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Entry: Waiting for Agitprop Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/waiting_for_agitprop#24411 Post contents: "The neocons are famous for justifying calamitous events by appealing to the democratic spirit, e.g., the forced internment of Japanese Americans during World War Two..." Speaking of history lessons, we need to be aware of several facts. (1) All Japanese American citizens and Japanese-origin non-citizens were neither interned nor relocated during World War Two. There were two processes going on. (2) One process was relocation which was uniformly required of all Germans, Italians, and Japanese who were not citizens of the USA and who lived within certain areas near the Pacific Ocean. Most people in this catgegory voluntarily complied. For example, Joe Dimaggio's parents were Italian Americans who were not citizens and were not allowed to visit him or his restaurant in San Francisco. Many Italian-origin fisher fleets were abandoned to rot on the Pacific Coast beach. This was the famous order of exclusion issued by FDR and usually misrepresented as applying to all persons of Japanese descent in the USA, and no one else. In fact, persons of Japanese descent, citizen or otherwise, who lived in Hawaii or a few miles away from the Pacific Ocean on the West Coast were not subject to this executive order. If Italian, German, and Japanese non-USA citizens ordered to relocate did not do so, they were forcibly relocated but were always free to keep on going east. Japanese American children were granted full scholarships, texts, and living expenses at US universities farther east when they were graduated from high schools which were outside the camps where they and their parents had been relocated. For insight into this, read the obituaries of elderly Japanese Americans in the newspapers these days. (3) The second process was internment, and this was reserved for persons found anywhere in the USA by a legal process to be enemy aliens, and these camps were work camps and many internees were kept incarcerated for up to two years after the end of WWII. But the spoiler statistic for the myth of Japanese-origin persecution during WWII is that the Italian-origin and German-origin internees far outnumbered the Japanese internees and, then, of course, excluded from any of the apologies and reparations granted to Japanese Americans. What is interesting about this myth is that it is so widely believed. For example, Professor Revilo Oliver, an early proto-paleocon, believed almost the exact words printed in this blog. Sent at: 2008 10 12