A pox on both their houses

Michelle Malkin and Eric Muller are having what seems to be an unending argument over Malkin’s new book.
The fact is that it is completely pointless to second-guess the post-Pearl Harbor internment of the west coast Japanese. The general attitude was that it was necessary to do so, and it doesn’t matter if the reason was to stop them from rising up as a fifth column against the United States, or if it was to protect them from Americans who wished to do them surrogate harm. We can report but WE CANNOT JUDGE. We WERE NOT THERE.
The same problem that faces modern journalism also faces modern historiography. Both historians and journalists have an obligation to document the truth without distorting it or leading their readers into wild flights of their own fancy. Historians may have wider latitude to draw lessons (“the lessons of history”) given their distance in time and their ability to use sources unavailable to journalists in the there-and-then. But it is not for historians to sit as judge and jury and say how awful we were when we did x or y. Unfortunately that is what most revisionist — and I won’t confine myself to saying “leftist” — history these days is all about.
In retrospect both the Mexican War and the Spanish-American War were terminally stupid. But they weren’t to the people of the day. They made great contemporary sense and satisfied the need to be avenged of an insult, whether real or imagined. You could say pretty much the same thing about how we got into the Second World War. There is a point past which it is dangerous to drive people and we are getting really close to that point with our Islamic friends.
And that, I believe, is probably Malkin’s real point.