Defending repression: why are conservatives trying to rehabilitate McCarthyism and the Japanese internment?

• Author: Young, Cathy

DURING WORLD WAR II, the U.S. government interned about 120,000 ethnic Japanese living in America, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens. This is almost universally regarded as a shameful blot on America's history, a cautionary tale of racism, paranoia, and wartime hysteria. In 1988 President Reagan called it "a grave wrong" and signed legislation authorizing $20,000 in reparations to each surviving internee.

In 2000 another eminent conservative, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, assailed his colleagues' ruling striking down Nebraska's late-term abortion ban by likening it to Dred Scott and Korematsu, the rulings which upheld the constitutionality of, respectively, slavery and the Japanese-American internment.

So it takes some nerve to pen a defense of this reviled policy--which is exactly what the author and syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin did recently, in a new book titled In Defense of Internment: The Case for "Racial Profiling" in World War II and the War on Terror. Malkin's argument is closely tied to post September 11 debates about ethnic, racial, and religious profiling as a "homeland security" measure.

Inevitably, critics have raised the Japanese internment as an extreme case of racial profiling gone awry. Malkin believes our safety is being compromised because any common-sense proposal that involves profiling--be it extra-vigilant screening of Middle Eastern passengers at airports, targeted monitoring of visitors with guest visas from countries with terrorist links, or special scrutiny of Muslim chaplains in the armed forces--is shouted down by invoking the specter of internment camps. And it's true that internment parallels have been frivolously and promiscuously thrown about in this debate. One would think, though, that if you truly wanted to counter such slippery-slope hyperbole about ethnic or religious profiling, the last thing you'd want to do would be to defend internment. It's a bit like trying to counter arguments that legalized abortion leads to acceptance of infanticide by publishing a tract in defense of infanticide. Malkin's calculus, however, is different: She hopes that if Americans can be persuaded to get over the Japanese internment guilt complex, the profiling of Arab Americans and Muslims will become more acceptable.

To counter this guilt complex--peddled, according to Malkin, by high school textbooks, universities, ethnic activists, politicians, and the media--Malkin sets out to debunk what she...