Heaping Plate of Idiocy

Tom Plate, in last week's column, demonstrates again that spewing dishonest left-wing hysteria is no obstacle to a regular gig as a San Francisco Chronicle columnist or a full-time job as journalism professor.

The column starts by describing the anti-war movement as full of a growing number of "centrist Americans". He doesn't happen to mention that the movement is led by a Communist organization(yes, there is still a Communist movement in America, believe it or not) called ANSWER. Plate writes, with unconcealed nostalgia, "a spring of protest may bloom on the West Coast that will remind people of the bad old days of Vietnam". Never mind the many differences between Vietnam and Iraq, Plate is apparently one of those who instinctively equates every US military engagement with Vietnam.

In a characteristic non-sequitur, Plate changes the subject to 1942.

Perhaps reconstituted memory as much as hard analysis is involved here. West Coasters, noting the recent arrests and clandestine imprisonments of Iranians and Muslims, recall the awful internment of Japanese-Americans six decades ago that still haunts our past. We recall that in 1942, the government routed 120,000 Japanese out of their homes and stashed them in detention camps -- even though the majority were solid American citizens or legal permanent residents. The fear then was that some were working for Tokyo as spies, so forget the procedural protections of the Fifth Amendment and due process.

In the injustice of the 1940s, innocent American citizens were rounded up solely because of their Japanese heritage. Nothing of the kind has happened to American citizens of, say, Iranian descent, nor is there any serious suggestion that this ever will happen. Today, the only people summoned by the INS are foreign visitors, and only those who have violated their visa terms are being detained.

What seems to motivate Plate and his fellow hystericists is the desire to return to the "bad old days" of Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement. Because righteous indignation is an exhilirating feeling and protesting against government misdeeds does wonders for one's soul. And government sanctioned segregation, for example, really was something to protest against. But for thirty years now, the left-wing protest junkies have been desperately searching for a legitimately invigorating problem that can be solved through protest. They haven't found any. So they have to invent them. And every military deployment is portrayed as another "Vietnam", and every time a foreign visitor is detained for breaking the law, it's called a "Japanese internment camp".

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at January 23, 2003 11:52 AM