What they’re really not telling you
There are few things more despicable than twisting the truth to fit a narrow ideological spectrum. Michelle Malkin, who already is the “proud” owner of one DUMB@$$ AWARD, seems to have no qualms with subverting the truth to ideology in the craven pursuit of another.
It’s the Josef Goebbels School of Political Truth: repeat something often enough and with enough conviction, and it eventually becomes the truth. The truly sad thing is that Malkin makes a pretty penny for spewing her ignorance and half-truths, all the while dressing it up as Gospel.
Malkin, in keeping with her history here, has produced an ideological work that discards basic standards of truthfulness, accuracy and fairness — not to mention basic decency — all in the pursuit of “proving” a thesis whose factual basis is nearly nonexistent. And in the process, she’s attempting not just to revise but to falsify history, just like David Irving and the Holocaust deniers, or Steve Wilkins and the slavery deniers….
This flaw characterizes the entirety of Malkin’s approach to history: Whatever evidence that exists which might undermine or even militate against her conclusions is hastily and summarily discarded. This includes nearly the entirety of the past half-century’s scholarly work regarding the internment, which Malkin airily disregards as the product of a liberal acadame. So, rather than engage their evidence, Malkin simply dismisses a whole host of serious historians with the kind of smear-laden rhetoric we’ve grown accustomed to from the likes of Fox News (where Malkin, of course, is a contributing pundit).
Malkin’s latest excuse for propaganda in the service of ideology is entitled In Defense of Internment: The Case for ‘Racial Profiling’ in World War II and the War on Terror. No, I have not read the book (nor do I intend to), but I am familiar enough with Malkin’s writings and her willingness to play fast and loose with the truth. I will not participate in putting money into her bank account, but there are plenty of Right Wing ideologues out there who will more than make up for my boycott.
Michelle Malkin, a journalist, has released a book that is does just this: it defends the eviction and incarceration of more than 70,000 American citizens during World War II. Her book “In Defense of Internment,” takes the position that the Government was right to round up the Japanese then, and Arab-Americans now. The mainstream position that the internment was wrong (expressed in Ronald Reagan’s apology), Malkin attributes to a “conspiracy.”
Malkin is essentially endorsing racism and racial profiling in the pursuit of the war against terrorism. In doing so, she ignores the fact that most acts of terror perpetrated on American soil have been committed by white males. If racial profiling is the categorizing of a particular ethnic group based on risk factors, shouldn’t we be paying closer attention to disaffected white males? Well, certainly we should, but how do you identify those people? (They all look us.) It’s so much easier to focus on Arabs, because, well, they LOOK different.
It is this willful ignorance of the truth that makes Malkin so dangerous. Sadly, there is a growing market for this sort of willful ignorance of historical reality. (see: “Coulter, Anne”, “Hannity, Sean”, “Savage, Michael”, or “Limbaugh, Rush”)
[T]he best she can hope for is vindication by propaganda; for her entire method is to narrowly select evidence and embroider it, while distorting and ignoring serious scholarship. It will never be taken seriously outside the realm of blinkered conservative-movement dogmatists — a bloc of the population, unfortunately, that appears to be growing.
Her argument is typical of dogmatic Conservatives who find nothing amiss in tailoring “facts” to service their version of the truth. The problem here is that truth is NOT relative. Truth cannot be massaged or shaded to serve a particular ideology. Yes, the interpretation of the truth is a highly subjective “art”, but Malkin’s willingness to play fast and loose with the truth does not change the reality that internment camps were designed for the mass collection of Japanese-AMERICANS simply because they LOOKED different. Rounding up Italian-Americans or German-Americans would have been a logistical nightmare- if for no other reasons than they generally didn’t have almond-shaped eyes or yellow skin.
