wingnuts take another step toward attempted nazification of America:
The book's title is In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror.
It clearly calls for a reassessment of the meaning of the World War II internment, evacuation and "relocation" process.
Malkin, in keeping with her history here, has produced an ideological work that discards basic standards of truthfulness, accuracy and fairness -- not to mention basic decency -- all in the pursuit of "proving" a thesis whose factual basis is nearly nonexistent. And in the process, she's attempting not just to revise but to falsify history, just like David Irving and the Holocaust deniers, or Steve Wilkins and the slavery deniers. It is a contemptible enterprise.
In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror is not just a deeply flawed book, it is a deeply dishonest one. As Tim Wu (posting at Lawrence Lessig's blog) observes, this text is a case of Orwellian "Blackwhite":
... or "a willingness to say black is white when party discipline demands this." In its advanced form it leads to "the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know black is white, and forget that one has ever believed the contrary."
Michelle Malkin, a journalist, has released a book that is does just this: it defends the eviction and incarceration of more than 70,000 American citizens during World War II. Her book "In Defense of Internment," takes the position that the Government was right to round up the Japanese then, and Arab-Americans now. The mainstream position that the internment was wrong (expressed in Ronald Reagan's apology), Malkin attributes to a "conspiracy."
The giveaway, really, comes on the book's flyleaf, which announces:
Everything you've been taught about the World War II 'internment camps' is wrong:
-- They were not created primarily because of racism or wartime hysteria
-- They did not target only those of Japanese descent
-- They were not Nazi-style death camps.
Malkin largely reproduces this argument in the Introduction, and she deploys it throughout; yet a relatively simple examination of these three core points makes clear the fundamental dishonesty of her argument. Malkin -- as is her wont -- examines only a narrow spectrum of facts, embroiders them with speculation and non-facts, and presents them as reality.
The reality is that -- as I've argued previously (several times) -- over the past 10 years, there have been many more acts of real terrorism planned and committed on American soil by white fundamentalist Christians than by radical Islamists of Arab extraction.
dneiwert.blogspot.com
dneiwert.blogspot.com
If we're going to commit to racial profiling based on known terrorist threats, then whites, once again, would be the first logical choice.
Would racial profiling of Muslims and Arabs really gain us anything, security-wise, in the long run? And would any of it be worth the price?
Michelle Malkin would have us think it would. Her case, though, is built on faulty method, faulty logic, faulty "facts", and an obviously faulty moral compass. Her book is best left shunned, untouched, and eventually, ignored.
Unfortunately, it will not be, at least as far as the "conservative movement" is concerned. Even if utterly discredited, Malkin's meme will continue to recirculate among the Fox News right, as well as more extremist elements. At some point it will become "received wisdom" as a talking point for right-wing pundits and radio talk-show hosts.
It is all, of course, yet another step -- following, you might say, in the footsteps of Ann Coulter's defense of McCarthyism in her screed Treason -- in the growing radicalization of the American mainstream right. I've written about this trend previously, and I hope to return to the subject again soon.
dneiwert.blogspot.com
Having supporters of the eugenics movement in the rightwing-nut ranks is not something to be overlooked. It's no accident that they're there. |
