January 2003

American Renaissance magazine
Vol. 14, No. 1 January 2003

CONTENTS

What Really Happened?
The White Man‘s Disease
Prof. Gottfried Replies
Georgians and Their Flag
Carr Brothers Sentenced to Death
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers

COVER STORY

What Really Happened?

Dangerous myths about the Japanese relocation camps.

A conviction that we should be ashamed about the treatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II is part of the conventional wisdom of our time. Columnist Myriam Marquez wrote recently in an entirely typical op-ed piece of the “injustices” and the “abominations” of the “internment camps for Americans of Japanese descent during World War II.”1 Americans believe with an almost religious conviction that their country committed a heinous act, and many take pride in denouncing the actions of their fathers and grandfathers.

Japanese Exclusion Order

What actually happened, and why? Before entering into details, here is an outline of the facts: As a war-time measure, the federal government required all Japanese-Americans to evacuate a large part of the American Pacific coast. They were free to move from the exclusion zone on their own, and to resettle anywhere else in the United States. Those who did not were taken first to assembly centers and then to ten relocation centers built for them as far east as Arkansas. They could stay in the centers if they wished or they could take jobs or attend college anywhere in the United States except the West Coast.

The centers were therefore not internment camps, but living facilities offered by the government to those who were forbidden to live in the exclusion area and who did not make other arrangements. The centers, though built in the same austere style as American Army barracks, had many amenities and were run by Japanese-Americans. By the end of 1944, with eight months of war still to go, several thousand people had already left the camps to find homes and jobs in the central and eastern United States. The US Army was careful to look after the evacuees’ property, and Congress appropriated several million dollars soon after the war to compensate Japanese-Americans for losses that did occur.

Were there any forcible internments? Immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Department of Justice incarcerated about 3,000 Japanese aliens who had been on a “danger” list since 1939.2 There were also some Japanese-Americans in the relocation centers who openly supported Japan in the war. They and their families (since no families were split), were sent to a real internment camp behind barbed wire, where for the duration of the war they paraded with rising-sun armbands and celebrated December 7 as a holiday. The government actually locked up only a small minority of Japanese-Americans — those who posed a genuine war-time security risk.

The Sequence of Events

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the establishment of military exclusion areas. The next month, Lt. General John L. DeWitt declared a major portion of the West Coast (approximately the western halves of Washington, Oregon and California, and the southern third of Arizona) a military area from which all people of Japanese descent would have to move. There was no effect on Japanese-Americans living elsewhere, other than that they could not go to the West Coast. The evacuation was put in the hands of Col. Karl R. Bendetsen, and Roosevelt created the War Relocation Authority (WRA) under the direction of Milton Eisenhower, brother of Dwight Eisenhower, to help the evacuees. Congress voted to approve the relocation, and the US Supreme Court considered and upheld relocation no fewer than three times.3 Civil liberties groups were silent or supported evacuation, and there was no opposition in Congress.4

For a short time, the plan was to help the Japanese-Americans move inland on their own. Col. Bendetsen, who managed the evacuation, later testified that “funds were provided for them [and] we informed them . . . where there were safe motels in which they could stay overnight.”5 Most families were not able to move quickly, however, and governors of states east of the exclusion zone complained about the prospect of thousands of people of Japanese descent moving into their states without oversight.6

Accordingly, by late March the relocation effort entered the “assembly center” phase. Japanese-Americans were moved into improvised centers on the West Coast until ten more-permanent relocation centers could be built further east in Arizona, Arkansas, eastern California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah and Wyoming. The evacuees could choose either to live in an assembly center or move east on their own.7 Public apprehension lessened over time, partly due to calming efforts by federal officials, and during the assembly center phase, some 4,000 families moved inland “on their own recognizance” with WRA help.8

The temporary centers were rudimentary, but the government and the Japanese-Americans made them as pleasant as possible. They were run almost entirely by the occupants. With WRA support, the centers quickly set up libraries, Boy Scout troops, arts and crafts classes, musical groups, film programs, basketball and baseball leagues, playgrounds, calisthenics classes, and even in one case a pitch-and-putt golf course. Because the occupants did not have jobs (or regular expenses for that matter), men and women were able to devote considerable energy to camp activities.

The assembly center phase was over by the end of summer, 1942, with all Japanese-Americans moved to the more-substantial relocation centers as soon as they were constructed. By November 1, 1942, the relocation centers housed what was to be their largest population: 106,770.9

The relocation centers were built in the same way as housing for American soldiers overseas. Scholar, university president, and eventual United States Senator S.I. Hayakawa wrote extensively about the centers but was never in one, having spent the war years teaching at Illinois Institute of Technology. He called the centers “dreary places,” but they rapidly became livable communities with many amenities: stores, theaters, hairdressers, newspapers, ping-pong, judo, boxing, badminton, sumo wrestling, basketball and baseball leagues, gardens, softball diamonds, tennis courts, hiking trails, classes in calligraphy and other subjects, art competitions, libraries with Japanese-language sections, and worship facilities (for any religion except Shinto, which involved emperor-worship).

The centers had accredited schools from kindergarten to high school, with music classes, school choruses, achievement testing, high school newspapers and annuals, dances, PTA meetings, student councils and class officers. The University of Utah lent caps and gowns for high school graduation at the Topaz center.10 The education programs were designed to encourage assimilation, a process criticized by multiculturalists today as a form of “racism.”11 The WRA had veto power, but otherwise the internal operation of the camps, like that of the assembly centers, was in the hands of evacuees, who elected their own representatives.12

As their name suggests, the relocation centers were camps from which Japanese-Americans could disperse throughout the United States, other than to the West Coast, and S.I. Hayakawa wrote that about half chose to do that.13 (David D. Lowman, a war-time intelligence officer who has written about the internments, sets the figure slightly lower at “about 30,000.”14)

Hayakawa tells us that by September 1942 “hundreds of Issei [first-generation immigrant] railroad workers were restored to their jobs in eastern Oregon.”15 The WRA operated field offices in cities in the mid-west and east to find jobs for anyone who wanted to leave. Churches maintained hostels in four cities for job-seekers.16 The government even appropriated four million dollars to help evacuees start businesses away from the centers. Many, particularly those who had worked in agriculture, left the camps to do seasonal farm work. Five thousand left the centers to harvest sugar beets in various western states.17

College-age young people attended university during the war. Two hundred and fifty were already attending 143 colleges by the fall semester of 1942, just nine months after Pearl Harbor. Eventually, 4,300 attended 300 different universities.18 Some won scholarships, and a “relocation council” funded by foundations and churches helped with college expenses.19

In early 1944 — with a year and a half of war still remaining — the government began to let those who had passed security investigations return to the West Coast. The exclusion order was ended for all Japanese-Americans on January 2, 1945, well before V-J Day in August. Except for the internment camp at Tule Lake, all the centers were closed by December 1, 1945.20

Tule Lake held three kinds of people: Those who had applied to be repatriated to Japan, those who had answered “no” to a loyalty questionnaire and had not been cleared by further investigation, and those for whom the government had evidence of disloyalty.21

Concentration Camps?

It is common to write of the relocation centers as if they were concentration camps. One author evokes the “parallel experience of the German Jews,” and it is common to speak of the centers as “concentration camps,” as if they were no different from Dachau or Buchenwald.22 Critics often refer to “barbed wire and armed guards.” If the relocation centers actually had these it would certainly suggest forcible incarceration. This is therefore an important factual question, and Col. Bendetsen was adamant during Congressional hearings in 1984 that there were no watchtowers or barbed wire: “That is 100 percent false . . . Because of the actions of outraged U.S. citizens [after the Pearl Harbor attack], of which I do not approve, it was necessary in some of the assembly centers, particularly Santa Anita, . . . to protect the evacuees . . . and that is the only place where guards were used.” As to “relocation centers . . . there was not a guard at all at any of them. That would not be true of Tule Lake” [which had guards after it became an internment center].23

Three years earlier, Col. Bendetsen had given similar testimony before the highly partisan commission that eventually recommended paying reparations to the evacuees. During those hearings, Senator Edward Brooke asked about the conflict between his account and those of others. He replied: “A great part of the testimony was given by people who were not yet born then . . . You had testimony available from many people who were not given an opportunity to present it, some of whom were physically intimidated by the people who were in attendance day after day . . . I have received a barrage of mail . . . There were many people who in good faith wanted to testify that they thought the conditions were nowhere close to some of the testimony [claiming there was internment] you have heard.”24 Neither in 1981 nor in 1984 did any of Col. Bendetsen’s questioners contradict his testimony or offer to produce evidence that he was mistaken.

There are many books about the centers that include photographs of fences and watchtowers, but they rarely explain where the pictures were taken or when. What are offered implicitly as photos of scenes common to all the relocation centers may well be pictures of Tule Lake.

There have been equally tendentious claims about theft or destruction of evacuees’ property. No doubt some Japanese-Americans suffered at the hands of unscrupulous opportunists in early 1942. However, the army took great care to protect property. As Col. Bendetsen testified:

When you are told that the household goods of the evacuees after I took over were dissipated, that is totally false. The truth is that all of the household goods of those who were evacuated or who left voluntarily were indexed, stored, and warehouse receipts were given. And those who settled in the interior on their own told us, and we shipped it to them free of charge. As far as their crops were concerned, the allegations are totally false. I used the Agriculture Department to arrange harvesting after they left and to sell the crops at auction, and the Federal Reserve System, at my request, handled the proceeds. The proceeds were carefully deposited in their bank accounts in the West to each individual owner. And many of these farms were farmed the whole time — not sold at bargain prices, but leased — and the proceeds were based on the market value of the harvest.25

Losses that occurred despite this effort were compensated by means of the “Claims Act” enacted by Congress in 1948. Evacuees received a total of $38 million for property losses.

Reasons for Relocation

What were the military reasons for the exclusion order? The destruction of the American fleet at Pearl Harbor left the West Coast of the United States open to attack. A Japanese submarine shelled a California oil refinery on February 23, 1942, and Los Angeles imposed a blackout two days later when five unidentified planes appeared in the sky. Draftees hurried to make up for the country’s lack of preparation, even training with wooden guns Louisiana.26

In late 1941 and early 1942, the Japanese swept across Asia, attacking Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines, Wake and Midway islands, Thailand, Guam and Singapore. In February 1942, the Japanese won a brilliant naval victory in the Battle of the Java Sea. The Japanese advance seemed unstoppable.

It is ludicrous to argue that there was no military justification for the relocation. Local officials worried about the vulnerability of the water supply and of large-scale irrigation systems, which were impossible to guard. Anyone who knows anything about California’s frequent brush fires understands why officials feared a possible “systematic campaign of incendiarism,” especially during the dry season between May and October. Earl Warren, who was then Attorney General of California and later became Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, produced maps showing that the Japanese-American population was concentrated near shipyards and other vital installations.27

At the same time, it was clear from decoded Japanese government messages that Japanese-Americans were spying for Japan. The US Navy had broken the Japanese diplomatic code in 1938, and decoded messages classified “higher than Top Secret,” went under the code name MAGIC to a handful of people at the very top of the Roosevelt administration.

Intelligence officer David Lowman testified in 1984 about Japanese espionage: “Included among the diplomatic communications were hundreds of reports dealing with espionage activities in the United States and its possessions . . . In recruiting Japanese second-generation and resident nationals, Tokyo warned to use the utmost caution.” In April 1941, “Tokyo instructed all the consulates to wire home lists of first — and second-generation Japanese . . .” The next month, “Japanese consulates on the west coast reported to Tokyo that first — and second-generation Japanese had been successfully recruited and were now spying on shipments of airplanes and war material in the San Diego and San Pedro areas. They were reporting on activities within aircraft plants in Seattle and Los Angeles. Local Japanese . . . were reporting on shipping activities at the Bremerton Naval Yard [near Seattle] . . . The Los Angeles consulate reported: ‘We shall maintain connections with our second generation who are at present in the Army to keep us informed’ . . . Seattle followed with a similar dispatch.”28

On January 25, 1942, the Secretary of War informed the Attorney General that “a few days ago it was reported by military observers on the Pacific coast that not a single ship had sailed from our Pacific ports without being subsequently attacked.”29 Was it unreasonable to assume that spies were at work?

Three days before Pearl Harbor, the Office of Naval Intelligence had reported a Japanese “intelligence machine geared for war, in operation, and utilizing west coast Japanese” (emphasis added). Intelligence officer Lowman testified in 1984 that on January 21, 1942, an Army Intelligence bulletin “stated flat out that the Japanese government’s espionage net containing Japanese aliens, first — and second-generation Japanese and other nationals is now thoroughly organized and working underground” (emphasis added).30

Every American official who received the MAGIC decodings favored relocation. The later critics, however, minimized the importance of MAGIC. John J. McCloy was Assistant Secretary of War during World War II, and testified in 1984 that “word has gone out now from the lobbyists to ‘laugh off’ the revelations of MAGIC.”31 Rather than laugh them off, however, the highly partisan Commission on Wartime Relocation simply ignored them. In its 1982 report, Personal Justice Denied, it claimed falsely that “not a single documented act of espionage, sabotage or fifth column activity was committed by an American citizen of Japanese ancestry or by a resident Japanese alien on the West Coast.”32

Two years later in 1984, McCloy testified that “proof that the Commission did not conduct an investigation worthy of the name is demonstrated by the fact that it never identified the existence of MAGIC.” He said that “by the time [of] the Commission’s investigation the existence of MAGIC was almost notoriously known by all knowledgeable military and intelligence sources in this country and Japan, as well,”33 but the commission pretended it had never existed.

Entirely apart from the MAGIC intercepts, Japanese-American disloyalty was clearly demonstrated in a little-known incident on the Hawaiian island of Niihau. A Japanese pilot shot down during the Pearl Harbor attack held 133 islanders hostage for six days — with the help of a resident Japanese alien and a Japanese-American couple, who allied themselves with the pilot. A later naval intelligence report said the Japanese-American couple “had previously shown no anti-American tendencies.”34

Many Japanese-Americans were loyal: approximately 9,000 served with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team in Italy and France; 3,700 others were translators in the Pacific. In all, more than 33,000 may have served the United States during the war, though some maintain that this number is too high.35

Many, however, were not loyal. Ninety-four percent of military-age men said they would not serve in the US armed forces (the 442nd regiment was recruited from the others). During the war, 19,000 applied to be returned to Japan, and 8,000 actually went back. There was also an active anti-American movement among the Japanese who remained. In May 1943, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson wrote about “a vicious, well-organized, pro-Japanese group to be found at each relocation center,” adding that because of them it had become dangerous for other Japanese-Americans to express loyalty to the United States.36 In late 1942, members of the pro-Japanese faction at one center attacked and beat leaders of the Japanese American Citizens League because the League approved a resolution supporting the United States.37 Eventually, there were so many anti-American mass meetings, mob actions, attacks on people who were suspected of being “pro-American informers” — even a “general strike” — that the American authorities separated out those loyal to Japan and incarcerated them at the Tule Lake center.

It is worth noting that Canada actually interned its Japanese-Canadians, and did not allow them to return to the West Coast of Canada until 1949.38

Critics have often charged that any special treatment of Japanese-Americans should have been carried out only after individual investigations. However, according to the 1940 census, there were 126,947 people of Japanese origin living in the United States. Almost 80,000 were born here, but many held dual American and Japanese citizenship. This would have been a huge population to process individually. If there had been no emergency, a case-by-case inquiry would arguably have been more consistent with standards of due process, though this would depend on whether there was a workable system for determining loyalty.

At the same time, the Japanese-American community was tightly-knit and unassimilated, and this made individual assessment difficult. Japanese were isolated partly because Americans had not welcomed an influx of Asians but also partly because of their own desire to maintain their identity. Chief Justice Harlan Stone of the US Supreme Court noted in 1943 that approximately 10,000 of those born in the United States had received all or part of their schooling in Japan, and that even those who attended school in the United States “are sent to Japanese language schools outside the regular hours of public schools in the locality.”39 S. I. Hayakawa wrote that “reverence for the emperor was taught in the Japanese-language schools.”40 Lack of assimilation made the community impenetrable to American intelligence, and also fertile for espionage and potential terrorism. Individual investigations were all the more impractical because potential witnesses loyal to America were subject to pressure and even physical intimidation by the pro-Japan element. The Supreme Court, in a decision written by Chief Justice Stone, agreed that it was reasonable to believe individual determinations could not be made.41

It is common to argue that the relocation program was “racist,” because it affected a group that was non-white. This charge completely fails to consider the American public’s emotions during the war. Americans were outraged by the attack on Pearl Harbor and the atrocities committed by Japanese forces against Americans in the Philippines. At all times, one of the reasons for relocation was to protect the Japanese-Americans themselves from this public anger. The anger is today called “racist,” but it was natural under the circumstances.

Chief Justice Stone’s comments at the time could well apply to the question of “profiling” young Arab men in the United States after September 11: “Because racial discriminations are in most circumstances irrelevant and therefore prohibited, it by no means follows that, in dealing with the perils of war, Congress and the Executive are wholly precluded from taking into account those facts and circumstances which are relevant . . . and which may in fact place citizens of one ancestry in a different category from others.”42

Critics have also argued that relocation was “racist” because German-Americans and Italian-Americans were left alone. This only reflects widespread ignorance. By October 1941, the government had drawn up plans for interning Germans and Italians — some of them US citizens — living in the United States. The plan went into effect the day after the Pearl Harbor attack, which was three days before the US was officially at war with Germany and Italy. The Roosevelt administration interned (as opposed to relocating) 31,275 people during the war. Of this number only 16,849 were Japanese. The rest were Germans (10,905), Italians (3,278), and a mix of other Europeans including Hungarians, Romanians, and Bulgarians (243). All Japanese internees were released by June 1946, but some Germans and other Europeans were kept locked up until August 1948. Germans and Italians were not excluded and relocated from the East Coast, but if there had been fear of German attacks (as there was of Japanese attacks), and if there had been evidence of anti-American activity among German-Americans there is little doubt the government would have acted.43

Another important distinction is that Germans and Italians had been in the United States much longer than Japanese, and had by assimilation clearly come to identify as Americans.44 They served in the armed forces at much higher rates than Japanese-Americans, and almost none sought to renounce American citizenship or seek repatriation as thousands of Japanese-Americans did.45

Other critics of relocation argue that it was inconsistent with the government’s treatment of the large number of Japanese-Americans in Hawaii, who were allowed to stay in their homes. Why the difference? The answer is that all of Hawaii was placed under martial law and “governed like a military camp for all its inhabitants.”46 The fact that Japanese were left where they were in Hawaii also supports the view that government policies towards them were not “racist,” but a response to the conditions at the time. A “racist” government would presumably have relocated all Japanese.

The Aftermath

The “Japanese American Evacuation Claims Act,” passed by Congress in 1948, provided for approximately $38 million to be paid for property losses. The country considered the matter closed, and for 20 years it was. The “redress movement” for reparations began in the late 1960s. In testimony before a Congressional subcommittee in 1984, Dr. Ken Masugi, then a resident fellow at the Claremont Institute, described the origins of the “concentration camp” version of what happened. He spoke of “Japanese-Americans who were activists in the sixties and then became lawyers and community organizers.” They propounded a story of abuse that met “one of the goals of the sixties protest movements: To show that America is a racist society, and that even in the case of World War II, America’s noblest foreign war, America was corrupt, having its own ‘concentration camps.’”47

President Gerald Ford responded to this kind of pressure in 1976 with a proclamation saying, “We know now what we should have known then: not only was [the] evacuation wrong, but Japanese-Americans were and are loyal Americans.”48 Four years later, in the final year of the Carter administration, Congress established the “Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians,” which in early 1983 issued its tendentious report, Personal Justice Denied.

The hearings held by this Commission were, in effect, an ideological show-trial. War-time Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy has written: “The manner and the atmosphere in which the hearings were held was outrageous and a disgrace . . . I have been before this Congress many times in hearings, but I have never been subjected to the indignities that I was at the hearings of the Relocation Commission. Every time I tried to say anything in favor of the United States or in favor of the President of the United States, there were hisses and boos and stomping of feet.”49

The House Subcommittee on Administrative Law and Governmental Relations held hearings in 1984, and in 1988 Congress enacted the “Japanese Money Bill,” which was ushered through Congress by Representative Barney Frank (D-MA), after he became chairman of the committee handling it.50 Under that Act, at least $20,000 was paid to each of more than 60,000 surviving evacuees, and each received an apology.51 The same year, the Canadians also apologized, and paid $C21,000 to approximately 10,000 survivors.

Recipients of American largesse, for whom the money was to compensate for “mental suffering and deprivation of rights,” included:

  • 490 people who many years ago went to live in Japan and are Japanese citizens.
  • 6,000 who were born in the centers, and thus suffered “mental anguish” when they were babies.
  • The 4,300 who left the centers to go to American universities during the war.
  • 1,370 Japanese aliens whom the FBI incarcerated for security reasons (in Department of Justice Internment Camps) at the beginning of the war.
  • 3,500 Japanese-Americans who asked to be sent to Japan after renouncing their U.S. citizenship.
  • 160 evacuees who belonged to the pro-Japanese Black Dragon Society while in the camps.52

Lowman tells us that “the Act also required payment [of $5,00053] to several hundred Japanese who during the war were sent from Latin America to the U.S. because they were considered security risks,” and were interned here.54 In all, the government handed out $1.6 billion. Five million dollars more were appropriated to “publicize” the Commission’s findings, and to declare it “official history.”55

Needless to say, the government’s actions raise a host of questions.

How does an ideologically-fabricated myth become accepted — with virtually no opposition — by the citizens of an allegedly free society? Why did our elected representatives, the press, and academic historians surrender their roles as guardians of the truth? Why do ordinary Americans come to feel a vested interest in believing that their own government was vicious and racist? Now that a precedent exists for paying “reparations” on the basis of myths, what is to stop other “aggrieved groups” from bulldozing their way to something similar? Clearly, none of this could have happened were it not for an utterly unnatural and dangerous unwillingness of whites to defend themselves.

This article is adapted by AR staff from original research by Dwight D. Murphey, professor of business law at Wichita State University. His findings first appeared in The Dispossession of the American Indian — and Other Key Issues in American History, Scott-Townsend Publishers, 1995.

  1. Myriam Marquez, “Avalanche is Burying Our Civil Liberties,” Wichita Eagle, Sept. 8, 2002.
  2. Dillon S. Myer, Uprooted Americans, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1971) p. 293.
  3. These are the Hirabayashi case and Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944), and Ex Parte Endo, 323 U.S. 283 (1944).
  4. Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Personal Justice Denied (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1982), pp. 9, 69, 99.
  5. Testimony of Karl R. Bendetsen before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, July 8, 1981, p. 140. Typescript available from national archives.
  6. 1981 Hearings, Testimony of Karl R. Bendetsen, p. 140.
  7. 1981 Hearings, Bendetsen, pp. 10, 74.
  8. 1981 Hearings, Bendetsen, pp. 10, 74.
  9. Commission Report, Personal Justice Denied, p. 149.
  10. Myer, Uprooted Americans, pp. 48, 56-7.
  11. Roger Daniels et. al., editors, Japanese Americans: From Relocation to Redress (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1986), p. 61.
  12. Commission Report, Personal Justice Denied, p. 145.
  13. S. I. Hayakawa, Through the Communication Barrier (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1979), p. 133.
  14. David D. Lowman, MAGIC: The Untold Story of U.S. Intelligence and the Evacuation of the Japanese Residents from the West Coast During WWII (No city given: Athena Press, Inc., 2000), p. 20.
  15. Hayakawa, Communication Barrier, p. 132.
  16. Commission Report, Personal Justice Denied, p. 205.
  17. Commission Report, Personal Justice Denied, p. 203.
  18. Commission Report, Personal Justice Denied, p. 181.
  19. Daniels, Japanese Americans, p. 43.
  20. 1984 Hearings, testimony of John J. McCloy, p. 125.
  21. 1984 Hearings, Bendetsen testimony, p. 682; Lillian Baker, American and Japanese Relocation in World War II: Fact, Fiction & Fallacy (Medford, Oregon: Webb Research Group, 1990), p. 52.
  22. Daniels, Japanese Americans, p. 188.
  23. 1984 Hearings, Bendetsen testimony, p. 698.
  24. 1981 Hearings, Bendetsen testimony, p. 71.
  25. 1984 Hearings, Bendetsen testimony, p. 683.
  26. Wichita Eagle, Feb. 23, 1992 (article noting the 50th anniversary of the refinery shelling); Myer, Uprooted Americans, p. 24.
  27. Hearings of the Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration, House of Representatives [“Tolan Committee Hearings”], Feb.-Mar. 1942, pp. 10996, 10997, 11107, 10973.
  28. 1984 Hearings, Lowman testimony, pp. 431, 434.
  29. Lowman, MAGIC, p. 243.
  30. 1984 Hearings, Lowman testimony, pp. 437, 438.
  31. 1984 Hearings, McCloy testimony, p. 148.
  32. Commission Report, Personal Justice Denied, p. 3.
  33. 1984 Hearings, McCloy testimony, p. 120.
  34. 1984 Hearings, Lowman testimony, p. 474.
  35. Baker, American and Japanese Relocation in World War II, p. 35.
  36. Myer, Uprooted Americans, p. 63.
  37. Myer, Uprooted Americans, p. 61.
  38. 1984 Hearings, testimony of John J. McCloy, p. 125.
  39. Hirabayashi v. U.S., 320 U.S. 81 (1943) at pp. 96, 97.
  40. Hayakawa, Communication Barrier, p. 135.
  41. Hirabayashi, p. 99.
  42. Hirabayashi, p. 100.
  43. Arnold Krammer, Undue Process: The Untold Story of America’s German Alien Internees (New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 1997).
  44. See Sen. Hayakawa’s observation about this at Hayakawa, Communication Barrier, p. 583; and the comments by Madera, California, officials on the same point, Tolan Committee Hearings, Earl Warren testimony, 10995.
  45. Krammer, Undue Process.
  46. Hearings [1984 Hearings] before the Subcommittee on Administrative Law and Governmental Relations of the Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. House of Representatives, June 20, 21 27 and Sept. 12, 1984, page 583, testimony of Dr. Ken Masugi.
  47. 1984 Hearings, Masugi testimony, p. 579.
  48. Daniels, Japanese Americans, pp. 188, 5.
  49. 1984 Hearings, McCloy testimony, p. 125.
  50. Lowman, MAGIC, p. 111.
  51. Wall Street Journal, September 10, 1991, letter from William J. Hopwood.
  52. Wall Street Journal, Hopwood letter.
  53. Lowman, MAGIC, p. 119, footnote 23.
  54. Lowman, MAGIC, p. 119.
  55. Lowman, MAGIC, pp. 2, 82, 83.

• • • BACK TO TOP • • •

BOOK REVIEW

The White Man’s Disease

A good diagnosis but no cure.

Paul Edward Gottfried, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy, University of Missouri Press, 2002, 158 pp., $29.95.

As the editor of American Renaissance I meet many people: some friendly, some hostile, all interesting. One of the most interesting was a black nationalist and separatist named William Brock, with whom I became acquainted not long after starting AR. He was friendly, candid, and amusing, and respected white people who were loyal to their race and culture. He once asked me a question I have never forgotten: “I think it’s great, of course, but why are white people committing suicide?” He mused about the influence of Christianity, world wars, and “the Jews,” but neither of us had convincing answers.

Muliculturalism and the Politics of Guilt by Paul Edward Gottfried

White suicide is, of course, the great question of our time, though only a small minority see clearly enough even to raise it. We see what is happening, and those who celebrate our decline see it too, but the vast majority of whites are shuffling towards the precipice with glazed eyes and obedient smiles.

One who is not is Paul Gottfried, professor of humanities at Elizabethtown College, archenemy of the neo-cons, AR conference speaker, and author of several books on politics and the plight of the West. His latest volume is a dissection of the poisoned state of mind that makes whites not only hate their own history and identity, but commands them to glorify and feel inferior to “victims” of all kinds: homosexuals, non-whites, foreigners, women, AIDS carriers, and essentially anyone unlike themselves. American Renaissance generally concentrates on the crisis that has arisen from loss of nerve among whites, but contemporary liberalism has turned its guns in many directions. Men, heterosexuals, explorers, war heroes, and many others who were once honored or at least considered normal are likewise made out to be villains. Only in the West do we find this kind of self-loathing, and Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt is as good a mainstream treatment of the white man’s disease as one is likely to find.

The Therapeutic State

Government, of course, has taken the lead in promoting the disorder. “The administrative state,” writes Prof. Gottfried, “most plainly in the United States, has come to define itself through a struggle against social pathology.” The most important objective for our rulers is to stamp out “improper thought,” to equate any remnants of traditional thinking with mental illness. They are more passionate about fighting “bigotry” than fighting crime, and it is this compulsion to eradicate every time-tested loyalty as if it were insanity that inspires Prof. Gottfried’s name — ”the therapeutic state” — for the form of government that now prevails in the West. This book does not get very far in explaining why the state tries to poison our minds and discredit the past, but it includes a good analysis of the principles governments follow:

“Fairness, caring, and openness,” Prof. Gottfried writes, must be the hallmarks of all government action. However, by no means everyone benefits equally from all this “caring.” The state diligently divides us up into victims and victimizers, with the former getting the “caring” and the latter getting the blame. Victims are all non-whites, women, homosexuals, foreigners, immigrants, and sometimes Jews. The victimizers are, of course, white men, and the government punishes and rewards us accordingly: “Some people will be pumped up to feel good about whoever they are, while others will be required to forfeit, disavow, or disparage their inherited identities.” An important objective is to promote everything and everyone who is as different as possible from what used to be the norm: “The state glorifies differences from the way of life associated with the once-majority population. It hands out rewards to those who personify the desired differences, while taking away cultural recognition and even political rights from those who do not.” A mix of perverts, misfits, hermaphrodites, aliens, and non-whites “represent[s] what democracy as public administration holds up as the happy alternative to how things used to be.”

Public figures become part — or even full-time arbiters of proper and improper thought, which results in the “replacement of traditional ethical values by a cult of psychological normality.” Those who disagree with modern liberalism are not simply mistaken; they are either outright evil or, more likely, suffering from a mental illness that sufficient “sensitivity training” will cure.

For whites — but only for whites — it has become a sign of good taste to minimize the accomplishments of their ancestors and to admire all things alien. Biological loyalties are suspect — at least for whites — and for all people there can be no such thing as human nature that determines sex roles or makes any of us impervious to the state-administered therapy that will cure us of retrograde views.

Clearly, it is in the interests of “victims” to milk their status for every possible advantage, but what is in it for the “victimizers”? “Why don’t they object passionately to their own apparent humiliation?” asks Prof. Gottfried. He does not offer any answers, but he does point out that “a transformation of the self-image of the majority population would have had to take place in order for the therapeutic state to have reached its present strength.” The white man, in other words, has been neutered. But how? Why? Prof. Gottfried does not say.

Government has worried about our psychological state for many years. Prof. Gottfried finds that as far back as 1965, President Lyndon Johnson was telling us: “We dream of a world where all are fed and charged with hope. And we shall make it so.” It is not the US government’s job to feed the world; it is arrogance bordering on insanity to talk about “charging it with hope.” It is utopian crusades of this kind that send our busy-body government into every corner of our lives to refashion us and “charge us with hope.”

One of the most effective mind-control techniques is constantly to evoke the specter of “fascism.” This works best in Germany, but even in the United States, which went to war against fascism, the slightest revolt against “sensitivity” or “caring” is supposed to lead straight to brown shirts and stiff-arm salutes. And, as Prof. Gottfried notes, “the unconquered fascist past has a remarkably fluid content. It keeps taking the shape of whatever is deemed politically incorrect, be it restrictions on immigration, enforcement of customary gender distinctions, or paying tribute to a recognizably European national heritage.” Anything the bureaucrats don’t like is “fascist.”

Needless to say, America is so good, so well fed, and so charged with hope that its techniques must be exported to rest of the world. As Prof. Gottfried explains, “Spearheading this mission have been media and academic personalities, from the American president on down, who define foreign policy as an extension of domestic crusades.” This means stamping out “racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” and all other forms of newly-discovered mental illness are big international challenges that guide our foreign relations. Once again, Lyndon Johnson was an early pioneer, pointing out in 1966 that “our safest guide to what we do abroad is always what we do at home.” True to form, President William Clinton justified our war against Serbia as an assault on “bigotry.” War is now, in Prof. Gottfried’s words, “the exercise of power as a form of caring;” we now kill people if they show too many signs of unacceptable mental illnesses.

As Prof. Gottfried points out, American notions of “caring,” “inclusiveness,” and deprecation of the majority population are quickly becoming the norm in Europe. Germany, in particular, must consider everything in light of whether it atones properly for Nazism. Prof. Gottfried describes “Weimar 1999,” the celebration of the 250th anniversary of Goethe’s birth in that town, as an especially loathsome example. The events, for which there was federal government money, concentrated as much on the nearby Nazi camp of Buchenwald as on the ancient Thuringian town ostensibly being honored. This new brand of German “civic patriotism” even required staged, public conversations between Weimar school children and elderly survivors of the camps. Any celebration of anything German must be tempered with apologies for Hitler.

As Prof. Gottfried explains, “maintenance of a contrite mood serves social reform.” Once Germans are sufficiently softened up, even letting in swarms of non-white immigrants can be seen as atonement for Nazism. The country is so hysterical about the dangers of “improper thought” that a federal judge, Rudolf Wassermann, wrote in 1994,”He who denies the truth about the Nazi extermination camps threatens the very foundations upon which the German Federal Republic is erected.” The very foundations! Prof. Gottfried quotes the famous German historian Ernst Nolte: “There will continue to be a kind of soft totalitarianism, which is certainly not bloody, which allows some range of opinions, and which is even permissive in matters that are not politically important, but intellectually it is totalitarianism all the same.” He could have been writing about America.

Of course, a history of slavery or a Nazi past are hardly required for white abasement. The British likewise (like all other Europeans) “have declared war against the scourge of prejudice directed against racial minorities that have immigrated to England.” Fortunately, there are still cultural and political strains in Europe that protect it to some degree against complete collapse. The motto of the Vlaams Blok, a Flemish political party in Belgium, states its priorities in its motto: Eigen Volk Eerst (Our Own People First). Although in the United States the Republican Party is unable to bring itself to oppose immigration despite the clear fact that non-white newcomers vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, Europeans are not so paralyzed by racial guilt. Umberto Bossi of the Italian Lega Nord (League of the North) strongly criticizes the Italian government for letting in so many foreigners who will vote for the left.

In most European countries there is vigorous above-ground political resistance to dispossession, though not always for explicitly racial reasons. Pim Fortuyn in Holland was opposed to Arab immigrants because he thought they could not be made to understand the homosexual-libertine culture of contemporary Holland. Pia Kjaersgaard of the Peoples Party in Denmark is somewhat more openly racial, but opposes immigration primarily because immigrants do not share the altruistic values that make the welfare state work. In any case, opposition of this kind has arisen in response to Europe’s infection with the originally American disease of glorifying the alien.

New Face of the Left

Professor Gottfried points out that although the great campaigns for “political correctness” are now associated with the left, they represent an almost complete shift away from the old socialist utopia. Practically no one wants to nationalize the economy anymore or give power to the proletariat, and even some liberals pay lip service to the idea that there must be limits on the redistributionist efforts of government. This is partly because basic welfare state programs are now universal throughout the white world. Our rulers are now intent on changing thinking and behavior rather than establishing the classless society. If the foot soldier of the old left was the trade unionist, that of the new is the social worker. Far more important than improving the lot of the workers is stamping out “improper thought,” and coddling non-whites and homosexuals.

The therapeutic state has discovered that much as it loves to boss us around for our own good, planned economies simply do not produce enough of the wealth the state is so eager to redistribute. Therefore our rulers are happy to promote free markets and competition (within “caring” limits) to, as Prof. Gottfried explains, “provide the state with more funds for social benefits by generating taxable wealth.” He goes on to explain that “social control by the state does not presuppose a socialized economy, and government intervention into child rearing, spousal relations, and intergroup dynamics can now go forward in conjunction with market forces.” Tony Blair’s Labour Party, for example no longer treats capitalists and wealthy industrialists as the enemy. They are the ones who produce the wealth needed to pay for the nanny state. Mr. Blair’s political passions are essentially indistinguishable from those of Hillary Clinton’s, with opposition to the House of Lords thrown in for local color.

Today, the European left loves the United States as the pioneer of “political correctness.” It would like nothing more than to enforce American-style uniformity across the entire political spectrum, to put immigration and rights for homosexuals beyond political discussion, and make apologies for racism and the Holocaust the new national religion. In a complete reversal of the Cold War period, it is now the European right rather than the left that opposes American power and influence.

As always, the left craves power — the immense power of the therapeutic state. The left used to want the power to run the entire economy; now it wants the power to control our thoughts. As Canadian Human Rights Commission member John Hucker explains, “you can’t rely simply on the free exchange of ideas to cleanse the environment of hate and intolerance.” Canada therefore forbids “hate and intolerance,” and gags and punishes the guilty. Likewise, many European countries have criminalized “incitement of hatred” and “Holocaust denial.” In the United States, the First Amendment still protects speech, but stiffer penalties for “hate crimes” are already punishment for unfashionable preferences. We have entered the age of what Prof. Gottfried calls “coercive tolerance.”

Role of Religion

What, though, has caused the white man’s disease? Prof. Gottfried makes a case for the view that Protestantism prepared whites (and men and gentiles and homosexuals) for neutering. His arguments are thoughtful but not, I believe, convincing. It is true that the fiercer variants of Protestantism held that man was inherently depraved, and saved not by words but only by God’s grace. This tradition now takes the form of “members of the majority group constantly dwelling on their collective sins and proposing public expiation.” Of course the sins to be battled have changed. No longer is there much worry about fornication, adultery, perversity, covetousness, sloth, or bearing false witness. Instead, “Yale, Harvard, and Princeton Divinity Schools have centered their training on combating sexism, homophobia, and misogyny.” Prof. Gottfried argues that the constant spectacle of white apology has a religious origin: By confessing his sins, the white man “is allowed to feel righteous individually while being part of a historically wicked society. And as a country redeemed from its own racist, sexist, homophobic past, the repentant Protestant is allowed to go forth and bring enlightenment to others.” He adds that “people proclaim their guilt for acts they have not committed” because “public contrition serves to showcase the self-consciously virtuous, while at the same time satisfying those embattled minorities that are demanding public recognition as victims.”

The Church is now the handmaiden of the state in promoting the new religion of tolerance, giving clerics a moral influence they lost at the end of the Middle Ages. In just one generation, the very nature of its teachings have shifted, and it agrees that its own past is just one more chapter in the depraved history of the white, male gentile oppressor. Christians now apologize for the Crusades, for having permitted slavery, sexism, and colonialism. And as Prof. Gottfried points out, American Jews have even succeeded in launching a movement that “has shifted from sharp distinctions drawn between Nazism and Christianity to a gradual blurring of the two.” Christianity is inherently anti-Semitic and genocidal.

Prof. Gottfried argues that the therapeutic state could not have taken root without Calvinism and the guilt it fostered. This might be an attractive theory were it not for the fact that white self-hatred seems to be just as common in Catholic countries, and particularly virulent among secularists. Furthermore, the people who perform today’s ritual confessions of sexist and racist sin do not do so out of anything like the conviction that drove their Calvinist ancestors. William Clinton may go through the motions of white abasement — and gladly reap the approval it brings — but can anyone believe he feels real guilt for anything? Edward Kennedy is ostensibly a Catholic, but is he cut from different cloth?

It is certainly true that the crusade to smite victimizers has become the new religion of the white man, but is this really a perversion of Christianity? Is it not just as likely to be an expression of underlying zealotry that in the past might have appeared as Christianity but now appears as something completely different.The mind of the Salem witch-burner is not unlike that of today’s “anti-racists” and other liberal crusaders, but witch-burning did not give rise to anti-Western hatred. Fanaticism comes in many forms, some religious some not, and for hundreds of years, Christianity defended the West in all its pride, and contempt for outsiders. Its transformation into an echo chamber for self-hate is surely more symptom than cause of our decline.

Where, though, will all this end? Prof. Gottfried suggests it may eventually dawn on the elites that what they have put in motion is not in their interests: “Staggering numbers of unfriendly foreigners must tell in the end,” he writes, and “Hispanic racialists, Third World patriarchs, and Mexican irredentists will likely eat up the present regime, if given the demographic chance.” At the same time, he shows keen insight into the profoundly irrational nature of the sickness that grips the West:

“Thinking these leaders govern through calculation disregards the fantasy aspect of their vision, one that has likewise spread among their citizen-subjects. The relation between the two [rulers and subjects] is derived partly from a shared obsession, a misplaced quest for religious redemption that takes the form of worshipping at the multicultural shrine.” Self-destructive madness can rage on until the lights go out if it is driven by what amounts to religious fervor.

What Prof. Gottfried is telling us is that Third-World invasion, devaluation of marriage, praise for perversity, scorn for historical tradition — all these things will eventually destroy the very societies over which the elites now throne — but even the clear prospect of destruction may not shift them from their course.

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ARTICLE

Prof. Gottfried Replies

Jared Taylor deserves to be congratulated for his thoughtful study of my book on multiculturalism. It is hard to imagine a review that deals with its themes more fairly and more intelligently. Most significantly, Mr. Taylor has grasped the subversive nature of my work, to expose politicized “sensitivity” and the indulgence of designated victims as a social sickness and as a tool of governmental control. But multiculturalism is not simply a way to jerk people around. It traps the political class in a set of beliefs and sentiments that opens the door to its own destruction through violence, social pathologies and, finally, the enthusiastic attempt to digest often indigestible minorities endowed with special rights. Those who embrace this ideology are not acting in a cold, calculating fashion but are subject to the same até, fated delusion, as those they mislead.

This brings me to what Mr. Taylor finds unsatisfactory about my arguments. One, I do not propose any solution to the problems posed. Although what is at issue is a thoroughly diseased Zeitgeist, I’m not sure how one sets about changing it. One change that I do suggest may take place: Being overrun by Latinos and other self-consciously anti-WASP and anti-white “minorities,” would keep the present generation from turning on the Western past. But such a catastrophe is not the solution that would recommend itself to readers of AR.

Two, Mr. Taylor criticizes my treatment of American Protestantism, as a chief cultural cause of the politics of guilt. As my reviewer well knows, there is no one who respects more deeply than I his Southern Calvinist roots or the association of Calvinism with both manly virtue and bourgeois morality. Unfortunately that once admirable Calvinist tradition has been recently invoked, however selectively, to support questionable attitudes, from social guilt to moral righteousness identified with holding “sensitive” political opinions. (This, by the way, can be seen even among those once stalwart Calvinists, the Southern Presbyterians and Dutch Calvinists, who now routinely apologize for past insensitivities.) The linking of Bill Clinton to a liberalized Calvinism is therefore not far-fetched. As a member of a Southern denomination that came out of Presbyterianism, by way of the hard-shell Baptists, Mr. Clinton shows religious habits that are at least derivatively Calvinist.

Moreover, anyone looking at the religious underpinnings of political correctness in the U.S. should be drawn to the Protestant matrix of our political values. Since its beginnings this once proudly WASP country has been predominantly Protestant, and Protestant denominations, including the Evangelicals, have showcased their outreach to minorities for decades. Unlike much of the Catholic clergy, moreover, most mainline Protestant leaders, as illustrated by their umbrella organizations, have been social and moral radicals throughout the second half of the twentieth century.

My own interpretive emphasis on the relation between Protestant religiosity and the politics of guilt does not of course exclude the consideration of other religious variables. American Catholics stand to the left of most American Protestants in their voting habits; and in a shocking exposé of radicalized Catholic clergy, L’invasione silenziosa, Alberto Carosa and Guido Vignelli document the Italian Catholic hierarchy’s support for Islamic immigration and the endorsement of state-support of Islamic cultural activities. But my argument is not gainsaid because there are Catholic as well as Protestant gravediggers of the West. In the US, Protestant leaders, who link Christian morality and multiculturalism with immigrationism, have been the major religious influence in changing political attitudes on this side of the Atlantic. And since the US has vastly more cultural as well as political and economic power than other countries, it is our identifiably Protestant politics of guilt that is the most likely to be exported.

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ARTICLE

Georgians and Their Flag

A symbol for increasing white unity?

Confederate Georgia Flag

The Georgia State flag from 1956 until 2001.

The impressive showing by Republicans on November 5, 2002, serves as a reminder that white voters still count — which shouldn’t be surprising, since they are still the majority. In Georgia, where Democratic governor Roy Barnes suffered an unexpected defeat to Republican challenger Sonny Perdue, whites may have felt especially motivated. Mr. Barnes had angered a great many whites by unilaterally removing the Confederate Battle Flag from the state flag, and then ramming the change through the state legislature.

This move won fawning plaudits from the Atlanta media, but country folk — as well as many suburban dwellers outside the I-285 perimeter around Atlanta — reacted differently. For over a year, in many a yard off many a country road, there were “Let Us Vote” signs, displaying the old state flag. These signs referred to the referendum in Mississippi, in which citizens voted to keep the battle-flag design in their state flag.

As election time neared, these signs had a new message: “Boot Barnes.” Mr. Barnes’s public appearances drew protests from the Sons of Confederate Veterans and other Southern heritage groups. Mr. Perdue, evidently seeing potential pay dirt, said that if he were elected he would hold a referendum on the flag. Still, Mr. Barnes overwhelmingly outspent Mr. Perdue, and in the week leading up to the election, led by a comfortable margin in all polls.

Sonny Perdue’s stunning victory sent convulsions through the South, and indeed the nation. Mr. Perdue will be the first Republican governor of Georgia since Rufus Bullock and his posse of Reconstructionist carpetbaggers and scalawags took over in 1868. Did the flag issue convince “yellow dog Democrats” to go over to the party of Lincoln? One cannot know for sure, but whites voted Republican in greater numbers than ever before.

Since Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, whites in the South, who had voted strongly for FDR and JFK, slowly began to drift towards the GOP in national races, even if they continued to vote Democrat locally. Since blacks in the South overwhelmingly vote Democrat, the party became an uneasy biracial coalition of black activists and white, conservative “Dixiecrats.”

Mr. Barnes’s capitulation on the flag speeded up the process of racial polarization in Southern politics. The elderly white “yellow dogs” are dying out, and the Democratic Party is becoming an association of blacks and white liberals pushing affirmative action and multiculturalism, while the Republican Party is overwhelmingly white.

Georgia Democratic senator Zell Miller, who has defied his own party and sided with President Bush on several key issues, recently decried the leftward tilt of his party, pointing out that many former Georgia Democrats are leaving. What went unmentioned but understood was the race of those alienated voters. Mr. Miller was underlining the need to reconnect with traditional Southern whites.

Why do Georgians feel so strongly about a piece of cloth? Many are angry about changing the flag because it is yet another assault on Southern culture by foreign invaders and domestic turncoats, an assault that began with the depredations of Sherman and continued through the crusades of the 1960s. To give up the flag would give one more victory to an enemy that wants to destroy their way of life. As one bumper sticker reads: “Lee Surrendered; I Didn’t.”

White Southerners have proven to be a resilient group. By and large, they refuse to commit cultural suicide, or submit to demands to undergo collective sensitivity training. They had the guts to greet John Rocker with a standing ovation when he came out of his suspension two years ago, and this year they came to the polls to end Roy Barnes’s political career. Their enemies are right to suspect that support for the flag is a sign of racial consciousness — racial consciousness that is growing bolder and more confident.

Andy Nowicki, author of The Psychology of Liberalism, lives in Georgia.

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ARTICLE

Carr Brothers Sentenced to Death

Execution could be a decade away.

On November 14, after seven hours of deliberations, the jury in the Wichita Massacre trial sentenced Reginald and Jonathan Carr to death for the murders of Jason Befort, Brad Heyka, Aaron Sander and Heather Muller on December 15, 2000. The next day, Judge Paul Clark confirmed the death sentences, and gave each brother a further 20-to-life sentence for killing Ann Walenta, and an additional 40 years for the other 83 felonies of which they were convicted.

Wichita Massacre Carr Wichita Massacre Carr Brothers

The Carr brothers.

The jurors were not swayed by defense attempts to elicit sympathy for the Carrs by portraying them as victims of violence, neglect, abuse, and drug addiction. One of the Carrs’ cousins testified she grew up with them in the same house, and was used as a sex toy from age six to 13. The jury may not have considered this a mitigating factor.

“I went with what the law said,” explained juror Joe Wendell. He said he followed instructions that called for the death penalty if there was proof beyond a reasonable doubt that aggravating factors in the crimes outweighed mitigating factors. The four aggravating factors the jury cited were that the Carrs killed more than one person, killed for money, killed to avoid arrest, and killed “in an especially heinous, atrocious or cruel manner.” Even so, another juror said it was hard to vote for the death penalty. “You’re determining someone’s fate; playing God,” said Tiffany Niblack, 22, “and it’s very, very difficult to do that.” Miss Niblack, who described herself as a strong proponent of the death penalty, said she was she was surprised the jury was able to reach the unanimity required for the death penalty. Neither Reginald nor Jonathan Carr showed a reaction when the jury announced the sentences.

Reginald Carr appears to be the more vicious of the two. During the trial he was shackled for making threats to deputies, and for taunting prosecutors and the victims’ families. DA Nola Foulston said of him, “He is a dangerous, relentless killing machine, and he does get the punishment he deserves.” Nov. 14, the day he was sentenced, he got a broken arm in a fight with another inmate in a holding cell. It was also his 25th birthday. As he was led away by deputies after sentencing, Mark Befort, Jason Befort’s brother, called out angrily, “Happy Birthday,” followed by an insult. “Fuck you,” replied Mr. Carr, continuing with a string of obscenities directed at the families of the victims. Jonathan Carr, 22, remained silent, except to tell his mother and sister he loved them. As deputies took the brothers down a hallway out of the courtroom, one yelled, “I’ll get out!” At the second sentencing hearing on Nov. 15, Judge Clark gave them an opportunity to ask for mercy or express remorse. Neither spoke.

The woman known as H.G., who survived a bullet in the head, released a statement describing the Carr brothers as “soulless monsters” for whom a death sentence “will be much kinder than the sentence [they] imposed on me, my friends and all our families . . . ” The petite woman, whose childhood nickname was “Toughy,” went on to say:

Every day there is a memory or a scar that reminds me of that night. While Reginald and Jonathan get to sleep peacefully in jail, I wake up in sweats from my nightmares. I pace at night because of noises that I think are somebody breaking into my house. And every morning I carefully blow-dry my hair to cover up the spot that can no longer grow hair. I look at my knees and see the scars from the carpet burns that I got from the rape and in the back of my mind I wonder will it happen again. There is the fear that evil will once again come into my life and take away the things that are precious to me . . .

At a Nov. 15 press conference, the victims’ families spoke fondly of their loved ones, and expressed satisfaction at the sentences. They were bitter that neither Reginald nor Jonathan Carr showed any remorse, and were angry at the brothers’ insulting behavior in court. “To look at those guys and have them turn around . . . and look at your mother, look at your sister and wink, or give a smirk, is for me the hardest dang thing,” said Mark Befort.

Although they each have four death sentences, it could be a long time before the brothers die. State law requires automatic appeal of death sentences, and the process takes up to three years. Federal appeals could take even longer. It could be eight to twelve years before the sentences are carried out. Since Kansas reinstated the death penalty in 1994, five people have been sentenced to death, but none executed.

The Carrs are likely to spend what remains of their lives in the maximum-security unit of the El Dorado Correctional Facility in El Dorado, Kansas. For two days a week, they will be in solitary confinement 24 hours a day, in a sparshly-furnished eight — by ten-foot concrete cell. Five days a week they will be let out for an hour to shower and exercise. With good behavior they may earn the right to a radio and television, and visits from relatives. When their appeals are exhausted, they will be moved to the Lansing correctional Facility in Lansing, Kansas. There, in a room on the fourth floor, Reginald and Jonathan Carr will die by lethal injection.

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IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

Haider’s Party Stumbles

Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party (FPO), which rocked the European establishment in 1999 when it entered an Austrian coalition government, won only a disastrous 10 percent of the vote in the latest parliamentary elections. The FPO’s tally dropped from 27 percent in 1999, with its coalition partner the conservative People’s Party picking up many of the defectors. The People’s Party won 42 percent of the vote, its best showing in nearly 40 years. The leftist Social Democrats, the strongest party in the elections in 1999, won just under 37 percent of the vote, and the Greens came in fourth at nine percent.

Jörg Haider

Jörg Haider

The FPO’s 63 percent drop at the polls does not mean Austrians are turning away from nationalism and immigration-control. The decline in the FPO and the gains for the People’s Party seem to have two main causes: Jörg Haider’s erratic behavior, and the adoption by the People’s Party of many of the FPO’s most popular positions. There is still a good chance the People’s Party’s leader Wolfgang Schuessel will offer the FPO several cabinet seats.

It was Mr. Haider himself who provoked the recent elections by instituting a purge within the party that resulted in resignations from cabinet positions and the fall of the government. This created a huge rift among party supporters, and Mr. Haider’s image was not improved by three widely-criticized trips to Iraq over the past year. After the November 24 vote, Mr. Haider announced his retirement from politics, saying the poor results showed “mistrust in me and in my policies.” Only a few hours later, he took back his resignation, saying party leaders had persuaded him to stay on. His close supporters now promise yet more purges: “An iron fist will be necessary,” says one. Associates say the 52-year-old Mr. Haider is increasingly mistrustful of colleagues and fearful of betrayal. [Austria’s Haider Plans to Step Down, AP, Nov. 25, 2002. George Jahn, Austria’s Haider Quits Politics, AP, Nov. 26, 2002. George Jahn, Haider Backers Attack Austria Moderates, AP, Nov. 26, 2002.]

At this remove, it is very difficult to tell what is going on inside the Freedom Party. The world press has been eager to report anything that might discredit Mr. Haider, but there does appear to be something unsound about his leadership. He has threatened to resign from politics many times, sometimes in pique, sometimes as a strategy to keep party dissidents in line. Still, he has succeeded in putting immigration-control and national identity at the center of Austrian politics, and the FPO paved the way for other nationalist parties to join coalition governments in Europe. He and his party may yet get a grip on themselves and lead Austria towards a brighter future.

BNP Wins Again

On Nov. 21, the British National Party (BNP) won a surprise victory in an off-year local-government election in Blackburn, Lancashire, in northwest England. Robin Evans, a builder, won the seat by 16 votes in a four-party contest. In May, the BNP shocked the British political establishment by winning three local council seats in neighboring Burnley, scene of last year’s anti-white rioting. The victory is especially sweet given that the British establishment from Prime Minister Tony Blair, Foreign Minister Jack Straw, and the Bishop of Blackburn on down begged the people of Blackburn to vote for anyone but the BNP.

While the votes were being counted (and recounted three times), protesters from the leftist Anti-Nazi League harassed and harangued the BNP’s Mr. Evans and his supporters. When the final tally was announced (578 votes for Mr. Evans, 562 for his nearest competitor, the Labour candidate; 32 percent of the total vote for Mr. Evans), a spokesman for the group bemoaned the low voter turnout — 39 percent — and sniffed, “The Nazis have stolen this seat on less than a third of the vote.” Of his win, Mr. Evans said it was “an important victory for a long neglected majority in other wards in Blackburn who now have a voice in me.”

After the election a chastened Mr. Straw, who represents the Blackburn area in Parliament, tried to downplay the victory by pointing out that only a minority of voters in the four-way race voted BNP. “The politics of racial exclusion can have no place in British society and all mainstream parties and politicians will now have to work harder to defeat it,” he added. [David Higgerson, Tony Blair Appeals to Blackburn Voters, Lancashire Evening News, Nov. 20, 2002. Matthew Tempest, BNP Gains Blackburn Council Seat, Guardian (England), Nov. 22, 2002.]

Near Miss in Switzerland

Swiss voters just missed giving their country the tightest, most sensible asylum laws in Europe. A referendum “against abuse of the right of asylum,” put on the November ballot by the Swiss People’s Party lost by only 3,422 votes. The law would have made it impossible for anyone coming from a persecution-free country — including all of Switzerland’s neighbors — to claim asylum, thereby cutting the flow to nearly zero. Christoph Blocher, leader of the People’s Party was exultant: “The outcome of the vote is sensational,” he said. “We were on our own against the Cabinet, all the other parties, against the media, and yet we finally only lost by a handful of votes.” He warned the government to take asylum-control more seriously, and promised to offer a similar ballot for the next elections. [Clare Nullis, Swiss Reject Anti-Immigration Plan, AP, Nov. 25, 2002.]

The New South Africa

Old Map of South Africa

South Africa circa 1905

Recently, a 29-year-old woman from Gloucestershire, England, flew to South Africa for a three-month visit with her white South African boyfriend. On November 16, the two were driving through the picturesque mountains of the Eastern Transvaal and stopped at a scenic overlook. Five blacks came out of the bush waving a pistol. They beat the two whites, gagged them, tied them up, and threw them in the back of the car. They then drove for 14 hours around the Transvaal, stopping frequently at illegal drinking dens called shebeens. The blacks got drunker and drunker, and several times brought other drinkers out to the car to show off the two trussed-up whites. They rightly assumed no one would object or call the police. The men frequently punched and kicked the defenseless whites. At least one of the attackers raped the woman repeatedly, but they do not appear to have passed her around the shebeens. They fired the pistol several times towards the couple, once through the floor of the vehicle where they were lying.

The blacks got so drunk that at 4:00 a.m. the next morning the driver lost control and flipped the vehicle. Two passing cars stopped to help, and as one of the drivers approached, a kidnapper shot him in the head, killing him. In the confusion, the whites escaped into the darkness, and were later able to flag down a passing motorist. The police picked up the couple, and as they were driving to the police station, the whites saw two of their attackers walking along the road. Police arrested them and found one had the man’s wallet and cell phone.

Several days after her ordeal, the woman was reportedly in such a state of shock she could still not give a statement to police. Doctors were giving her drugs to combat the AIDS virus, which her attackers may well have given her. [Tim Butcher, AIDS Terror of British Tourist Raped by Gang, Telegraph (London), Nov. 19, 2002.]

Blacks killed another white tourist in the same province just a few days later. On Nov. 21, Geoffrey Dex, who lives in South Africa, was staying with his family at the Umbhaba Lode in Hazy View. At about 10:15 in the evening he heard a noise at the bar and walked over to investigate. Three masked men, who were holding up the receptionist, shot Mr. Dex three times in the chest. There have been at least 29 violent attacks on foreign tourists alone in the province, which have undercut its attempt to promote itself as an exciting new vacation destination. [Tourist Killed For R1,000, African Eye News Service, Nov. 22, 2002.]

Meanwhile, South African prison gangs have a new punishment for disobedient inmates: rape by AIDS carriers. The prisoners call the punishment “slow puncture” because the victim, once infected, dies a lingering death, just like a tire slowly going flat. Gideon Morris, director of the South African Judicial Inspectorate of Prisons, says AIDS may now be the leading cause of death in the country’s prisons, but it is difficult to say because many AIDS deaths are incorrectly listed as death from natural causes. [Reuters, S. Africa Prison Gangs Use AIDS Rape as Punishment, Nov. 21, 2002.]

Some South Africans saw the writing on the wall even before the country was handed over to blacks in 1994. In the early 1990s, a group of Boer farmers established the town of Orania, on the edge of the Karoo Desert, as a white enclave. They hoped it would eventually become an independent Boer republic, and they expected thousands of far-sighted whites to apply to become residents. At first there were only 600, but Orania is now beginning to fill up. “We are overwhelmed by calls from people inquiring about moving here,” says John Strydom, a doctor who arrived five years ago. “We have had 200 calls and e-mails in the last month alone.”

Orania is based on the principle of separation, and its residents believe whites should do all the work of the town, no matter how menial. They see the old apartheid system as hypocritical, because it was a hierarchical arrangement rather than genuine separation. Riekie de Jager, 62, concedes that she misses the services of the black staff she left behind to move to Orania two years ago, but expresses what are no doubt widely-held views:

People think we are here because we hate the blacks — we don’t. We are very friendly with them when we meet. But I am happier here with people like myself. Things are going the way of Zimbabwe and we have come here for some security. Things are very bad now, but you wait — when Nelson Mandela dies there will be nothing but chaos. But at least in Orania we can feel safe. [Jane Flanagan, Fearful Boers Flee to South Africa’s Last White Enclave, Telegraph (London), Nov. 24, 2002.]

For how long?

The Old Nigeria

The Miss World pageant was supposed to be held in Nigeria this year, but organizers and contestants fled the country after controversy over the contest led to four days of rioting and more than 200 deaths. Nigeria has a history of ChristianMuslim violence, and the prospect of pretty girls prancing in bathing suits pleased Christians but angered Muslims.

The violence went into high gear when This Day newspaper published an editorial on Nov. 16, suggesting the prophet Mohammed would have approved of the contest. “He probably would have chosen a wife from among them [the contestants],” the paper concluded. This was too much for Muslims in the northern city of Kaduna, who think beauty contests promote promiscuity. They hacked at Christians with sticks and knives, and Christians hacked back. Kadunans also took to burning each others’ houses, and an estimated 4,000 people lost their homes.

When violence spread to Abuja, the capital, where the pageant was to be held, organizers decided to clear out. Beauty queens in tank tops and short summer dresses climbed onto a chartered Cameroon Airlines flight, which took off at 3:45 a.m. on Nov. 23–12 hours behind schedule. Christians in Kaduna, who saw the pageant’s evacuation as a victory for Muslims, were sharpening their knives for vengeance. [D’Arcy Doran, Miss World Pageant Moves to London, AP, Nov. 23, 2002.]

Meanwhile, further north in Kano, there are fewer Christians and less violence, but health authorities have a different problem. The latest drug craze is to get high on lizard dung, either by smoking or drinking it. “Since I discovered the use of lizard dung I have found peace,” says 28-year-old Ado Kabir of Kano. “I no longer have to spend much money on drugs since I discovered the efficacy of lizard excrement,” he adds. According to Mr. Kabir, there are many ways to take the drug. One of the most popular is to mix it with water and blue laundry detergent, and drink it. “It produces a strong effect similar to the effect of drinking strong whisky to excess on a hot day,” says the articulate Mr. Kabir. The droppings can be dried and then smoked with tobacco, marijuana, or heroin. The effect, says, Mr. Kabir, is “exhilarating.”

Bala Abu is a 20-year-old high school graduate living in Kano, who cannot find a job. He, too, loves the new drug. “Since I discovered the use of lizard dung I have found peace, because whenever I smoke it with tobacco all my worries are gone,” he says. [Junkies Get a Kick Out of Lizard Dung, Independent Newspapers (South Africa), June 27, 2002.]

White Flight

A recent study shows whites are still willing to tell pollsters they don’t want to live among blacks. Maria Krysan of the University of Illinois at Chicago and her colleagues surveyed 1,600 whites in Detroit, Boston, and Atlanta by showing them outline drawings of 15-house neighborhoods with varying numbers of black residents. Three percent of whites said they would move if there were blacks living in only one of the houses. Thirteen percent would move if there were blacks in three of the 15, 19 percent if blacks were in five. Thirty-eight percent said they would move if there were blacks in eight of the 15 houses, giving the neighborhood a slight black majority — which is to say that 62 percent claimed they would stick around while their neighborhood became majority black. Whites cited higher crime rates and dropping house prices for the reasons they would move.

Dan Krichbaum, the executive director of the Michigan office of the National Conference for Community and Justice, explains why whites say they would move: “[I]t obviously comes from their insecurities and the fact that their experiences are so limited with people from other racial and ethnic groups.” Needless to say, Mr. Krichbaum got it wrong. [Oralandar Brand-Williams, 40% Say They’d Leave If More Blacks Move to Neighborhoods, Detroit News, Nov. 22, 2002.]

No Different in Norway

Fifty-nine percent of the robbers in Oslo, Norway, are immigrants even though immigrants account for only 20 percent of the city’s population. Immigrants account for even more teen-age robbers: 69 percent. Two ethnic groups, Pakistanis and Somalis, are particularly over-represented among teenage robbers. Pakistani teenagers are only 3.5 percent of the teenage population but commit 20 percent of robberies by teenagers. The figures for Somali teenagers are one percent and 15 percent. [Kjetil Kolsrud, To av Tre Ranere har Innvandrerbakgrunn (Two Out of Three Robbers are Immigrants) Aftenpost (Oslo), Oct. 28, 2002.]

During the first several months of 2001 there were 111 reported rapes in Oslo. Of that number, 72 were committed by non-white immigrants, 25 by Norwegians, and 14 by unidentified men. Non-white immigrants therefore accounted for 65 percent of the rapes but only 20 percent of their victims were non-white. [Kjetil Kolsrud , Sjokk-tall om Voldtekter i Oslo: To av Tre Anmeldte er Innvandrere (Shocking Statistics About Rape in Oslo: Two Out of Tree are Committed by Immigrants), Aftenposten (Oslo), Sept. 5, 2001.]

Crazy Crazy Crazy

As a fund-raiser for the Fort McHenry Military Museum in San Pedro, California, volunteers planned a December 7 showing of the film Tora Tora Tora about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. There were to be ushers in World War II uniforms, vintage cars, and Pearl Harbor survivors at a gala evening at the 1930s-era Warner Grand Theater in Sand Pedro. The event is off. The Department of Cultural Affairs of Los Angeles, which runs the theater, says showing the movie on Pearl Harbor Day would be too insensitive to Japanese-Americans. “Dec. 7 is a tough day, especially for the second and third generations of Japanese-Americans,” says Los Angeles councilwoman Janice Hahn. “Why do we want to do something that makes it more difficult?” [Donna Littlejohn, Mixed Feelings Over San Pedro Film Event, Daily Breez (Torrance) California, Nov. 18, 2002.]

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Letters from readers
LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — I recently came across Jared Taylor’s review of No Escape: Male Rape in US Prisons by Joanne Mariner (see AR, April 2002, and AR web page). As a racially-conscious white prisoner who has been incarcerated in Virginia for 8 1/2 years, it is obvious to me that neither Miss Mariner nor Mr. Taylor has any real knowledge of prison life.

It is true that the majority of rape victims in prison are white, and that the rapists are overwhelmingly black. However, Mr. Taylor too easily accepts the “victim” label. I think he would be surprised to learn that most of these “victims” bring it on themselves, and actual force is used quite rarely. For the most part, prisoners who are raped are young men who run up gambling or drug debts, or more commonly, fall prey to the intimidation game. About 90 percent of the time, the intimidator is nothing more than a grown-up version of the school-yard bully — deep down he is a coward. If you take a swing at him, he will back down. Just like wolves, they pursue those who offer the least resistance.

Mr. Taylor is apparently outraged at what he calls lack of white racial unity in prison and thinks “whites allow other whites to be raped.” While the former is partially true, the latter is a misunderstanding. When I was incarcerated, there was a great deal of white solidarity. The new generation of prisoners consists mostly of “whiggers” who listen to rap music, and dress and act like blacks. Only a fool would expect them to show any racial solidarity.

As for letting blacks rape whites, as I pointed out earlier, actual physical force is seldom used. Usually the victim just gives in to pressure. If force is used, the victim has the chance to fight. If he fights or at least tries to resist, and he’s white, I’ll help him — whether he’s racially aware or not. But if he won’t defend himself, why should I help him? If he won’t fight for himself, he surely won’t fight for me in a tight situation or a race riot, and he clearly isn’t going to fight for his white sisters either. We have no use for men like that.

I doubt the credibility of many of the anecdotes cited by Mr. Taylor. In one example he gave, a prisoner claimed he had “become a man’s sex toy in order to avoid being constantly gang-raped by other prisoners.” This man obviously wanted to have a homosexual relationship. Ignoring the inmate’s blatant cowardice, it is inconceivable to me that this man was as unwilling as he claims. He could easily have avoided all that by going straight to a guard and asking to be placed in protective custody. If the staff refused to lock him up, all he had to do was spit on him and he would have been guaranteed to go straight to the “hole” where he would have been as safe as at home. He made his choice. I fail to find the words to describe some of the other men whose stories Mr. Taylor takes seriously.

I served part of my sentence at the Greensville Correctional Center during the ‘90s, when it was the worst prison in the state. I was housed in Building A1 — better known as the infamous Housing Unit #7 — where stabbings and murders were everyday occurrences. Ninety-three percent or more of the 2,800 inmates were black. In my entire time in the system, I have only been approached once by a would-be predator, whom I quickly drove off. And I am neither a large man, nor a great fighter, nor do I belong to a clique or gang.

There are a few things to remember in prison. Mind your business, don’t borrow, don’t gamble, and limit your acquaintances. Every smiling face is not a friend. And if someone approaches you in a threatening manner, break out your trusty sockful of “D” size batteries (when you first come to prison and have no friends, no status, and no rep, your socks and a six-pack of Evereadies are your best friends) or your nearest AC adapter cord and introduce yourself with a few good licks to his head. Even if you lose, at least you fought. You will gain respect. And remember: Nothing can happen to you that the doctor can’t fix.

Robb Harksen, Red Onion State Prison, Pound, Va.

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Sir — I will never understand the fascination Christian groups have with primitive Third Worlders, like the Nebraska Dinka mentioned in last month’s issue and the Somalis currently invading Lewiston, Maine. Yes, the federal government is ultimately to blame for granting these dubious “asylees” admittance, but were it not for the pressure put on the government by religious activists (in order to get those hefty resettlement assistance grants), maybe the State Department would occasionally say no, or would direct these people to countries where they are more likely to fit in. I rather doubt clitoridectomy is commonplace in Maine, but since this is one of the quaint practices of these new Americans, it may become what Lewiston is known for in the future.

When a company wants to build a new factory, or a utility wants to put up a new power plant, the government requires an environmental impact statement. I propose that from now on, before any religious organization can sponsor yet another tribe of stone-age refugees, it must produce a cultural impact statement. This would include the costs to taxpayers for welfare, housing and food subsidies, educating immigrant children, and incarcerating immigrant criminals. I also think people in the communities should be allowed to vote on whether they want these newcomers or not. These Christians may have guilty consciences, but they have no right to ease them on the backs of people who do not.

Sean Alan Price, Mansfield, Ohio

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