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There is a difference between principles and law. Principles are foundational and are protected by the Constitution and it would require an amendment to change them. That is at the heart of the debate over Bush's “signing statements” in which he claims to right to ignore any law that he chooses, a reversion to Nixon's statement that “If the President does it, it's not illegal.” The basic rights don't change. Freedom of speech is freedom of speech, freedom of the press is freedom of the press. What changes is the world around us and this requires us to reexamine the meaning of those rights in light of the current situation. An unchanging interpretation of the freedom of the press could very well mean that kiddie porn could be distributed over the internet without penalty, while an unchaning interpretation of freedom of speech could mean that, to use Justice Holmes' example, I could yell “Fire” in a crowded theatre without repurcussions. Societies change, circumstances change, the world changes, and laws must change in response. Even morality changes. Two hundred years ago it was not uncommon for a woman to lose everything if her husband died because it all went to the closest male relative. One hundred fifty years ago we had slavery. Sixty years ago segregation, our version of apartheid, was legal. German POWs could eat in the main dining car, black combat veterans could not. If our Constitution, our laws, should ever become rigidified, out of touch with the real world in which we all live, then it would be time for a Second American Revolution because our entire government would have become the enemy.
Sure....I'll move this topic into the American Legal History board and we can discuss this, since it is an interesting area.I believe that the Constitution is a "dead" document; in other words, it is necessary to try to determine the sense and intent behind the words in the Constitution as written by the Framers.? I do not agree with the "living document" interpretation of the Constitution which argues that the meaning of the law changes according to the times.? This latter interpretation essentially renders the Constitution meaningless, since the rights protected under the original document won't necessarily hold true in the future.
First, I don't recall seeing an American Legal History board on this sight. Is it at another location or did I just miss it? As for the Constitution being a "dead" document, that would presume that the Founders assumed that conditions would never change. They in fact knew that conditions changed, because it was precisely the reason that they could no longer function under British colonial rule, that they had in fact outgrown their founders. Besides, if it was intended to be an unchanging document, why would they have included a mechanism for adding amendments, which by definition change the document. One of the bigger debates in the Constitutional Convention was whether to make the Amendments as add-ons that modified the document or as changing the fundamental document. They went with add-ons because, if an amendment changed the foundational document, it would have to be re-written and re-ratified with every amendment, hardly a practical solution. So they created a mechanism for modifying the document, for making it able to change as circumstances changed. They may not have envisioned the extent of the change, they may not have even expected it to last this long, but they were smart enough to create a flexible document. Besides, there is absolutely no way we can KNOW what their original intent was since there was no official record kept of their deliberations, only recollections, which was deliberate, quite likely because they didn't want future generations to be limited by their interpretations. These were smart men, flexible men, to suggest that they expected this nation, this world, to stay exactly as it was, or the governing document to be unchanging, flies in the face of all logic. Besides, if you're right, we have to return most the land west of the Mississippi to France and Mexico since there is absolutely nothing in the Constitution about acquiring additional territory, much less forming new states. We would be unable to regulate air travel or television. A dead Constitution is a dead letter.
I recognize Blazing saddles!
Don't remember it from "Blazing Saddles" but it wouldn't surprise me if they did a take-off on it. Mel Brooks can't resist making fun of things, especially when they are approaching iconic status.
Gerald R. Stone wrote “Perilous Times” and it is available from Amazon or at your local bookstore in either hardbound or paperback.
There hasn't been a lot of Korean War films that I can remember, but I remember “Steel Helmet” as being pretty damned gritty. It was a small movie about an infantry squad and it starred Gene Evans as the hard-bitten sergeant, and please don't ask me why I remember that factoid. I also remember that one character carried something marked “Fat Paul” which turned out to belong to a Father Paul who was killed doing something heroic. I also think there was a Sidney Poitier movie that revolved around an incident leading to a case of hysterical blindness. There is also the classic “Bridges over Toko-Ri” which is more a story set in Korea rather than a movie about the Korean War. I think there was a Victor Mature movie about a Greek engineer unit. And I think there was a fairly recent movie about an incident where American artillery was called down on a group of civilians because there was supposedly a large group of infiltrators mixed in with them. Don't know whether all of this helps or confuses, but its the best I can do.
The bottom line is that religion belongs in private life, not public life, while morality belongs in both. Unfortunately there are far too many people that believe that religion should govern both public and private life while an equal, or perhaps greater, number seem to operate under the system of “Morals? We don't need no steenkin' morals.” (For those who may not recognize the reference, it is a variation of a line from an old western movie only I substituted “morals” for “badges”.) Even more unfortunately, many of them seem to hold high public and corporate positions.
I will agree that political correctness and common sense don't go together, and this applies whether the PC is from the Left or the Right. I would argue however that the Right tends to more the attack-dog mentality (O'Reilly, Limbaugh, etc.) while the Left is more the touchy-feely type. One tries to beat you into submission while the other tries to smother you with pablum. But there is still an ongoing attempt to suppress dissent by effectively saying that liberals are in cahoots with the enemies of America. In the '50s they called them “fellow travelers” who had joined “Communistically inspired” organizations whereas now the VP says that their actions help the “al-Queda types.” Now there is nothing wrong with insulting your opponents, that has always been and will always be part of American politics, going back to the Jefferson-Adams presidential contest of 1800. It is when the executive proclaims that it has the right to wiretap phones without a warrant, to seize and lock up American citizens without benefit of any legal proceedings and hold them as long as it sees fit, when it supports torture in violation of domestic and international law, when it seizes people off the street both here and abroad and “renditions” them to countries that allow all kinds of physical torture, and finally WHEN THE CONGRESS STANDS IDLE AND LETS IT HAPPEN, that's when I get very nervous. Fortunately the Supreme Court still seems to have a little bit of courage left, at least until another justice dies, retires, or whatever. The bottom line is that the direction we are currently headed in is scary. Or to put it another way, how would you like to see Hillary Clinton as President with the same powers that George Bush claims?And I don't care what websites you find, 110,000 Americans citizens WERE swept up in a matter of weeks from one entire section of the country and FORCED to leave almost everything behind while they were FORCED to move into what were concentration camps where they were held without any legal recourse for at least a year, perhaps more, I'm not sure of the time frame offhand, but then the amount of time is irrelevant. Nothing even close to this was done to any other group, and it was done to this group BECAUSE they were Japanese or of Japanese ancestry. Other groups may have been mistreated during the war - this country has a history of mistreating or taking advantage of immigrants - but nothing on the scale that we did to the Nissei.
It was before my time, by I did see 'Good night and good luck' which I found very interesting. It seems everyone was afraid of the good senator and he finally hit a brick wall when he accused the army of harboring communists.? It surely was the most harsh suppresion of political dissent this country has ever seen, a close brush with fire. it reminds me of during the last days of WW1 and some time after, the communist witch hunt (not to the extent of the McCarthy era) spearheaded to a certain extent by a young J. Edger Hoover.
You might want to read the book "Perilous Times". Don't know the author or publisher off hand and it's on the second floor and I'm in the basement, but if your interested I can get you the info. It covers governmental efforts to suppress dissent from the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 up through the war in Iraq and covers both Red Scares in depth. Reading the book will scare the hell out of you if you have any appreciation of the First Amendment and what its loss would really mean. It also gives one a whole new perspective on current attempts to brand anyone who disagrees with the administration as a "cut-and-runner" and a friend of "the al-Queda types". What I find interesting, and at the same time disgusting, is this is all being done by a group that managed to avoid military service, except for Rumsfeld who spent a few years in the peacetime Air Force. I think if you looked up the definition of the word "chutzpah" you'd find a picture of a number of contemporary politicians accusing Kerry or Murtha of being less courageous than themselves.
War and violence both. Think about the men who are sent off to war. They are told they are going to fight against evil and the spread of what ever, Mom, apple pie and all that. But even though they are told this they still come back with nightmares and emotional problems from what they were told was the right thing. It isn't natural for one human being to kill another, it's inbred. (there are exceptions of course, but these people aren't normal.) Politics and greed push this on the backs of the masses and they are made to go off and fight and die for the desire and ambition of other men.
Unfortunately things are not going to change anytime soon. I'm coming to the conclusion that we should reinstate the draft, and this is coming from a Vietnam-era vet who spent 2 years as a cross-country hitchhiking hippie after service. I think it should cover EVERYONE between the ages of 18 and 35. No deferments unless you are physically or mentally unable to perform ANY duties. For example, you can be confined to a wheelchair and still answer phones or work the register at the PX and can replace either an ablebodied soldier or a contract employee working to make some Halliburton clone rich. That way the sacrifice, and the risk, is spread over the entire population. No more avoiding service because you had "other priorities" or your daddy could get you into a stateside unit and you could play Steve Canyon, Fighter Jock, on the public dime. You want to be an American? Then serve America. I would even offer service in the Peace Corps or Americorps, if they even exist anymore, as an alternative. Have you ever read "Starship Trooper" and if you have seen that Piece-O-Sh-t movie of the same name, it has very little to do with the book. One of the aspects of the book is that to qualify for citizenship, and the vote, an individual must volunteer for federal service and can then be assigned to the military or whatever the government deems the individual best suited for AND that there is a need for. The enlistment period is limited so its not a lifetime committment, and you can even opt out at any point, even go AWOL and the only penalty is you do not qualify for citizenship. The point is that if you are to have the privileges of citizenship you must have demonstrated a willingness to serve for the public good. Not a bad concept.
Actually, it looks like Order 9066 applied to all ethnicities, not just Japanese:However, Japanese were far more affected than other groups, but from what I have read it sounds like the other groups were treated pretty bad, if not equally as bad.? There is a page, here, which discusses the myth that Japanese Americans were interned en masse.Regardless, the treatment of people with particular nationalities, especially the Japanese in America, appears to have been pretty harsh.? But again I don't think this is comparable to anything that is going on today.? Aside from limited acts of retaliation (e.g. right after 9/11) perhaps the opposite it true; for example, political correctness has mandated that profiling not be used at airport screenings.
First, the mass internment of Japanese-Americans on the West Coast in early 1942 is NOT myth, any more than the Holocaust is myth. It happened, to them and nobody else. There were three Supreme Court cases triggered by it. They are no more myth than the Dred Scott case. And the point is not what we HAVE done, but what we MIGHT do. The fact that we haven't done anything remotely resembling what we did during World War II is a good thing, but we need to keep our guard up so that we DON'T do it. That's why we have to dial back on the political rhetoric that equates any disagreement with administration policy as helping the "al Queda types" and calling anyone who wants to see an actual exit strategy for Iraq in place a "cut-and-runner". This country has a long history of abusing minorities when it fits a social or political agenda. It also has a long history of suppressing dissent during war times, regardless of the severity of the threat, so we must be as vigilant against those who would use the threat to attack their political enemies or support their social agenda as we are against the threat itself.
I think you hit it dead on. I firmly believe that the war, like most wars, are about money, politics, etc. and rarely have little to do with the propaganda surrounding the event that we are usaully force fed in high school text books.
That is why I consider most wars immoral - they are started to acquire some material gain and not over principle and are thus like the neighborhood bully who beats you up for your lunch money. A war can acquire morality when one side is fighting for a principle, even if that principle is merely survival, like the kid who whips the bully and takes back his lunch money. Then, if the principled side wins, it is considered a "good" war, but if the other side wins, well it is still often considered a "good" war because the winner gets to write the history books. And then there is always the "unintended consequences" factor, which can be good or bad. Our Civil War resulted in the end of slavery in this country, which was a good thing. World War II ended in a victory for the moral side, a good thing, but also featured the development and use of thermonuclear devices, about as bad a thing as you could want. The bottom line is that violent conflict is just about always bad, in so many ways, but unfortunately mankind, as a species, hasn't progressed far enough to avoid it. Hopefully we will before we destroy the planet.
It still amazes me that it took a hundred years to get the ball rolling on that. The south was what it was and it takes time to change generations of thinking. But you'd think the north would have pushed harder for civil rights. It shows me that the war really wasnt about slavery, for if the north and the federal government had beeen willing to expend hundreds of thousnads of lives to get rid of the institution they would have pushed harder for civil rights for the ex-slaves, especially in light of the Jim Crow laws. But they did not.
The North never pushed Civil Rights because they didn't give a damn about them, at least not for blacks. The Civil War was about the SPREAD of slavery, not its existence. The North didn't want slavery in their states for much the same reason that people hate immigrants - they are cheap competition for labor. Most northerners didn't care if it existed in the South because they only grew cotton while the North was basing its economy on manufacturing, commerce, and small farms. The South wanted to expand slavery into the northern states and territories so that they could take their slaves with them anywhere in the country. That is what the Dred Scott case was all about and that is why the decision in the case, which made slavery national, is commonly viewed as the event that made the war inevitable. The war became about the EXISTENCE of slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation which Lincoln used to end any possibility of British interference. Up to that time there had been a lot of pressure on the British government to force the U.S. to accept international mediation, which would probably have lead to the permanent division of the country, and would have assured a steady supply of cotton to the British textile industry, which was the engine that drove the British Empire. When the Proclamation made the war ABOUT slavery the British knew that its people would never allow them to interfere because slavery had been banned in the Empire since 1837, I believe. So the War was ultimately about economics and slavery, a nice combination of money and morality, which is at the core of much of history. The bottom line is that the North did NOT want any of the "coloreds" to move there. In fact, many states had laws before the war banning free blacks from living there. The deal that gave the 1876 presidential election to the Republicans was all about keeping the blacks in the South and letting the southerners handle their "colored" problem any way they wanted, without interference from the federal government. This deal was cemented in 1896 with the Supreme Court decision in "Plessy v Ferguson" which gave segregation its constitutional imprimatur. Many historians say that the primary reason that the federal government got interested in defending black civil rights in the 1950's and '60's was that television coverage of the various racist actions in the country was giving the Communists a lot of ammunition in the struggle for control of the emerging Third World, which hurt the U.S. politically and economically as well as morally. So while the people involved were doing it out of conviction, the politicians were doing it for advantage. What a shocker!!!
Historywonk, in response to your request about the source, you can view the underlined links in my previous post to see the page where I got the info from.? One of those sites is a comprehensive detailing of the internment of German Americans during WWII: http://www.foitimes.com/
If I am reading the information on foitimes.com correctly, he is referring to the people taken into custody by the FBI and his figures are comparable to those that I have seen. I am talking about the mass internment of Japanese-Americans which included ALL of them in the Military District that covered the West Coast. It was done under the authority of Executive Order 9066. This was strictly a military operation, conducted by the Army, in the Department commanded by Gen. DeWitt if I am remembering the name correctly. This was an entirely separate operation from what the FBI did. Their operations were against individuals suspected even before Pearl Harbor of ties to one of the Axis governments and they were usually given access to some sort of legal proceedings. The people taken to the internment camps were eventually released but everything that they owned or possessed at the time of their internment was gone. None of them were ever given any type of hearing or judicial procedure. There was nothing similar done to any other group. Again, this was a completely separate operation from the FBI's taking of people into custody. In fact, one of the condemnatory aspects is that the man in charge of it, DeWitt, made J. Edgar Hoover look like an ACLU member, and THAT was really hard to accomplish. It's why they received an official apology and reparations from the government.
Please tell me your source for the information about the actions taken against German-Americans & Italian-Americans' . I have never seen any reference to any such widespread actions in all my reading. I'm not doubting you but if I'm wrong I want to verify it and correct it. But the measures you describe sound much less draconian than those taken against the Nissei and they seem to be less widespread. Still, that does put a new perspective on the whole issue. So please let me know your sources and if I was mistaken I will admit it. After all, it wouldn't be the first time and likely wouldn't be the last. Besides, all of it was still wrong and violated most of what this country supposedly stands for and what we were supposedly fighting against. And I would still argue that there is a direct connection between those actions and much of what we see today. But you are right, there is much difference between the war then and the “war” now. For one, there is no threat of invasion, except by us. Our current enemy cannot destroy us while the original Axis very well could have. Both could and have inflicted death and destruction against us and our allies but, while 9/11 has much in common with Perl Harbor, there has been no Bataan, Corregidor, or Wake Island to follow it up and I imagine that most Britons would concede that the Underground bombings of last year pale in comparison to the Blitz or Dunkirk. I'm NOT saying that the terrorists are to be taken lightly, far from it. They have a demonstrated willingness and ability to kill and destroy anyone, anywher, at any time, but again THEY CANNOT DESTROY US, THEY CANNOT CONQUER US!!! However, we can destroy ourselves by engaging in self-destructive behavior because of raging fear and paranoia, and it still wouldn't protect us from the terrorists – the ability of the mujaheddin to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan is vivid testimony to the fact that brute force cannot defeat a civilian insurgency that has any significant amount of popular support, as is the current situation in Iraq. At let's not forget Vietnam. People must be allowed to determine their own fate even if we don't like the results. Trying to impose our ideology because we don't like theirs never works. And finally, we must not repeat the mistakes of the 1940's and '50's when we almost consumed ourselves through things like McCarthyism. Again, history repeats itself and the results are often not pleasant.
All of the responses seem to have one thing in common – none of them were about anything the people interned did. Just because they looked like the enemy did not make them the enemy or in any way responsible for enemy actions, must less plans. The attitude of the general responsible for starting the rumors of “suspicious lights” and other actions attributed to Japanese-Americans was – and this is a quote – “A Jap is a Jap.” In other words he was declaring that because of their race their were automatically a suspect class. Nothing even remotely like it was done to, or even suggested, against Italian-Americans or German-Americans. And all of this was after the FBI had identified all enemy aliens that were deemed as suspect and they were either rounded up or under surveillance. In fact the head of the FBI was against the internment. He happened to be J. Edgar Hoover who was never exactly renowned for giving a rat's behind for anybody's civil rights. The point that I am trying to make is that the country did these unconstitutional and immoral things to a group because the people were scared and the group they were scared of the most were easily identifiable by their race. I think that in this day of over-hyped terror plots – plots such as the most recent where the suspects had been under investigation for over a year – we need to be aware of our proven tendency to react when scared by striking out at the most easily idenfiable group without much caring about things like proof or even guilt. We as a a nation have always had a tendency to strike out blindly when we feel threatened and in this day of an ever shrinking and more dangerous planet we have to be even more careful. If anything, recent events should have taught us hitting the wrong target can turn friends into enemies, in a heartbeat, and we need friends more than ever. The Nissei reacted to their treatment by forming the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, either the most decorated, or one of the most decorated, combat units in all of World War II. Other groups might not be so understanding or committed to proving themselves to us. I'm not saying that the government didn't have the right to be suspicious of the Nissei and to keep an eye on them and investigate suspicious activity – that is, by definition, their job. I'm saying they did not have the right to punish an entire group of people, to take away everthing they owned, to lock them up, without proof or anything even remotely resembling a judicial proceeding. If we are going to hold ourselves up as the bastion of democracy we have to hold ourselves to a higher standard or we are no better than whatever the current “axis of evil” that we are opposing, regardless of who are its members.
