Interned Minds: Issues of Historical Interpretation in Michelle Malkin's In Defense of Internment

From R. Paul Lege, University of Phoenix.

Quotes from the original work will be in italics.

Abstract

This essay discusses the controversial work by Michelle Malkin (2004) entitled In Defense of Internment. Malkin is an ex-FOX news commentator in the United States who supports racial profiling in the war on terrorism. Malkin explores historical questions related to Japanese-American internment during World War II as a justification for a new policy on racial profiling. Her book offers us a chance to look at how history can be used to buttress anti-democratic policies. Sharply rebuked by many American historians, this treatise possesses problematic methodological issues and raises serious questions in terms of the direction that democracy should take with civil liberties. As part of the open debate that she promotes, this paper addresses some of the more critical errors in her historical analysis and polemical work, which she continues to promulgate on her personal website in rationalizing the concept of objective discrimination.

Introduction

This essay discusses Michelle Malkin's work In Defense of Internment (2004) in order to illustrate problems in her historical methodology, which she uses to advocate a set of political objectives. Furthermore, Malkin ties this issue in with her opposition to the fact that many of those who suffered from the tragedy of internments have received reparations from the United States government. Succinctly, she opposed reparations as a false claim to injustice because the internments during World War II were for national defense as interpreted under the Alien Enemies Act (1798). For these reasons, in Malkin's logic, an "objective" form of discrimination or racial profiling becomes an essential weapon in the present War on Terrorism.

Malkin charges that "ethnic activists" and "revisionist historians" have distorted the historical record in their opposition to racial profiling. Rejecting the controversy over World War II internment, and blaming "revisionist historians" for reparations to Japanese-Americans, Malkin leaped the historical debates and concluded that because civil liberties were curtailed after Pearl Harbor, it is justifiable for the government to restrict freedoms today.

I'd like to point out here that the time after Pearl Harbor was a time of national crisis, a time when we were entering a two-front war and a time of military preparation for a world-wide war with a clear set of enemies and enemy locations. This is not the same case as we have today. We have terrorists which are individuals acting on behalf of their country or their religion. Their home countries are not at war with the United States in any kind of full scale war as there was in WWII. Having terrorists is not a justification for the restriction of people's rights.

Ignoring the evidence to the contrary, Malkin rejects the notion that the "relocation" policy during WWII was related to race and hysteria.

In other words, she chose to ignore the very long tradition on the West Coast of prejudice against Orientals in general, and Chinese and Japanese in specific. There is a lot of indisputable evidence that there was racism against the Japanese in particular before WWII even began.

The essence of her treatise rests on an interpretation that significantly widens the meaning of the Alien Enemies Act (1798) to include citizens as well as aliens. Used to interning Japanese-Americans as well as aliens during WWII, she claimed this served the greater good of the nation (pp. 60-63). Essentially defined, the act of 1798 gives the president the power to arrest foreign nationals deemed a possible threat in a declared war.

She uses this type of thing to argue that racial profiling is justified. Did she ever hear of DWB? A lot of Blacks will say that Driving While Black is when a Black person driving fancy car will be pulled over by police when a white person driving the same kind of car will not. That is definitely racial profiling, and it is most definitely wrong.

She proclaims that the stakes in national security remain so high that it necessitates drastic measures because "it is undeniable that ethnicity, national origin, nationality, and religion are correlated with terrorism"

So, national origin is a justifiable criteria for judging whether a person is a terrorist? Then, under that concept, all the persons of Italian origin and all the persons of German origin in the United States at the outbreak of WWII should have also been put in internment camps. Ethnicity? Put all the Blacks and Hispanics in internment camps. Religion? Put all the Muslims, Hindus, Sikh, Native Americans and everyone that follows any spiritual path but Christianity in internment camps. It doesn't make any sense at all does it.

Basically, Malkin would grant the power to the president to discriminate objectively not only against aliens but also against US citizens suspected of subversion. Since the words suspect and subversion are qualitative terms difficult to assess without clear judicial evidence, the easier route is to circumvent civil liberties and corral anyone perceived to be suspect based on racial identification. That such a premise might (or in fact did) result in numerous abuses in history remains beyond the author's scope of analysis simply because she holds to the presupposed belief that when it comes to national defense, civil liberties must recede to the will of the executive.

So, it's okay to lock up someone who is suspected of subversion? Suspected is not the same thing as charged, tried and proved guilty of subversion. She is forgetting the concept of law in the United States that a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Does she want to do away with that?

During World War II, elements of the military advised the president to sign Executive Order 9066 based on selective information, and this lead to the relocation of a segment of a population on the grounds of a perceived threat from a few. Despite the law, the issue came down to the nature of citizenship and the issue in identifying suspected subversives. In the case of the WWII internment policy, the executive orders failed to distinguish between aliens suspected of subversion and US citizens alleged to have engaged in such acts.

The people who were interned were not even charged with any crime. They were not tried, they were not found guilty of anything. Some were put into prisons simply because they were leaders of the Japanese community. She also ignores the fact that two-thirds of the persons interned were actually American citizens, having been born in the United States.

Rather than discussing the problems above, Malkin elected to debate the meaning of the camps rather than the meaning of the experience of those who endured them. In fact, the author spends more time attempting to explain the technical and semantic differences between relocation, internment, and concentration camps then actually imagining what the internees must have experienced. She highlighted the apparently wondrous features of such camps including running water, dirt baseball fields, and tomato gardens (most of which were developed through the ingenuity of the occupants), while forgetting that their liberty and virtually all their possessions had been stripped away. Malkin further argued that much of the misery experienced by the internees was brought on by themselves, while writing trite statements such as; "the fencing, barbed wire, gun towers were primarily in place to keep out wildlife and range cattle".

This shows an absolutely inept view of the camps. The fencing, barbed wire, gun towers, machine guns and in one case even tanks were not used to keep wildlife out. That type of approach goes beyond the concept of absurd. The 'wondrous' feature of having running water (only in the communal showers in many cases) does not constitute a full life. The internees in many, many cases lost their homes and their businesses. They were moved into very inhospitable areas (geographically).

Now there were, indeed, differences in terms used for the camps. Internment camp seems to be the most often used term. Relocation center/camp could also be used. Concentration camp is used rarely, at least from everything I have read, since that implies the Holocaust-type camps that people were sent to to be murdered in vast numbers. Also, the internment camps did, eventually, start allowing students to relocate to other areas to go to school. Also, many of the internees were allowed to leave temporarily to help farmers harvest there crops. So concentration camp isn't really applicable to the camps they wer put into.

She seems to believe that there were a lot of spies among the Japanese Americans, but the author of this paper says:

The cables in question centered primarily on only six intercepted messages in 1940-41 indicating that the Japanese Imperial Government endeavored to recruit individuals in the United States for espionage. Interestingly, several of these cables evinced that the Japanese government sought-out anyone they could for spying activities including: "anti-semites, communists, labor unions, negroes, white persons and others of alien race"

She talked about the submarine attacks on the West Coast (of which there were few) but ignores that tremendous number of ships sunk by the Nazis in the Atlantic.

She also seems to ignore the Bund, the Facist organization in the East of the U.S. She ignores the Ku Klux Klan which was into a period of lynchings and were of far more danger to certain people than any of the Japanese Americans.

Apparently she debates the numbers involved in just how many were interned. This does not in any way abrogate the fact of the injustice done to all those who were interned, whether it was 112,000 as she claims or 120,000 as other sources claim. She also questions the loyalty of the Japanese Americans, according to the author of this report. She also ignored the various problems in the camps that led some of the internees to become protestors and, at rare times, violent.

She also went after those who renounced their American citizenship but ignored the fact that those who did were from the mainland camps, while the Hawaiian persons of Japanese Ancestry, who were not placed in camps, did not have the same problem.

She also claimed that thousands of Nisei served in the Japanese Army for which there is no evidence that any did so voluntarily.

So, the paper shows that the authors are saying that Malkin's work was poorly done, her evidence was questionable, she played games with the statistics, and what she said didn't really tie in to the issue of what to do with today's terrorists.

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