We've got a history of having some relatively tolerant views of "collateral damage" campaigns.

During WWII, US citizens polled higher than British citizens in finding it exceptable to bomb civilian areas. The reason for that, it is speculated, is that the British had been suffering from Nazi air raids over British civilian areas, and this led the people to believe bombing non-military targets was wrong. The US, on the other hand, did not have such an experience.

In other words, the Brits couldn't rationalize attacking civilians because it would justify the Nazi attacks on them. The Americans, however, were able to engage in this rationalization. This is one of the chief critiques that Noam Chomsky has always had of American foreign policy ... we tend not to apply universal prinicples to ourselves.

When thinking of this topic in regards to the conservative movement, Altemeyer's work on the ethnocentrism, double standards, comparmentalized thinking, and hypocritical thinking that is commmon to authoritarians adds another level of understanding.

Attacking civilians is as American as apple pie. Many (perhaps most) Americans regard U.S. participation in WW2 as our most heroic national achievement, one in which we quite intentionally incinerated hundreds of thousands (millions?) of German and Japanese civilians.

Actually, the British did the bulk of bombing of German civilian areas in WWII. The American air support came later in the war and the US command was more strict about targeting military targets and avoiding civilian facilities.

It was in Japan, however, that Americans were less restrained and burned villages to the ground with fire-bombing and such. This is attributed to Americans having more racist sentiments towards the Japanese than the Germans.

I’ve heard Malkin deny that she supports concentration camps for Muslims, in spite of her book on the subject of internment. But she never offers any substantive ideas or anything except fear, hatred and anger.

She'd be for them the moment a Leader said they were necessary. Before 9/11, she said Japanese internment was wrong. After 9/11, she Japanese internment was right. I've read enough about historical revisionism to understand what the implications of that probably mean. It means Michelle's authoritarian brain was revising reality to justify the measures she felt would be necessary to take against Muslims.

Holocaust deniers do the same thing. They say they're just interested in the truth, in objectivity, that they aren't in anti-Semites etc. It's bullshit. They are trying to revise reality to make it safe to hate Jews again, and given the opportunity, those lying sacks of shit would fire up the gas chambers again.

Malkin says she's not advocating concentration camps for Muslims. I guess that sort of true. She's just attempting to pave the way for them by providing a historical justification.

Ben Shapiro wrote one of the most disgustingly un-American articles I've ever read in which he recounted some of American histories most disgusting violations of civil liberties and suggested that such measures might be nessecary to win the war on terror. In said article, he implied that we won WWII becuase we interned Japanese Americans in concentration camps. And let's be clear ... Shapiro wasn't even focusing on these measures in regards to Muslims, he was writing this column in response to Al Gore and other "liberal" dissenters.

Malkin linked to an excerpt of that article with no comment other than approval.

http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/05/other-kinds-of-terrorists.html

Speaking of the Aryan Nations, it turns out that the shooter who went on a rampage this past weekend, killing four people and wounding two before killing himself in Moscow, Idaho (where my alma mater is) was a longtime member:

Jason Kenneth Hamilton, the man responsible for the deadly shooting spree in Moscow, Idaho, was a card-carrying Aryan Nations member licensed by the federal government to possess fully automatic weapons, including a military-style machine gun, sources confirmed Tuesday.

"How he got one, I have no idea," Latah County Sheriff Wayne Rausch said Tuesday of Hamilton’s license from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Rausch confirmed that Hamilton also had a concealed weapons permit in Latah County, despite a domestic violence conviction that should have barred him from owning guns.

The 36-year-old janitor moved to North Idaho from the Boise area in 1998 or 1999, and shortly thereafter became a member of the Aryan Nations, which was based in Hayden.

About that same time, Hamilton was arrested in Latah County for shooting at a building or a car, but the charge was reduced through a plea bargain, incomplete court records show.

Hamilton committed suicide in a Presbyterian church after killing his wife, a police officer and a church sexton and wounding three other men Saturday night and early Sunday morning.

The report is by my old friend and colleague Bill Morlin, and is worth reading in full, just to get a complete picture of what a piece of work Hamilton was.

What's clear is that Hamilton fully intended to take as many people with him as possible; that's why he began by targeting the dispatcher's office, where he knew he would get police response. And considering his extremist background, it is certain this was intended as some kind of political statement. It was, by most definitions, an act of domestic terrorism.