Defending Repression

Why are conservatives trying to rehabilitate McCarthyism and the Japanese internment?

Cathy Young from the November 2004 issue

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A similar dynamic may be at work with the Japanese internment issue. Some of the history textbooks Malkin indignantly quotes probably do err on the side of dismissing all World War II-era concerns about subversive activities by Japanese ethnics as unfounded paranoia. The weakness of this position creates an opening for revisionism, including the radical revisionism of In Defense of Internment.

It is useful, too, to remember that defending the indefensible has long been a popular sport on the left, whose own revisionist historians are busy trying to sugarcoat not McCarthyism but Stalinism. (See "Fools for Communism," April 2004.)

Also at work, however, is the dark side of modern American conservatism. The left's obsession with America's allegedly unique evilness, and in particular with real or imagined racism, has prompted a fully justified backlash. But that backlash can morph into an ugly and disturbing mind-set -- one that regards all efforts to confront America's past wrongs as the province of sissy liberals and wild-eyed lefties.

As the revisionists plow ahead, sometimes one wants to ask, "Have you no sense of decency, folks, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"