FDR Lives On: Democrat Wesley Clark Suggests Putting Radicals Into Camps

Clark Shows Totalitarianism Has Home in Democratic Party

by Josh Guckert

On Friday, in an interview on MSNBC, retired General and 2004 Democratic Presidential candidate Wesley Clark was asked how he would prevent future tragedies in light of the shooting in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The response he gave was both surprising and frightening.

Clark said we must first identify those who are “most likely to be radicalized.” He went on to state that during World War II, “If someone supported Nazi Germany. . . we put them in a camp; they were prisoners of war.” Clark added on that if certain people are “radicalized,” it is the country’s “right and obligation” to “segregate them from the normal community for the duration of the conflict.” The statement received next to no reaction from interviewer Thomas Roberts, who kindly thanked Clark for his time before moving on to the next segment.

Clark emerged as a leader within the Democratic Party following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Having retired as a General in 2000, Clark became a CNN commentator, often criticizing the Bush Administration’s policy in Iraq. Clark become so popular that he entered the Democratic Presidential primary in 2004, and was fairly successful, winning Oklahoma while finishing second in Arizona, New Mexico and North Dakota.

The political party of which Clark is a member is of importance when one remembers the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was of course President during the period which Clark is referring to. While Clark makes reference to the Roosevelt Administration’s handling of American Nazis during World War II, it is the treatment of another group for which Roosevelt is most remembered.

On February 19, 1942, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing one of the darkest actions in the country’s history (perhaps second only to the tolerance of slavery). Under the order, military camps were set up throughout the western United States, wherein over 100,000 Japanese Americans were relocated. In 1944, the internment was upheld as Constitutional by the Supreme Court. The disgrace went largely undiscussed formally until 1988, when President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which apologized for the internment on behalf of the US Government and awarded $20,000 to each remaining survivor.

This was far from the only brush with tyranny by a legendary Democratic President, as Woodrow Wilson committed similarly atrocious acts through the power of the Espionage Act. Wilson’s authoritarianism most infamously led to the jailing of Socialist Presidential Candidate Eugene V. Debs in 1918 for making a speech urging resistance to the draft during World War I. The espionage legislation was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1919. President Warren G. Harding commuted the sentence in late 1921 and the two met the following day.

As much as these two examples are eerily similar to Wesley Clark’s calls for segregation of “radicals,” one needn’t have a thorough knowledge of history to remember the revelation that the IRS purposefully targeted conservative and “Tea Party” groups during the 2012 election. Wonderful memory is not needed either to recall the revelations by Edward Snowden that the government was collecting the data of millions of Americans without warrants. While the former was widely denounced by most Democrats in public, the latter raised ire from most leaders within the party, including President Obama and Hillary Clinton.

While it is obvious that neither Party has had a monopoly on tyranny and abuses of power, it is difficult to not become extra anxious when those within the Democratic Party speak of taking actions to quell national security concerns. For whichever reason, the Party which likes to so often pride itself on defense of minority rights has an abysmal record on that very topic.

Some who desire security may welcome special measures to isolate those who appear to be outside the mainstream. However, one must always first ask a simple question before jumping on-board with such ambitious endeavors:

How sure are you that you’re not one of the radicals?