new book out defending Japanese internment camps in WWII

[bobbieinok]

http://www.catch.com/comments/33410_0_17_0_C/

[GOPisEvil]

1. Michelle Malkin is a self-loathing hypocrite.

[Generic Other]

6. Go write a review of her book at Amazon

Here's mine:

American Racism Simplified, August 4, 2004
Reviewer: Uncle Samarai - See all my reviews

"Malkin's round eye analysis of what makes her more American than me."

She deserves it!

[truthspeaker]

2. Good gods. It's like we have to re-learn every lesson from WWII

Lesson 1: Imperialism costs more in the long run than the short-term benefits

Lesson 2: Pure capitalism results in a unfair society, which usually results in revolution.

Lesson 3: Targeting people based solely on their ethnicity is bad, m'kay?

Lesson 4: modern warfare is so destructive it must be used as a last resort, and requires a total national commitment to war. Fighting 19th-century small wars without disrupting life in the home country is impossible.

[NewJeffCT]

3. does she give reason why...

Italians & Germans were not similarly detained?

[Jim Sagle]

5. Actually, they were - just in much smaller numbers.

[DrWeird]

8. What's with the apologizing for Internment?

Nobody was going through German and Italian ghettos, rounding them up, and sending them off to concentration camps.

[Jim Sagle]

14. I'm not apologizing for or excusing anything - just laying out facts.

Sorry if that upsets you.

Your mindreading skills suck galaxies through a soda straw.

[NewJeffCT]

11. smaller numbers and

I'm sure it was a drastically lower percentage of Germans & Italians, as Germans & Italians are in higher numbers in our population than Japanese.

[Jim Sagle]

15. Very good point. Japanese-Americans were singled out like no one else.

[Ms. Clio]

12. Please provide links or book cites for that information n/t

[MadHound]

16. While not as widespread as Japanese-American internment

Both German and Italian Americans were internted during WWII. The following page provides some enlightening links. <http://www.serve.com/shea/germusa/intern.htm>

Also note that the internment of German-Americans occurred during WWI as well. In fact the town that I spent a good part of my childhood in, Hermann Mo, was a defacto internment camp for much of WWI. The state and local police kept the traditionally German town under a strict lockdown. For the year that America was actually in the war, few people were allowed to enter Hermann, and even fewer were allowed out.

[Ms. Clio]

20. Thanks for the info

I know about the internment of German-Americans during WWI--in fact, several German-Americans were lynched by mobs during the period.

It should also be noted that the site you link includes the following rebuttal:

An Opposing View


Review Essay: Were German-Americans Interned during World War Two? A Question concerning Scholarly Standards and Integrity. AATG's The German Quarterly, Winter 1998, pp. 73-77. Jeffrey Sammons (Yale U.) reviews two works on the topic with special focus on the Holian work noted below.

Despite all the assertions, including the blatantly tendentious subtitle of the Tolzmann volumes, no evidence has as yet been brought forward that, except for the minor children of enemy aliens, any German-Americans were interned during World War ll. To claim otherwise is irresponsible.


This is quite compelling criticism of these claims from a respected scholar.

I would certainly need more evidence than Jacobs' unfootnoted assertion that "11,000" German-Americans were interned.

[jmowreader]

32. They tried detaining my Italian great-grandmother

Anyone who had been convicted of a crime and who was Italian was considered for detention. My great-grandmother had been busted on Volstead Act violations on several occasions (that Dago Red is important, dammit!) so she was considered for detention.

The sheriff of Shoshone County, Idaho, stepped in for her. She was making the wine for personal use, not for sale, she only owned two hunting guns and except for the Dago Red, she wasn't a threat to the public order.

So a compromise was reached: her phone was tapped, she wasn't allowed to speak Italian on the phone or in public, and she had to check in with the sheriff frequently. But she stayed out of a cage during WWII.

[Hell Hath No Fury]

4. From someone who has friends...

whose families were interned, I will forever say it was one of the most shameful acts our country has ever perpetrated on its citizenry.

Shame, shame, shame on anyone who tries to defend or rationalize those acts. :grr:

[Connie_Corleone]

7. Just another...

Ann Coulter wannabe.

WTF, are they having a contest of who can hate themselves the most??

[smirkymonkey]

30. And an Ayn Rand disciple to boot....

From an Interview w/ Insight(???) on the "News"

Q: Where did you acquire your conservatism?

A: My parents, though rock-ribbed Reagan Republicans, never were demonstrative about politics. In high school, I read all of Ayn Rand; that was my epiphany. I still have my copy of Atlas Shrugged with everything underlined!

http://www.insightmag.com/main.cfm?include=detail&storyid=422234

[jdj]

34. surPRISE, surPRISE, surPRISE

not.

[DoktorGreg]

9. Well if you are goona compare Terra War to WW2

We should be wraping it up here pretty soon, and those people arn't going to languish in those detainment centers for 20 years or something like that.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

10. An apologia for the future?

Just imagine what would happen if AQ or anyone with a "Muslim" name were to set off a bomb in a Church in this country. How many good 'Merkuns would object to setting up "detainment" camps for the "protection" of the "homeland".

My brother-in-law was a guard at one of the internment camps during WWII. He, being from Southern California, and seeing some of his friends interned, was so disgusted that he begged for a transfer. He was assigned to guarding German/Italian POWs in Idaho who were made to work on the farms. According to him, the Germans were hard workers, but the Italians preferred frolicking with the farmer's wives and daughters.

[Ms. Clio]

13. A recent article noted that according to a poll, 40% of Americans

would approve of interning "Muslims," just because.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

21. Imagine the boost in that percentage if we had another 9/11.

Also, imagine the rationalizations. "It's to protect them." "A temporary measure carefully administered". etc., etc.

[Ms. Clio]

23. Would jump to at least 60%, and that's probably a conservative estimate

And we could write all the government rationalizations and media reports from the history books.

[greekspeak]

17. What's the F-ing sequal called?

"Slaves loved picking cotton: 1001 true historical facts unedited by librul revisionists?"

[bobbieinok]

22. I think that book's already been written ... in the 70s or 80s

was the title Time on the Cross?

[bobbieinok]

24. see a review

....

Not everyone agreed on which of the conclusions was most startling, or which was more in error. On the one hand, Richard Sutch saw the "authors' claim that the physical and psychological well-being of American slaves was much greater than previously believed" as the lightning rod that attracted so much attention to the book (1975, p. 335). Thomas Haskell argued that the 'book's central argument, the claim that slaves were more efficient workers than free men." (1975, p. 36). In a sense it was the conjunction of interrelated claims, or what critics saw as the whole house of cards, that made for so much controversy.

By itself, for example, the finding that farms using slave labor were estimated to have been more efficient than farms using free workers might not have been controversial. It may have been surprising, but that was in part because no one had thought to look before. If that were an isolated finding, only those who worry about the details of estimating production functions would have cared. But it was not an isolated piece of information, it was part of a different view of the slave regime -- the centerpiece of it according to Haskell (1975, p.36). In the Fogel-Engerman scheme the efficiency of southern agriculture was the joint product of shrewd capitalistic planters and hard-working slaves. The innovative, and highly controversial point, was that slaves worked hard because they were rewarded for doing so, not because they were driven to it. Critics pointed out that there was little evidence on rewards; to a large extent this was inferred from the economic outcomes, and from the evidence on the slaves' material standard of living and the hierarchy of occupations in which they were employed, and from the evidence that whipping did not appear to be widely used to motivate the slaves.

Of course, slaves were motivated by a combination of the stick and the carrot. Fogel and Engerman may have exaggerated the role of the carrot, but a more lenient view is that they were attempting to shift the balance towards well-motivated economic behavior and a more reasonable treatment of slaves. In their summary of the traditional view they argued that Kenneth Stampp had come "remarkably close to discovering the true nature of the slave system..." but had overestimated the use of cruelty." In Fogel and Engerman's view, force was necessary, and, although it "could, and often did, lead to cruelty" there was less of it than Stampp believed. Planters, being capitalistic businessmen "used force for exactly the same purpose as they used positive incentives -- to achieve the largest product at the lowest cost. Like everything else, they strove to use force not cruelly, but optimally" (p. 232).

In the opinion of Fogel and Engerman, it was the traditional view in which slaves were lazy and not well motivated that gave rise to the false stereotype of black labor that still plagues blacks today (p. 215). In their revised view slaves were hard working; slave labor was of superior quality. Indeed, this helps explain why large slave plantations were much more efficient than free southern farms. "This advantage was not due to some special way in which land or machinery was used, but to the special quality of plantation labor" (p. 209). Ordinary slaves were "... imbued like their masters with a Protestant ethic" (p. 231). They could not exercise that work ethic in whichever direction they wished, but within the confines of the slave system they could, and to a large extent did, strive hard. This revised view, as you can see, shifts attention away from the effect of slavery on the conditions and behavior of blacks today, and puts it back on the conditions of black life that took place after the Civil War (p. 260). And one can imagine this revised view would have bearing on the question of black reparations.

more....

http://www.eh.net/bookreviews/library/weiss.shtml

[Djinn]

35. LOL

reaches for wipes for monitor!

[Lisa]

18. interesting how the rationale for internment also changed ...

I can't speak for the US situation, but up here in Canada, where my entire family was interned, the justification began as possible collaboration with the enemy -- and a half-century later, when it became evident that not ONE Japanese-Canadian committed terrorist acts, it somehow turned into "we did it for their own safety to protect them from overzealous vigilantes" -- implying that BCers were murderous thugs or something.

A lot of non-Japanese BCers have told me that they are very suspicious about who got the property taken from the Japanese. And I've been reading historical records which suggest that even certain trade unions (and the BC Communist Party) favoured the internment because it would remove Japanese-Canadians from the fishing and timber industries. Even the progressive CCF (now the NDP) experienced uncertainty among its membership, when it tried to take a moral stand against the internment. It was a horrible, divisive time that caused a lot of damage to Canadian society.

I recently got into an argument with a right-winger who wanted to deport all Arab-Canadians -- he ended up by accusing my parents of being enemy subversives who "could have done something", and slunk away when I informed him that they were 13 and 15 years old at the time. And yes -- my parents are appalled by "racial profiling" and (unlike them, because their wartime experience tended to scare them off political activity) they've been in the local paper, speaking out against anti-Arab sentiment.

[Hell Hath No Fury]

28. Yes...

Here in California we had Japanese-Americans who had their farms taken outright from them when they were interned, and others who lost theirs when there was no one left to care for them and they were "poached".

I remember hearing one beautiful story about a Japanese-American farming family in the Valley area who had been interned. They were worried about what would happen to their farm in their absence. Other farmers in the area promised to take care of it for them until they got back - and they did.

And yes, the reason for the internment is morphing over time and bullshit is was for their "safety". :grr:

[Democat]

19. Another right winger who can never run for office in the civilized world

One more down, many to go.

[tkulesa]

25. Rebuttal coming.

I happen to know one of the academic experts on the topics of the Japanese-American Internment and the history of Japanese Americans. He and one or two other scholars are in the process of writing a major rebuttal to this book that should be ready for distribution by tomorrow.

It's going up on one of the major blogs and I'll certainly reference it here.

[bobbieinok]

26. great.....I heard abt the book on a RW talk show..bk proves Arab/

Muslim detention would be <in the best traditions of American values>

[Ms. Clio]

27. Well it is in the "best traditions of American values"

If by that it is meant, "customary, usual, habitual cultural patterns of suspicion of and violence against minority groups perceived as internal enemies."

The future RW talking point will be, "Hey, at least we don't hang them from trees anymore."

[smirkymonkey]

29. Does Michelle Malkin ever stop and think....

"Hey, if this goes far enough, I, myself could be rounded up and sent to an internment camp!"

As the daughter of immigrants, you think she would get tripped up by her own hypocrisy. But no, she's a REPUBLICAN! Stupidity is A-OK!

Maybe she should try to join the Klan and see how far she gets.

[RetroLounge]

31. Was the Forward written by Ann Coulter?

just asking...

RL

[Fatima]

33. I've seen this book- she's laying out the case for Gitmo, etc

She wants to see Muslims rounded up and thrown into camps, civil rights be damned. Make no mistake, she hates us all, and would probably prefer to KILL us all if that's possible, but she'll take the camps for now. And profile, profile, profile, baby!

Funny thing though, I understand she was quite irritated when stopped at the airport for a security check...I guess she should be exempt from profiling? (She should have worn her swastika armband)

She's a real hateful cow toward immigrants especially considering she's the child of Filipino immigrants. Self hating folks like her always puzzle me. Maybe she can go get her skin lightened, dye her hair blonde and pass herself off as another Ann Coulter/E.D. Hill wannabe...maybe she won't get stopped at the airport so much.

[CaTeacher]

36. She thinks she is white--that is the problem.