Some people are ideal driven. Doesn’t make them all driven by lust for power. Obama certainly never struck me as someone with a lust for power. Ambition, yes. Idealism, sure. Power for its own sake, not so much. Current Pope doesn’t strike me as someone hungry for power either.
All of that may be true, but it doesn’t contradict what ElvisL1ves said. Acting more liberal than you actually are doesn’t require a desire to screw conservatives.
We’re running concentration camps at the southern border, in the facilities we used as Japanese internment camps. History could not be screaming any louder if someone tacked up “Work Will Make You Free” above the gates.
At this point, if you don’t feel some form of extreme vitriol towards at least some of your fellow countrymen…
CLAP CLAP OI! WAKE UP!
You’re either asleep, or you’re one of the people I’m feeling quite vitriolic towards.
I think the border situation is a travesty of justice but I don’t think we are making those detainees perform hard labor or gassing them, or holding them without an intent to file charges, nor do I think we are anywhere near that kind of slippery slope. Maybe that is not what you alluded to in the above, but it is certainly what I read into your post.
~Max
Kids have died in those cages.
Yes, which sucks majorly and should make the administration reconsider their policies.
But that is totally different in than the summary executions associated with “concentration camps” and “Work Will Make You Free”.
~Max
Worth a read.
“What’s required is a little bit of demystification of it,” says Waitman Wade Beorn, a Holocaust and genocide studies historian and a lecturer at the University of Virginia. “Things can be concentration camps without being Dachau or Auschwitz. Concentration camps in general have always been designed—at the most basic level—to separate one group of people from another group. Usually, because the majority group, or the creators of the camp, deem the people they’re putting in it to be dangerous or undesirable in some way.”
"Things can be concentration camps without being Dachau or Auschwitz."
Not every concentration camp is a death camp—in fact, their primary purpose is rarely extermination, and never in the beginning. Often, much of the death and suffering is a result of insufficient resources, overcrowding, and deteriorating conditions. So far, 24 people have died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the Trump administration, while six children have died in the care of other agencies since September. Systems like these have emerged across the world for well over 100 years, and they’ve been established by putative liberal democracies—as with Britain’s camps in South Africa during the Boer War—as well as authoritarian states like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Camps set up with one aim can be repurposed by new regimes, often with devastating consequences.
History is banging down the door this week with the news the Trump administration will use Fort Sill, an Oklahoma military base that was used to detain Japanese-Americans during World War II, to house 1,400 unaccompanied migrant children captured at the border. Japanese internment certainly constituted a concentration-camp system, and the echoes of the past are growing louder. Of course, the Obama administration temporarily housed migrants at military bases, including Fort Sill, for four months in 2014, built many of the newer facilities to house migrants, and pioneered some of the tactics the Trump administration is now using to try to manage the situation at the border.
Thanks. I do think the Japanese internment was a good comparison but I don’t think you accomplished much by saying “concentration camp” and “Work Will Make You Free”. True, concentration camps are not technically extermination camps, but they often involve hard labor and are forced upon people who in all cases should not be detained.
Whether asylum-seekers should be detained is debatable as a practical matter (morally of course not), and I think most everybody will agree that the detention should be short and well attended. But you should know that “concentration camp” has a specific connotation, especially when accompanied by the Auschwitz motto. That’s why I was taken back by your hyperbole, in this thread of all places.
~Max
I will scream “1933 Germany was not 1942 Germany” into the void until someone figures out what I’m talking about. Why yes, these camps aren’t death camps. Yet. The mere fact of their existence should already be sending anyone who cares about human rights into fits. “No, see, it’s just a concentration camp like the ones we had during period X, not like the ones in nazi Germany” - be my guest and insert a period there where it isn’t a national or international source of shame and horror and/or a black mark on the country.
One of the things that I think has really changed is that people don’t accept fig leaf explanations anymore. At one time, there was a feeling that you were supposed to accept things like what Velocity or UltraVires said about the ‘deny care to LGBT patients’ laws, that they’re really just completely innocent and only about really specific transition-related treatments and not basic lifesaving care. But enough people now are tired of pretending that’s what those laws are about, that that is either the intended or actual effect of such laws that they will treat supporters of such laws with the vitriol appropriate to someone who wants to protect and encourage EMTs to laugh at someone bleeding out on the side of the highway. People entertained the fiction that anti-abortion laws were really about protecting babies, but more people now are willing to say ‘hey, this is actually about forcing an 11-year old rape victim to carry her rapists baby and engage in custody disputes with him for the next 18 years’, or ‘this is actually about forcing a woman to give birth to a baby with no actual brain that cannot possibly be viable’, and ‘yeah, we’re not going to ignore the vitriol of protestors hanging outside of clinics that perform abortions for non-rich people shouting ‘whore’ at people anymore’.
I will also note that no one has answered the question from a while back about what time period was actually free of vitriol. I think that if someone manages to actually answer that, find that what’s really being objected to is not ‘vitriol’ per se, but that rich white people, primarily men are now getting the same vitriol they’ve been handing out since the start of the country.
“Well, our concentration camps are just at the level of Germany’s prewar concentration camps and not up to the level of extermination camps, why do you have to be so rude as to make the comparison to concentraion camps?”
A good example of what I mean about the one sided nature of the complaints: Conservative opponents of abortion rights have been comparing legal abortion to the Holocaust since at least Pope Pius XII comparison in 1951 have been numerous books published directly comparing legal abortion to the Holocaust, such as There The Abortion Holocaust: Today’s Final Solution and Abortion: The American Holocaust . But apparently in this discussion, this sort of thing doesn’t count as vitriol at all! It’s only calling actual, literal concentration camps that aren’t extermination camps ‘concentration camps’ that seems to warrant the label.
I don’t think there ever was such a true zeitgeist of honest, vitriol-free debate. That shouldn’t be a barrier to improvement, though, and I do think less vitriol is an improvement. I’m not saying people should roll over and die, just continue to give your opponents the benefit of the doubt whenever possible.
That is almost an accurate paraphrasing. I would say pre-war German concentration camps are yet another level of evil, specifically because the inmates were detained for race/sexual orientation/religion/thought crimes/political affiliation, and they were forced to perform hard labor. Current camps imprison people based on nationality and only then because of the bureaucracy involved with asylum. So in my opinion, to compare Germany’s pre-war camps with the current internment camps on the southern border is still a little over the top.
Comparison with Japanese internment camps is fine in my opinion, but it doesn’t have the same outrageous and vitriolic reaction as a comparison German concentration camps. This is becacause of detentionuse the current internment camps really aren’t as outrageous and offensive as German concentration camps.
~Max
Thank you for putting my thoughts into a more readable form.
Well, our concentration camps are just at the level of Japanese internment camps and not up to the level of concentration camps as commonly understood, why do you have to be so rude as to make the comparison to concentration camps?
~Max
So something like “Well our concentration camps aren’t 100% exactly like the prewar German concentration camps, just close, but are very much like the concentration camps set up in the Us in the past that we deliberately euphemize by not calling concentration camps, why do you have to be so vitriolic as to use the accurate but mean phrase ‘concentration camps’ instead of something more euphemistic? I mean, kids are dying, people are being held in cages in 100+ degree eat without adequate food and water for months with no charges filed, but there’s no need to resort to mildly disparaging but completely accurate language!”
It’s a very fine line. To say “to me, abortion is like the Holocaust because fetuses are people” is OK. To say “you are as bad as Nazis” is not OK.
To say “to me, outlawing abortion is like enslaving the female sex” is OK. To say “you want to enslave the female sex” is not OK.
~Max
I’m fine with calling them concentration camps because that’s what they are. The fact that what’s going on behind those walls is presumably not what went in Dachau doesn’t mean they aren’t concentration camps.
It’s a euphemism precisely because of the connotations. Technically, the American internment camps were concentration camps. Technically, the current facilities are concentration camps. But “concentration camp” and “Work Will Make You Free” implies more than inadequate facilities, long detention time, and some 20-30 deaths over two years. It implies forced labor, imprisonment for thought crimes and political/religious/racial/sexual affiliation, gas chambers, genocide, and Nazism. People say we youngsters don’t know how bad the Holocaust was, but surely nobody seriously accuses the U.S. of committing a second Holocaust on our southern border.
So I chalk Budget Player Cadet’s simile up to hyperbole. Further, without this hyperbole Budget Player Cadet’s post loses its passion; I don’t feel the same reaction reading:
"We’re running [internment] camps at the southern border, in the facilities we used as Japanese internment camps[…]
At this point, if you don’t feel some form of extreme vitriol towards at least some of your fellow countrymen…
CLAP CLAP OI! WAKE UP!
You’re either asleep, or you’re one of the people I’m feeling quite vitriolic towards."
Now don’t misunderstand me, Japanese internment was horrible and I think the current situation is horrible, too. It’s enough to get worked up over. But it is not the same kind of horrible as Nazi camps, Soviet Gulags, or Maoist Laogai. It is not enough for me to start feeling vitriolic towards people who enforce current policies on the southern border.
~Max
The best case scenario with concentration camps is something like the Japanese Internment Camps. The best case. The worst case is the most heinous act of mass murder in history. There is no “good” case on that gradient, and the longer it goes, the worse it tends to get. And given that the president has “joked” about shooting immigrants and ICE is riddled with white supremacists who are eager to dehumanize immigrants, we have good reason to believe it’s going to get worse.
Why are you splitting this hair? Okay, the camps are currently only “one of the worst blots on America’s post-slavery history with very good odds of getting worse” instead of “the worst thing a government ever did on purpose”. Why does that matter to you more than seemingly any other part of this? To put it very bluntly, I’m interested in this ending before the mass graves, you seem more interested in saying, “chill, there are no mass graves yet”.
… Why? Why is the hyperbole the thing you’re complaining about, rather than literally anything else about this? Why?
Only because this hyperbole thing is the topic of the thread… while I do have strong feelings about the border situation I don’t see any point in complaining about the president when my own representatives take unfortunate positions on this issue. Legally I think the president is justified, as in he will win in court. I think the only resolution on the border would be legislative.
~Max