Exhuming Manzanar
Metafilter led me to the website of the dreadful Michelle Malkin who argues that the illegal internment of Japanese-American citizens during the Second World War was justified. She does this partly by muddying the waters between Japanese citizens and American citizens of Japanese descent, and by a general appear to fear and hatred of Arabs and South Asian people post 9/11.
It’s odd how clumsy her arguments are. Basically she says that we are justified in locking up people who are related to people who’ve threatened us, as long as they look different. Italian and German enemy aliens were indeed interned, as were Japanese nationals during the war. But Italian-American and German-American citizens were not. The issue isn’t the actual threat, but racial fear.
Notably no one was interned in Hawaii at all, where the danger was greatest, because way too many people there were Japanese-American.
Malkin is disingenuous and smarmy, and obviously knows when she’s lying and how to do it in order to please her masters, who are wealthy and powerful people. I assume she gets a nice five bedroom house and a couple of $80,000 cars for her trouble, and some well-heeled racists get another book to footnote when they’re raving about the need to lock up the brown people.
I wonder if Halliburton will take the job of shining up Manzanar for its new occupants? After all, they do look funny. A lot easier to find than Tim McVeigh or Eric Rudolph.
September 9th, 2004 at 5:24 pm
I think the important question is, how much freedom are we willing to give up in order to achieve a greater margin of security? And who’s giving up the freedom, who’s gaining the security, who’s making the decisions, and how do we define “freedom” and “security”?
For myself, I’m not sure I’m comfortable giving up the spirit of the equal protection clause in order to increase security, even if that increase is irrefutable.
On the other hand, one question that continues to bother me is this: of the terrorist attacks against American interests in the past decade, what percentage were perpetrated in the name of Allah, and what percentage were carried out by those of Arab background? If these numbers are as close to 100% as my admittedly cursory research indicates, this raises a troubling point: that profiling of Arabs and Muslims, while unquestionably violating the rights of some innocents, would nonetheless undoubtedly decrease future attacks.
By how much, in what locations, and whether that trade-off is worth it (or even morally justifiable at all) are questions I’m not qualified to answer. And frankly, it disturbs me very much that the answers, on both sides, seem so unsatisfactory.