Letters to the editor

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Barriers to history

Editor, The Times:

In 1988 President Reagan (that paragon of liberal thought) signed the Civil Liberties Act, providing reparations and an official presidential apology to those Japanese Americans who had been interned during World War II, American citizens who had their property and livelihoods stripped from them in a state of collective hysteria. As a nation, we recognized this was a travesty.

"Internment debate lingers" (Times, Local News, Sept. 6) reports that a Bainbridge Island parent, after reading Michelle Malkin's "World War II: Fact, Fiction & Fallacy," wants the School District to consider Malkin's view that internment was the right thing to do.

Malkin, and other right-wing revisionists obsessed with shielding America and American children from our darker truths, is trying to revise history so that we never admit we are wrong. We have grieved and reconciled over the internment and Vietnam. This is a necessary process for individuals and nations.

This right-wing tendency to want to erase our wrongs is a growing disgrace.
— Gregory Thompson, Kenmore

First draft against tyranny

Mary Dombrowski, in her criticism of the one-sided teaching of the internment of her Bainbridge Island neighbors, requests that the internment of Japanese be taught with more context. I agree. It is important to understand how and why otherwise decent people, including presidents and neighbors, can turn their backs on their fellow citizens in times of strife.

Just as important, it should be taught what protects us from those presidents and neighbors: the Constitution. Hopefully, those kids on Bainbridge will grow up and be better people than President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and all those succeeding him who failed, until 1980, to recognize the unjust and unconstitutional actions against their fellow Americans.

Dombrowski rationalizes the internment with the sentiment that it is wrong to question FDR, presumably because it is wrong to question a president. Not only is it not wrong to question a president, including FDR, it is essential. Dombrowski would do well to study the Constitution. It is the only thing protecting the rest of us from the tyranny of the majority, who, sadly, think much more like Dombrowski than like me.
— Hunter Marshall, Seattle

Resembling persecution

I assume from Mary Dombrowski's defense of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II that she would have no problem with interning oh, I don't know, Polish Americans if we went to war with Poland? Oh, that's right, those faces are a little harder to pick out of a crowd...
— Nora Kelly, Port Angeles

The only good war

Your story on Mary Dombrowski makes it sound as if she's simply calling for balance in a lingering historical debate over Japanese-American internment. Instead she is actually calling for the introduction of a discredited argument into our schools' curriculum.

Historians and legal scholars have proven that FDR's decision to intern the Japanese Americans during World War II was an unsupportable act, even considering the evidence available to the president. There was no evidence that Japanese Americans posed a national security threat, and the calls for the internment came largely from the long, sordid tradition of West Coast racism.

It is therefore quite legitimate to teach students that the internment was wrong — because it actually was, and the U.S. courts and the U.S. government, from Congress to the president, have agreed that it was wrong.

If we are to accept the idea that it is somehow biased to take a moral stand with our children on what was clearly an immoral act, then perhaps we should forget trying to teach them right from wrong at all. Maybe "wrong" deserves its day in class, too.
— Robert Cruickshank, Seattle

Some are less equal

What's next on the Bainbridge Island agenda? Will there be calls for a more "balanced" approach to the history of Jim Crow legislation or slavery? Can we anticipate pious claims that it's wrong to "second-guess" the many presidents who supported the "peculiar institution," including Jefferson Davis?

Countless historical questions are worth debating in the classroom, such as the origins of the American Revolution or World War II. Other historical opinions, while protected under the First Amendment, are more appropriate for venues where the intent is to provoke rather than to educate.
— David Hyde, Seattle

Barriers to the future

Good grief, isn't it time to put away the self-flagellation whips, and get on with life? Yes, I believe the internment was a mistake, but all of the armchair quarterbacking in the world doesn't change anything. Yes, we should learn from our mistakes, but we should also learn that living life involves making mistakes.

I am not a Democrat, but I think that President Roosevelt had to make some very serious choices in a very small time period and did not have the luxury of hindsight as his guide. To be teaching children that this was an avoidable mistake may in itself be looked at in hindsight as an avoidable mistake.

Do we really want to be put in the position of endless critiquing of our every decision? One of our most serious problems in politics is our inability to forgive our leaders any mistakes they commit while in office, thereby causing their unwillingness to admit to mistakes in time to correct them.

Must we continue to wallow in Watergate, Internmentgate, Monicagate, WMDgate, or any of the other "gates" that the press feeds us in endless critiques?

Ladies and gentlemen, let's get on with life!
— Charles George, Stanwood

Deciding factors

I commend "Help select the 'People's Court' " (guest commentary, Sept. 1). The ability to elect our public officials has been a long-standing tradition in this state and is the cornerstone of our American constitutional system. Electing judges promotes public accountability and allows judges to act independently "without fear or favor" in rendering their decisions.

Sadly, not all Washington citizens have a right to vote for their local judge. Currently, there are 426 judges in this state. Of those, only 340 are elected; the rest are part-time Municipal Court judges who are appointed or retained by local mayors or city managers every four years, not (seated) by public election.

The Board for Judicial Administration has recently commissioned a study of Washington's court system. The Court Funding Task Force has studied the judicial selection process utilized by cities and is recommending the appointment process be eliminated and that all judges serve at the pleasure of the public, not city officials. How else can judges be held accountable?
— Judge Robert McSeveney, Kent Municipal Court; member, Board for Judicial Administration

Preserving the Union jobs

Jane Powers' letter ("Disapproval from a distance," Northwest Voices, Sept. 6), complaining that "every" Kerry-Edwards sticker in Seattle is on a foreign car, seems to imply that Democrats are unpatriotic because we don't "buy American."

This measure of loyalty must only apply to cars. Last I heard, Wal-Mart was thriving in the "red" states.

By the way — in addition to its Kerry sticker, my Subaru has another that came with it, saying it was built in Indiana.
— Sal Gordon, Seattle