Permit me to stray from the realms of science to briefly bring your attention to the results of a Discovery Channel/TIME magazine poll released last night, a poll that every decent American should be embarrassed to acknowledge. I can't find a link to it yet, but the details were discussed Sunday night on a live joint NPR-Discovery Channel program, "The Price of Security." There's also a link to the audio of the program here. The most disturbing finding of the poll: 25 percent of Americans would repeat one of the most shameful episodes in the country's history by rounding up all Arab Americans and holding them until they're proven innocent of any involvement in terrorist activities.
This evokes the disgusting practice of rounding up Japanese Americans during the Second World War and holding them in detention camps. Canada did the same thing.
It's bad enough that 40 percent of Americans still think Saddam Hussein had something to do with the 9/11 attacks. We can blame that no Fox News, I suppose. But if a quarter of the country is willing to abandon some of the most essential principles of democracy and justice, then it suggests this country is a lot further from greatness than even the likes of Noam Chomsky would have us believe.
Franklin was right: we deserve neither security nor liberty.
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For those 25%, patriotism is no more than rooting for the local team and proudly wearing the team's colors.
It has absolutely nothing to do with supporting the ideals upon which the country was founded.
And just like with the obnoxious parent in the bleachers, their team can do no wrong and commit no foul.
Frankly, it is easy to engage in high-handed criticism of Japanese internment, retrospectively. We now know that there was no significant threat. The country, during WWII, didn't have that luxury. I recommend reading this book review, which gives a more balanced picture:
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/internment.htm
My adoptive grandfather's family was placed in internment camps during the war. They were not even Japanese! They were Chinese. But because they lived in a predominantly Japanese neighborhood in Seattle they were mistakenly rounded up. They lost nearly everything. (Though, everything was much less back then, given the fact that the country was only beginning to emerge from the Depression.) Fortunately they, like most others at the camps, rebounded fairly quickly after the war.
I also think it is important to keep in mind that Japanese internment during World War II is barely a footnote among injustices going on at that time. The atrocities of the Nazis and Japanese war crimes make internment look like a trip to summer camp. Unlike the United States, the Japanese haven't ever truly owned up to their history.
Criticism of internment decades after it happened reminds of the related liberal tendency to romanticize the Native American tribes of the Plains now that they have been safely packed off to the reservations and cannot hurt anybody. No one with any serious familiarity with the history and culture of Comanche, for example, would have any romantic 'Dances with Wolves'-style notions about them.
In any event, I wouldn't take the result of a poll like this too seriously. In any poll of this nature (i.e. one that involves answering questions in a way that might horrify pollsters), it seems there is always a "joker factor" of about 10-20% percent.
.....The country, during WWII, didn't have that luxury.
Yet we seem to have had the luxury of appointing a German-American as the Allied High Commander in Europe.
(My mother's classmate - a German-American WAS interred. But then he was a member of the Hitler Youth and had spent his summers in Germany)
And the Native Americans? They fought amongst themselves and fought back against us, so we shouldn't feel any shame for destroying them?
Yet we seem to have had the luxury of appointing a German-American as the Allied High Commander in Europe.
The German population in the United States was largely assimilated long before WWII broke out. In fact, the previous World War largely encouraged the vast majority of Germans to abandon any signs of overt 'Germanness.' The Japanese were much less assimilated into the mainstream of American life.
Besides, the German population of the United States is the single largest group by national origin. Internment wasn't feasible. (As you point out, some Germans and Italians actually were placed in camps depending on their backgrounds.) By contrast, the Japanese population was tiny and only the Japanese population on the western coast of the United States was affected. The Japanese in Hawaii and further inland in the western U.S. were not. If you read the book review I linked to, Steve Sailer points out that unfortunately there were a few incidences involving Japanese citizens prior to internment that cast doubt upon the loyalty of the Japanese population. These were probably just coincidences, but again we have the luxury of hindsight; FDR did not.
And the Native Americans? They fought amongst themselves and fought back against us, so we shouldn't feel any shame for destroying them?
Please read what I said more carefully. I didn't say that whites were blameless in the destruction of Native Americans; I simply pointed out that there is a tendency to idealize Native Americans and to portray them in a wholly unrealistic light. I people in modern Americna tend to project too much of our own thinking and values onto the Indians. Few people seem to understand just how alien the worldview of Native American tribes was in relation to our own.
One of the best books ever written on any Indian tribe would is this one concerning the Comanches.
If you can afford a few bucks, give it a read. It isn't unsympathetic to the Comanches, far from it. On the other hand, it doesn't mythologize them either. I think it will give you a completely different perspective on relations between whites and Indians.