Just in case anyone was wondering what it was like to be a German in the late 30s this is it.
I’d say we’re on a different wedge, adjacent to the death camp wedge, and further along than the tip.
People will start dying at these camps, for sure. But I think the administration will try to avoid it. It’s not 1941 anymore and piles of bodies on social media are hard to ignore.
Trump et al are taking lessons from Putin and other modern dictators. Russia doesn’t have death camps either. They do have political prisoners that they ship off to miserable prisons, though. And political assassinations. And a war in which they can send conscripts off to die. I see all of these things in our future.
With mass deportations + the fear the administration is instilling in the populations it considers undesirable, I don’t think death camps would ever be necessary. Self-deportations are ramping up. Lots of liberals are looking for a way out. They don’t need to actually kill us all, just get enough of us out of the way and quiet for them to never lose power. And that’s already started.
Trump, MAGA, and the current incarnation of the Republican party have it so much easier than the modern-day political left does.
We question, we challenge, we argue, we have protracted and nuanced debates. We’re cynical, fractured, skeptical, logical, intellectually curious, and have a keen grasp of no end of relevant history to provide critical context.
The MAGA world just signs up, lines up, joins up, shuts up, suits up, and ammo’s up behind their Dear Leader.
Demagoguery 101. It hasn’t been done any better in my lifetime.
The everglades camp is the new Siberia. Or very much like North Korean ‘prisons’ where people kill and eat lizards to survive. If those aren’t death camps, there is nothing more to talk about.
This is the most likely outcome.
And I think it’s worth remembering that hyperbole about Trump has mostly seemed to benefit him in the past, as it serves as an excuse for dismissing legitimate criticism, and has a ‘boy who cried wolf’ effect. If most people understand ‘death camps’ as extermination camps, and ‘genocide’ as slaughtering an ethnic (or religious etc) group, it’s better to reserve the terms for those meanings, or make it very clear what specifically you mean.
This isn’t fair, but life isn’t fair.
I disagree - I think they want certain types of people gone, and I think they don’t want to be bothered with due process - but I think they would be fine if those people just left on their own . I’m pretty sure that’s actually the goal of the Salvadoran prisons and South Sudan- and I absolutely do not believe the administration will stop anyone from leaving on their own.
It really is. Killing someone by depraved indifference is still killing them.
As we’ve seen at the El Salvador camp, and the administration’s reaction to the reports of what’s going on there?
I’m not sure what you’re objecting to. I think the Administration will do the bare minimum to keep the body count hand-waveable. That’s sorta what they’ve established with El Salvador. Have people deported there died? Has the number reached a point where it’s causing more trouble for them than it’s worth?
For the people arguing over the term Death Camps, is Gulag a more acceptable term?
No one knows. This administration has thrown up their hands and claimed ignorance.
In before: ‘Gulags are forced labor camps, no one is being forced to work so, no.’
Thanks for saying so I didn’t have to. Isn’t great how accuracy so unrewarding that you have to dress it up as a joke? Hahaha.
Somewhere Orwell is puzzled, he thought they take away words so there would be no word to describe things. Turns out, it’s the opposite, we have so many words that we have folks rejecting descriptive words because the thing being described isn’t an exact match for the current usage and definition.
Now, the argument on what to call the extrajudicial detention camps does seem boring to me. Even more boring than this nothingburger of a completely benign administration. What was I worrying about in the first place!
Generously, it’s a detention center. Less generously, it’s a concentration camp. In either case not a death camp.
These are all good points.
You may well be right that they’ll keep this at a level they can deny. Just the occasional “she was trying to escape and guards had to shoot, don’t listen to the fake news that it appears she died as a result of months of sustained abuse”.
And, as we’ve seen, MAGA own or have enfeebled enough of the media that they can say anyone is an MS-13 mastermind general, so not enough people will care about the lack of due process for putting people in prison in the first place.
I will say though that if all this comes to pass and Trump is still alive and has control of the GOP in 2028…all bets are off. I don’t think it’s implausible that they would go to the next level at that point.
I don’t know how you’d ever be bored, when you have voices in your head rambling about “completely benign administrations”.
Wow
Woosh…
You’re about two centuries too late. Manifest destiny is sooooo 19th century!
“America will be terrific!”