Michelle Malkin’s book purports to justify the removal and incarceration of the Japanese Americans, in the service of advocating racial profiling by the Bush Administration.
I just had to post this immediately, not much time to compose a newsflash; here’s an email I just got from historian Greg Robinson (author of By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans), who is an advisor for Life or Liberty.
Dear friends and colleagues,
You may have heard by now of the egregious new book IN DEFENSE OF INTERNMENT, by the FOX news correspondent and right-wing columnist Michelle Malkin. The book purports to justify the removal and incarceration of the Japanese Americans, in the service of advocating racial profiling by the Bush Administration. I believe that Malkin’s work is a terrible distortion of history, and may cause damage among people unexposed to the proper facts, especially as the author is a mell-known and connected media figure whose last book was a bestseller. I have therefore joined Eric Muller, author of the fine book on the WWII JA draft resisters, FREE TO DIE FOR THEIR COUNTRY, in contributing a set of critiques of the book, showing its historical errors and ideologically-driven thesis. Our set of 11 texts is posted on a blog, the Volokh Conspiracy, which has a large readership:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_08_00.shtml#1091629458
It is important that we get our voices heard and head off this book before the author starts on the Talking Head circuit.
Best
Greg
Many of you may be shocked to know there’s people out there who have recently argued and written books justifying the internment of Japanese Americans. To catch up with what I know on the topic, you can read the online debate I had with one of these people last year:
Archived posts on the WWII internment
This debate arose from the story that Representative Coble, who was (still is?) Chair of the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Domestic Security, had made comments favorable to the WWII internment on the radio, and has never retracted them.
Michelle Malkin is a substantial darling of the right wing; the fact she’s Asian American may well lend legitimacy to the “pro-internment” side of a debate officially settled years ago, and bring others out of their hidey-holes.
Get ready.
