Criminalization of Poverty/Homelessness and the Holocaust

Has anyone else noticed the similarities between the Holocaust and America’s persecution of low income and homeless people?

The Holocaust wasn’t something that happened overnight, but rather was implemented in stages as soon as the Nazi party came into power. First there were laws to exclude Jews and other minorities from civil society.

America has done this to the poor by criminalizing homelessness and poverty.

People who collect welfare or disability are second class citizens and are for the most part banned from owning anything including a decent car, as well as from investing or starting a business - the only things that can lift them out of poverty and allow them to be self sufficient. Essentially they are stripped of their citizenship. This was also done to the Jews who were banned from universities and most professions.

Just like Jews, Gypsies and other minorities in Nazi Germany, America’s poor are forced to live in the worst parts of the city – in this case by unfair renting laws, such as refusing to rent to people who make less than 300 percent of the monthly rent.

Another similarity is the hatred for people with disabilities, and people who are not neurotypical, and the portrayal of them as parasites.

The propaganda about welfare queens leeching off the middle class and eating sushi and lobster is eerily similar to Nazi propaganda about greedy and treacherous Jews stabbing Germans in the back. Just like Hitler blamed the Jews for the Great Depression, conservatives and libertarians blame immigrants, blacks, and poor whites for the Great Recession.

Violence against the homeless has increased dramatically since the economy crashed in 2007, just like pogroms against Jews and Gypsies became more frequent until Nazi rule. Police brutality against blacks also echoes these pogroms.

Just like the Jews, the poor had their property unfairly confiscated from them during the Great Recession; in the form of foreclosure.

Just like the Holocaust, the American prison industry is for profit and involves death via deprivation and torture. The privatization of the prison industry is making prisons more and more like death camps. Hundreds of thousands of people are thrown in jail for years merely for possessing small amounts of drugs and are subject to dangerous and horrible conditions. American prisons haven’t reached the same level as Nazi death camps in terms of cruelty, but they are headed in that direction. These people are unemployable once they leave prison because they have a mark on their record, and their existence as a human being becomes illegal from that point on.

Like the Holocaust, the persecution of the poor has taken place in the context of an invasive war of conquest and anti-socialist sentiment.

Most importantly and lastly, Nazi Germany was the richest, most high tech country in the world during the 1930s. America is the richest and most powerful country in the 2010s, but like Nazi Germany it is very poor in character, and mean spirited to an obscene degree.

The ultimate goal is to strip the lower class not only of their rights, freedom, dignity, and even their right to sleep, but of their lives.
Wake up people.

If you dig deep enough, almost everything can be made to resemble the Holocaust.

The poor should be helped, but do you think there’s going to be genocide? Come on.

I would argue to a certain extent there already is, and that it could get far worse.

Vote Democratic. :slight_smile:

The fact it’s a crime just to sleep if you’re homeless in many places is not very far off from genocide. The comparisons to the Holocaust might seem hyperbolic and silly, but I’m sure many people in Nazi Germany thought the idea the Nazis would actually kill the Jews en masse was silly, even though they openly suggested it for years. The GOP never outright say they want to physically eliminate the homeless and disabled and enslave the poor, but they are nonetheless very open about their desire to.

lol

I don’t have a nice car, my own business, or investments beyond a retirement account. I’m pretty self-sufficient.

'e’s not dead, ‘e’s restin’.

The hyperbole is strong with this one.

Except for all the details, they’re identical.

Nobody is banned from owing a car or a house or a business because they’re poor. They can’t afford these things because they’re poor. But there’s a vast difference between being unable to afford something and being legally banned from something.

Propaganda about welfare queens is really nothing like propaganda about Jews stabbing Germany in the back. The point of the stab in the back myth was to explain why Germany lost World War I. Nobody is claiming “welfare queens” caused the United States to lose a war.

Germany was not a rich country in the thirties. Its relative poverty was one of the reasons for the Nazi rise to power.

Prisons are not death camps. There is no genocide going on in this country and if you think there is then you don’t know what the word means. And “their existence as a human being becomes illegal” is just nonsense.

And where’s the supposed invasive war of conquest going on?

Is poverty a serious problem in America? Yes. But inventing a fantasy world isn’t part of any solution.

This exactly. The promiscuous use of the term “genocide” merely cheapens the term and makes the cause for it one of wild-eyed long-haired idealists, not for the sober-minded men and women who make up the majority of this country’s population.

Ladies and gentlemen, gather round, and hail the savior of our civilization, the defender of all that is holy, the indispensable and essential, the ayatollah of rock and rolla, the one and only protoboard! Hear his plan to rid our beautiful culture of the decadent and degenerate Nazi scum, who have for years been stabbing our brave men and women in the back! Listen raptly as our strong and righteous leader casts out the morally bankrupt conservative parasites and the untermensch libertarians! Hail protoboard!

Why do I have a sudden desire to set fire to the Reichstag?

Regards,
Shodan

The comparison is odious.

That said, let me point out that there is a war against the poor. Get caught with an ounce of pot, go to jail for ten years, get out and then try to get a job. Practically every job app wants to know about criminal record and will not hire if you do. So you turn to selling pot. Back in prison for 20 years and your life is essentially finished.

When they put the homeless (note, not ‘homeless people’, because dehumanisation is part of the process) in labour camps (rather than ‘work for welfare’ programmes) and then gas them (rather than just letting them die) then you can come here and tell us we should have woken up sooner, you crazy hyperbolist.

Who would have guessed? It’s always the last one you suspect who turns out to be the communist plotter.

That’s so cute.

This, Germany was in a ton load of deep doodoo and that is what allowed Hitler etc to swarm to power. America is not a third world country as Germany was close to becoming back then.

Also, hardly any americans speak german, whereas almost all the Nazis did. So that’s that discussion neatly put to bed.

How is letting them die much different from the Holocaust? Not all of the Holocaust victims were gassed, many of them were simply worked to death and/or starved which is what the right wing wants to do to the poor.