Posted by Eric Muller (visiting from <a
href="http://www.isthatlegal.org/";>isthatlegal.org</a>):
IN DEFENSE OF INTERNMENT, Part 3:
In her prefatory note to readers of her new book "In Defense of
Internment," Michelle Malkin says the following about the book's goal:
"This book defends both the evacuation and relocation of ethnic
Japanese from the West Coast (the so-called "Japanese American
internment"), as well as the internment of enemy aliens, Japanese
and non-Japanese alike, during World War II. My work is by no means
all-encompassing; my aim is to provoke a debate on a sacrosanct
subject that has remained undebatable for far too long."
Read just a bit further, though, and you'll see that the book is not
just about "provoking debate." It's about "correcting the record"
(page xv). By the time she finishes her retelling of the story of how
the U.S. government decided to force 112,000 Japanese aliens and U.S.
citizens of Japanese ancestry from their homes and into camps in the
interior, she maintains that "it should be obvious to any fair-minded
person that the decisions made were not based primarily on racism and
wartime hysteria" (page 80), but were based instead on information in
top-secret decrypted cables from Japan to its embassies around the
world (the so-called "MAGIC" decrypts) suggesting that certain people
in the Americas (both ethnically Japanese people, including primarily
Japanese aliens but also a handful of American citizens of Japanese
ancestry, as well as people of other races and ethnicities) were
secretly working as spies for the Japanese government. In other words,
the government did what it did to people of Japanese ancestry in the
United States from 1941 to 1945 because a select few officials at the
very top of certain branches of the government (really a very few--the
President, the Secretary of State, and a few War Department officials,
but not the Attorney General or J. Edgar Hoover) knew that the
Japanese government had sought to develop relationships with
ethnically Japanese (as well as ethnically non-Japanese) people in the
United States, and had apparently had some success in developing such
relationships. It was cool and calibrated military necessity, not
racism and not war hysteria. I'll have more to say about her
substantive claims about MAGIC and racism and hysteria later. (Dave
Neiwert has already said plenty about it, by the way.) First, though,
people ought to ask Michelle some very serious questions about the
book's goal and the research methods that support it. I was, frankly,
amazed at the speed with which Michelle researched and wrote the book,
and then brought it to publication. She mentioned yesterday that she
had been led to do much of the research for the book by a weblog
dialogue (a "diablogue?") between me and Sparky at Sgt. Styker that
took place 16 months ago. I know that when I undertook to tell the
story of a single government decision from this era -- the decision to
draft American citizens of Japanese ancestry out of the camps and into
the military -- I had to spend hours and hours first finding all of
the relevant files from all the relevant agencies in archives all over
the country, then sifting through those files to find all documents
from all agencies and people relevant to the decisionmaking process,
and then poring over the documents themselves, in order to link
together disparate positions of many different people in many
different agencies into a coherent narrative. In "In Defense of
Internement," Michelle "corrects the record" by telling a much broader
story about a whole long set of government policies and decisions. She
cites to original documents from a staggering number of agencies and
offices within agencies--the FBI, the Justice Department, the Office
of Naval Intelligence, various branches of the War Department
(including G1, G2, and the Provost Marshall General's Office), the
State Department, the Military Intelligence Division, FDR's
communications, and, of course, the voluminous MAGIC cables. I haven't
checked, but I assume that lots of relevant materials for the story
Michelle tells would be all over the country--in both DC-area branches
of the National Archives as well as many of its regional offices, in
presidential libraries, in the private papers of people like John
McCloy and Milton Eisenhower and Franklin Roosevelt and George
Marshall and many others who played a role in this long anc complex
story, and in lots of other places. I can't imagine how Michelle--or,
indeed, anyone--could have done the primary research necessary to
understand the record, let alone "correct" it in the manner the book
attempts to do, in five or six years, let alone in one. Especially
while doing anything at all in addition to researching the book (such
as writing a nationally syndicated newspaper column). To tell the
story correctly, a person would need to sift through thousands and
thousands of pages of archival material from all over the country and
then piece bits together into a coherent story. I have a hard time
believing that Michelle did anything of the sort. I supect that she
derived much of the information that supports her account from
secondary sources, and relies primarily on primary research done (or
perhaps not done) by others. A person certainly can "provoke debate"
(uninformed debate, at least) by going about things in this way. But a
person can't "correct the record" in this way, or report history in a
way that anyone ought to believe. It's just not possible, and it's not
credible.
_______________________________________________
Volokh mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://highsorcery.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/volokh
