Is That Legal?

I don't need (and didn't even before her book came out) Michelle Malkin - or anyone else - to do my thinking for me.

It's the height of arrogance to suggest that readers of Malkin's book haven't enough intellectual horsepower to avoid the evil racist death rays her book gives off. Does Silber think we're all so weak-minded that the idea of internment hasn't occurred to millions of people in this country? Certainly the Left has been shreiking about it WAY louder than the Right.

Gimme a break. Silber's pseudo-dudgeon speaks more about him than about Malkin. The title of his preceding post says it all: Disempowered White Men Are Very, Very Pissed. Silber's one of them, apparently.

Eric,

Do you ever feel that taking the time to criticize someone like Malkin is worth it? Isn't there a danger of legitimizing her work?

I'm always fearful of the catholic reader who looks at "both sides of the issues" and "weighs them equally" to see which issue prevails. Or how about that all-too-common creature, the pseudo-intellectualis major, which muses that there are valid points on both sides, and that he can understand how both sides arrived at their conclusions. Or worse yet, the Split-It-In-Halvers, those grand compromisers who believe that the answer to every human problem can be found in simple Solomonian reasoning. Wait, have I forgotten the Devil's Advocates, the Irrationalists, the self-proclaimed mediocre Free-Thinkers, the self-satisfied People-Shockers, and the Iconoclast-for-Iconoclastic-Sakers?

Sure, some of them would very well be Malkin apologists without your help. Which seems to beg the question, Who is your audience?

Well, I am, and many others, thankfully, are. You, and other willing knights of the lost thinking arts, are our intellectual heroes. But it doesn't change the fact that sometimes it feels that the dragon you wanted to slay is nothing more than the lazy spin of a windmill.

Malkin doesn't deserve an opponent.

David,

This is a question I wrestled with, and settled, last August, when her book came out. Some people at that time said to me, "Just ignore the book, and people will be less inclined to take it seriously."

I think this position absurdly overstates my (or any academic's) ability to influence public opinion, and seriously underestimates the ease with which Malkin can influence it.

In the scheme of things, I lend her book no credence at all by reading it, parsing it, and criticizing it. If my efforts produced even a dozen more readers of her book, I'd be astonished.

More people in this country have now heard about the Japanese American internment from Michelle Malkin than from every American scholar combined.

So just sitting by and ignoring it is not an option. Challenging the book may ultimately do little good, but I'm quite persuaded that it can really do no harm.

For better or ill (in my opinion most definitely "better") there is a network effect from things like Greg and Eric's refutation. It gets cited, linked-to, or just helps educate receptive individuals who go on to post their own opinions, hopefully now better-informed by the exposure. In time, the indirect positive effects may overwhelm the effect of actually reading and digesting their piece -- and the better the quality of the initial arguments (and they were strong) the greater their subsequent contagion.

There is no body-blow that can remove something like the Malkin book from public consciousness. It takes years, and thousands of small efforts by a large number of individuals. Having Greg and Eric's piece to refer to will help buttress many of these efforts, directly or indirectly.

The book was already starting to be taken seriously before it even emerged. I'm enormously grateful that Eric and Greg (along with David Neiwert and others) took the time and effort to discredit Malkin before the book achieved wide distribution. It remains to be seen just what the enduring influence or their efforts will be, but I can't imagine it as anything but positive.

Just wanted to add my whole-hearted agreement to modus potus' comments

We need to remember that Malkin's book on the Japanese-American internment wasn't just another in the long line of designer right-wing best-sellers; hers parades itself as a work of historical scholarship. Eric, Greg and David demonstrated precisely why and how it wasn't what it pretended to be. It was such a comfort when asked my opinion by college students who'd gone to hear Malkin and suspected both her reasoning and her facts, but were surprised, and even somewhat swayed by her poise and assurance, to be able to refer them to three online resources that dealt with the Malkin thesis, and her blatant reshuffling of historical evidence, so compellingly and with such authority.

Reading Malkin's responses to Eric and Greg's work, one could sense that she felt the need to be on her best behavior, because she wasn't being attacked on a personal basis, but solely on the basis of work that was deficient by any and all professional standards, and though she tried very hard to match the tone of the critiques, she simply couldn't defend the specific content of the book, at least not to any reader not already as determined to believe her thesis as she was.

I'm fairly cynical about right-wing books; even so, some of Malkin's leaps of both logic and fact took my breath away.

I have no doubt it was worth the effort, and will continue to be so over time.

So, thank-you Eric, and my thanks also to Greg and to David N.

Hey, Eric, after "In Defense", I'm really hesitant to take anything off Malkin's blog as "investigative journalism", but that's what she's claiming with her current post about Air America. Any thoughts?

None yet. I haven't read what she's written.