That splashing sound you hear is Palooka pouring gasoline over himself. He has been stubbornly, and almost randomly, throwing out wild and unsupportable defenses of the internment. His case boils down to his assertion that certain things were unknowable, such as the implications of the delta between the two nation’s productive capacities, the amount of sabotage necessary to have a perceptible effect on the war effort, etc, and therefore it was right to intern people on the basis of their ethnicity in order to save American lives and shorten the war.
And yet, when it’s pointed out that his arguments in defense of internment can just as easily be applied to justify similar internments in “the War on Terror”, he suddenly does a 180, saying: “World War II promised to be concluded–one way or another–within a relatively short historical time frame.”
And why is that? Surely, he can’t be suggesting the 42,000 troops Japan could have landed were going to first wipe out the 260,000+ American troops in California, then march their way across the country to Washington in a relatively short period of time. No, he must be talking about the American defeat of Japan. And why did it promise to be concluded in a short period of time? Because the production delta demanded it, spot raids and sabotage notwithstanding.
Palooka understands this too, for all his unwillingness to publicly admit it. But admit it he now inadvertantly has, unless he wishes to argue for the impossibility of a Hundred Years War, or even a Thirty Years War.
scratch, hiss, FWOOMP