As long as we’re clearing up ambiguities, how was this directed? Am I supposed to be Neville Chamberlain in this analogy?
Because if so it’s a bad analogy. Chamberlain abandoned the problem that was facing him that day because he was too concerned about dire possibilities that might occur in the future.
I wrote the opposite. I said we shouldn’t be so concerned about dire possibilities that might occur in the future that we lose focus on the problem that is facing us today. Which, to use your analogy, was saying if Hitler is threatening Czechoslovakia, we should be fighting him in Czechoslovakia.
It’s totally on point. Chamberlain completely trusted Hitler to not bomb Czechoslovakia. So much for that. He thought Hitler would do only this and nothing more, that appeasing his annexation of the Sudetenland would be the end. We know how that worked out. 50M dead, death camps, torture, murder, devastation. If only someone had done something.
If the “might occur in the future” things are 10/10 bad, the things he’s actually doing are still 8/10, which is more than bad enough to get “hysterical” over. The systematic dismantling or corruption of virtually every pillar of governance is already a red-alert all-hands-on-deck situation that warrants basically the same response as genocide, slavery, or nuclear war.
Right, but the point some of us are trying to make is THAT’s what to concentrate on, and saying nonsense like he wants a nuclear war, is going to invade Canada, start concentration camps, or any number of other hyperbolic, absurd, and frankly every bit as conspiracy theoretical as anything QAnon ever came up with doesn’t help, and generally detracts and distracts from the real work at hand.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines the term concentration camp as: “A camp where persons are confined, usually without hearings and typically under harsh conditions, often as a result of their membership in a group which the government has identified as dangerous or undesirable.”
Pretending that the concentration camps don’t already exist.
People who like to hide themselves from what is currently happening in my country like to equate concentration camps with boxcars and gas chambers.
Without those, how dare anyone call these places concentration camps?
Give this American caution verging on hyperbole any old day. It’s in the same American tradition that fuels 2nd amendment nuts, and that provides us with enough nuclear weaponry to melt the planet.
Also pretending that genocide has to mean mass extermination when it just as often means forcibly removing a people from where they live and destroying their families and culture, which is what Trump is doing to Latinos.
The paragraph before the one I quoted addresses that,
The term “concentration camp” and “internment camp” are used to refer to a variety of systems that greatly differ in their severity, mortality rate, and architecture; their defining characteristic is that inmates are held outside the rule of law. Extermination camps or death camps, whose primary purpose is killing, are also imprecisely referred to as “concentration camps”.
To add on to what @crowmanyclouds is saying, an example of a concentration camp might be, for example, taking all of the people of Gaza and putting them into a prison. E.g. as a way to be able to process them individually, to interview as potential members of Hamas and to prevent them from aiding members of Hamas.
You haven’t arrested them because they’ve committed any crime, you’re just locking them up because it suits your military goals.
See, for example, the Boer War concentration camps:
Oh come on, where’s this imminent nuclear war? Are the troops massing on the Canadian border?
Neither is the case. And won’t be the case. Those things in particular are just hot air and bullshit. We shouldn’t take that seriously. Lord knows there’s enough other stuff to take seriously instead of worrying about that sort of Trumpian nonsense.
The threat of a nuclear war breaking out over Ukraine would be high regardless of who was president at the moment, but I don’t think having a demented incompetent calling the shots from the Oval Office is reducing that risk any.
Nevertheless, Canada is taking the threat seriously, and is taking serious steps. A lot of that has to do with trade (internal and international), but not all of it.
The general thought is that Americans aim to break the country economically and force annexation in the wake of that rather than invade militarily.