Locke and Load

The Malkin Wars

Offline yesterday, arch-conservative The Man sniffed at my use of the term "arch-conservative Michelle Malkin" in this post here. He furthermore took issue that my single-issue gripe of Malkin's work was a book of hers that I haven't read, In Defense of Internment. In my own (ahem) defense:


1. I began my description of Michelle Malkin with "serious looker." Not "arch-conservative." Priorities.


2. Clearly I meant the thing to be a silly post about a silly subject. Either someone at CNN meant to position the X over Vice President Cheney's face, and we learn nothing new about CNN, or someone didn't, and we will all take to our graves our unquenched thirst for justice. The Man knows about me something most of you do not: I do not believe the expression "arch-conservative" actually represents anything real. The term "conservative" describes a belief in a certain set of negative rights and positive obligations, and posits what we should do together to preserve those rights and obligations. Even if you could describe precisely what "conservatism is" (you couldn't, nor could you describe precisely what "libertarianism is," or what "centrism is," because the only internally complete "-ism" is totalitarianism) you could never indicate graphically its relative positions to other ideologies. I've made this point before.

But forget all that for a moment, and imagine a graphical point named "conservative." Moving too far from that point in one direction (call it "maverick") or in the other direction (call it "arch") does not make you a "maverick conservative" or an "arch conservative," it simply makes you not-conservative, since you now maintain a different set of rights and obligations, and submit different solutions for each. This takes us nicely back to:


3. The big one: Malkin's book, In Defense of Internment, which is titled perfectly: a defense of American internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. To wit:

On May 3, 1942, General DeWitt issued Civilian Exclusion Order No. 346, ordering all people of Japanese ancestry, whether citizens or non-citizens, to report to assembly centers, where they would live until being moved to permanent "Relocation Centers."

Over 112,000 residents of Japanese ancestry were subject to this mass exclusion program. Of those, approximately two-thirds were U.S. citizens by birth.

It was the "single largest forced relocation in U.S. history." Michelle Malkin herself wrote that, "There is no denying that what happened to Japanese-American internees was abhorrent and wrong." But, by her own pen:

I was compelled to write [In Defense of Internment] after watching ethnic activists, historians, and politicians repeatedly play the World War II internment card after the September 11 attacks.

[...]

If you want to read a book decrying the loss of personal freedom in wartime America, this is the wrong book. If you want to read a book about the history of institutional discrimination against minorities in America, you’re out of luck again. Bookstores, library shelves, and classrooms are already filled with pedantic tomes, legal analyses, and educational propaganda along these conventional lines.

[...]

The Bush Administration’s critics have equated every reasonable measure to interrogate, track, detain, and deport potential terrorists with the “racist” and “unjustified” World War II internment policies of President Roosevelt. To make amends for this “shameful blot” on our history, both Japanese-American and Arab/Muslim-American activists argue against any and all uses of race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion in shaping current homeland security policies. Misguided guilt about the past continues to hamper our ability to prevent future terrorist attacks.

Emphasis mine.

With executive summaries such as these, and written by the author herself, I don't need to read any further. Simply perusing the dust jacket is enough. Do you need to read Mein Kampf for yourself to conclude that the text of the book is abhorrent?

Malkin intends to defend Bush administration policy by defending Roosevelt administration policy (and a national shame for which the government has apologized and paid reparations). Hers is a logical misstep and it is a quite un-conservative position: that of detaining sovereign men strictly on the basis of ethnicity.

posted by Immanuel Can't @ 5:06 AM