Churchill tells us history is written by the victors. Compare the portrayal of the Bataan death march with the portrayal of the Cherokee trail of tears. What about the internment of American Japanese during WWII.? In 2004, Michelle Malkin argues in her new book, "In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War 2 and the War on Terror," that things are not as black and white as we've been led to believe. To the contrary, Malkin argues that "the national security measures taken during World War 2 were justifiable, given what was known and not known at the time".

In Korematsu vs. the United States, the Supreme Court justified the executive order as a wartime necessity. When the order was repealed, many found they could not return to their hometowns. Hostility against Japanese Americans remained high across the West Coast into the postwar years as many villages displayed signs demanding that the evacuees never return. As a result, the interns scattered across the country.

In 1988, Congress attempted to apologize for the action by awarding each surviving intern $20,000. While the American concentration camps never reached the levels of Nazi death camps as far as atrocities are concerned, they remain a dark mark on the nation's record of respecting civil liberties and cultural differences.

Santayana is known for his (often-misquoted) comments: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to fulfill it",[1] and "[O]nly the dead have seen the end of war."[2] The latter sentence has often been falsely attributed to Plato; the former is itself a misquote of a statement by Edmund Burke. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santayana

Too often these days, I see history not as a guide to avoid unwanted entanglements but as a precedent to continue the wrongdoing of an earlier era. Two wrongs to not make a right. Then again, the politicos are so bold that Kissinger can say,"The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer."