupidity tax, just tax the stupid people!" - Eddy, Ab Fab.

Um ...

I think you're mad at the NPS for trying to remove the word "internment", but I think they're correct. The legal term, really, is "concentration camp", but that now has Holocaust inferences which are inappropriate. The US citizens who were relocated were legally displaced persons. Relocation has been used before, e.g. Jimmy Carter established a "Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians" to study compensation issues.

There's no one easy way to say it, and if you try, you get into a host of problems.

They're right to go with the example of Manzanar, which is simply Manzanar National Historic Site.

fuckin a man.

I'm agreeing with stillcho -- I think NPS is saying that "internment" isn't actually quite horrific enough a term; they're saying that's what you do to aliens, not to your own citizens, and presumably doing it to your own citizens is an even larger failure of the government.

Everyone I've known who's worked for the Park Service has been a serious lefty. I don't think they're trying to minimize the horror here, just categorize it as accurately as possible.

Hmm. Yeah. I'll always listen to you, Occhiblu, because you're scarily rational and smart and I like you. But I'm not really buying it.

I don't get the impression that the NPS is trying to forge an accurate name, but rather they're trying to depoliticize the naming of the site -- and the obvious reason is our current political climate. (Fun fact: Guantanamo has a Starbucks.)

I've known a lot of people who have worked for the parks too, and like you say, they've all been crunchy granola outdoor enthusiasts. But those are the younger folks who sign on for summer jobs because they love what the National Parks represent. (Or if not what they represent -- because I guess I don't really even know what I mean by that -- what they contain.)

But the Park Service and is still a fundamentally political entity and its leaders are political appointees.

So, while a semantic debate is certainly appropriate -- and some would say warranted -- I'm choosing to think of the name thing as political bullshit. Sorry.

I just don't that verbal accuracy is actually their top priority. I mean, if they want to be rhetorically and historically accurate about the name, they should just call it "Out-of-the-Way Place Where We Stuck All The America-Born Japs During WWII" and be done with it.

But given the fact that the Bush administration is asking national parks to operate at 80% of their budgets in 2007, and has cut their funding by $100mil, they probably couldn't afford to fit all that on the sign.

P.S.: My copy-editing sucks tonight.

Everyone I've known who's worked for the Park Service has been a serious lefty.

But Bush appointees are wreaking havoc. As per this article about his political hacks. Hack #12 is Paul Hoffman, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks, Department of the Interior. They had this to say about him:

Paul Hoffman is an avid angler, hunter, skier, and horseman. So it was only natural to tap this former chief of the Chamber of Commerce in Cody, Wyoming, (population 9,000) to help run the National Park Service. Sure, Hoffman had no parks experience other than recreating in them and, as head of the Cody Chamber, advocating for more snowmobiles in nearby Yellowstone National Park. But he had spent four years in the 1980s working as the state director for then-Wyoming Representative Dick Cheney. Since arriving at the Interior Department in 2002, Hoffman has demonstrated a knack for thinking outside the box. In April 2003, he went against the wishes of the staff of Yellowstone and asked the U.N. World Heritage Committee to remove the park from its "In Danger List." Last year, he overruled geologists at the Grand Canyon National Park and instructed the park's visitor centers to stock a creationist book that explained how God made the canyon 6,000 years ago, ordering up a flood to wipe out "the wickedness of man." And, this year, Hoffman pushed for wholesale revisions to the Park Service's management policies. Instead of giving priority to protecting natural resources, Hoffman proposed that managers emphasize multiple uses for their parks--including snowmobiling, Jet-Skiing, grazing, drilling, and mining. After Hoffman's proposed reforms set off a firestorm of criticism from Park Service employees and members of Congress--"The inmates are in charge of the asylum," one Park Service retiree complained--the Bush administration claimed that Hoffman's suggestions were "no longer in play" and that he had merely been playing "devil's advocate."

I think The Coalition of National Park Service Retirees was created in 2003 or 2005, though I could be wrong. They're certainly mad.

Well, I doubt they made people sleep on the floor, and they must have fed them or they would have starved, so it was a Bed and Breakfast, no?

I also believe "internment" isn't strong enough - "concentration camp" or "prison camp" would be closer to the truth. And apologies, occhiblu, but I don't think the Park Service is saying the same thing.

That said, I don't believe leaving out the word really means a whole lot. Visitors know what the place used to be and the inclusion (or exclusion) of the word "internment" won't make a difference.

The worst part of the whole situation was people being stripped of their property and paid little to nothing in compensation.

*leaves the light on for mudpuppie*

I guess I'm getting stuck on this:

["internment"] ... does not accurately reflect the government's forced relocation of thousands of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent.

I think it's the "forced relocation of thousands" language. It doesn't sound like they're trying to downplay the horrors of what actually happened, since they're still mentioning what actually happened.

On the other hand, Bush appointee's wrangling of the CDC and FDA on various reproductive health issues have left me assuming that any language they use, no matter how innocuous in and of itself, is part of a larger campaign to strip as many rights from women as possible, and I will argue that to the death, so I'm not going to pretend the same thing may not be happening here.

(In other news, why do I use so many double negatives???)

And I do, by the way, know many full-time NPS employees, not just the summer volunteers; I seem to have a weirdly high number of archaeologists in my acquaintance, all of whom work for the Park Service.