Eric Muller has responded to my post on taking the Korematsu thing out of context, with a post cleverly titled Ful(ford) of It.

James Fulford apparently doesn’t think that his resurrection of the smear of Fred Korematsu ought to count as an instance of “invidious racism and hate” on VDare.com.

I’m puzzled by the word “smear” here, since I can’t think of anything I’ve said that wasn’t true, and as for the famous 1942 headline, “Jap Spy Arrested in San Leandro,” you can’t honestly call that a smear.It was a justifiable error on the part of the newspaper and the authorities. The other part I’m resurrecting is the details of his arrest. Which need resurrecting, in the interests of historical accuracy.

Here’s the statement that Ellen Tauscher, the Congresswoman for San Leandro, issued when she was attending the Presidential Medal Of Freedom ceremony for Korematsu.

During one of the darkest chapters in American history when the U.S. government forced thousands of American citizens into internment camps simply because of their ancestry, Mr. Korematsu had the courage to say no. He was subsequently arrested for demanding no more than what every American citizen is entitled to — his basic human rights.

….

Mr. Korematsu was arrested in 1942 for staying in his own home and refusing to comply with the order that sent more than 120,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry to internment camps during World War II.
Tauscher to Attend Presidential Medal of Freedom Ceremony at White House for San Leandro Resident

That’s a lot of wrong historical facts to get wrong:

Korematsu didn’t have the courage to say no, he ran and hid.

He wasn’t arrested in his own home, (which was in Oakland) but in San Leandro, where he was hiding.

There weren’t “120,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry to internment camps “ –of approximately 120, 000 people, (110,000 in internment camps) 38% were not American citizens–they were subjects of the Emperor Of Japan. With whom the United States was at war, remember?

But the main thrust of his post is a laundry list of other quotations from the Complete Works Of James Fulford, with this note:

Fair enough. If you don’t like that one, how do the following quotes from Mr. Fulford suit you?

Most of them suit me fine, because I wrote them. He doesn’t attempt to say what’s wrong with them, either, and the first couple of commenters on his blog seem to think they’re fine, but I’ll have to devote a whole other post to them, above.

The big wrong I saw missing from the list of of Dahlia Lithwick, that Steve Sailer recently wrote about is systemic sexual abuse of prisoners in the US-often with involvement of officials (who do things like purposely house inmates with known abusers of other inmates. )

I consider this a gross violation of the Bill Of Rights’ guarantees against “cruel and unusual” punishment. Itspeaks enormously badly of the elites running the US government in recent decades–and the entire legal profession. This problem is so severe, that it erupted into the international scene with abuses at Abu Ghraib.

Brad Krantz recently opined:

Mr. Brimelow was not CENSORED, in any sense of the word. As a well-educated man, I’m sure you realize that censorship has to do with the First Amendment, which refers to the government preventing speech. As a talk show host on a radio station privately owned, I am under absolutely no obligation to allow anyone I don’t want on my show, nor any ideas if I decide I don’t want them.

Actually, Mr. Krantz appears confused here. First off, not just anyone can get access to the “megaphone” he has in the way of access to radio spectrum. In the process of allocating spectrum, very real decisions about how political discourse will take place are being made. The radio station he works for thus has very real obligations. They don’t “own” the radio spectrum they use, but are granted the use of that spectrum with the expectation they serve the public interest.

The notion of “public interest” is explained here

Federal oversight of all broadcasting has had two general goals: to foster the commercial development of the industry and to ensure that broadcasting serves the educational and informational needs of the American people

Although the present state of talk radio in the US may not reflect this, the responsibilities of folks like Mr. Krantz go much deeper than just keeping the owners of their radio station-and their advertisers- happy. For example, there are real legal issues in how a station can use its influence to support a particular political candidate or ideology.

Personally, I think Peter Brimelow is just too dang “nice” here. He seems to mainly want VDARE.COM to be treated like other news sources of similar editorial stature and quality(and unlike myself has avoided advocating expropriation of concentrations of wealth accumulated with the aid of illegal immigration). I tend to think that the tendency of American media to grossly distort the range of public opinion and debate on issues like immigration is evidence of an enormous need for media reform–and reason for fundamentally changing the way commercial radio and television is regulated. These changes need to significantly increase the entre of the average American to the media –and limit the autonomy of the owners of networks and stations to arbitarily choose programming.

How, this might be done is likely to be complex-but I think a Citizens’ Assembly appointed for the task of starting investigation on how to democratize media access and control would be very worthwhile. I fully expect the owners of the radio station Mr. Krantz works for wouldn’t be entirely happy with the results of such a process–and I expect many VDARE.COM readers would be pleasantly surprised the new management such a process might give folks like Mr. Krantz.