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[Makura]

but quite frankly every other person supporting this kind of outright racism and discrimination should also be banned.

It's comments like these that make it seem like you have not bothered to research the topic of this thread at all.

 

[videogamer]

It's comments like these that make it seem like you have not bothered to research the topic of this thread at all.

WWII Japanese interment and racism? The Japanese-Americans were interned there because they were of their Japansese heritage, not because they were spying on America. When the order came out, it called for ALL people of Japanese heritage. They didn't look at other factors. The interment sounds fairly discriminatory to me.

 

[fennec fox]

I get the idea that, like a lot of arguments that allegedly split between left and right values, both sides are arguing over different matters without realizing it, then pick on each other for the wrong reasons.

Malkin's argument, minus her rage-inducing writing style, is that the Japanese were out to get us and we needed to do something about it. The opposite reaction -- that internment is a terrible idea -- misses the point of this particular argument, and as a result we could go on for 200 more replies and not get anywhere with each other.

As I mentioned earlier, it's not Malkin's argument that really deserves debating here -- it's the implication, however much she tries to deny it, that internment might not be a bad idea for all those brown guys out to get us, which is so much wartime hysteria. It's especially insidious because, unlike WWII, there will be no real fixed end to the War on Terror seen in our lifetimes.

 

[videogamer]

I get the idea that, like a lot of arguments that allegedly split between left and right values, both sides are arguing over different matters without realizing it, then pick on each other for the wrong reasons.

Malkin's argument, minus her rage-inducing writing style, is that the Japanese were out to get us and we needed to do something about it. The opposite reaction -- that internment is a terrible idea -- misses the point of this particular argument, and as a result we could go on for 200 more replies and not get anywhere with each other.

As I mentioned earlier, it's not Malkin's argument that really deserves debating here -- it's the implication, however much she tries to deny it, that internment might not be a bad idea for all those brown guys out to get us, which is so much wartime hysteria. It's especially insidious because, unlike WWII, there will be no real fixed end to the War on Terror seen in our lifetimes.

Really, with that wartime hysteria, the US government should have done it's duty and protected its minorities (admittedly it had a poor record of this at the time). Moreover, "protecting" the Japanese-Americans in internment camps does not mean that they had to lose their freedoms and live in a shitty place in the middle of nowhere.

 

[Celicar]

Like Stele said, Malkin is from Philipino heritage. It was the Japanese-Americans who were rounded up and kept inside the "internment camps", not the Philipino-Americans. Don't generalize Asians all into one group... the differences in cultures and histories are tremendous.
.

Because it was only people of Japanese descent being put into camps?


Riiiiiiiiiight.

 

[border]

Because it was only people of Japanese descent being put into camps?

As far as I know, they left other Asian cultures alone. There are even funny old propaganda articles that instruct people on how to tell the difference between a friendly Chinese person and an evil traitorous "Jap".

 

[videogamer]

Because it was only people of Japanese descent being put into camps?


Riiiiiiiiiight.

Uh the vast majority of them were Japansese. However, if you have links to show, please do. Furthermore, I'd think that the ones that actually went through the internment camps would be bitter, not so much the following generations.

 

[Celicar]

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree because I don't have a link and you don't have a link. I'm not debating the vast majority were Japanese, but I think it's highly unlikely that the US didn't put other asians in the camps also.

 

[videogamer]

As far as I know, they left other Asian cultures alone. There are even funny old propaganda advertisements that instruct people on how to tell the difference between a friendly Chinese person and an evil traitorous "Jap".

Chinese:

Japanese:

http://bss.sfsu.edu/internment/posters.html

 

[border]

Yep, can you believe that friggin' LIFE MAGAZINE used to print this stuff?

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/foster/lifemag.htm

The typical Northern Chinese, represented by Ong Wen-hao, Chungking’s Minister of Economic Affairs (left, above), is relatively tall and slenderly built.
His complexion is parchment yellow, his face long and delicately boned, his nose more finely bridged. Representative of the Japanese people as a whole is
Premier and General Hideki Tojo (left, below), who betrays aboriginal antecedents in a squat, long-torsoed build, a broader, more massively boned head and
face, flat, often pug, nose, yellow-ocher skin and heavier beard. From this average type, aristocratic Japs, who claim kinship to the Imperial Household,
diverge sharply. They are proud to approximate the patrician lines of the Northern Chinese.

 

[videogamer]

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree because I don't have a link and you don't have a link. I'm not debating the vast majority were Japanese, but I think it's highly unlikely that the US didn't put other asians in the camps also.

Hmm.. that probably would have been an accident. In every single piece of information I have looked at, they mention only the Japanese. America wasn't at war with Indonesia or China.

Maybe you should try to avoid implying things without having evidence to back it up in the first place.

 

[firex]

Makura, it's "comments" (if such inane banter devoid of any objectivity can be deemed readable enough to be commentary) like every post you make that make it seem like you don't know how to do anything but parrot whatever the right shoves so far up your ass it spews out your mouth, especially anything from "Mein Kampf" -- the English title of GWB's autobiography of his college days.

Malkin is attempting to justify the illegal, immoral, unethical relocation of thousands of Americans 60 years ago, which was based purely upon their racial background and involved such draconian things as allowing the army-age boys to go free only if they would swear to give up their allegiance to the Emperor of Japan (a question put to young men who were born and raised in America and had more connection with this country than where their parents or grandparents may have emigrated from), and enlist in the army.

She is trying to justify this act, which was apologized for 40 years later under the Reagan administration, by attempting to apply modern logic towards the people locked up in Guantanamo Bay -- something, I might add, the current administration is having to relinquish more and more as time goes on as they find they have no legal or moral ground to continue keeping people locked up for years without legal counsel or press being allowed inside the "camp" to see what's going on.

I am a history student who doesn't even have a BA yet, and even I know that you can't justify past events with modern logic because it makes the assumption that the people of that time think, feel, and believe exactly the same as the author does today.

There is no defending the internment of Japanese Americans, especially when investigation of the reasoning behind the internment shows it was purely motivated by family history, and as evidenced by the less severe problems German and Italian Americans faced, it was racially motivated as well.

The fact that you can support someone who tries to defend nationally instituted racism and discrimination is appalling. Deny it all you want -- that's PRECISELY what this policy was, and precisely why the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Korematsu. I don't have to read every reply in the thread to know what happened in America in the 1940s, and I don't have to be a liberal to know it was arguably the second worst thing America has done to its own citizens in the history of the entire nation.

Just think what you have said in this thread.

Michelle Malkin, shes cool. I've been a fan of hers, shes got a great blog. I might get this.

What twisted way of thinking makes you think it's A-OK to be interested in a book that flies in the face of 60 years of cold, hard fact that America did something horribly wrong to its own citizens, which only caused harm to the country, not stability or safety? How can you be interested in a book that has been proven, by people who are experts on the subject, to be sloppily researched and supported? The arguments Malkin makes are specious at best, and her attempt to justify the current detention of all manner of alleged terrorists in Guantanamo, some of which have been released years after being detained because it was proven they had no connections at all to any terrorist groups, by comparing it to a past atrocity is nothing short of vile. The circular method of justifying the unjustifiable past by spinning it to compare to the present, and then saying it was justifiable in the past so it's justifiable now, is mind-boggingly stupid.

It's this way of thinking that sickens me, makes me realize that the Republican party is going off the deep end, and makes me pray that someone else in the party comes along and takes it in a new direction that actually follows the foundations of this country.

 

[border]

I don't think that there was any significant Fillipino immigration in the early 20th century, and thus there probably weren't that many Fillipinos that they might have "accidentally" been put into "happy fun evacuation places"....so I doubt that sourcing Malkin really lends that much credence. Her connection to the event is displaced both by time and by her background.

Regardless, every race has its Uncle Toms so I don't think you can really point to one person who approves of past injustice and say that nobody else should be angry over it.

 

[videogamer]

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree because I don't have a link and you don't have a link. I'm not debating the vast majority were Japanese, but I think it's highly unlikely that the US didn't put other asians in the camps also.

Are Asian Americans bitter about this whole ordeal? After all these years? Malkin is asian and she seems to be fine with it. And besides, they got restitutions.

Also, does Malkin have some Philipino relative that accidently got sent to the "internment camps"? I don't think she has a shared history with the Japanese as much as you would like to say. You're making quite the logical leap right here.

edit: eh border beat me to it

 

[firex]

Celicar: The fact that you know shit all about what happened should be enough for you to shut up on this subject; I suggest you do so before making a complete fool of yourself. The detainees were rounded up based upon Japanese origin, checked mostly by immigration records, and any non-Japanese who were detained certainly didn't go willingly, nor were they detained because they were suspicious (unless being Asian is suspicious; then again, some people try to justify being anything but white as suspicious). There is very little research on non-Japanese Asians who were detained as well, but what we do know is that none of these people went of their own will, and that it is absurd, at best, to justify unconstitutional imprisonment as all right because Michelle Malkin says so.

 

[Azih]

1. She's not trying to play down anything
2. She's not trying to portray the internment as "not that bad."

No? She didn't even like the moderator saying the words 'locked up'. She actually used the words 'evacuated and reloacated to camps that were I believe run in a humane way". Dude listen to what she's saying before defending her. She's PLAYING DOWN the internment. So hell she's doing both of those exact things you're saying that she didn't. Listen to the radio show from the 37 minute mark to around 41.

Edit: Once again, the argument for or against internment is not a binary one, the issue has never been that it was solely racism or solely millitary reasons for the internment, the argument is over which of those were the PRIMARY reason for the internments. The more it was based on racial bigotry, the less justified it was and vice versa. So your contention that Malkin has proved her contention just by stating that there were some millitary reasons for the interments is false. She has to show that the millitary rationale was stronger than the knee jerk racism aspect of it, and she hasn't done that very well at all.

Edit Part TWO: Another note about how Malkin isn't 'playing down anything'. Since her whole point depends on showing that millitary/security concerns were responsible for the internment she doesn't even MENTION the racism that Japanese people were subjected to in her book. From her blog (quoting introductory paragraph of book) http://michellemalkin.com/archives/000360.htm

Next, Eric writes:
"What does Michelle offer to discredit the copiously documented influences of nativism, economic jealousy, racial stereotyping, rumor-mongering, and hysteria on the series of decisions that constituted the program Michelle defends? Nothing. Literally not one single thing. Not a sentence."

Umm, as I write in the very first paragraph of the introduction to my book on p. xiii:
"....If you want to read a book about the history of institutional discrimination against minorities in America, you’re out of luck again. Bookstores, library shelves, and classroom are already filled with pedantic tomes, legal analysis, and educational propaganda along these conventional lines".

She doesn't even mention racism in her book! If that isn't playing down then nothing is.

Later on in the same blog post.

I don’t think Eric gets it. My whole book is devoted to debunking the myth that the evacuation policy was borne of such factors rather than bona fide national security concerns. I am well aware that there were nativists and racists on the West Coast, but as I argue in the book, the decision was made by Roosevelt and his closest military advisors in Washington DC, where knowledge of MAGIC resided and where homeland defense, not "nativism, economic jealousy, racial stereotyping, rumor-mongering, and hysteria” was the paramount concern.

She completely ignores the well documented statements from Roosevelt *and* his closest millitary advisors that showed that they themselves were as racist as anybody else of the time. She ignores it here, she ignores it in her other blog posts, and she ignored it on the radio show where Muller mentions Roosevelt's comments at minute 30:54 "anyone who has travelled in the far east knows that the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces in nine cases out of ten the most unfortunate result".. Malkin's response was merely that nevertheless the millitary reasons were the primary ones. She PLAYS THE RACISM DOWN to zero in her book. She plays it down TO THE EXTREME. She had to be pushed hard by Muller on the radio to even acknowledge that 'some people my have held those kinds of views'.