The Omega Letter Intelligence Digest

Vol: 36 Issue: 20 - Monday, September 20, 2004
History Revised: The Wrong Lesson
by Jack Kinsella

The biggest danger America faces from the terrorists who want to destroy
us comes, not from the terrorists, but from revisionist historians.
Thanks to them, even something as obvious as profiling is widely seen as
un-American and 'racist'.

As a consequence, if you are a little old white-haired lady with a walker,
you just might be pulled out of line at the airport and singled out for a
secondary search and inspection. Not because little white-haired old
ladies represent a threat to national security.

Instead, little white-haired old ladies, (not to mention 87 year-old
former governors who hold the Congressional Medal of Honor - Joe Foss was
ordered to remove his shoes as the airport inspector tried to confiscate
his CMH) are being sacrificed on the altar of political correctness.

A political correctness that was born out of the historian's horror
stories about Japanese relocation during World War II. Revisionists call
that one of the darkest periods in American history.

The relocations were chalked up to latent American racist tendencies being
allowed to rise unchecked, due to mass 'war hysteria' -- instead of a
common-sense approach to homeland security in time of war.

As proof, they point to the fact that there wasn't a single instance of
Japanese-American sabotage throughout the entire war.  And that the 442nd
"Nisei Battalion" fought with distinction during World War II, earning
significantly more medals than the average combat unit.  Both are true.

But in the first instance, historians give no credit whatever to the
relocation camps for taking potential Japanese-American saboteurs out of
circulation in the first place.

In the second instance, Japanese-Americans of the 442nd fought with
distinction because they were Americans first and Japanese second, men who
volunteered for combat like millions of other Americans.

They fought hard and distinguished themselves, BECAUSE they represented
America, not Japan. They fought against the REASON there were relocation
camps.  They weren't fighting against American racism.  They were fighting
against Japanese imperialism, realizing that with victory, the relocation
camps would be unnecessary.

But that isn't the way American history remembers it.

The 19th century philosopher Santayana warned, "those who do not learn the
lessons of history are doomed to repeat them." In the rarified atmosphere
of liberal academia, historians spend more time learning about America's
response to Japanese atrocities than it does to the atrocities that
started the war in the first place.

With the typical self-loathing that so often accompanies liberal academia,
the Japanese get a pass for STARTING the war, (because of the way it
ended -- in a mushroom cloud).

Thanks to that mindset, we've learned the wrong lesson.

Assessment:

An exclusion order signed by President Roosevelt, included "any and all
persons" living within a prescribed military area. The order did not apply
strictly to the Japanese as revisionist historians would have the public
believe.

"Any and all persons" included those whose countries of origin, not race
were at war with the United States. The primary targets of the exclusion
order were Germans, Italians and Japanese.

All were directed to move out of the State of California and from the
western halves of Oregon and Washington as well as from the lower one
third of Arizona. Thousands complied.

The order was a direct result of the American Signal Corps having broken
the secret Japanese diplomatic code thus, the American government was
reading what the Japanese government was advising its consulates around
the world.

These Top Secret messages were dubbed "MAGIC" and only a mere handful of
people knew about this code-breaking feat until after the war. MAGIC
messages were not made public until 1980. Therefore all books or articles
written prior to 1980 about why the relocation was necessary are obsolete
by error of omission.

Historical revisionists don't like to have the record corrected,
particularly if it means that the lessons of history they worked so hard
on making clear are the wrong lessons.

It would mean going back to the drawing board to revise history from 1941
to the present all over again to learn the REAL lesson history teaches.

It would require the relocation of 'political correctness' to the trash
heap of history where it belongs.

Knowing the rest of the story puts the relocation camps, and their
contribution to America's victory, into a different perspective.

In dozens of MAGIC messages, persons who were loyal to the Imperial
government were named and locations given. This data, added to other
information from German and Italian sources, caused American government
agents to swoop down on hundreds of German, Italian and Japanese on the
day war was declared (December 8, 1941) with named warrants to arrest
these persons.

Each person was given an individual hearing. As a result of the hearing,
the person was either paroled and permitted to rejoin his/her family, or
sent to an Internment Camp to be deported.

Of particular concern to the U.S. government was the fact that all
Japanese children were required to be registered at birth with the nearest
Japanese Consulate.

When the boys reached age 17 years of age, they were required to join the
Japanese army or perform other military service as directed -- including
spying for Japan, if called upon to do so.

Question in the minds of U.S. authorities: Would these men side with Japan
in the event of war or side with their birth land, the United States? As
history shows, there were lots of each.

MAGIC revealed that, by mid-1941, six months before Pearl Harbor, Japan
already had an extensive espionage network along America's West Coast.
There were Japanese spies watching military bases, shipyards, airfields
and seaports.  A Honolulu cell provided important last-minute help to the
attackers at Pearl Harbor.

History shows the vast majority of Japanese-Americans were as loyal as the
men of the 442nd.  But Japanese ultranationalists were broadcasting into
the United States, sending coded messages to enemy sleeper cells embedded
near strategic sites.

All US intelligence knew was that there WERE sleeper cells of
ultranationalist Japanese scattered up and down the West Coast. The
intercepted Japanese coded messages proved that.  But they didn't know who
or where.  The only way to watch them all was to put them where the
government could see them.

Now, I am NOT advocating the revival of relocation camps for followers of
Islam or Arab-Americans.  In the first place, I don't think it would work.
This is 2004, not 1941.

And in the second place, the vast majority of Arab-Americans and American
Muslims are as loyal as were the majority of Japanese-Americans in the
1940's.

But the Twin Towers weren't brought down by white-haired old ladies or
former governors or by a sect of Norwegian monks.  And profiling isn't
relocation or deportation.

It is this revisionist view of history that spawned the politically
correct worldview that profiling Muslim males between the ages of 17 and
35 is as racist as the relocation of enemy aliens and potential enemy
sympathizers during World War II.

Ironically, the lesson of history that revisionist historians miss is the
one they keep trumpeting to promote the current politically correct view
that profiling is 'racist' and un-American.

There were no documented acts of Japanese sabotage or disloyalty after the
Japanese and other potential enemy aliens were relocated.

If we had learned the correct lessons of history, 19 Muslim males of Arab
descent between the ages of 17 and 35 may have been 'profiled' before they
boarded their flights on September 11, 2001.

And maybe it would have been just another day.