A discussion panel on the subject of SB 1070 was held by the Cato Institute recently. Although the discussion itself ran along fairly predictable lines, Mark Krikorian has some fascinating observations about the participants and audience.
A discussion panel on the subject of SB 1070 was held by the Cato Institute recently. Although the discussion itself ran along fairly predictable lines, Mark Krikorian has some fascinating observations about the participants and audience.
The anonymous woman cited in Mr. Krikorian’s entry says a lot more than he even points out, whether she is a leftist or not: She herself is apparently as ignorant as she assumes that we hoi polloi are! In the first place, the relocation camps were created during the war and for its duration, not after the war. Second, the camps were not, as she certainly seems to imply, a craven bureaucratic reaction to a popular demand by an enraged mass of racist and paranoid white citizens. The camps were the brainchild of our leaders– and the leader most vociferously pushing for the relocation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast was the man now considered a liberal icon of Constitutional freedoms: the future Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, then-Governor Earl Warren of California! Much more important, and contrary to popular belief, Japanese citizens were not simply rounded up and herded into concentration camps, as if they were living in German-occupied Europe– or, say, Japanese-occupied Asia! Relocation applied only to the western states, and the Japanese Americans resident in those states merely had to move east of those states. Only those who were unable or unwilling to do so were interned in government-run camps. Yes, it was of dubious Constitutionality and dubious public necessity, even in light of wartime conditions; and, yes, there were many regrettable and preventable hardships, such as many Japanese Americans who felt compelled to sell their homes and possessions for a fraction of their actual market values. It was not, however, as it has been portrayed by the regnant powers-that-be in contemporary America; nor was it the hateful, vindictive, racist “witch hunt” that it is made out to be today by both leftists and the ethnic interests that they inspire and organize in hopes of destroying traditional America and its silent majority of remaining adherents.