In her prefatory note to readers of her new book “In Defense of Internment,” Michelle Malkin says the following about the book’s goal:
“This book defends both the evacuation and relocation of ethnic Japanese from the West Coast (the so-called “Japanese American internment”), as well as the internment of enemy aliens, Japanese and non-Japanese alike, during World War II. My work is by no means all-encompassing; my aim is to provoke a debate on a sacrosanct subject that has remained undebatable for far too long.”
Read just a bit further, though, and you’ll see that the book is not just about “provoking debate.” It’s about “correcting the record” (page xv). By the time she finishes her retelling of the story of how the U.S. government decided to force 112,000 Japanese aliens and U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry from their homes and into camps in the interior, she maintains that “it should be obvious to any fair-minded person that the decisions made were not based primarily on racism and wartime hysteria” (page 80), but were based instead on information in top-secret decrypted cables from Japan to its embassies around the world (the so-called “MAGIC” decrypts) suggesting that certain people in the Americas (both ethnically Japanese people, including primarily Japanese aliens but also a handful of American citizens of Japanese ancestry, as well as people of other races and ethnicities) were secretly working as spies for the Japanese government.
In other words, the government did what it did to people of Japanese ancestry in the United States from 1941 to 1945 because a select few officials at the very top of certain branches of the government (really a very few–the President, the Secretary of State, and a few War Department officials, but not the Attorney General or J. Edgar Hoover) knew that the Japanese government had sought to develop relationships with ethnically Japanese (as well as ethnically non-Japanese) people in the United States, and had apparently had some success in developing such relationships. It was cool and calibrated military necessity, not racism and not war hysteria.
I’ll have more to say about her substantive claims about MAGIC and racism and hysteria later. (Dave Neiwert has already said plenty about it, by the way.)
First, though, people ought to ask Michelle some very serious questions about the book’s goal and the research methods that support it.
I was, frankly, amazed at the speed with which Michelle researched and wrote the book, and then brought it to publication. She mentioned yesterday that she had been led to do much of the research for the book by a weblog dialogue (a “diablogue?”) between me and Sparky at Sgt. Styker that took place 16 months ago.
I know that when I undertook to tell the story of a single government
decision from this era — the decision to draft American citizens of Japanese ancestry out of the camps and into the military (which is the subject of my book) — I had to spend hours and hours first finding all of the relevant files from all the relevant agencies in archives all over the country, then sifting through those files to find all documents from all agencies and people relevant to the decisionmaking process, and then poring over the documents themselves, in order to link together disparate positions of many different people in many different agencies into a coherent narrative.
In “In Defense of Internement,” Michelle “corrects the record” by telling a much broader story about a whole long set of government policies and decisions. She cites to original documents from a staggering number of agencies and offices within agencies–the FBI, the Justice Department, the Office of Naval Intelligence, various branches of the War Department (including G1, G2, and the Provost Marshall General’s Office), the State Department, the Military Intelligence Division, FDR’s communications, and, of course, the voluminous MAGIC cables.
I haven’t checked, but I assume that lots of relevant materials for the story Michelle tells would be all over the country–in both DC-area branches of the National Archives as well as many of its regional offices, in presidential libraries, in the private papers of people like John McCloy and Milton Eisenhower and Franklin Roosevelt and George Marshall and many others who played a role in this long anc complex story, and in lots of other places.
I can’t imagine how Michelle–or, indeed, anyone–could have done the primary
research necessary to understand the record, let alone “correct” it in the manner the book attempts to do, in five or six years, let alone in one. Especially while doing anything at all in addition to researching the book (such as writing a nationally syndicated newspaper column). To tell the story correctly, a person would need to sift through thousands and thousands of pages of archival material from all over the country and then piece bits together into a coherent story.
I have a hard time believing that Michelle did anything of the sort. I suspect that she derived much of the information that supports her account from secondary sources, and relies primarily on primary research done (or perhaps not done) by others. (I do not doubt, by the way, that the documents to which Michelle cites actually exist; I’m not suggesting she’s making them up. What I suspect–indeed, what I know from my own experience–is that there must be thousands of additional documents in the archives that are relevant to a full understanding of the government’s wartime decisions, and that massively complicate the simple story she narrates.
A person certainly can “provoke debate” (uninformed debate, at least) by going about things in this way. But a person can’t “correct the record” in this way, or report history in a way that anyone ought to believe. It’s just not possible, and it’s not credible.
Comments are closed.