... for Michelle Malkin's "In Defense of Internment," the egregiously flawed justification of the incarceration of Japanese Americans that she published back in 2004.
I visited the Manzanar National Historic Site for the first time last Thursday. It was a very moving day. The National Park Service has done an outstanding job of preserving the site of the camp and interpreting its history. It's a six-hour round-trip drive from Los Angeles, and worth every minute of it. (Also worthwhile is a visit to the Eastern California Museum in Independence, CA, just a few minutes north of Manzanar, which offers an outstanding trove of Manzanar artifacts and photographs.)
A few years back, when I learned that the Manzanar bookstore had decided to stock Malkin's glossy repackaging of the revisionist nonsense that had circulated for years at the reactionary fringe, I criticized the Park Service for its decision. Just as I couldn't imagine that I might visit Buchenwald and find the German government offering for sale a shoddy justification of my grandfather's post-Kristallnacht detention there in November and December of 1938, I couldn't imagine a former Manzanar internee returning to the site of his or her incarceration and finding the government offering Malkin's book for sale.
It turns out that the book -- a single copy -- is still on the shelves. But I like what they've done with it:
There it is, tucked in right alongside "Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?"
On reflection, I can't picture a better place for it.
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