Sometimes you really don’t know what you are going to get when you read the Powerline. I mean, you know what to expect, but it is just hard to believe they will keep delivering time and time again. At any rate, upon learning of J. Edgar Hoover’s plan to detain up to 12,000 Americans suspected of disloyalty, this little back and forth took place:
PAUL adds: Hoover did not favor the mass internment of Japanese-Americans that occurred after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
JOHN responds: True. But if we had gone to war with the Soviet Union, I’ll bet he would have been champing at the bit to round up Communists and Communist sympathizers. Of course, there is a huge difference in principle between rounding up those who are believed to be disloyal and rounding up, or restricting the movements of, an entire ethnic group. And domestic Communists would have posed a far greater security risk than Japanese aliens and Japanese-Americans.
PAUL concurs: Without a doubt. The World War II example shows that, at least in some cases, Hoover was less quick than certain liberals to judge people potentially disloyal.
When your first instinct upon learning of this plan is to try to figure out how the liberals are worse, you have issues.
Jay
Yesss!
Statler and Waldorf!
myiq2xu
They couldn’t blame Clinton for Japanese internment because he wasn’t born until 1946.
Wingnut knee-jerk response #1 – “Clinton did it too!”
maxbaer (not the original)
Clinton only interned interns in blue dresses.
Ted
They don’t call him Assrocket for nothin’.
Scott H
First, thank you for reading these morons so that I don’t have to (I don’t even read Sullivan since the race/IQ thang, switched to Yglesias.)
Second, anybody but me curious as to who the 12,000 people, reported as mostly citizens, were?
demimondian
You know another way in which liberals are bad? They complained about the Japanese internment! Unlike the loyal conservatives who have loudly and proudly backed the Bush Administration’s detention policies, the treacherous, not to say explicitly traitorous, left wing had the audacity to claim that we shouldn’t be detaining people because of the color of their skins *while we were doing it*!
The Democrats are worse.
calipygian
Hoover was a crossdresser. Therefore he was a liberal. Ergo he was a fascist. So he was bad. Thus endeth the lesson.
Chris Johnson
Loyalty is earned.
Or in some cases not earned.
Sure wish MY country made the slightest effort to earn it- the pitiful thing is how willing my countrymen are to give it, warranted or not. To break such a trust is appalling.
myiq2xu
A few facts about Japanese internment:
1) Many of those interned were American citizens.
2) German-Americans and Italian-Americans were not interned.
3) Internment was based on prejudice, not evidence.
4) The most decorated military unit in WWII was made up of Japanese-Americans.
Jay
I just finished the biography by James Lorence and I guarantee this guy was in the top 50.
RSA
That’s right–and how dare Paul imply that the mass internment was anything else than good! A good conservative would have written,
Scott H
@calipygian: Hoover was in a discreet, long term, monogamous relationship. Therefore he was a conservative. Ergo he was a… what? Stalinist? Wait. I can’t do this new Goldberg math!
Ivan Renko
I’ll see your guarantee and raise you one more.
Joey
“2) German-Americans and Italian-Americans were not interned.”
Yes they were.
demimondian
Yeah, Robeson would certainly have been locked up. And I think that these two would probably have been high on the list. Not to mention this guy, who committed the terrible crime of civil rights agitation while black.
demimondian
Aw, phooey, John. Three links induces moderation these days? Darn.
Scott H
@Jay: Camped out on Don West’s farm.
tags: lsd, wandering bagpiper, in the woods, late at night,laudator temporis acti
Aaaanyway, yeah, Grandpa Walton and his buddy Harry Hay were probably on that List. Who else for New Dachau? Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Burl Ives? Certainly anybody not on Elia Kazan’s good side.
demimondian
Yeah, scott, I had Pete and Woody on my list. I missed Burl; he surely would have been there. I was proudest of this one, who, as I pointed out, had actually gone so far as to commit agitation for civil rights while black.
ThymeZone
When I’m 80 (in a couple of years) I’d like to be as smart as Anthony Lewis.
I am going to buy his book.
ThymeZone
For the record.
Jay
Robeson was mentioned numerous times in “A Hard Journey”.
Scott H, Which farm? Pipestem or Georgia?
Wilfred
A difference so huge that I can’t see it at all. “Rounding up” (always the reduction to beasts) anyone just on suspicion is the American way, at least according to the Right. Assrocket, et al. are the kinds of people who peak through the blinds at their neighbors.
myiq2xu
From YOUR source:
During WWII, the US Government interned at least 11,000 persons of German ancestry. By law, only “enemy aliens” could be interned.
By contrast, 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans were interned. 62% of those interned were American citizens.
myiq2xu
Phooey? Darn? I hope my mom doesn’t read this blog.
BTW – Three drinks is not moderation, unless you live in a trailer park.
Scott H
@demimondian: I was not so familiar with Randolph. Thank you.
@Jay: Pipestem.
@ThymeZone: Sucks about Ives. Maybe Hoover would’ve made him a camp trustee.
rawshark
That is the saddest unprovoked swipe I’ve ever read. They can’t go a day can they? Don’t these fuckers realize only the most paranoid insecure assholes care about loyalty?
Davis X. Machina
Don’t these fuckers realize only the most paranoid insecure assholes care about loyalty?
They’re not paranoid, or insecure, by their own terms of reference. The ground of their reality is challenged by such folk
If the State is your God — and presently these crypto-monarchists have a hard time separating the person of the Boy-King from the State — then what we might consider ‘disloyalty’ is tantamount to blasphemy.
Mark S.
Especially when it would be guys like Hoover, McCarthy, and Roy Cohn deciding who was loyal or not.
Eural Joiner
It’s also interesting to note concerning the Japanese-American internment that:
1) It only took place in California and not on the Hawaiian islands which one would expect – with a higher Japanese immigrant population – to be at greater risk for security threats. (Granted it wasn’t a state then but we had no problem interring Philippino’s a few decades earlier when it suited our needs)
2) The Supreme Court upheld the internment camps as permissible due to the dire circumstances the country faced at the time. (Which follows from the precedents set in WWI – if the government decides we face a clear and present, existential danger then our civil liberties don’t matter squat. Get the message you Islamofascist liberals?)
demimondian
Not true. The Issei and Neisei communities here in Seattle were devastated by the internment.
There’s a particularly touching bonsei in the Bonsei garden at Weyrhouser Hq. It’s much too big, and its roots have grown out of the pot. The description explains that its owner was interned, and the person who took care of it didn’t understand bonsei, so the plant developed as it is. In a very Japanese way, the original owner tended it as it was when he was released, rather than trying to retrain it down to the “correct size”. The result is on permanent display at the garden.
myiq2xu
Here in the Central Valley of California (which was then almost entirely a rural farming area J-A’s were interned to Arizona, even though there were no significant military or strategic assets that could have been vunerable to sabotage or espionage.
Most of the people who were interned lost their land and everything else they owned.
Joey
“German American Internment refers to the detention of persons of German ancestry in the United States during World War II. Many of the detainees were American citizens.
If you had read the rest of the source, you would have noticed the part about family members who were American citizens ‘voluntarily’ joining their relatives at the camps. Most of those interned went on to become American citizens that weren’t already, not that it really fucking matters. What matters is that innocent people were interned based solely on their heritage, Japanese, German, and Italian.
Joey
A little more reading material for you.
myiq2xu
I did read it. J-A’s who were citizens were involuntarily interned, whereas only “enemy aliens” from Germany and Italy suffered the same fate.
Joey
The ‘voluntary’ in quotation marks should have made it kinda clear that it wasn’t really voluntary. The family members often didn’t have anywhere else to go or anyway to taking care of themselves because they were, you know, kids. The ‘enemy aliens’ were immigrants living in the US legally who just happened to emigrate from the wrong country. Their internment was in no way more or less unjust than the internment of the Japanese. The Japanese were qualified as ‘enemy aliens’ too, at least the 38% that weren’t citizens.
Ted
Assrocket uses Japanese internment to slam liberals of today, and considers it an inherently liberal policy. Meanwhile, the very TOP conservative blogger, Malkin, has written an opus of praise for that very policy. Assrocket is not stupid (at least excessively so). He knows Malkin has written this, very likely has read it and agreed with it. He’s just being a lying ass.
To borrow a phrase from The Editors: Hinderaker is an enormous, mendacious, disembodied anus.
myiq2xu
If we were attacked by another nation the way we were at Pearl Harbor, I could understand taking some precautions like detaining “enemy aliens” from that country, especially if they had never even applied for citizenship here.
Native born and naturalized citizens of this country are a different matter. Even worse would be detaining our own citizens merely because they were merely “suspected” of being disloyal.
Imagine if G-Dub and Darth Cheney had U.S. citizens (who weren’t even of Iraqi or Arab descent) detained indefinitely
just because they protested against the war or belonged to a group like MoveOn or Code Pink.
Because you can bet that they would like to do just that. Kos, Glenn Greenwald, John Murtha, Sean Penn and the Dixie Chicks would all be behind barbed wire right now if it were up to Big Dick and Lil’ George.
myiq2xu
Second, third and fourth generation adult citizens of Japanese descent were involuntarily interned, not just kids.
German-Americans and Italian-Americans were not treated the same way.
The Other Steve
In fairness, the Germans got theirs during WWI. Not so much interred, but beaten and their culture shat upon.
cminus
The ‘voluntary’ in quotation marks should have made it kinda clear that it wasn’t really voluntary. The family members often didn’t have anywhere else to go or anyway to taking care of themselves because they were, you know, kids. The ‘enemy aliens’ were immigrants living in the US legally who just happened to emigrate from the wrong country. Their internment was in no way more or less unjust than the internment of the Japanese.
My German-American grandfather was interned briefly during WWII, after, as he put it, two intimidating government agents asked if he would agree to be “voluntarily” interned “for his own safety.” He went along with it, but he didn’t feel that it was really that voluntary. They let him out after a couple of months, though, after he was able to provide clear evidence of his anti-Nazi bona fides.
His son, my uncle, married a Japanese-American woman from California whose family had been interned during WWII. Based upon the family discussions, the Japanese-American experience was probably somewhat more unjust. Not only were Japanese-Americans rounded up with far less exacting standards (most Japanese-Americans went to the internment camps, while only a relative handful of German-Americans, mostly known Nazi sympathizers, the recently naturalized, and American-born minor children of non-citizens, did), but from the stories the guards at the internment camps treated the German-Americans better than the Japanese-Americans. My grandfather described the guards at his camp as fair-minded people who expected that most of their charges were innocent of any wrong-doing and would soon be released, while my aunt’s family felt that their guards, while not cruel, thought of them as something approaching enemy prisoners of war. Also, my grandfather’s camp had much nicer surroundings, but that may just be geography — if you went inland from New York in the 1940s, you were still in a well-settled land with plentiful resorces, whereas if you went inland from California, you were in a desert.
The Other Steve
Aye. Although I’m sure Malkin probably agrees with Hindrocket that the Japanese internment means liberals are worse.
demimondian
Unfunny, unclever, and unworthy.
myiq2xu
Also untrue. Here’s a quote from Molly Ivins:
War brings out the patriotic bullies. In World War I, they went around kicking dachshunds on the grounds that dachshunds were “German dogs.” They did not, however, go around kicking German shepherds.
The Raven
There were also Japanese internments in Oregon. There are several “apology monuments” in Portland.
There were, in fact, proposals to intern Germans and Italians during World War II. They didn’t get nearly as far, largely due to the influence of the German and Italian communities in New York politics; the Japanese, of course, had no comparable influence; Italian-Americans at least were required to register–I am not sure about the Germans. Ironically, there was in fact some German subversion in the USA; there was never evidence of Japanese.
Caw! Caw! Caw!
The Raven
Caw!
Germans and Socialists in Milwaukee
Margaret
Well I know one German American who was not interred nor would it even have been considered: Chester Nimitz. Nor did he serve in any segregated unit. He was in fact CINPAC from shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack until after the end of the war. Like many Texans of German decent, he learned English as a second language.
The Japanese internment had a facet that so far hasn’t been addressed and that is the fact that many west coast land owners and specifically citrus growers were Japanese Americans. Lemon Grove for example had a Japanese American majority and the white growers coveted their plantations. In Hawaii it was the sugar plantations they were after. So fear played a role and bigotry played a role but these emotions were cynically manipulated by liberals and conservatives alike because the only party affiliation required was greed and a lust for power.
Scott H
@cminus: Apologies to your grandfather considering how many prominent blue-chip unhyphenate Americans of the day (whose spawn we must yet endure, how long, O Lord?) were rather casually not demonstrating their anti-nazi bona fides right up until the actual declaration of war.
I figured we couldn’t get past the Japanese-American internment without mentioning that one sad, sad individual – in whose defense one must surely admit her screed was no more than getting a meal ticket punched for the reactionary gravy train.
calipygian
I thought Germans were kind of into that.
calipygian
And don’t forget this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1312540,00.html
Does one choose to be a war criminal? Or is it genetic, passed from generation to generation?
ThymeZone
Thanks for that, what a great quote.
Ellison, Ellensburg, Ellers, and Lambchop
Welcome to Bizarro World. FDR, Hugo Black, Earl Warren, etc., etc., etc. are no longer liberals.
White is black, up is down, Sonny is Cher.
Bob In Pacifica
It’s been awhile, but a lot of the movement for interning the Japanese came from politicians in California. If I’m not mistaken, wasn’t Earl Warren, the Republican governor of California, in on it? I also recall a General John Lesesne DeWitt being a public leader in pushing for it. There were a lot of people coming forward claiming that a guy who ran a laundry was a friend of Hirohito, that Japanese Americans owned property that could be used for landing strips. That owning fireworks was a sign that the offender was going to be signalling the Japanese fleet. I don’t think that the idea originated with FDR, but I am willing to stand corrected. A lot of Japanese Americans were screwed over, having to sell their properties and businesses. Thus, the jackals got to pick at the possessions of the detained, not unlike what happened to those interned in Germany.
The irony is that the same thing couldn’t be done in Hawaii, a lot closer to the action, because too many people there were of Japanese ethnicity.
Also, Hoover investigated the claims of Japanese Americans being treasonous and could find no proof.
But Republicans have been working on detention camps for years. As I recall, during the Reagan administration, there was something called the King Alfred Plan.
demimondian
OK, kids, today we’re going to have another lesson in “How sophists lie.”
Now, notice the accusation here: some select liberals didn’t complain, so, since liberals did complain, these must not be liberals. This is a special form of fallacy, called The “Fallacy of the General Rule”, combined with a particularly vile kind of personal attack, a Generalized ad Hominem.
Sadly, this is the level to which the modern conservative movement is reduced; its adherents are such utter fools that they are reduced to exposing that they have no substantive arguments to offer.
Wilfred
Was? At the levels of manipulation there are no liberals or conservatives, democrats or republicans – only land, resource and power grabbing whores. People like Eliot Abrams, Libby and Wolfowitz who always manage to find their way back to authority, aided and abetted by people like Hilary:
Far enough, btw, would be Iran.
In any case, in the days of the electronic panopticon it’s not necessary to build internment camps – we’re already living in one.
calipygian
Speaking of Scooter Libby and Richard Perle:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/27/AR2007112702356_pf.html
Aren’t we trying to HOLD Iraq together?
Len
Hoover was a closeted homosexual. Therefore he was a Republican.
We ain’t got no closets in the Democrat party!
(Apparently we can’t speak no English either.)
Tsulagi
cminus,
Not my grandfather, but my German great-grandfather was too. But he was detained and questioned for only about three weeks.
He immigrated to this country and obtained citizenship before WWII. Settled in a small town in CO that had a high percentage of German immigrants. He started a small sawmill business and as we were heading toward WWII had defense contractor and govt. contracts to make and supply packing crates for munitions and lumber.
After WWII started, some twit, probably low level, in the War Dept. decided it was a security risk to have my German born great grandfather owning and operating a business used in the war effort. We’re talking packing crates, not the freakin’ Manhattan Project.
While he was detained, it was strongly suggested he sell the business to a “true blue American,” Funny thing, he offered to put the entire business ownership and operation in my great grandmother’s name, a woman he married here, a Native American. You don’t get more American than that. For some reason that didn’t go over that well. Another problem was that just about everyone working in the mill and loggers in the area supplying it were also German. So some common sense prevailed and they simply let him go and dropped it. They needed the packing crates. Maybe it helped that his oldest son, a 17-year-old had enlisted about three months earlier.
Later, my then 17-year-old grandfather went on to serve in three wars leaving blood in each finally retiring as a CSM. My great grandfather, partly for his new country, and also for his son, later enlisted using his German language skills in an intel unit. He returned home after the war.
No doubt a fair number of Japanese Americans would have taken a similar path if they had had the opportunity. Stupid happens, but it doesn’t have to be repeated.
Bruce Moomaw
Let’s not forget, shall we, what Hoover’s standards would have been for identifying those “domestic Communists” that PowerLine would have loved to see “locked up”: “The prisoners eventually would have had a right to a hearing under the Hoover plan. The hearing board would have been a panel made up of one judge and two citizens. But the hearings ‘will not be bound by the rules of evidence,’ his letter noted.” Now, THAT’S a setup for accurate justice if ever I saw one.
By the way, the Times also notes: “The only modern precedent for Hoover’s plan was the Palmer Raids of 1920, named after the attorney general at the time. The raids, executed in large part by Hoover’s intelligence division, swept up thousands of people suspected of being communists and radicals.” There is a new book out on the subject — I can’t remember the historian’s name — claiming to reveal the newly discovered fact that Hoover himself (at age 24!) personally conceived the Palmer Raids and singlehandedly persuaded Palmer to carry them out. Apparently, even at that age, he had a powerful understanding of how to pull political strings. Rather like Stalin’s rise to power, in fact. Fortunately, when he tried to repeat the accomplishment, Truman had somewhat more attachment to elementary democracy than Woodrow Wilson. (Given Hoover’s politics, I find myself wondering whether his reluctance to intern Japanese-Americans might actually have been due to some degree of sympathy on his part for the Axis.)
Anne Laurie
Ives was identified in the infamous 1950 pamphlet Red Channels as an entertainer with supposed Communist ties.[11] In 1952, he cooperated with the House Unamerican Activities Committee and named fellow folk singer Pete Seeger and others as possible Communists.[12]
I’d almost forgotten — that was why my mother banned the TV version of “Frosty the Snowman” in our household. Happy solstice season, folks!
John S.
I’m not sure if EEEL was ‘reduced’ to this level. My hunch is that this is how he has operated all along.
Perry Como
There was Rex 84, something that was overseen by the well known liberal Ollie North.
TenguPhule
EEEL is a colon pimple on the asshole of the Universe.
No wait, the last one is true.
Chuck Butcher
If you start with the Rupublicans during Truman’s Admin and move forward checking for fear-mongering and poisonous rhetoric accompanying power grabs something interesting emerges. It doesn’t have much of anything to do with libruls.
Jen
O/T
Seen today at the Dollar Tree (everything’s a dollar! But they don’t have the little parachuting soldiers my son wants! No one else does either!)
Hardback books by:
Paul Begala and James Carville, together
Ari Fleischer
and
John Ashcroft
Amazingly, every one of these guys saw fit to put their own pictures, prominently, on the cover. Dare I hope that Jonah Goldberg does as well?
p.s. I think his wife kept her name = feminazi = liberal = fascist.
Truly, the infiltration is complete.
demimondian
Yup. Ms. Gavora kept her own name.
Psycheout
Thought you guys might like this, since you support the terrorists.
CIA chief to drag White House into torture cover-up storm
Merry Christmas, BDS’ers!
ThymeZone
This has been Studies in Practical Proctology, brought to you by the Continuing Education Division of Balloon-Juice.
(c)2007
myiq2xu
Here’s two money quotes from Earl the Pearl:
“The only reason that there has been no sabotage or espionage on the part of Japanese-Americans is that they are waiting for the right moment to strike.” Testimony before Congress on the Internment of people of Japanese Ancestry (1941)
“I have since deeply regretted the removal order and my own testimony advocating it, because it was not in keeping with our American concept of freedom and the rights of citizens. Whenever I thought of the innocent little children who were torn from home, school friends and congenial surroundings, I was conscience-stricken.” Remarking on his past advocacy on Japanese internment in his autobiography.
(from Wikipedia)
I love the circular logic of the first quote.
Warren wasn’t considered to be a liberal until he his SCOTUS. He is used as the example of the danger of lifetime appointments.
demimondian
I’m puzzled, Psicko. I thought you were the one who was down with Eric and Tim?
myiq2xu
Oops! My bad.
Fixed
Enlightened Layperson
Not to mention Dwight David Eisenhower.
Crawford Kilian
Well, my family would have been nailed if the Cuban Missile Crisis had gone out of control. I recall a Los Angeles TV news announcer telling us that subversives would be rounded up if war broke out.
My dad looked at me, smiled, and pointed at himself. He was a longtime “premature antifascist,” and by 1962 he and my grandfather, stage and screen actor Victor Kilian, had been blacklisted for 12 years. Hoover’s guys had chased them out of job after job, essentially for the crime of lousy political judgment.
See my comments about it on my politics blog.
The Other Steve
Sorry, my family is partly German. Want to try again?
The Other Steve
Eisenhauer
Conservatively Liberal
Fixed.
Beej
TOS,
Eisenhower is the way the Pres. spelled it. Maybe is was Eisenhauer originally.
myiq2xu
So is mine, and no I don’t.
Fe E
A few more facts about the internments: they occured only on the West coast–as that was where naval movements against the Japanese occured, Japanese Americans in the Midwest and East were not interned as there was no fear that they were spying for Germany. Many internees were allowed to leave internment provided they left the West Coast. Reasons for leaving included getting jobs or attending college in the East. I haven’t done an internet search on this, but there is a pretty good write-up in Dunnigan and Nofi’s “Pacific War Encyclopedia.”
To be clear, I still think the internments were deplorable, but I wa once again surprised to find that history was not as black and white as I had been led to believe. I don’t know why I thought it would be in this case, but there you have it….
Zifnab
:p I’m Jew-Talian. There wasn’t a spot in the known world during the 40s where I wouldn’t be arrested.
John S.
Well hello fellow Jew-Talian!
There are a lot of us out there…my barber is an old school one from Brooklyn.
skip
After 911 does anyone seriously question the ongoing capacity of the American people to go flat insane for extended periods?