THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN cONSERVATIVES AND THE rIGHT:

Niebuhr made some simple points that shouldn't be heavy lifts. The first was a demand for basic discrimination: that it was incumbent upon the U.S. to distinguish between those Japanese Americans who had given every indication that they were loyal and those who gave reason to be wary. He admitted to having no doubt that there were, or could be, disloyal members within the Japanese American community. He simply argued that, until one faced a situation of last resort, that there was time for less drastic methods to deal with the potential peril.

Niebuhr is well known both for believing the war against Nazism and Japanese militarism needed to fought and that the gloves should come off to fight for the win. Still, his call for discrimination extended, he urged, to distinguishing between essential liberties, upon which democratic governments rest, and more peripheral liberties, which might be curtailed in emergencies. "The mass evacuation of Americans," he suggested, "without due process of law must certainly be regarded as the abrogation of an essential right."

Because it was, Niebuhr understood that in striving for American security, America had hobbled itself in other, equally essential, dimensions. To get at this, he recorded a letter from a Japanese American pastor. The pastor describes the "uncertainty, fear, and heartbreaking disappointment" of those in his congregation. His flock did not, in the days of war, expect to live lives of calm but it was nevertheless "a blow to America-loving, peaceful, permanent residents who have lived in America for 30-50 years to be suddenly classified as 'enemy aliens' and receive treatment as such." He points to the extraordinary service many Japanese Americans were already doing in the American armed forces as a model of the general patriotic fervor of the Japanese American community. Indeed, over 5,000 Japanese were already in service and many more would follow when the draft would be extended to include Japanese Americans in confinement. That so many Japanese answered this call despite their treatment points to an extraordinary capacity for virtue that all Americans ought to be proud to claim as deeply American. Meanwhile, this pastor insisted, he and his people were, through their confinement, "Willing to go a second mile in serving and suffering for our nation." We ought to relish calling such as these our neighbors and fellow countrymen.

The record shows that America has learned from its errors in WWII. 

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