This is nonsense, classic revisionism, i.e., a cynical rewrite of history for narrow and selfish political purposes. History has made its judgment and its not the one the scandalously bigoted Malkin and the scandalously bigoted Leo claim.
Over 120,000 people, including children and the elderly, were required to leave their homes in California and parts of Washington, Oregon and Arizona. Most people did not have time to store or sell their household goods at a fair price. Some people moved to other states, but the majority went to internment camps. They were only allowed to take few belongings with them, and many families lost virtually everything they owned except what they could carry. Internees spent many years in camp, behind barbed wire fences and with armed guards patrolling the camps. Entire families lived in cramped, one room quarters that were poorly constructed.The scandalously bigoted reactionaries peddling their scandalously bigoted line of crap are not to be deterred by either fact or history's judgment. I've already told you what I think of the scandalously bigoted Malkin, so this time let's focus on her scandalously bigoted marionette.
In 1980, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians was established by Congress. This commission reviewed the impact of Executive Order 9066 on Japanese-Americans and determined that they were the victims of discrimination by the Federal government.
On August 10, 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. The Act was passed by Congress to provide a Presidential apology and symbolic payment of $20,000.00 to the internees, evacuees, and persons of Japanese ancestry who lost liberty or property because of discriminatory action by the Federal government during World War II. The Act also created the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund to help teach children and the public about the internment period.
As one example of how he deals with facts, the scandalously bigoted Leo claims that "most of the U.S. fleet [was] destroyed at Pearl Harbor [and] the Pacific became a Japanese pond." But according to the Navy's own description of the battle (thanks to Chris Bray at historians.blogspot.com for the link), there were 90 ships anchored at Pearl Harbor, of which 21 were damaged or destroyed - which means 69 were not. Admittedly, those numbers alone understate the degree of damage since the Japanese concentrated their attack on the battleships, eight of which were damaged or sunk. But that still doesn't justify a description of the attack as destroying "most" of the Pacific fleet.
That's especially true since not a single aircraft carrier was damaged: They were all at sea at the time. What's more, 18 of the 21 damaged or sunk ships were repaired and put back in action - and of the other three, two were deemed too old or obsolete to be worth the effort. Six months after Pearl Harbor, at the Battle of Midway (June 4-7, 1942) the US assembled a force of 3 aircraft carriers, 8 heavy cruisers, 15 destroyers, and 12 submarines and their associated support vessels (and 234 aircraft afloat). Another dozen submarines and 10 PT boats cruised the waters around Midway Island. Meanwhile, a Japanese attack on the Aleutians on June 3 was met by a task force of 5 cruisers, 14 destroyers, and 6 submarines.
A lot of this might be dismissed as irrelevant since FDR's internment order was issued on February 19, 1942, nearly four months before these battles. However, the purpose was to point out the fact that the scandalously bigoted Leo's assertion that in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor the Pacific "became a Japanese pond" is bogus. And for that it still works.
What's more, as the scandalously bigoted Leo himself admits, the "core" of the scandalously bigoted Malkin's scandalously bigoted book concerns the so-called MAGIC decrypts, decoded Japanese messages sent to and from Japan in the time leading up to the war. In the eyes of the scandalously bigoted reactionaries, these documents demonstrated that by mid-1941 there was an extensive, organized, spy and subversion network among Japanese-Americans on the west coast.
The only problem is, they don't say any such thing. Instead, as noted by both David Neiwert and Greg Robinson (scroll down to "In Defense of Internment, Part 5"), the documents speak far more of what Japanese agents hoped to achieve rather than what they had achieved. There is no evidence they actually succeeded to any significant extent.
To bogus history and slippery analysis, the scandalously bigoted Leo adds some creative accounting (referring to 100,000 interned, understating the actual number by nearly 20%) and a list of what are apparently supposed to be gasp-inducing incidents which actually add up to very little. One example, "shell[ing] California's Goleta Oil Fields," is darkly amusing. The attack was by the deck gun of a single submarine, it lasted a few minutes, and did minimal damage - and actually happened because the captain of the sub wanted revenge for an incident years earlier when his American hosts has a laugh at his expense when he fell backwards into a cactus. Now, of course this last part wasn't known at the time, but the rest was. While it not surprisingly generated some hysteria in the region about an imminent Japanese attack, are we really to think the country's military and political leaders, with their knowledge of Japanese intelligence, thought this was a significant encounter?
Well, yes, actually, we are - or, rather, the scandalously bigoted Leo would prefer we don't think too much about it at all. Because that's where the strength of the scandalously bigoted right lies: in people not thinking.
So why are the scandalously bigoted wingnuts trying to refight an old, lost battle? Why the drive "toward our first national discussion on the wisdom and fairness" of a discredited policy of 60 years ago? The scandalously bigoted Leo tells us:
Malkin's point is that if the threat to the survival of America is severe enough, some civil liberties must yield. She is right that the internment issue is currently being wielded as a club to prevent reasonable extra scrutiny of suspect Arabs and Muslims. But the twin towers were not brought down by militant Swedish nuns. It is always reasonable to look in the direction from which the gravest danger is coming. It's also reasonable and important to open an honest discussion of internment, past and present.Internment past and present.
Past and present.
Past and present.
Just keep that last word in mind and you will understand all.
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