So you’re voting for people trying to end it in 2020, right?
So if I find one instance of an anti-abortion activist crossing that line, then you’ll admit that the vitriol is nothing new, and has been around for decades in one direction, and that the real difference is that the vitriol is now being directed against conservatives, especially rich, conservative white men? Because it’s not really that hard to find such a quote.
I’m not clear how this interacts with your earlier post. According to what you claimed just a few posts prior, claiming that the camps are just like Nazi camps is fine and would not cross the line into vitriol. Literally claiming that there was a Holocaust occurring in the Southern US would no more cross the line than anti-abortion activists claiming that legal abortion is another Holocaust. But here you seem to think that using the term ‘concentration camp’ is vitriolic and inappropriate even though you admit that it is literally the correct term to use! According to your standards, it’s fine for anti-abortion activists to directly, literally compare aborting a rapist’s baby to the Holocaust, but using the correct term ‘concentration camp’ for the US’s current concentration camps is vitriolic and inappropriate, due to the fact that the term is associated with the Holocaust.
What exactly is different in the two situations, other than the fact that one ends up making conservatives, predominantly rich, white, male conservatives, look bad and the other is directed against a different demographic?
Yes, equating today’s “internment camps” with Nazi death camps is far-fetched.
I bet if anybody had predicted 1933’s internment camps would become death camps within a decade, that would have been considered far-fetched, too.
At what point did the Nazis start separating mothers and babies?
I’m not sure they ever did. Hmmm … maybe it is unfair to compare today’s camps with Nazi Germany’s.
I wouldn’t add the part I bolded because I think there are previous instances of vitriol against conservative white men for as long as conservatism has been around. Certainly there has been since I first voted in 2014 (not that my vote counted, since I missed the primary). But I will readily admit that vitriol is nothing new and has been around for decades in general, right back to the late eighteenth century and probably earlier.
“Concentration camp” may be the correct term in a technical sense but it is a politically charged word with specific connotations that were reinforced when Budget Player Cadet added: “History could not be screaming any louder if someone tacked up “Work Will Make You Free” above the gates.” I classify that comparison as vitriolic because it is both insulting and inappropriate. ETA: Inappropriate, as in “does not belong”; a comparison between the border now and concentration camps in Nazi Germany is inappropriate.
If upon examination Budget Player Cadet had said ‘no, I meant the technical sense of the word, like a Japanese internment camp, not a Nazi camp’ I would say the comparison was insensitive rather than vitriolic. But the pathos of the post falls apart if we remove the implied comparison with Nazi concentration camps.
I keep saying Nazis were worse than Americans, because they were, or so we were taught in school. I had one paragraph in American History about Japanese internment, plus maybe a sentence or two in World History. I had an entire spring semester on the Holocaust (part of a civil rights/Holocaust class), plus a good week in World History and at least half a chapter in American History. This was in a public school with a non-Jewish teacher.
As I said, it is a very fine line. If the pro-lifer’s comparison, in context and upon questioning, implied that people who commit or sanction abortion are like those who committed or sanctioned the Holocaust, that would be vitriol, in my opinion. To make such a statement without being vitriolic takes some effort, but it can be done, just like the comparison between certain concentration camps during WWII (the Japanese internment camps) and the current border situation. It is the difference between justifying one’s own beliefs and assuming someone else’s beliefs in any but the most flattering way.
~Max
See you consistently seem more upset about me implying that our current concentration camps (y’know, the ones now being put under the Department of Defense, which makes it far easier to avoid outside scrutiny) might be going the way of the nazis than about the actual camps, and that confuses me, because one of these things is a national tragedy that may turn into an international tragedy if not stopped, and one of these things is extremely mild hyperbole in a forum post. You also didn’t answer my question about voting to stop it - probably because the answer is “no”.
Dachau was not a death camp. Never got around to it. They installed the gas chambers and furnace but never used them before the end of the war. Would you object to me referring to that as a “concentration camp” because my “vitriolic language” implies that concentration camps are like Auschwitz, rather than like the “mere” concentration camp of Dachau?
Let me paint it out as clear as I can, and let’s see if you get the picture.
In 1933, Dachau’s guards beat a prisoner to death, and a prosecutor indicted them. (This was overruled by Hitler.)
By 1945, the death toll of prisoners in Dachau had reached well past 6 figures.
There’s a timeline there. It starts with the establishment of a camp we throw all the undesireables. Sometimes, that’s where it stays. Other times, it goes to very dark places. There are good reasons to believe we’re heading for those darker places.
“Never Forget” does not mean “if things get as bad as Auschwitz, we riot”. It means “Never let things get that bad again”. And when an administration that jokes about shooting immigrants throws a whole bunch of immigrants in concentration camps, that is the call to action. If we wait until there are death camps, it will be too late.
Y’know what else is a really fine line?
There’s some expression about those…
You seem pretty into splitting hairs. Be it whether someone really thinks the US is committing mass murder or whether I’m exaggerating by ringing the alarm bells about concentration camps on American soil because they’re “only” like Dachau ca. 1933, instead of like Dachau ca. 1945 (the point is to stop them before they go from point A to point B). I don’t get it, and frankly it seems like there’s more important things to do. Arguing semantics over whether or not ICE is running concentration camps (they are) is a bit like arguing over who gets the last lemon square at the buffet on the titanic - the list of “more important things to do” encompasses fucking everything.
In my defense, I have admitted the border situation was a travesty or comparable to Japanese internment in almost every relevant post, including the opening of my original reply to you.
Actually I missed your response altogether. I’ve recently started using a linear thread display and I think I’m missing a lot of posts, but eventually I’ll get a hang of it.
But the answer will probably be “no”, because I don’t have a Senator on the ballot in 2020 and my Representative will probably run virtually unopposed. Again. The opposing representative candidate (Democrat) didn’t even have a platform in 2018, and nobody else ran in the Republican primary. The 2016 and 2014 Democratic candidate for representative omitted immigration from his platform. My state representative is up for reelection but immigration wasn’t an issue last time that job was up for grabs.
I highly doubt I’ll be voting for the incumbent president of the United States, but then again, my county is so red that my vote literally doesn’t matter in the general election. And I don’t think Mr. Trump will have any competition in the primaries.
You can call Dachau a concentration camp. Not all concentration camps are extermination camps, although this is sometimes the connotation. Also implied is forced labor, which was the case at Dachau but is not the case with our detention centers. Also implied is that most prisoners are prisoners of conscience or plain racism, which is not the justification with our detention centers. Also implied is that thousands of people are dying, summary execution or not, that being sent to a camp is a death sentence, which is not the case with our detention centers. These are the reasons I object to your comparison with even Dachau.
Things aren’t nearly bad as Dachau in 1933. Things aren’t even remotely approaching the horrors of Auschwitz. You could say we should drop the pretense of civility because the TSA is getting to the point where they systematically conduct penetrative rape. I’ve heard horror stories about sexual assault from TSA agents and I think it is a serious problem. But the TSA is not conducting systematic penetrative rape, and such a comparison is insensitive. So to do I think your comparison of asylum seekers’ detention centers with Nazi concentration camps is wildly inappropriate.
This is a thread for us to discuss hatred and vitriol and the state of America. You compared detention centers for asylum seekers to concentration camps, then said history could not be screaming any louder if we posted “Work Will Make You Free” above the gates. That is a direct reference to Auschwitz and Vernichtung durch Arbeit (extermination through labor) in particular - not gassing. We are nowhere near that level of evil. In my opinion your comparison is insensitive and your call to vitriol misinformed.
~Max
Not to derail the thread (although it’s probably irreparably derailed already) but aren’t both the abortion and migrant camps Holocaust comparisons both partially right in their own way?
Abortion: IF abortion = loss of a human life (as pro-lifers claim,) and 60 million lives have been lost in America by that logic, then what’s so unreasonable about Holocaust comparison?
Camps = if migrants are indeed being “concentrated” in camps, then what’s so unreasonable about the Holocaust concentration comparison?
If you are insulted when someone points out that the camps you support are torturing and killing people, like the ones being run in the US today, the moral solution is to stop supporting murder and torture, rather than to complain that someone pointing out the murder and torture you endorse is being ‘insulting’ by pointing it out. The fact that a number of people are significantly more bothered by ‘this completely accurate comparison hurts my feelings’ than ‘there are camps where parents and children are separated, people are held without trial or even charges for weeks or months, people are held without sufficient food or water in 100 degree heat, and armed guards prevent humanitarian aid to them’ says a lot.
Since that’s exactly what they do in the examples I provided, why are you not willing to outright call that comparison ‘inappropriate’ and ‘vitriolic’ the way that you do the comparison between literal concentration camps and historic German concentration camps? Why all of the hedging and claiming that there is a thin line?
Again, you’ve offered no actual justification for your claim that describing legal abortion as another Holocaust in America is not vitriolic and is appropriate, but that calling what you agree are literally and correctly called ‘concentration camps’ by that name is vitriolic and inappropriate. Just declaring that there is ‘a thin line’ is dodging the issue when you either refuse to specify what the line is, or state a definition of the ‘thin line’ that doesn’t actually distinguish the two cases like you do above.
Personally, I didn’t state that it was unreasonable in that sense, merely that it is vitriolic and has been repeated for a long time, longer than I think the ‘state of America’ being referred to in this thread. The idea that widespread vitriol is something recent when there is a long, well-documented history of making comparisons between a simple medical procedure and the holocaust by the right wing, and not just by a small lunatic fringe but by major religious figures like the Pope and major political figures like the President of the US (Ronald Reagan) is absurd, and that’s what I was pointing out and providing counterexamples to.
(I don’t believe pro-lifer’s claims that they actually care about human life or that they regard fetuses as human lives, and wouldn’t share the belief even if I did think they believed it, but that’s a discussion for another thread.)
Nope: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/04/17/us/immigrant-detention-forced-labor-lawsuit/index.html
Detainees at the Stewart Detention Center in south Georgia generally make between $1 and $4 a day for tasks such as preparing food, mopping floors and doing laundry, according to the lawsuit, which describes the practice as a “deprivation scheme” and alleges it’s a violation of human trafficking laws. Detainees who work double shifts can earn up to $8 a day.
Part of the scheme, according to the lawsuit: Depriving detainees of basic necessities like food, toothpaste, soap and toilet paper, so they have to work to pay for those items from the detention center’s commissary.
(Remember, “detainee” does not mean “criminal”.)
Let’s just say that while proving racist motivation is difficult (we only know the holocaust was an intentional attept to commit genocide because they arrested one of the participants for Treason before he could shred his copy of the documents related to it), I think you’re probably wrong on this one too. Nobody is making detention centers for canadian immigrants. Or european immigrants. The current administration has been unapologetically racist. I mean, did you miss the memo that we weren’t using the “protect american jobs” euphemism any more?
Yeah, we’re not there yet. Slave labor? Torture? Denial of basic resources? Imprisoning innocents with no promise of when they will be released and no due process? Widespread dehumanization of those being detained, up to and including “joking” about murdering them? We’re all there and a bag of chips.
But mass murder? No, things aren’t that bad.
Yet.
But every indication is that things are going to get worse. In fact, that’s kinda baked into the camp system. From that Esquire article that I really hope everyone in the thread has read by now:
“There’s this crystallization that happens,” Pitzer says. “The longer they’re there, the worse conditions get. That’s just a universal of camps. They’re overcrowded. We already know from reports that they don’t have enough beds for the numbers that they have. As you see mental health crises and contagious diseases begin to set in, they’ll work to manage the worst of it. [But] then there will be the ability to tag these people as diseased, even if we created [those conditions]. Then we, by creating the camps, try to turn that population into the false image that we [used] to put them in the camps to start with. Over time, the camps will turn those people into what Trump was already saying they are.”
Make no mistake: the conditions are in decline. When I went down to see the detention facility in McAllen, Texas, last summer at the height of the “zero-tolerance” policy that led inevitably to family separation, Border Patrol agents were by all appearances doing the very best they could with limited resources. That includes the facilities themselves, which at that point were mostly built—by the Clinton administration in the '90s—to house single adult males who were crossing the border illegally to find work. By that point, Border Patrol was already forced to use them to hold families and other asylum-seekers, and agents told me the situation was untenable. They lacked requisite staff with the training to care for young children, and overcrowding was already an issue.
But according to a report from Trump’s own government—specifically, the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security—the situation has deteriorated significantly even since then. The facilities are overcrowded, underfunded, and perhaps at a perilous inflection point. It found adult detainees are “being held in ‘standing-room-only conditions’ for days or weeks at a border patrol facility in Texas,” Reuters reports. But it gets worse.
(The article then goes on to discuss how, exactly, it gets worse. And boy, does it get worse. Pro tip: when you are regularly, as a matter of course, subjecting non-criminal detainees to torture, it’s less a matter of “shit hitting the fan” and more a matter of “a continuous stream of chunky diarrhea hitting a jet turbine”.)
There are extremely good reasons to believe it’s going to keep getting worse. I’ll keep on bringing them up. I don’t recall if you’ve responded to those reasons, and reviewing the recent posts in the thread I don’t really think you have. As bad as Dachau 1945? Hopefully not! You know what a good way to ensure they won’t get that bad? Stop running concentration camps.
Because abortion, like a great many other things that may lead to human death such as accidents, aging, self-defense, heart disease, etc. is not murder. It’s like how we could talk about deaths from suicide (tens of thousands every year!) as a “miniature holocaust” but don’t, because that would be stupid and offensive.
What a ridiculous tangent. Might as well call prisons concentration camps as well. Are conditions good? No. Should they be much better? Yes. But some blame needs to be directed at those breaking the law and those Americans helping and encouraging law breaking for political reasons.
If the comparison is about the fact that people are literally “concentrated”, as in population density, the comparison is fine. But usually a comparison to Holocaust concentration camps or Nazi concentration camps involves prisoners of conscience subject to summary execution or death by forced labor.
~Max
The person pointing at torture and murder might be wrong, in which case I would disagree on that course of action. That is why I defined vitriol as insulting and inappropriate. I also want to point out that I don’t support the camps on the border, but still find Budget Player Cadet’s [POST=21698023]post #243[/POST] to be vitriolic and misguided.
I am not “more bothered” by vitriol on a single forum post than the real life situation in asylum detention centers across the country. I am more bothered by vitriol in general than the real life situation in asylum detention centers across the country, and a variety of other issues. Why? Am I a gormless jerk? No, it is because I think vitriol is exactly what caused the immigration problem and further, vitriol blocks the path to a resolution.
You did not actually provide any examples, so I did not address them. You asked what I thought if a pro-lifer crossed the line, and my response was that if they crossed the line, “that would be vitriol”.
I think you misunderstand me. Comparing legal abortion with the Holocaust can be vitriolic, but it is not necessarily so. Calling asylum detention centers ‘concentration camps’ can be vitriolic, but it is not necessarily so. There is a line dividing vitriol from non-vitriol, and in [POST=21698023]post #243[/POST] the line was crossed.
The line is called good faith, specifically as soon as someone assumes another’s beliefs (motivation) in any but the most flattering way the line is crossed. To do so is both insulting and inappropriate, therefore vitriolic. If I were a better man, I would provide several quotes from prominent people stressing the importance of good faith in politics. Alas, I am woefully underread and unable to do so.
~Max
So in your mind, the problem of people being held without charges, tortured, killed, and separated from their families is caused by people objecting in too strenuous of terms to the camps. That’s an incredibly level of victim blaming and blame shifting, and it’s simply an absurd claim. The camps were built and run by the people who built and ran them, not in some sort of time traveling reverse of cause and effect by people who are complaining about them now.
Post #243 says nothing about beliefs or motivation (which are two different things), it talks only about people’s support for particular actions. So no, you still haven’t made a line. I believe that inferring people’s actual beliefs from their actions is a good thing so I certainly wouldn’t object to that, and motivations are irrelevant, since “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions”. Most people who do terrible things have or claim the highest reasons as their motivation.
…they are concentration camps. Its bad faith to argue otherwise.
"Insisting that the Holocaust was uniquely evil and can’t be compared to anything else is a ploy to place it outside of history & politics.
People who do this are trying to distract from the obvious parallels with the campaign of escalating dehumanization happening here and now.
And that effort - to use the memory of victims of white supremacy to shield the people in power who are currently enacting white supremacists policies from critique - is profoundly offensive."
- Leah Greenberg, https://twitter.com/Leahgreenb/status/1141027101681823744?s=19
Also, Mike Godwin (yes, that Godwin) thinks they’re concentration camps.
And, stealing this wholesale: “Yet” should not be the thing differentiating us from Nazis.
Yeah, politicians elected by the rich victimizing the rest of us in service of the rich.