Posted by Eric Muller (visiting from <a href="http://www.isthatlegal.org/";>isthatlegal.org</a>): IN DEFENSE OF INTERNMENT, Part 4:
As I continue liveblogging my own thoughts about Michelle's book "In Defense of Internment," I'll note a part of the book where I think Michelle is quite right. In her introduction (pages xiii to xxxv), or at least in certain parts of it, she makes the case that the civil liberties Left and representatives of the Japanese American community have not helped anyone think clearly about the Roosevelt Adminisration's policies by attacking each step of the Bush Administration's domestic antiterrorism policy since 9/11 as a reprise of the worst mistakes of WWII. This was one of the two main points I made in my article [1]"Inference or Impact? Racial Profiling and the Internment's True Legacy," which Michelle graciously cites in her book. A big part of what drove Michelle to write this book was her disgust with people on the left who have never met an antiterrorism policy they like, and who have trotted out the scary specter of the incarceration of Japanese Americans at every opportunity. In "Inference or Impact," I worried about the Chicken Little effect of repeatedly claiming a reply of the WWII experience of Japanese Americans--that it might lead people to minimize the reality of that experience. Michelle is doing that in this book, and in at least a small way, I think the civil liberties left has some of its own rhetoric to blame. David Cole didn't force Michelle Malkin to write this book, mind you. But maybe some of David's rhetoric helped her build her head of steam. Now I hasten to add that Michelle is also slaying dragons of her own creation. She's outraged, she says (see pages 95-99), at all of the people who liken the War Relocation Authority's "Relocation Centers" for Japanese Americans to Nazi death camps by naming them with the historically accurate term "concentration camps." (That's what FDR himself called them -- see the quotation from FDR on page 21 of Michelle's book.) I don't have the faintest idea who Michelle is talking about here. I know of no one who compares Manzanar to Auschwitz, and Michelle's book doesn't cite anyone who does so. Michelle is certainly right that scholars of the Japanese American experience and the Japanese American community itself play games with terminology, sometimes using historically authentic terms such as "concentration camp" while rejecting other historically authentic terms (such as "internment") on the basis that they do not adequately reflect what really happened. (Most savvy people today speak of "incarceration" rather than "internment.") But Michelle does exactly the same thing, rejecting the historically authentic term "concentration camp" while insisting on using the historically authentic but grossly misleading term "evacuation." (People are "evacuated" in order to protect them from a threat, such as a hurricane or a forest fire. Japanese Americans were evicted from their homes, not evacuated.) If in fact there were people who compared this country's camps for Japanese Americans to Nazi Germany's death camps, I would certainly understand Michelle's angry desire to set the record straight. My grandfather was in Buchenwald,** and I'd be as outraged as anyone--probably more outraged than most--by the suggestion that this government ran places like that. But--to foreshadow my next post on this topic--the way to counter a comparison of Manzanar to Buchenwald is to describe Manzanar carefully. It is not to compare Manzanar to a Boy Scout Camp, which Michelle comes very close to doing. More on that later. **I note that Michelle has set up [2]an "errata" page for the book. Here's one. On page 99, she says that "[h]istorians who compare the American relocation camps to Dachau and Bergen-Belsen will be hard-pressed to find a single European Jew who ... was given permission to leave ... a Nazi death camp." Not so. Nearly all of the German and Austrian Jews (like my grandfather) who were seized at Kristallnacht and taken to Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen in early November of 1938 were released over the following several months. Those who could not get visas out of Germany and Austria were later recaptured and killed (like my great uncle Leopold). But Nazi Germany's policy from the mid- to late 1930s was to "encourage" (by which I mean terrorize) Jews into leaving the country. You can read more about this episode [3]here if you're interested. References 1. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=462522 2. http://www.michellemalkin.com/errata.htm 3. http://www.holocaust-history.org/short-essays/kristallnacht.shtml _______________________________________________ Volokh mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://highsorcery.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/volokh
