Auschwitz wasn’t a death camp when it opened either. It was a POW camp in 1939, industrialized mass murder didn’t start until 1941 (per Wiki, I am not a scholar on this subject).
Regardless of what it may be called right now, doesn’t it make you uncomfortable that such a thing even exists? I know Jewish people aren’t at the top of Trump’s “first they came for the…” list but they are certainly on there somewhere.
Look, I’d love to be wrong. I’d love for it to just be another shitty jail in a country already full of shitty jails. But we’re dealing with the people who deployed the military domestically to respond to a riot that they started. We’re dealing with the President who just this past week said something openly antisemitic on television and pretended he had no idea what it meant. We’re only seven months into Trump’s term. Based on how things have gone so far, I can’t assume he’s going to just give up on the authoritarian dream, especially since he’s gotten away with so much already.
You know what’s good at making bodies disappear and/or discouraging searches for them? Alligators.
Then let’s put it to the test and have companies and officials attest that the camps will not be used for ‘free labor’:
The first action is simple. CEOs should now, this summer, this month, next week, sign a pledge not to use labor from concentration camps. It could be as simple as that: “On behalf of my firm I promise not to use labor from concentration camps nor to cooperate with any firm that does.”
Let’s get it on the record right now because when it does happen the rationale is going to be along the lines of, “Why shouldn’t they be made to pay for their detention?”
In fact, while the Nazi regime committed various incidences of murder of POWs, foreign detainees, and then ‘undesirables’ within Germany and German-occupied nations, it never had an organized plan for mass murder using concentration camps prior to the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, almost a decade after the Nazis took over the Germany government and replaced the Weimar Republic with the German Reich. All of this evolved as Nazi control over not just government and military but the daily affairs of German citizens increased to a virtually totalitarian degree. Jewish (and Roma and political) prisoners were originally used for forced labor doing construction on the Eastern Front, working in materiel factories and on the Aggregat program, and doing other menial labor tasks to the extent that the most strident objections to the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” was the matter of replacing Jewish forced laborers with others.
As noted, Auschwitz wasn’t a “death camp” to start with either. But how do you think locking up people (again - without due process or cause in many cases) in overcrowded, poorly-built facility in the middle of a Florida swamp in inhumane conditions and virtually no oversight is going to end up? Especially given the vast expansion in ICE numbers and powers?
The Joni Ernst argument that “hey, everyone dies” does not change the fact that there was no legitimate need for these people to.
You do realize that the place being a torture camp is a feature for the magaflatearthers, don’t you? They relish in their fantasies about what can happen there and they absolve themselves by declaring that he and the other deportees deserve it “because they broke the law”. Yeah, they committed misdemeanors. And let’s not pretend they care about people breaking the law. If they did, they wouldn’t support someone with 34 felony convictions. They relish in this fantasy and reality because, quite simply, they are bigots.
I’m in the Sacramento area and on Sunday, I saw my first Homeland Security type vehicle. The driver was driving somewhat aggressively but didn’t appear to actually be chasing anyone down. I couldn’t read the entire message but “Protecting Our Homeland” was prominent.
A couple weeks ago I might have said the same, except this person was driving aggressively .. on an electric bicycle on the sidewalk. While wearing an ICE cap. I can’t think of a use case in which one would use an electric bike to monitor things, especially since this was in the middle of the suburbs.
So my best guess is that he lost his license for some reason or another, and thus can’t work for ICE and was simply cosplaying.
Of course, if Obama ran a death camp then that means the Democratic party is OK with death camps and has overseen them in the past, which means both sides are basically the same and it doesn’t matter who you vote for.
And that’s the problem with hyperbole or using inaccurate language. Although I still think Gitmo will forever be a stain on Obama’s legacy.
Exactly. This whole gotcha of “your guy did it, too” doesn’t make any of it OK. Gitmo was a total travesty of justice. Oh, they’re not POWs or war criminals, but they’re so dangerous we can’t release them, but we also don’t have evidence to convict them of anything. So we’ll just hold them for a decade or two and occasionally torture them, then quietly let them go home when people have stopped paying attention.
Some of us think that kidnapping people and sending them to prisons to undergo torture is wrong, whether those people are in the US or in a different country, whether the words used to describe it are precise or exaggerated. It’s wrong when incarcerated people die whether it’s from torture and neglect or mass executions.
What the fuck is wrong with the people who’s biggest problem with these places is the name used to refer to them?
No, that means Obama fucked up big time by not stopping it his first day in office. Sorry, Mr President that it’s hard to figure out what to do with these people, maybe go back to being a community organizer if you’re not up to it.
And yes, Democrats were extremely complicit in all of the actions that led to people ending up in Gitmo. Doesn’t mean they’re OK with what the current regime is doing now, but it would be real nice if the Democrats could figure out ways to fight it other than forcing a vote out of committee, or whatever parliamentary action they’ve claimed to taken.
“Let’s just argue about calling them ‘death camps’ until they meet our definition of a death camp, and then we can start working on getting rid of them.”
