Indefensible Internment

There was no good reason for the mass internment of Japanese Americans during WWII.

Eric Muller from the December 2004 issue

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What supported it was instead the sort of view that Gen. DeWitt expressed in 1942, when he said that "the Japanese race is an enemy race, and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become 'Americanized,' the racial strains are undiluted." What supported it was the sort of opinion voiced by California Attorney General (later U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice) Earl Warren when he argued that the absence of subversive activity by Japanese Americans proved that such activity was just around the corner. What supported it, in other words, was racism and wartime hysteria.

And what supported the government's decision to force all American citizens of Japanese ancestry into camps for years while taking no programmatic action of any sort against American citizens of German or Italian ancestry? It is important to remember that while Lou Shimizu and Joe Takahashi sat in desert camps, Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio played baseball. This was a breathtaking discrimination among U.S. citizens who shared every cause for suspicion except for their race.

Malkin justifies this discrimination as a military measure in a single paragraph, contending that our European enemies posed a lesser threat to the U.S. mainland than the Japanese and had fewer spies, and that American citizens of German and Italian parentage would have been too logistically difficult to exclude because of their large numbers. These justifications defy reason.

Germany was a more dangerous presence along the East Coast of the U.S. mainland for a far longer time than was Japan along the West Coast, and it twice landed saboteurs on Eastern shores. Germany had a network of spies whose existence did not need to be pieced together from vague references in decrypted diplomatic messages. And as for Malkin's point that there were so many potential German-American and Italian-American saboteurs on the East Coast that it made sense to do nothing to them--well, that argument refutes itself.

Lurking behind Malkin's book is a more basic error about the way human beings make decisions. Malkin writes about a world in which the president and his military advisers acted primarily because of either clear military threats or racism and hysteria. But of course that is not how racism and hysteria work. Racism and hysteria are irrational lenses through which people see their world, including its military threats. Malkin writes as though it were possible to wring prejudice and panic from the minds of the military men who planned and executed the Japanese-American internment. To say that racist and hysterical planners may have believed it was necessary to evict and detain tens of thousands of innocent Americans is one thing. To say, as Malkin does, that these planners truly were motivated by cool assessment of solid intelligence is quite another.

In the final analysis, In Defense of Internment is a book that did not need writing. When she finally gets around to proposing antiterrorism policy in the last chapter of her book, Malkin advocates such measures as allowing law enforcement and airport security to take account of ethnicity, and barring Muslims from serving in combat roles in the Middle East. To support these measures, she had no need to take up the cause of defending the lengthy and miserable detention of tens of thousands of innocent American citizens of Japanese ancestry.

Why, then, did she choose to take up that cause, and why now? Could it be that she actually supports the idea of detaining American Arabs and Muslims? "Make no mistake," she says in her book, "I am not advocating rounding up all Arabs or Muslims and tossing them into camps."

Forgive me the mistake.�