The American Gulag
9/24/2004
Whenever a neocon defends governmental acts of tyranny, despotism, and brutality (a defining characteristic of a neocon) it’s a sure bet that he will eventually “justify” such acts by invoking the image of the “sainted” Abraham Lincoln. If “Father Abraham” did it, the argument goes, then it must not only be accepted but celebrated.
Neo-columnist Michelle Malkin makes just this argument in her recent defense of FDR’s rounding up of over 100,000 ethnic Japanese Americans during World War II and sending them to what FDR himself called “concentration camps.” (In her book, In Defense of Internment, Malkin euphemistically calls the camps “relocation centers”). In an August 9, 2004 interview on Townhall.com Malkin predictably played the Abe card: “Historically, civil rights have often yielded to security in times of crisis. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, which enabled him to detain thousands of rebels and subversives without access to judges.”
This statement is half truth and half lie. Lincoln certainly did unconstitutionally suspend habeas corpus. But the tens of thousands of Northern citizens who were imprisoned without due process by the Lincoln administration (as many as 38,000 by one estimate in the Columbia Law Journal) were overwhelmingly plain citizens from all walks of life who simply expressed doubt over the administration’s unconstitutional and despotic policies, including the shutting down of more than 300 opposition newspapers and the mass arrest of political dissenters by the military. Tens of thousands of Northern political prisoners spent months in a series of gulags, such as Fort Lafayette in New York Harbor, which came to be known as “the American Bastille.”
Harold
