US Supreme Court Justice Declares Mass Internment Inevitable

Thursday, February 18, 2016
By Paul Martin

By Tom Carter
Global Research
February 18, 2016

In the wake of Judge Scalia’s passing, we bring to your attention this article originally published in February 2014:

Referring to America’s mass internment of people of Japanese ancestry during the Second World War, current Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia declared: “[Y]ou are kidding yourself if you think the same thing will not happen again.”

Scalia made these comments during a speech to students at the University of Hawaii on February 3. He was asked about the Supreme Court case of Korematsu v. United States (1944), which involved a legal challenge by two Japanese Americans—Fred Korematsu and Gordon Hirabayashi—to orders to report to mass internment camps during the war. On appeal, the Supreme Court infamously declared the internment camps constitutional on the grounds of “military urgency.”

Hawaii, where Scalia was speaking, was one of the many states in which internment camps were established.

“Well of course Korematsu was wrong,” Scalia said, in comments reported by the Associated Press. “And I think we have repudiated it in a later case. But you are kidding yourself if you think the same thing will not happen again.”

Scalia invoked the Latin expression, “Inter arma enim silent leges” (roughly, in times of war the law is silent).

“That’s what was going on—the panic about the war and the invasion of the Pacific and whatnot. That’s what happens. It was wrong, but I would not be surprised to see it happen again, in time of war. It’s no justification, but it is the reality,” he said.

While Scalia’s remarks took the form of nominal disapproval of the Korematsucase and mass internments, his shoulder-shrugging at “the reality” of future mass internments should be taken as a serious warning.

Since Scalia’s arrival on the Supreme Court in 1986, he has been a leading figure in the ongoing rollback of democratic and social rights. Some of the highlights of Scalia’s career include Stanford v. Kentucky (1989, upholding the death penalty for crimes committed by 16 and 17-year-olds), Bush v. Gore(2000, halting vote counting and installing George W. Bush as president), and Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010, removing limitations on corporate spending during elections), among many others.

There is an element of arrogant pageantry and provocation to everything Scalia does, both in his official and individual capacities. In 2004, Scalia famously went on a hunting trip with Vice President Dick Cheney while a case involving the latter was pending before the Supreme Court, in flagrant violation of judicial ethics. Scalia’s contempt for the principle of separation of church and state is frequently on display, as in a 2012 speech arguing that the position that “our Constitution forbids anything that favors religion over non-religion is a lie.”

Scalia’s pronouncement on the inevitability of mass internment borrows not a little from fascist jurisprudence. Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt developed the theory that a national emergency could constitute a “state of exception” (Ausnahmezustand) pursuant to which the executive may ignore the rule of law, the Constitution, and democratic rights. Similarly, Scalia imagines a scenario in which mass incarceration in the US would technically be unconstitutional, but “in times of war the law is silent.”

The Rest…HERE

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