Common sense on internment?
This week Michelle Malkin is launching a book defending America's internment of the Japanese during World War II. I suspect it will prove timely and correct. I learned only fairly recently how controversial this decision was. Certainly I am not aware of any real constituency in British society which harbours any great regrets about Britain's own internment of Italians, Germans and leading members of the British Union of Fascists, so I was quite surprised to discover just how many Americans consider their parallel measure to be a deep and tragic error, sometimes listing it alongside slavery and segregation as one of white America's great sins.
Notably, the book draws deliberate parallels with today's War on Terror. This analysis is correct, because the war at home within each Western society is if anything more important than the war abroad. Perhaps one of the most frightening passages I have read on the war on terror comes from Pat Buchanan:
In the worst of terror attacks, we lost 3,000 people. Horrific. But at Antietam Creek, we lost 7,000 in a day's battle in a nation that was one-ninth as populous. Three thousand men and boys perished every week for 200 weeks of that Civil War. We Americans did not curl up and die. We did not come all this way because we are made of sugar candy.
Germany and Japan suffered 3,000 dead every day in the last two years of World War II, with every city flattened and two blackened by atom bombs. Both came back in a decade. Is al-Qaeda capable of this sort of devastation when they are recruiting such scrub stock as Jose Padilla and the shoe bomber?
In the war we are in, our enemies are weak. That is why they resort to the weapon of the weak - terror. And, as in the Cold War, time is on America's side. Perseverance and patience are called for, not this panic.
In 25 years, militant Islam has seized three countries: Iran, Sudan, and Afghanistan. We toppled the Taliban almost without losing a man. Sudan is a failed state. In Iran, a generation has grown up that knows nothing of Savak or the Great Satan but enough about the mullahs to have rejected them in back-to-back landslides. The Iranian Revolution has reached Thermidor. Wherever Islamism takes power, it fails. Like Marxism, it does not work.
Yet, assume it makes a comeback. So what? Taken together, all 22 Arab nations do not have the GDP of Spain. Without oil, their exports are the size of Finland's. Not one Arab nation can stand up to Israel, let alone the United States. The Islamic threat is not strategic, but demographic. If death comes to the West it will be because we embraced a culture of death - birth control, abortion, sterilization, euthanasia. Western man is dying as Islamic man migrates north to await his passing and inherit his estate.
Few are those in the United States who are willing to apply the principles of the war to defend Western civilisation to the homeland. Interning those whose faith or ethnicity marks them out as potential foes in this war, unlike in World War II, is not even close to being on the agenda in America, and I find it very difficult to consider this a bad thing. But what should worry everyone is that even discussing the idea of stopping their immigration is similarly off the cards. It is hard to conceive of an American political class that would have permitted mass immigration from Japan during World War II, yet mass immigration from the Islamic world continues through the war on terror and shows no sign of stopping. Will it take another few 9/11s before America's modern political class will also start to take this conflict seriously?
