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Current group: nz.politics
Kooky right wing columnists try to justify Japanese internment, rehabilitate McCarthy
| Morrissey Breen | | bernxard at yahoo.com.au | | bernxard at yahoo.com.au | | tom | | Tilly |
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| | From: | Morrissey Breen | | Subject: | Kooky right wing columnists try to justify Japanese internment, rehabilitate McCarthy | | Date: | 20 Jan 2005 16:26:30 -0800 |
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 | Defending Repression
Why are conservatives trying to rehabilitate McCarthyism and the
Japanese internment?
by CATHY YOUNG
November 2004
During World War II, the U.S. government interned about 120,000 ethnic
Japanese living in America, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens.
This is almost universally regarded as a shameful blot on America's
history, a cautionary tale of racism, paranoia, and wartime hysteria.
In 1988 President Reagan called it "a grave wrong" and signed
legislation authorizing $20,000 in reparations to each surviving
internee.
In 2000 another eminent conservative, Supreme Court Justice Antonin
Scalia, assailed his colleagues' ruling striking down Nebraska's
late-term abortion ban by likening it to Dred Scott and Korematsu, the
rulings which upheld the constitutionality of, respectively, slavery
and the Japanese-American internment.
So it takes some nerve to pen a defense of this reviled policy --
which is exactly what the author and syndicated columnist Michelle
Malkin did recently, in a new book titled In Defense of Internment:
The Case for "Racial Profiling" in World War II and the War on Terror.
Malkin's argument is closely tied to post-September 11 debates about
ethnic, racial, and religious profiling as a "homeland security"
measure.
Inevitably, critics have raised the Japanese internment as an extreme
case of racial profiling gone awry. Malkin believes our safety is
being compromised because any common-sense proposal that involves
profiling -- be it extra-vigilant screening of Middle Eastern
passengers at airports, targeted monitoring of visitors with guest
visas from countries with terrorist links, or special scrutiny of
Muslim chaplains in the armed forces -- is shouted down by invoking
the specter of internment camps. And it's true that internment
parallels have been frivolously and promiscuously thrown about in this
debate.
One would think, though, that if you truly wanted to counter such
slippery-slope hyperbole about ethnic or religious profiling, the last
thing you'd want to do would be to defend internment. It's a bit like
trying to counter arguments that legalized abortion leads to
acceptance of infanticide by publishing a tract in defense of
infanticide. Malkin's calculus, however, is different: She hopes that
if Americans can be persuaded to get over the Japanese internment
guilt complex, the profiling of Arab Americans and Muslims will become
more acceptable.
To counter this guilt complex -- peddled, according to Malkin, by high
school textbooks, universities, ethnic activists, politicians, and the
media -- Malkin sets out to debunk what she describes as politically
correct myths about internment: that it was motivated primarily by
racism and hysteria, that there was no national security justification
for it, and that the relocation and internment camps were Nazi-style
death camps. (It's not clear who has ever made that last claim. Malkin
asserts simply that such images are evoked today by the use of the
term concentration camp, a phrase that was actually used by U.S.
authorities at the time.)
The truth, Malkin contends, is that the U.S. leadership had ample
reason to fear sabotage and espionage by ethnic Japanese --
particularly on the basis of intelligence data declassified years
after the war, from decoded Japanese
diplomatic communications -- and didn't have the ability or the
resources to assess individual risk.
As historical revisionism, In Defense of Internment largely falls
flat. (You can go to isthatlegal.org for two scholars' critique of the
book, and to Malkin's own site, michellemalkin.com, for her replies.
Reason will review the book in an upcoming issue.) Malkin does
demonstrate that there were instances of disloyalty by Japanese aliens
and Japanese Americans during the war, and that the Roosevelt
administration had evidence that the Japanese military was seeking,
apparently with some success, to recruit agents in the Japanese
community on the West Coast of the United States. But she never
justifies a response as extreme, and as offensive to the most basic
notions of justice and human rights, as mass internment.
Of the anti-Japanese bigotry that was pervasive in America and
especially on the West Coast even before Pearl Harbor, and was whipped
up into virulent hate by a propaganda campaign after the start of the
war, Malkin says nary a word.
Responding to critics on her blog, she suggests she didn't need to
address the issue of racism because her whole point was to disprove
the "myth" that it was a dominant factor in the internment. (In other
words, if you decide to write a book debunking the notion that obesity
causes heart disease, you can omit any mention of obesity in your
examination of risk factors. Makes sense.)
In the same vein, Malkin gives only passing mention to such
unpleasantness as shootings of internees by camp guards but discusses
at length the amenities offered in the camps and the petty complaints
of some internees.
In a way, In Defense of Interment follows in the footsteps of another
recent famous (or infamous) right-wing tome: last year's Treason, by
Ann Coulter, which undertook the rehabilitation of Sen. Joseph
McCarthy and a debunking of "the myth of ‘McCarthyism.'" McCarthy,
Coulter proclaimed, was a true hero in the struggle against communism,
and the only unjust persecution was that of Tail Gunner Joe himself by
his left-wing, America-hating enemies.
There's a strong parallel between Coulter's apologia for the
anti-communist witch hunts and Malkin's apologia for the
Japanese-American internment: In both cases, there was a genuine
national security risk and a wrongheaded, hysterical government
response that did grave damage to the very freedoms it was supposed to
protect.
Notably, Coulter's harshest critics include anti-communist historians,
such as Ronald Radosh and Harvey Klehr, who have taken a lot of flak
from their left-wing colleagues for daring to say that Soviet
espionage really was a serious threat and that many American
Communists targeted as Soviet agents really were guilty. Radosh
referred to Treason as "crap" on Andrew Sullivan's weblog, expressing
dismay that Coulter drew on his work to support her "ludicrous"
arguments. Klehr, writing in The New Republic, dismissed her book as a
"crass apologia for McCarthyism."
Why the rush to defend what was only recently seen, across the
political spectrum, as indefensible? Partly, it's the sheer appeal and
satisfaction of skewering sacred cows, liberal ones especially -- and
there are, God knows, so many that deserve skewering. Indeed, in the
case of McCarthyism, the stubborn blindness of leftists and many
liberals both to the brutality of the Soviet regime and to the extent
of Soviet espionage during the Cold War undoubtedly helped create
fertile ground for Coulter-style polemics.
A similar dynamic may be at work with the Japanese internment issue.
Some of the history textbooks Malkin indignantly quotes probably do
err on the side of dismissing all World War II-era concerns about
subversive activities by Japanese ethnics as unfounded paranoia. The
weakness of this position creates an opening for revisionism,
including the radical revisionism of In Defense of Internment.
It is useful, too, to remember that defending the indefensible has
long been a popular sport on the left, whose own revisionist
historians are busy trying to sugarcoat not McCarthyism but Stalinism.
(See "Fools for Communism," April 2004.)
Also at work, however, is the dark side of modern American
conservatism. The left's obsession with America's allegedly unique
evilness, and in particular with real or imagined racism, has prompted
a fully justified backlash. But that backlash can morph into an ugly
and disturbing mind-set -- one that regards all efforts to confront
America's past wrongs as the province of sissy liberals and wild-eyed
lefties.
As the revisionists plow ahead, sometimes one wants to ask, "Have you
no sense of decency, folks, at long last? Have you left no sense of
decency?"
Contibuting Editor Cathy Young is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
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| | From: | bernxard at yahoo.com.au | | Subject: | Re: Kooky right wing columnists try to justify Japanese internment, rehabilitate McCarthy | | Date: | 21 Jan 2005 05:24:23 -0800 |
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| That is totally exaggerated, totally wrong: McCarthy's target always
was commuinists and those that would betray America to achieve some
imported vision. Not "Liberals". In those days the term "liberal"
still meant "liberal" with its conotations of broad mindedness and was
not a cop out word for ethno-marxist (or a shield term for ethnocentric
Jewish activism.)
What gets your goat I suspect is that many of your Jewish
co-religionists ( who had been immigrating form eastern europe since
the 1880s) of the time were communists. For many of those in the USA
and the USSR helping the tribe was for many being involved in
communism and marxist radicalism. The two were collapsed.
White anting Hollywood and selling out America's nuclear secrets to the
Soviet Union were part and parcell with bringing in Hispanics post 1965
and offering them the same lavish and burdensome "compensatory
affirmitive action" as blacks who were the descendents of unwilling
slaves.
This is the thanks Americans of the day got for letting eastern Jews
enter. All the scabs and inconsistencies that exist in any society
were sought out not to heal them but the open them up wide and raw and
use them.
McCarthy showed however no specific animous towards Jews, this despite
the fact that their over abundence in communism would've provoked a
saint.
If McCarthy was obnoxious by your standards then he was no more
obnoxious than the people he deservedly exposed for what they were and
would have done and stood for.
I've seen communists: in Eastern europe and in universities. They are
brutal oppresive, dangerous nasty filthy pigs as soon as they get any
power or influence they change and thenforce brook no disagreement.
All McCarthy did was: expose paid soviet agents who were communists in
the state department and outed white anting propagandists. If you
think that senate select hearing on un amercian activies were vile than
you haven't seen the communist show trials tormenting the whole of
eastern Europe through to china.
> He was also a racist
Yeah, well people like you throw that in ad nauseum and without basis.
IIt rhetoric and ad hominem. It's worthless and meaningless based on
contextualisations to suit you.
McCarthy didn't pick on Jews, he picked on communists and they often
tended to be jews. Now the pinkos have reframed themselves as neocons.
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| | From: | bernxard at yahoo.com.au | | Subject: | Re: Kooky right wing columnists try to justify Japanese internment, rehabilitate McCarthy | | Date: | 20 Jan 2005 20:32:22 -0800 |
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| What is the linkage between the internment of Japanese, Stalinism and
McCarthyism?
Not much even if you read this rambling article. They are conected
only by rhetoric: the attempt to link something unpleaseant with
something the author doesn't like in order to trasfer the negative
emotions.
McCarthey never jailed or had exectuted anybody. All he did was ask
awkward questions in US senate hearings.
He exposed a lot of Communists who were trying to "white ant" the
Hollywood system. People making movies, writing scripts, to harm and
discredit the west and the USA. Some were clearly communist party of
America members: a party that was used by Soviet Espionage. He also
exposed penetration of the US state department with no less than 57
spies. (there were apparently over 2000 but he daren't shock the
American public). His allegations were latter confirmed by the
Decryps.
So what is the link between Stalinism and McCarthyism? Nothing except
that McCarthy tried to stop Stalinism. Stalinism which included
politcally correct propaganda through the complete control of the
media, the murder of 4.5 million ukranians and millions of others and
the establishment of Gulags.
Face it. McCarthy stopped the radical communist left by doing to it
only a fraction of what it would have done in turen: he only did
earlier and in time.
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| | From: | tom | | Subject: | Re: Kooky right wing columnists try to justify Japanese internment, rehabilitate McCarthy | | Date: | Fri, 21 Jan 2005 04:51:52 GMT |
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wrote in message
news:1106281942.960627.129860@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> What is the linkage between the internment of Japanese, Stalinism and
> McCarthyism?
>
> Not much even if you read this rambling article. They are conected
> only by rhetoric: the attempt to link something unpleaseant with
> something the author doesn't like in order to trasfer the negative
> emotions.
That's how this dope Breen works.
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| | From: | Tilly | | Subject: | Re: Kooky right wing columnists try to justify Japanese internment, rehabilitate McCarthy | | Date: | Fri, 21 Jan 2005 19:02:04 +1300 |
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| bernxard@yahoo.com.au wrote:
> What is the linkage between the internment of Japanese, Stalinism and
> McCarthyism?
>
> Not much even if you read this rambling article. They are conected
> only by rhetoric: the attempt to link something unpleaseant with
> something the author doesn't like in order to trasfer the negative
> emotions.
>
> McCarthey never jailed or had exectuted anybody. All he did was ask
> awkward questions in US senate hearings.
>
> He exposed a lot of Communists who were trying to "white ant" the
> Hollywood system. People making movies, writing scripts, to harm and
> discredit the west and the USA. Some were clearly communist party of
> America members: a party that was used by Soviet Espionage. He also
> exposed penetration of the US state department with no less than 57
> spies. (there were apparently over 2000 but he daren't shock the
> American public). His allegations were latter confirmed by the
> Decryps.
>
> So what is the link between Stalinism and McCarthyism? Nothing except
> that McCarthy tried to stop Stalinism. Stalinism which included
> politcally correct propaganda through the complete control of the
> media, the murder of 4.5 million ukranians and millions of others and
> the establishment of Gulags.
>
> Face it. McCarthy stopped the radical communist left by doing to it
> only a fraction of what it would have done in turen: he only did
> earlier and in time.
Neither was excusable and neither Mc Carthyism or Japanese internment
should ever be be 'rehabilated or labelled as acceptable behaviour..
McCarthy was an obnoxious human being who accused anyone who didn't agree
with him, had liberal views , or that was a political opponent of being a
'commie'. He was also a racist.
--
Tilly
striking1583REMOVE@yahoo.co.nz
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