re: #5 Charles

I’m a little confused - because I thought the hard right was supposed to be in favor of Japanese internment?

That’s Michelle Malkin’s stance, at least. Not sure about other pundits.

It’s a tough call. In “total war” (which is what WWII was), extreme measures are often necessary. What FDR did in the 1940s was child’s play compared to what Lincoln did in the 1860s (another era of “total war”), when he basically suspended the Constitution wholesale, and got rid of habeas corpus, which meant summary imprisonment and executions with no trial, etc.

Ex post facto armchair quarterbacking is a futile exercise. FDR thought there were Japanese spies and Japanese sympathizers among the Japanese community. But there was no way to tell who was who, and no time to go through a laborious screening process. So in the interest of national security, he locked up all Japanese in coastal regions (note: inland Japanese were not interned) because they could potentially aid in a Japanese invasion of the US homeland, which many thought was imminent (at least until Midway).

And it turns out FDR was right — we now know there were (at least a few) Japanese agents intermingled with the general Japanese-American population, and there were many more sympathizers toward the Imperial Japanese government, who, although not officially “spies,” were at great risk of aiding any potential future invasion when it happened. (Those who admitted to this, called “The No-No Boys” because they answered “No” to both questions on a loyalty-to-the-US oath) ended up at a special cap in Tule Lake for high-risk internees — a camp which eventually became overcrowded, there were so many sympathizers.)

And those spies? They were caught in the net, interned, and were neutralized as a threat.

We look back now and think FDR was being racist, but at the time it would have seemed suicidal to let hundreds of thousands of potential enemy sympathizers living amongst the general population during a time of total war and during a time of great risk of invasion. The subsequent discovery that FDR’s suspicions were to some degree confirmed only makes it harder to gainsay his decision.

I knew a lot of internees growing up, and the vast majority of them in fact did NOT have hard feelings about it. The older ones felt it was their patriotic duty to help the US war effort.

Remember, the US government has since not only officially apologized to all internees, but also paid them all substantial reparations (in a bill sponsored by Sen. Inouye). The financial losses suffered by Japanese-American families was not at the hands of the US government, but rather done by unscrupulous non-Japanese US citizens, who occupied and stole away Japanese property — or more commonly bought it at greatly discounted prices — while their owners were not around to intervene. That part of the story is more shameful than what the government itself did.

Personally, I would award each detainee a retroactive medal for bravery and duty in wartime, doing their part (albeit in a very unorthodox way) to aid the US war effort at the time.

But I personally do not fault FDR too much. There were in fact plans for Japanese spies in the US to help coordinate the invasion (of Long Beach harbor, specifically). The invasion never happened (thanks entirely to the incredible brilliance of the US Navy), but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t on the drawing table.