Sending hundreds off to CECOT in El Salvador strikes me as that much worse, especially combined with the Trump maladministration’s statements that they reserve the “right” to deport people to third-party nations. The fact that doesn’t meet the definition of deportation – sending a person back to their home country, where they’re as free as any other citizen or subject – makes this significantly worse.
CECOT’s really bad for (1) its horrible conditions, being imposed on (2) people who haven’t been convicted of a crime (most with no criminal record, period!), for (3) as long as Trump keeps paying Bukele to keep them. Venezuela trading for the release of most of the CECOT “deportees” doesn’t actually change any of those three things. The only difference now is the “deportees” remaining in CECOT are all El Salvadoran so they’re back in their home country.
Alligator Alcatraz strikes me as Trump’s effort to duplicate CECOT on American soil as closely as U.S. law will let him. Calling it Alligator Alcatraz to mock it doesn’t faze Trump or Trumpists, as they’ve fully embraced the insult – as formidable to escape and harsh to live* as Alcatraz, just with swamps and alligators instead of ocean currents and sharks. It seems to me that Alligator Auschwitz is not disrespectful to Holocaust victims but a necessary escalation if you want to convey disapproval that MAGAts won’t just adopt as a twisted compliment.
*Alcatraz was harsh, no doubt, but prisoners were actually pretty well fed and punished for rules violations with isolation rather than corporal punishment as previously and elsewhere. Cite. The goal was to keep prisoners from escaping, people weren’t hoping that prisoners drown like MAGAs seem to hope detainees are eaten by alligators.
Quite possibly. The point is we’re playing on Trump’s field when we call it Alligator Alcatraz, and we have to call it something that unambiguously conveys condemnation.
If Alligator Auschwitz is considered too extreme or disrespectful, Gator Gulag has the advantage of (1) being pithy and (2) invoking a place where the management didn’t care if the inmates lived or died. It has the disadvantage that the USSR has been gone long enough that a lot of people don’t know what a gulag is/was.
The point is, this facility won’t be a death camp, when it opens, and neither was Auschwitz, when it opened. Auschwitz was later turned into a death camp. And places like this will also be eventually turned into death camps, if Trump and his cabal aren’t stopped first. We can’t say “Well, we shouldn’t make the comparison until the gassings start”. Before the gassings start is precisely when we should be making the comparison.
No, it’s already much worse than those. People were locked into those camps, but not locked up within them. And they were given food (that i think they had to cook themselves.) Most of those imprisoned survived, and were released after the war ended.
An elderly relative of my college roommate survived one, and she said they were all surprised at how well they were treated, for being in a prison camp.
Gator gulag sounds best to me, so far. I don’t think it will become alligator Auschwitz, but i wish i were more certain of that.
If, in 1940, people had said of the actual Auschwitz, “Oh, don’t be so histrionic, it’s not like it’s a genocide camp”, they would have been technically correct, because at the time, it wasn’t.
Re-read @puzzlegal 's post, there. She wasn’t referring to camps across Nazi Germany. She was referring to the camps in the US where Japanese-Americans were interred. We did, in fact, treat the Japanese considerably better than the Nazis treated the Jews, but that’s damning with faint praise.
