Author Archive | Eric Posner

wherein Professor Robinson further disassembles Michelle’s assertion of a supposed military necessity to evict and detain all Japanese Americans (but not all German or Italian Americans): The author’s case for military necessity–she claims there was a “West Coast under siege”–is fatally flawed, as it reposes on her dramatic account of the shelling by Japanese submarines […]

Professor Greg Robinson, author of “By Order of the President,” has more to say about Michelle Malkin’s book “In Defense of Internment”: Michelle Malkin engages in overkill. Her stated purpose is to prove that the removal and confinement of Japanese American aliens, and particularly of citizens, was based on justifiable fears of espionage and sabotage, […]

This just in: Baying at the moon is not a crime in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

As I noted yesterday, in her new book “In Defense of Internment,” Michelle Malkin undertakes to “defend … the evacuation and relocation of ethnic Japanese from the West Coast (the so-called “Japanese American internment”).” (p.xii) (“Ethnic Japanese” here means the Nisei–American citizens born in this country to Japanese immigrant parents who had been forbidden by […]

If you were of a mind to unsettle the settled understanding of what led to the incarceration of Japanese Americans between 1942 and 1945, and restore some credibility to the now-discredited claim of military necessity, you’d need to do two things. First, you’d need to make at least a prima facie case of causation–that is, […]

OK, enough about research methods and terminology and book covers. Let’s get to the meat of Michelle’s claim, shall we? Her argument is that intercepted and decrypted Japanese “chatter” about efforts (a small number claimed to have been successful) to recruit Japanese aliens (“Issei”) and American citizens of Japanese ancestry (“Nisei”) was “the Roosevelt administration’s […]

As I continue liveblogging my own thoughts about Michelle’s book “In Defense of Internment,” I’ll note a part of the book where I think Michelle is quite right. In her introduction (pages xiii to xxxv), or at least in certain parts of it, she makes the case that the civil liberties Left and representatives of […]

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, […]

OK, I said my first post on the subject of Michelle’s book would come in a couple of hours, and would be about the book’s goals and method. I lied. I posted a message on my own blog yesterday that the cover of the book didn’t inspire much confidence that the book would be Fair […]

Eugene was kind enough to invite me to guest-blog here today and tomorrow, and with the publication this week of Michelle Malkin‘s book “In Defense of Internment: The Case for ‘Racial Profiling’ in World War II and the War on Terror,” it looks as though I’ll have plenty to write about. About which to write, […]