Another military broadcaster who served at Hellenikon AFB has set up a website focusing on his time there in the early Sixties…
And Costas, the civilian engineer was STILL there when I was there, in 1983.
A station never lets go of a senior broadcast engineer, you know— because chances are, they are the only one who knows how it all is wired together!!
Check it out!
I fell asleep to the monotonous, but engaging drone of Eugen Weber, preaching of the final days of The Holy Roman Empire on PBS’ The Western Tradition. I awoke to the sounds of the same man – but preaching a whole new doctrine.
More later
Update: Argh, how embarrassing. I had a whole argument formulated last night, which I can’t recall this morning. *blush*
It basically followed this line. He proclaims the legitimacy of the European nation-state model because we’ve come to rely upon national governments for “all the services they provide.” But, in his section on the 16th and 17th century, he argues that the European nation-states were formed almost exclusively for the express purpose of more effectively conducting war.
Indeed, a strong argument can be made that the majority of the troubles facing the world today are the aftermath of centuries under the stewardship of war-mongering imperialistic European nations.
I see the day coming, not likely in our lifetimes, but perhaps our children’s, where mankind is, by and large, no longer at war. And people compete with each other in a truly free and global marketplace, not the field of battle. When that day comes, I predict that the great nations of the world, and their governments, will become obsolete, and slowly fade into just another chapter in the annals of human history.
Anyway, that wasn’t bad for something off-the-cuff. 🙂
It is a country of dreams, fragile pavilions, airy courtyards, and meticulously planted gardens, cool trickling fountains and pools, refuges from the harsh summer heat of Southern Spain, that the Moors called Al-Andalus. In this country the bougainvillea vines make a splash of dark red or electrical magenta against whitewashed plaster walls, and curved roof tiles of a peculiar faded hue, somewhere between rose pink and honey. In the afternoon, the cicadas make a churring sound in the oleanders in the great enclosed garden of the citadel of the Alhambra high on the Albaicin hill, in the city of Granada.
The place seems deserted of people, only my daughter and I exploring the paths where the white dust settles softly in our footprints as we pass. Behind us is the ruined citadel of the Alcazaba, the fortress looking out over the city below, and the sprawling palace complex of towers and courts, whispering with myrtle leaves and the trickle of water. The Patio of Myrtles – the Comares Tower, the Hall of the Ambassadors, its interior walls covered with a fine tracery of intricate plaster lace. Our footsteps fall with a faint scuffing sound on the stone floors. The Lions’ Court, water bubbling from a great stone basin, born up on the backs of oddly stylized, almost Chinese-looking stone lions, at the center of a forest of slender pillars, branching into more elaborate arching trees of plaster filigree. To me it is a wonderland, a place of enchantment, but something about the rooms opening into the Lion’s Court creeps out my daughter. She feels a sense of oppression, the whisper of something bad having happened there, and runs ahead. I follow, doing my best to drink it all in, the fabled rooms and gardens, loggia and court. There was the Queen’s mirador, a tower with an airy latticed window, once with a view into the town below- all ornamented with plasterwork, with tile and magnificent woodwork, the last grand flowering of the Moorish kings in Spain, their paradise on earth, planted with flowers and shrubs to make a living carpet, ornamental trees swaying gracefully in the cool breeze. Boabdil, the last king of Granada, departed in 1491, asking of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Monarchs that the gate out of which he left be stopped up and never used again. At the head of the pass leading down towards the sea, he looked back at his glorious citadel and wept.
Granada, the last remnant of Moorish control on the Iberian Peninsula. Once, at the peak of power and glory, the great dynasties—the Umayyad, and after them the Almoravids and the Almohads held all but Asturias in the far north-west, and went over the Pyrenees as far as Tours before being pushed back by Charles Martel. Moorish rulers held the great cities of Toledo, Cordoba, Seville; shining beacons of learning and culture in the darkness of the European Middle ages. Gloriously adorned with gardens, running water, street-lighting, Cordoba boasted subtle philosophers, learned doctors of medicine, poets and mathematicians, and an atmosphere of toleration that drew on the finest scholars from all three religious traditions. Abd-al-Rahman III, who held supremacy as the Caliph of Cordoba built himself a great palace outside the city, called the Medinat-al-Zahra – palace, garrison and city all at once, splendid and sprawling – as glittering and ultimately as fragile as a blown glass sculpture. It existed only a bare half-century as the Versailles of Iberia, before it was razed nearly to the ground, and the Caliphate collapsed into a muddle of warring city states. The Christian Reconquest slowly gathered, retaking Toledo by the 11th century, brought to a glorious conclusion by Ferdinand and Isabella in this very city, in the shimmering fairy-tale palace that my daughter and I now explored. Within a few years and decades many others followed King Boabdil into exile, probably many of them looking one last time over their shoulders and weeping for that lost paradise, that splendid dream that was no longer theirs. The exiles took skills, intellect and trade contacts with them, and Spain glittered for a while, and then grew moribund, rigid, overtaken in intellectual, industrial and mercantile energy by other countries.
But some still dream, of colonnaded gardens, and fountains of clear water from the snow-melt of the Sierra Nevada, and of taking back the lost paradise of Al-Andalus, caring little that what made it so, was liberty from religious orthodoxy, and the free exchange of ideas, in the courtyards of Cordoba and Toledo, with the blossoms of orange trees perfuming the twilight air.
Three or four years ago while Saddam Hussein still had a death-grip on the Iraqi people and a slightly looser grip on the Western journalists who came to commiserate with them, I listened to an interview on NPR, an interview with an Iraqi gentleman and musician, who was the principle cellist with the symphony orchestra in Baghdad. The orchestra then existed against great odds and every deprivation that the UN sanctioned, and out of which certain western powers were profiting.
It was heartbreaking, listening to the voice of the cellist, and his account of the orchestra, much reduced, and with its surviving coterie of musicians having to work day jobs, and starving not only for materiel sustenance, but for connection with the larger world, with other musicians, to travel, to perform for a world audience. The Iraqi cellist longed for it, longed with the desperation of a man stranded in the desert who craves water, a desire all the more poignant because of dread, dread of what might, would, probably take place in order to make all those longings a reality. And of course, with Saddam’s media minders vetting every word of interview, the cellist could not voice his hopes or fears in any but the most banal and inoffensive phrases and I am sure the interviewer knew this, and so did any sensitive listener.
The interviews were taped during rehearsals for a concert featuring Elgar’s Cello Concerto. I rather like Elgar and composers like Smetana, Dvorak, Neilson, and Delius; the agreeably second-rank, late nineteenth and early 20th century composers of symphonic music, with a mildly nationalist interest in the folklore and musical traditions of their respective countries. It’s accessible in a way that the jangly and self-consciously modern later composers are not. They composed and performed largely in a time and world which was hopeful, where great and wonderful advances in everything—medicine, machinery, political movements, and communications— were making lives better and more rewarding, and most Americans and Europeans were confident that things would get even better. Even the Cello Concerto, completed in 1919 after the wreckage of much of that sunny confidence during the First World War, still offered a bit of hope, and a refuge in music, when everything else is gone.
I don’t know how the concert itself went over, but I wonder now if it wasn’t something like an occasion caught for newsreel cameras sometime during the last months of Hitler’s Germany; one last performance by the Berlin Philharmonic; the faces of the audience somber and exhausted. The vengeful Soviets are advancing from the East, the British and Americans from the West, every night, the nights are hideous with high-explosives as the Allied air forces methodically steam-roller cities into rubble, the thousand-year Reich is imploding, its’ functionaries seeing enemies and saboteurs everywhere, nemesis and blood. There is no refuge for the concertgoers, except for a little while in the music. That little is all they have left, before the ending of their world, and so they are lost in it, grateful for this little respite, the reminder that there is order, and beauty, and hope in the world, and a promise that the present nightmare may pass. And so I think it was for the principal cellist of the Baghdad symphony— a hope and a reminder.
I don’t know about Afghanistan; it seems to be very like what it was in Kipling’s’ day, all swashbuckling and intrigue and tribal feuds. But for a country like Iraq, where there can be a symphony orchestra, and a musician who loves Elgar’s Cello concerto; that is indeed a light and a promise of order, beauty and hope.
Around the time of the first anniversary of 9/11, I saw a drawing commemorating, and making a bittersweet comment about anniversaries, memory and the passage of time. Quick pen sketches of the WTC towers, each with a sequential date underneath; 9/11/02, 9/11/03, 9/11/04, but with each repetition, the outline of the towers became mistier, more diffuse. The first anniversary to me was almost unbearable, as much of a psychic battering as the event itself. The second was a sad and thoughtful occasion, and now we are facing the third year, and the day falls on a Saturday; not a work day for most of us. Curiously, that seems to set the event a little aside, this year. I will not be walking into the glass and granite lobby of the office building where I work— a lobby that looks eerily like the lobby of the WTC buildings, owing to the fact they were built at about the same time, following many of the same architectural precepts, and which houses many of the same sort of businesses, although on a much smaller scale— on a glorious September day, not knowing that the towers had already been hit, they were burning, and thousands of people doing the same job they did every day would be dust and ashes in the next few moments.
On that day, a great crack ran across our universe, and everything before that day was on the other side of a great chasm. On the side of the chasm where we were now, we would be taking the fight to the hydra-headed monster that is Islamofascism, grimly lopping off the heads that we could get at; either heads that were directly responsible and defiantly proud of it, or heads that would at least discourage the others from striking again.
Time and events have overtaken the memory, and as the sketch artist pointed out, the edges will fade and blur, year by year, and on the whole, I do not think this is a bad thing; it is, in fact, they way we humans are. It is the way we have to be, if we are able to go on with living, and living anything like a normal life.
Curiously, this week marked another anniversary of catastrophe, but a natural one, rather than man-made. On September 8th, 1900, the city of Galveston, on the Texas Gulf coast was struck dead on by a tremendous hurricane. The city was built on a low sand barrier island, just a few feet above the water, separated from the mainland by a wide lagoon, a pleasant seacoast town of wood-frame buildings boasting all the amenities of new and bustling port— a thriving business district, railway terminal, schools, an orphanage, a theater, boarding houses, mansions and a newspaper. With almost no warning, the weather— the first cool days of fall, much longed for in South Texas— turned queer and ominous. The movie director King Vidor, who was a small boy at the time, always recalled how water of the lagoon and the sea seemed to mound up on either side of the town, as the hurricane drew towards the coast, as if Galveston were at the bottom of a bowl and the water about to spill over.
The barometers plummeted down, and down, and it began to rain, and the waves fell on the sand shore, heavier and heavier, gnawing away the margin of safety. The winds increased, hurling the rain— and soon all sorts of deadly debris sideways; some estimation put the wind speed at 150, possible up to 200 MPH. And the storm surge, when it swept ashore, was fifteen or twenty feet of water, which pounded the houses into so much scrap lumber, and drove a deadly moraine of debris against every structure still standing. The waves smashed the orphanage buildings, where the ten Urseline sisters had herded the children into the upstairs dormitory farthest from the seashore, and each had lashed seven or eight children to themselves with clothesline, all in a line like ducklings after their mother, in a vain attempt to keep them together and safe. The sea came down, and smashed the building, and the only ones to survive were three older boys who scrambled into a tree.
In the morning, the dazed survivors would find bodies everywhere, and a two-story tall line of storm wrack dividing the town into a sector in which buildings still stood, however damaged, and a sector swept nearly clean. It still stands, over the Johnston Flood and the San Francisco Earthquake as a municipal disaster, with at least 6,000 dead, possibly as many as 10,000.(This is a good account of it.) Not a family was unaffected; even if they had all survived, huddling in their houses, listening to the roar and crack, feeling the house shudder underneath and all around for all that deadly night. Recovering and burying the dead went on for months, the rebuilding for years, for the city fathers had decided on a great course of public work; a seawall, and to raise the level of the town.
This was eventually done, and Galveston rebuilt on a scale grander yet, but in the stories written about the centenary of the great hurricane, many of those who grew up In Galveston afterwards often remarked that their parents and older kin who had survived it, never much mentioned the storm. It was almost as if they had willed the whole traumatic time out of existence. I finally understood why this was so, nearly a week after 9/11, when I forced myself away from the television, and put the portable radio back onto the classical station, and took it out with me while I pruned the rosebushes, and spread out mulch in the garden.
This was what you had to do, to not forget such an event— something like that could never be put out of mind and memory, but compartmentalized, just so you can go on and build some kind of satisfactory life, rebuild a city, win a war, make your garden grow. But the music in my mind when I see the videos of the fires, of the clouds of dust, of people falling, is always and forever Mozart’s’ “Requiem”, a mourning for what we lost, and the world that used to be, a world that is fading like the outline of the towers.
I am honored to be given the opportunity to email interview best-selling author Michelle Malkin. Michelle is the daughter of Filipino immigrants, wife and mother of two, blogress, TV commentator, nationally syndicated columnist, author of Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores and her just released book In Defense of Internment: The Case for “Racial Profiling” in World War II and the War on Terror.
Before we get on with the interview I want to state three things. First I want to say that I think that this is an important book that proves there is an intellectual case for the 1942 evacuation order. That there were abuses that occurred as a result of that order is undeniable, but they were not the reasons for the order. Second, my wife and I agree that this book is an impressive achievement given that Michelle gave birth while writing it. (Dr. Wife gave birth to Darling Daughter#2 while finishing her PhD long distance, so we empathize.) And thirdly, I personally want to thank Michelle for writing this book. After my posts on the 1942 Evacuation Order, I received many requests that I write a book on the subject. Michelle has written a book better than I could have imagined. So thank you, Michelle, for getting me off the hook!
Michelle: Thank you for your kind comments about the book. As you know, I embarked on this project in part because of your debate with Eric Muller last spring. If not for you, I doubt that this book would exist.
Sparkey: Thank you! I really appreciate that. Now, you once wrote that you believed the internment of “ethnic Japanese was abhorrent and wrong.” What changed your mind? Was there a specific “Aha” moment, was it a gradual process, or what?
Michelle: My “Aha” moment occurred as I read David Lowman‘s book, especially the MAGIC cables and intelligence memos that he reproduced in the back of the book. I put many of those documents in my book and online. Many more are available at www.internmentarchives.com, which was founded by Lowman’s publisher, Lee Allen.
The memos show that U.S. intelligence agencies regarded ethnic Japanese on the West Coast as a serious national security threat. My critics have written dozens of blog entries assailing my book. They have accused me of being a self-hater, of slander, of shoddy research methods, of providing too few footnotes (there are more than 600), and of being physically repulsive. But as of this morning, they have not addressed the concerns about Japanese espionage discussed in the intelligence memos reproduced in my book. Why? Because anyone who spends even ten minutes perusing these memos is likely to conclude that the evacuation and relocation of ethnic Japanese on the West Coast was rooted in legitimate national security concerns, not simply wartime hysteria and racism.
Sparkey: In the introduction to In Defense of Internment you state that it is forgivable that American’s don’t fully appreciate “the wartime exigencies of early 1942.” How do you feel the prism of Vietnam has distorted people’s view and understanding of 1942?
Michelle: In the late 1960s and the 1970s, anti-war agitation and ethnic identity politics became all the rage. Third- and fourth-generation Japanese-Americans embraced the America-bashing, victim-card culture and launched a nationwide bid for blanket payments to evacuees and their families. That movement led to the formation of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, which issued a biased report that reached the predetermined conclusion that Roosevelt’s policies were motivated by racism and wartime hysteria.
Sparkey: How widely publicized was the Niihau incident in the States, and how significant was the event to the Administration at the time? [Niihau is a Hawaiian island where ethnic Japanese Americans assisted a downed Japanese pilot after the Pearl Harbor raid. -S]
Michelle: It was written up by naval intelligence officers in Hawaii and was publicized by the local papers. The incident appears to have been very significant to the Roosevelt Administration-as evidenced by inclusion of reports related to the incident in the proceedings of the Roberts Commission.
Sparkey: After both Pearl Harbor and 9-11 many security fears were not realized. Critics point to these as evidence that such fears were unfounded. How do you respond to this?
Michelle: Obviously this is a logical fallacy. If X (say, an appendectomy) causes the absence of Y (say, a burst appendix), it is incorrect to conclude that since Y did not occur, X was unnecessary.
[I would like to add that just because a threat was not realized doesn’t imply that the concern for that threat was unjustified. – S]
Sparkey: Eric Muller insinuates that (based on the name of your book) you’re really advocating an Arab roundup of a sort. You address this charge in your rebuttal, but it does beg the question, why name the book In Defense of Internment if you’re not really advocating internment?
Michelle: The title is In Defense of Internment because the bulk of the book (including all 12 chapters between the introduction and conclusion) is devoted to a defense of the evacuation, relocation, and internment (policies collectively referred to as “internment”) of ethnic Japanese during World War II. This is very relevant to the War on Terror, obviously, and I tease out some lessons in the introduction and conclusion. But it is clear that my book is a defense of internment in 1942, not today. I do support racial profiling and other policies that my opponents have repeatedly likened to the WW II internment.
Sparkey: What do you see as the biggest benefits resulting from the 1942 Evacuation Order, and do they justify the policy?
Michelle: The greatest benefit was to severely disrupt Japanese espionage cells on the West Coast. Given what was known at the time, I believe the decisions made in early 1942 were justified.
Sparkey: What do you see as the biggest negatives of the policy and their effects on public perception?
Michelle: The biggest negative was the adverse impact on Japanese-Americans who were loyal to the U.S. and the PR campaign on their behalf that followed. The effect has been to wrongly discredit any and all homeland security policies that apply heightened scrutiny based on race, ethnicity, religion, or nationality as well as any detention policies that bypass the criminal justice system.
[It also didn’t help that the Government dragged its feet to the point of abuse in providing direct compensation for actual incurred losses after the war. – S]
Sparkey: How do you think the Evacuation Order could have been handled differently or better?
Michelle: There were numerous problems with the way evacuation was carried out. Military authorities did not initially appreciate how hard it would be for ethnic Japanese to move east on their own. They initially allowed Terminal Island residents 30 days to evacuate, then abruptly shortened that length of time to 48 hours following the Goleta shelling and Los Angeles air raid scare. This caused considerable hardship for the evacuees, who scrambled to sell off household goods (typically at rock-bottom prices) and pack for their move. The conditions in some of the assembly centers were miserable. (It is worth bearing in mind, however, that the centers had to be built quickly and at the time construction materials and equipment were scarce.) Some of these problems could not have been prevented, but others might have been with better planning.
Sparkey: It’s obvious many critics haven’t even read your book before casting aspersions. It’s as if you attacked some article of their religion. How do you expect to “kick off a vigorous national debate” with those who believe in the infallibility of their faith?
Michelle: There are many people who feel the issue is settled and should not be debated. This is unfortunate. If they are confident that their position is right, they should have nothing to fear from an open, vigorous debate. There are others, however, who are willing to debate the issue-most notably Eric Muller and Greg Robinson.
A word about that debate. Muller mainly addresses side issues, such as the book cover and my research methods and terminology and the book’s title and why he didn’t receive an advance copy of the book from my publisher and whether I slandered Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga and whether I mischaracterized Sarah Eltantawi of the Muslim Public Affairs Council and whether I took too long to respond to his critique.
Robinson, to his credit, focuses on the core issues-but much of what he says is flat out untrue. He says most of the MAGIC cables I discuss in my book came from Tokyo or Mexico City and refer to areas outside the United States. Wrong. He says those cables that do speak of the United States detail various efforts by Japan to build networks, and list hopes or intentions rather than actions or results. False. He says I said that Hoover’s opinion was not reliable or relied upon. Nonsense. He says ONI opposed evacuation. Rubbish. He says the Navy opposed evacuation. Wrong again. I pointed out these errors 18 days ago, but he has yet to acknowledge any of them.
Sparkey: Your book Invasion didn’t receive the attention it deserved from the mainstream press. How does the reaction to In Defense of Internment compare?
Michelle: I was heartened by the pre-release response, particularly the coverage my Bothell, Wash., speech received in the Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Invasion was never covered as a news story by any major newspaper. Though I sent In Defense of Internment to every major newspaper, it appears it will not be reviewed, just as Invasion was not reviewed (except by a few small-town papers).
Sparkey: The next time you are in the Dallas area, would you give my family and me the honor of having dinner with us?
Michelle: If time allows, I would be delighted. I will be in Houston later this week, by the way, at an event sponsored by the Houston Forum. More details here.
I didn’t intend to get involved with the point-counterpoint between Michelle Malkin and her critics (Eric Muller et al). She can obviously handle that herself. I do find most objections to her book sounding more rhetorical than substantive, blatantly ignoring what she, you know, actually wrote in her book. But a bit more on that later, as I really want to address our long-lost favorite cheap-shot artist, Dave Niewert.
To recap, Michelle responded to a journalist’s question to President Bush at the at the UNITY conference in Washington DC. She felt the question was a cheap shot at her book. This is what Michelle quoted (the reporter) on her blog:
I wanted to ask you about protecting all Americans, as well. There are many Arab Americans and Muslims in this country who find themselves unfairly scrutinized by law enforcement and by society at large. Just yesterday we had arrests in Albany, New York. Immediately afterwards, some neighbors in the community said they feared that the law would come for them unfairly next. We have a new book out today that suggests perhaps we should reconsider internment camps. How do we balance the need to pursue and detain some individuals from not well-known communities, while at the same time keeping innocent people from being painted by the broad brush of suspicion?
Michelle sent an email to the reporter identified in the transcript as CBS News Anchor Julie Chen:
It is obvious from your ignorant question to President Bush at UNITY that you did not bother to read my book. In fact, you didn’t even bother to read the back cover of my book, which says, “Make no mistake: I am not advocating rounding up all Arabs or Muslims and tossing them into camps. But when we are under attack, ‘racial profiling’-or more precisely, threat profiling-is wholly justified.” [Emphasis added – S]
Now anyone who has really read the book (and I don’t mean those who’ve read it the way the Grand Inquisitor would a protestant tract) will understand why Michelle took offense at the mischaracterization of her work in front of the President of the United States, but it’s not befitting according to Mr. Dave (When I do it it’s Okay, but when you do it that’s bad) Niewert, who writes:
Just a reminder: The book’s title is In Defense of Internment. It clearly calls for a reassessment of the meaning of the World War II internment, evacuation and “relocation” process.
Does anyone else see a “cheap shot” there? Hm. Me neither.
This is a sloppy mischaracterization first of all, but right now I have something else to point out. Dave continues:
In any event, as you can see, Michelle promptly fired off a letter to Julie Chen — who among other slots at CBS, is the host of the game show “Big Brother” — outlining her thinking. Evidently, Michelle believes that writing a defense of the Japanese American internment and linking it to post-9/11 racial profiling should not lead anyone to conclude that she was suggesting that internment is an appropriate response in the current “war on terror”. Heavens no. She’s only laying down the dots. God forbid anyone would connect them.
Typical postmodernistic red herring. Dave is telling his readers “don’t believe what Michelle writes; I’ll tell you what she really believes.”
Well, in any event, before firing off her nasty letter, Michelle forgot to perform one of those good ol’ Journalism 101 functions: Double-check your source.
Just the way you do all the time eh, Dave?
Does this sound familiar? It should. Because this is the kind of approach to basic standards of factuality we’ve come to expect from Malkin.
More familiar all the time, just not the way you think…
Malkin was clearly working from the White House transcript, which as it turns out, misidentified the questioner.
Oh, my goodness, she trusted a written source. She actually believed what she read on paper! Terrible, how careless of her…
Had Malkin taken the time to, say, review the tape or double-check by placing a quick phone call with UNITY officials, she’d have discovered that the questioner was none other than CBS’s Joie Chen.
How awful, she criticized the WRONG person?!?! Goodness, it is not as if you’ve never done that, eh Dave? Like back in early 2003, when you didn’t notice that each post on this web site had an author’s handle, and they might be different? Remember how it took me three emails to get it through your head that it was I, Sparkey, not Stryker who wrote the posts you were so lamely critiquing. It so frustrated Stryker that he wrote this post:
To all those who link to various posts to disagree with whatever’s been written, I have a small reminder. We Have Several Authors Christ, do you know how stupid you look when you’re talking trash and flinging sarcastic remarks disparaging the intelligence of the piece when you can’t even get the name of the author right? Oh yeah, Mr. Smartypants, you’re a mental giant, all right. Each post is clearly delineated and contained within its own box with the name of the author at the very top! You’re like the guy trying to give a serious presentation, unaware that his fly’s unzipped and wondering why everyone’s snickering at him. Yeah, but why am I trying to correct you? Seeing a bunch of ill-equipped and uncoordinated numnuts trying to play the game is entertaining, to say the least. By all means, continue.
Of course you could have exercised good Journalism 101 and double-checked your source by emailing the author, or maybe just maybe, actually reading the post. Oh, but wait, you eventually apologized on the basis that you’re “a bit new at this blogging game…” That makes it all better, because you couldn’t read my handle off the stinking web page because you were an arrogant newbie. Now you’re just an arrogant blowhard taking Michelle to task for making a mistake in more forgivable circumstances, just so you can score worthless debating points and inflate your own self-importance. Leave it to a postmodernist like Dave to specialize in the sloppy ad hominem attack.
Now let’s return to Dave’s earlier sloppy mischaracterization, the book title. Seeing how he has difficulty reading what other people actually put down on paper, I reiterate, the title of the book is not “In Defense of Internment” it’s In Defense of Internment: The Case for “Racial Profiling” in World War II and the War on Terror. That is a very important difference, one that Dave is desperate to cover up.
The collective group think on 1942 has so distorted history that our nation is now going to great lengths to avoid any profiling whatsoever. This leads to absurd situations where two obviously Middle Eastern men can board a flight without so much as a second glance whereas my blonde, blue eyed, 8 year-old son is searched not once, but twice for the same flight. Had 911 been perpetrated by the Baader-Meinhof Gang that might make some sense, but it wasn’t. Instead of prudent filtering to the threat, we have a colossal waste of both public and private resources that takes away penknives and 7/16th open ended wrenches without making us one iota safer. Despite protests to the contrary, the rehabilitation of the histography behind the 1942 evacuation order is not a call for a round-up, but rather for a logical policy of allocation of resources in a time of some very direct threats.
The proposition that the 1942 Evacuation was all about racism forces one to ignore certain factoids from history, the first of which is that the people of warring nations tend to not like one another. However, the purveyors of victimology would have us believe that just because people from a belligerent nation living in the United States who have documented divided loyalties like dual citizenships, that are educated in nationalistic schools centered on and financed by the “mother” country, and hold to a faith that teaches of their ethnicity’s divine and holy destiny (Shinto) are de facto and a priori benign. You have to trivialize, marginalize, and suspend thousands of years of human history to conclude that a people coming from such a background would automatically have allegiance to the United States and not the land of their parents’ birth.
Though he be a gentleman, remember, Eric Muller is also lawyer. His critiques of Michelle’s book reflect his “legal brief” training: spray a bunch of stuff out there, hope no one looks too hard at the substance (nits, tons of nits), and pray something sticks (above all convince people to not read it to begin with). Scholarship is like detective work–outliers do not by themselves disprove a thesis, because one must look at the totality of the record; however, to a lawyer pointing to outliers can bring reasonable doubt – the truth isn’t his concern, winning his case is.
Historically, the evidence is there: Imperial Japan weaponized its expatriate populations, and when the opportunity presented itself, large segments (i.e. the majority) of those populations assisted the Empire. The failure to acknowledge or address this on a logical or historical basis is the failure to consider the real world ramifications of such a stance, that one’s theoretical “fears” may prevent one from addressing a very real danger. One that wants to display our severed heads on TV.
Now excuse me, I have a real job to do, I have a weapon sensor to finish. It’s not as if there isn’t a war on ya’know? (Just in case you’ve forgotten – and some seem to have – and if you do happen to take offense at that then maybe, before objecting to me, you should ask yourself why you feel that way.)
I was further inspired by some intriguing blog debates last year between Sgt. Stryker [FYI: that would be me – Sparkey, not Stryker] and Is That Legal?. After reading a book by former National Security Agency official David Lowman called MAGIC: The untold story of U.S. Intelligence and the evacuation of Japanese residents from the West Coast during WWII, published posthumously by Athena Press Inc., I contacted publisher Lee Allen, who generously agreed to share many new sources and resources as I sought the truth.
And now I feel it is time for a public service announcement:
(A gentle reminder for those Neanderthal’s whose, ignorance, penchant for creative spelling, and remote locations make it difficult to take their hostile messages seriously – despite the author’s intent. We now return you to our regularly scheduled blog.)
To make it easy, here’s a list of my blog entries on the subject.
Some Facts (Not PC Shrill) on the Relocation of Japanese During WWII
Update to Japanese Evacuation/Internment
I have a big deadline tomorrow, but more soon, I promise!
UPDATE: I fixed the links!
So now, it is perfectly plain, that we all should have seen it coming: Congress and CIA/FBI, and 60 Minutes and all— the muses and gods know that it was all written out plain for us, did we only have the wit and imagination to interpret correctly what had been laid out before us. Yea, even your humble author, a retired rear-echelon type with an eccentric penchant for reading all sorts of things, and altogether more books than are really called for in the household of someone not actually a PHD— oh, I should have seen it myself, even absent any meaningful connections to the law enforcement and intelligence communities. Because I read a lot, and widely, and one of those was Bernard Lewis’ article in the Atlantic, in late 1990— I went around brandishing it to all my co-workers, and friends, saying “Read this! It explains a lot! I mean, he really, really knows about why they are doing this stuff!” Stuff being things like the detonation of the Marine barracks in Lebanon, of the kidnapping and/or murder of Americans all over the Middle East, even the takeover of the American Embassy in Iran. We had been on a collision course with radical Islam for the previous decade, now I knew why, and I knew with the same certainty that I know the sun will come up in the morning, that the day would come when someone representing themselves to be acting in the behalf of Muslims would do something grisly and atrocious, and productive of screaming headlines on American soil, to Americans, and finally and seriously piss off us all. Silly me, I thought it would involve high explosives, and something like a school bus or a nursery school, and maybe thirty or forty casualties, a hundred or so, tops.
So, 9/11 blindsided me, with the sheer enormity. Call it a failure of imagination, even though such a thing had been imagined…
Imagined for movies.
One of my acquaintances told me, a couple of days after, he had been working on something deeply absorbing, that dreadful and interminable Tuesday morning, and had the TV turned on, but with the sound muted, not turned to any particular channel, and that he had glanced over and happened to catch a sequence with an airliner crashing into a tower, and thought “Cool— what movie is that?”. He watched for quite some minutes before realizing that reality had trumped imagination.
Just as Hitler announced plainly all his intentions, in books, speeches and interviews, all during the 1930ies, so did Osama Bin Laden. Just as a scattering of people with imagination took Hitler at his word, and saw a growing danger, so did the scattered handful who saw Bin Laden as something infinitely more than a beardy wierdie in a long robe squatting in a hut in Afghanistan, muttering over age old grievances, and preaching apocalyptic vengeance to a handful of lunatic followers. If, on the morning of September 10th, someone in the FBI, or Congress, or the White House even, had stood up to say,
“Umm, this millionaire Islamic fundamentalist nutcase has this plot going, to hijack four or five airliners full of passengers and jet fuel, and simultaneously crash them into some important buildings in order to kill thousands of people, and maybe incapacitate the government and economy,” I know as surely as I know anything, that a few people would have replied,
“Hmm, maybe something in that, a bit ambitious, but there are a couple of precedents,” and the rest of us would have snorted skeptically and said,
“Ok, yeah, sounds like the plot of a bad disaster movie— Tarantino or Bruckheimer?”
Even if it had been spelled out in every detail, honesty compels me to admit that I would have taken it with a handful of salt— we all would. Jews marched into the gas chambers of Birkenau, and Sobibor hoped until the very last minute that those awful stories wouldn’t be true, couldn’t be true, although the announced intentions had been on the record for a decade or so, and the actions of the Nazis were perfectly manifest.
Because, in the main, we are logical, and baffled as to why someone would want so badly to kill us, for what seems like no reason at all; that degree of paranoia is the exclusive province of the urine-stained lunatic babbling on a street-corner.
To be sure there are people and nations that we have wronged, that have a rightful grudge against us: Cuba, Vietnam, Mexico, any number of other South American countries. However, as poor, persecuted, and rightfully aggrieved as their citizens may be, they are not plotting our mass destruction— in fact, any number are, and have been plotting to get to America on anything that would fly or float for the honor of working a lot of unpleasant and less-than-minimum-wage jobs. The rest are petitioning in the courts, or the courts of public opinion for redress, not lining up to organize mass-murder, even as some Americans rack their memories for some kind of justification— what could we have done to them, that would be a reason for this. The deeds are horrible, there must have been something.
The answer is; yes there was something: our culture, descended from the Enlightenment notions of separation of the state, and organized religion, the fantastical notion that religious belief— or no belief at all, is a personal matter, and no business of the State. Free from the dead hand of orthodoxy, technology and the imagination thrive, with all sorts of interesting results. Genius, after all, is a rare plant, and when religious, or political, or social conformism lops off all unapproved thoughts and expression… well, those rare plants become all the fewer. With luck, they relocate themselves to more hospitable soil, which has the side effect of impoverishing the original location. We inherited the tontine of hatred and resentment, when a culture which thought themselves blessed by the particular favor of Allah looks around and has to admit that hard proof of this favor is particularly thin on the ground, and whose fault is that, then? It can’t be the fault of those who have followed every rule; it then must be the fault of some malign power, that they have not been blessed with honor, riches, glory and power.
And so, there we are, then, and it seems hard sometimes to grasp, even after three buildings in smoking ruin, and a hole in the ground near Shanksville. Our imagination ought to be aided by that recollection; yes, they want to kill us, as many and by whatever means possible. It does seem ironic, though, that some of those who deny that future possibility still demand to know why 9-11 hadn’t been prevented; they bathe in the waters of Denial, which is more than a river in Egypt. But grasp it we must, to see it clearly and without equivocation. We must expand our imagination to embrace the unpalatable fact; that a there are some very dangerous people who want as many of us as possible very, very dead. Just internalizing that reality makes it all the easier to decide what to do about it.