A high-level document from WWII has been discovered that openly admits the reason for internment of Japanese-Americans in WWII (~70% of them US Citizens) was not for national security reasons, but because of political pressure–which was mounting toward racist violence. (Not that the violence itself concerned them.)
The handwitten note at the bottom of a letter dated July 23, 1942, by John McCloy, FDR’s assistant secretary of war to Robert Patterson, undersecretary of war, (typed in the available file copies) reads:
These people are not ‘internees’ — they are under no suspicion for the most part and were moved largely because we felt we could not control our own white citizens in California.
McCloy was a key player in the iternment, and a defender of it after the fact, who has been used in recent renewed attempts to justify it–and thus justify extreme measured by Bush/Cheney in destroying basic rights in the War on Terra. The note utterly contradicts McCloy’s later claims, and with it, the entire revisionist thesis.
The discovery was made by Greg Robinson, assistant professor of history at the University of Quebec at Montreal, and author of By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Harvard, 2001). It was written about Seattle Times columnist Bruce Ramsey here, and the full context explained by award-winning blogger David Neiwart here.
Niewert’s Orcinus is one of the left blogosphere’s real treasures. He has run award-winning series like “Rush Newspeak and Fascism [PDF] (2003 Koufax Award). Traking, exposing and explaining the significance of scapegoating, demonization and hate crimes–and how to combat them have been among his priniciple concerns. He has been particularly focused on the revisionist attempts of Michelle Malkin (no, I won’t give her a link, you will have to go to Orcinus for that) whose book In Defense of Internment has been the centerpiece of recent revisionist attempts.
Niewert has been the leading debunker of her book–a tavesty of scholarship–which he has done in excuciating detail, while also highlighting and explaining the significance of other people’s work in debunking Malkin. His post dealing with this latest discovery provides a detailed explanation that tells you pretty much everything you might want to know about the entire context of the controversy, and significance of this letter in putting the final kabosh on it.
However, in view of the ongoing wretched state of the media, I feel it’s necessary to highlight a few points. One comes from Ramsey’s column, in which he writes:
The sense of alarm ran deep. After the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, people were told the West Coast was undefended.
A map in The Seattle Times showed likely invasion beaches at Grays Harbor, with big black arrows sweeping toward Seattle and Portland. Japan had no capability of launching an invasion across the Pacific, but the article gave the impression that maybe it did. Another article told of Japanese Americans arrested in Seattle for attempting to sell gasoline tanks to Japan; the tanks, it said, would hold enough fuel for bombers to fly all the way from Tokyo to Seattle and back. Japan didn’t have bombers that could fly that far, but the article gave the impression that maybe it did.
WMDs, anyone?
Editorially, The Seattle Times was neutral on the internment (though its news coverage does not feel neutral). But the Los Angeles Times was beating the drums for it. The entire Pacific Coast congressional delegation was for it. The mayor of Seattle told a congressional committee the people here were for it.
Let’s be “perfectly clear” as one of our most well-known war criminals liked to say. The WWII internment of Japanese-Americans was driven by hysteria based on false media reports, just like the false media reports that have been driving our politics for the past four years.
For whatever reasons–including a delusional concept of “balance” and “fairness”–the media have lied to the American people, just as they lied during WWII. The evidence that Bush & Co were lying has been there all along, and has even been reported in bits and pieces. It has purely and simply been surpressed, whether for political, monetary or ideological reasons. (For example, the neo-con vision has never been concerned about terrorism, it’s been concerned about non-existent rival superpowers, a central and fundamental fact that the media never seems to mention.) This is an exact repeat of the reprehensible, irresponsible behavior that lead to the mass human rights violations involved in the internment of Japanese-Americans in WWII.
One last note that highlights this point: Michelle Malkin got her start at the Seattle Times. For many decades, the corporate media has promoted a grossly disproportionate number of conservative columnists. When this is pointed out to conservatives, a standard response is that it is necessary, to combat (or at least “balance”) all the liberal reporting. This response is quite telling: Conservative opinion to balance liberal facts. It would be bad enough if that were all there were to it. But conservative columnists are not simply individual ill-infomed voices. They are part of a network of deliberate lies and propaganda. Every newspaper that carries them is part of that networkm regardless of how good its news coverage may be.
