Even Alex Rawls, a rabid RWer who defends the internment of the mostly-women and children (he doesn't mention the horrible conditions and breakup of some of the families and the theft of their assets), writes of the suprising "lack of sabotage by Japanese-Americans."
This made me laugh:
January 3rd, 1942 army MID memo states, "'there can be no doubt that' most of the leaders within the Japanese espionage network of Japanese clubs, business groups, and labor organizations "continue to function as key operatives for the Japanese government along the West Coast".
A memo states that "there can be no doubt" of this? A MEMO, you paste to me? Where's the evidence?
Was there "no doubt" in Hawaii, also? Evidently not! Sometimes the little things are the most telling: In Hawaii, they didn't put their Japanese-American Hawaiians into camps. They needed them out, because they were leaders and workers. Lucky for them, they were residents of Hawaii. So it wasn't necessity, it was mood, and the luck of where you were.
J. Edgar Hoover opposed it. You don't know more about it than he did.
And you've gotta know it was scapegoating and racism by looking at the way it was carried out: This was not a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger deal!
There are still apologists for the useless, cruel imprisonment and impoverishment and seizing of the assets of good, law-abiding Amerian citizens for the sole reason that they were of Japanese extraction, even after they've discovered that there wasn't any sabotage going on. There are apologists even for the Inquisition. |
