REAGAN ON JAPANESE INTERNMENT

I took my brother and dad to the internment memorial in DC yesterday, and noticed again how prominently Ronald Reagan's name is featured on the memorial. It was Reagan who signed the federal law establishing restitution payments and officially apologizing to those injured by internment. Here are some of Reagan's remarks on August 10, 1988 when he signed the relevant bill:

Yes, the Nation was then at war, struggling for its survival and it's not for us today to pass judgment upon those who may have made mistakes while engaged in that great struggle. Yet we must recognize that the internment of Japanese-Americans was just that: a mistake. For throughout the war, Japanese-Americans in the tens of thousands remained utterly loyal to the United States. Indeed, scores of Japanese-Americans volunteered for our Armed Forces, many stepping forward in the internment camps themselves. The 442d Regimental Combat Team, made up entirely of Japanese-Americans, served with immense distinction to defend this nation, their nation. Yet back at home, the soldier's families were being denied the very freedom for which so many of the soldiers themselves were laying down their lives.

. . .

The legislation that I am about to sign provides for a restitution payment to each of the 60,000 surviving Japanese-Americans of the 120,000 who were relocated or detained. Yet no payment can make up for those lost years. So, what is most important in this bill has less to do with property than with honor. For here we admit a wrong; here we reaffirm our commitment as a nation to equal justice under the law.

Source: here. Just wondering: for those who really think that internment was justified, do they think that this apology should be retracted? Should the restitution payments be returned?

LOOSENING CONSTRAINTS ON THE GERMAN LEGAL PROFESSION?

The German Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) has issued two decisions that appear to be part of a trend toward loosening constraints on the legal profession. In one case, the court overturned a lower court ruling that upheld an order requiring a lawyer to take the words "specialist in transportation (or traffic) law" (Spezialist in für Verkehrsrecht) off of his letterhead since the legal profession had no corresponding official title. (Decision here, press release here.) In another case, the court overturned a lower court ruling that upheld a fine levied against a retired judge who admitted to providing free legal advice. (Decision here, press release here.) In both cases, the court emphasized that the occupational freedom of the individual outweighed any social interest in protecting clients or in safeguarding the integrity of the legal system as a whole (especially from what would be called "unauthorized practice of law" in the U.S.).

I haven't done a full-blown study of German constitutional employment law, and I'm not an expert in this area by any means, but there have been several cases over the past few years in which the court has sided with the individual in challenges against restrictive rules promulgated by professional organizations. Many of these rules have to do with advertising.

It is not surprising that restrictions on advertising are facing pressure from individuals seeking to market themselves and develop their own "brand identities." This process is already well advanced in the U.S., where lawyers can advertise in ways that their German colleagues would find shocking and crass. I would bet that some older American lawyers find this process disorienting as well.

Back to Germany: I suppose one interpretive question would be the extent to which these rulings are 1) the result of the inevitable boundary clashes between individual freedom and professional self-organization -- i.e., far from threatening professional power they actually uphold it by protecting the boundaries in a new market context -- or 2) the result of a society-wide pressure on professional organization that the judges support and the constituency for which they want to court.

BILDBLOG

This site -- a critique of BILD Zeitung, literally "the picture paper" -- is a great idea. BILD is a printed and even more debased version of FOX news, if you can imagine such a thing. It is also the highest circulating German newspaper, partly due to its potent mix of scandal, nationalism, right-wing politics, sex and nudity. BILD was the subject of Heinrich Boell's classic The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, which was also made into a brilliant movie by Volker Schloendorff.

Link via Margaret Marks, who found it through Papascott.

It would be worthwhile to develop concepts for criticism of the visual imagery of news outlets as well. (BILD is the "picture paper," after all.) I just had a visit from my sister Heidi and her boyfriend Steve Aishman. Both are artists, and Steve is a professor at SCAD. Both Heidi and Steve made the argument that education in visual communication is becoming increasingly important in a shrinking and media-saturated world; they both approach their work as an exercise in teaching the art of visual criticism. The most accessible technique within the context of their own work is humor -- humor can force a shock of recognition -- but the point is a general one.

The folks at BILDblog are performing an important function in criticizing the non-visual aspects of the paper, much as media watchdog sites in the U.S. have been doing. My favorites are Media Matters and the incomparable Daily Howler. The fact that these sites earn asymmetric partisan ire should not obscure the theoretical service that they are performing: developing high-quality patterns of criticism of the way that news is both created and presented. Many of their critical tropes are available on a non-partisan basis.

Seems to me that a similar approach should be taken to visual imagery. The costs of the technical side of such criticism have dropped dramatically over the past few years, as it has become easier to copy and publish photos on the web. It's primarily the conceptual language that's lacking, I think. It's pretty easy to talk about the "horse race" or the "he said / she said" tropes as misleading, but a little harder to talk about photo and shot selection in the same fashion.

I don't know of any sites that attempt this kind of criticism, but I'm on the lookout!

ON GUNBOAT DIPLOMACY

Just finished reading Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat, a brilliant novel on the end of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. There is a lot to say about this book, particularly on the subject of the psychology of dictatorships: both the psychology of complicity and the relationship between power and eros. But in the interest of being fair -- since I criticized Bob Kagan's neo-imperialist view last week -- I should note that Vargas Llosa portrays the threat of an American invasion as an important bargaining chip for Balaguer in his struggles with the Trujillo family after the assassination of Rafael Trujillo in 1961. I don't know enough about these episodes to say anything profound, but according to Vargas Llosa, the lesson in DR was that American military power could be used as a cover for domestic reformers.

The issue is, of course, complicated. Despite the regime's complicity in genocide and widespread human rights abuses, Trujillo himself received American support until the 1950s, when the U.S. began subsidizing attempts to assassinate him.

DHAFIR

Take a look at the Syracuse Post Standard's Sunday editorial on Rafil Dhafir, here. Here's a taste:

Gov. George Pataki unfairly smeared a Central New York doctor Thursday when he linked Rafil Dhafir and his charity for Iraqis to terrorist organizations. Pataki's public remarks seemed to confirm what Dhafir and his supporters have been saying all along - that the federal case against Dhafir is a political prosecution as well as a criminal one.

Dhafir, 56, is the Manlius oncologist who was charged in February 2003 with violating U.S. sanctions by sending humanitarian aid to Iraq without a license. He also faces charges of diverting some of the $5 million he raised for Help the Needy for his own purchases of properties in Syracuse, plus counts of Medicare fraud, tax evasion, mail fraud and wire fraud.

But prosecutors have been careful not to allege that Dhafir, who was born in Baghdad, or his charity assisted terrorist organizations.

That didn't stop Pataki, a loyal Bush Republican eager to point to successes in the War on Terror. When a federal sting operation busted two men in Albany Thursday for their alleged willingness to aid in a fabricated terrorist plot, the governor stepped up and proceeded to undermine Dhafir's right to a fair trial.

Whatever you think about this administration's approach to international terrorist organizations, this is a case that deserves your scrutiny. There is a big difference between committing fraud, evading decade-old sanctions for apparently humanitarian reasons, and supporting terrorist organizations. One of the lessons of the Iraq war should be that the public needs to demand very high standards of accuracy from politicians in national security matters. It seems to me that if the administration is going to claim that there are terrorists among us, they will have to provide more convincing evidence than the Dhafir case . . . at least more convincing than the facts and allegations that the government has made public so far.