The title of the OP makes the claim that Trump is running concentration camps. Unless you are a historian or a Holocaust expert, you should not be “weighing in” as you did. If you are a historian or a Holocaust expert, you will need to present some kind of reason why I should accept you as an authority.
Maybe you could get a mod to rephrase your title as a hypothetical - “If Trump Were Running Concentration Camps, What Effect Would That Have on His Re-election Chances?” or something like that.
I recognize how uncomfortable it can be to have someone challenge an unproven assertion, but that’s kind of how we roll hereabouts.
But you do you.
FWIW, I didn’t vote for Trump, but rhetoric about “Trump is a Nazi/Trump is running concentration camps/Trump is going to cancel the elections/Melania is changing her name to Eva” don’t generate much outrage in me. Unless “derisive snickers” count as outrage.
It’s a feature, not a bug. Just like child-separation – that was the point of the policy, to hurt families and children (for deterrent purposes). This is what the administration wants to do.
Over the course of the thread I have cited two historians, a journalist and author who is an expert on concentration camps, and several news pieces that cite many more. Most of these cites are in the OP, or in articles linked within the OP.
[ul]
[li]Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps [/li][li]Waitman Wade Beorn, a Holocaust and genocide studies historian and a lecturer at the University of Virginia[/li][li]Jonathan Hyslop, author of “The Invention of the Concentration Camp: Cuba, Southern Africa and the Philippines, 1896–1907,” and a professor of sociology and anthropology at Colgate University[/li][/ul]
I am not talking on my own authority. The (false) claim that I am shows that you have not read the thread, the OP, or even the first sentence in any meaningful way. The fact that I am relying largely on expert testimony is downright hard to miss.
(bolding mine)
I’m sure there’s a good joke about cultural appropriation in here somewhere.
OK, but “concentration camps” is still Godwinizing, and I still snicker. If these are concentration camps, jails are concentration camps, POWs are held in concentration camps, putting them up in a motel would be a concentration camp, etc.
What effect will it have on the election? Very little - nobody is going to be convinced by calling Trump a Nazi, again.
As things stand now, it will probably help him as much as it hurts.
We’ve taken the idea of a dualistic (dueling!) ideological framework (two party system, adversarial justice, good vs evil) just about as far as it can go. It makes for great drama, sure, and there are people who can get off on that, people who depend on it to profit in a superficial way, and people who can’t tell when they are beating a dead horse.
Continuing to use “us vs them” rhetoric to fight problems which are themselves rooted in an “us vs them” mindset will just dig deeper trenches for the status quo.
It would probably, in fact, better for both the camps, and the Trump opposition, to divorce the issues.
For the record, and for anyone talking about Godwin:
“Chris, I think they’re concentration camps. Keep in mind that one of their functions by design is to punish those individuals and families who are detained. So even the “charged” term is appropriate.”
This thread is about the electoral ramifications of the “concentration camps” so what the majority of your fellow citizens think is rather the point, not your personal preference.
Yeah, it would be like me starting a thread entitled “Why are Liberals Destroying America?” and getting pissed that people were claiming that they really weren’t and demanding that because it is my thread that people stop debating whether liberals are destroying America and simply focus on why they are destroying America. :rolleyes::rolleyes:
ETA: And yes, I don’t care that what the British did in the Boer War were called concentration camps. That term from 1945 until the end of time will always mean “what Hitler did.” The meaning has changed.
Wikipedia is obviously not the end-all be-all of facts, especially for current events, but it’s notable that Wikipedia considers the US migrant camps to be concentration camps.
It occurs to me that they hang on in the hopes that the vast majority of Americans, being good and humane people, will not stand for this when they hear the truth. They just pray they can hang on until that happens.
Our camps seem to be missing this part: “the deliberate policy of extermination through labor in many of the camps was designed to ensure that the inmates would die of starvation, untreated disease and summary executions within set periods of time”
which is what most people think of when you say “concentration camps”.
I don’t know if that’s what most people think of – if so, hopefully most people can be educated as to the history of concentration camps. Maybe discussions like this could be part of it.
I don’t the British were trying* to kill Boers in their concentration camps, nor the Spanish trying to kill Cubans in their concentration camps, if for no other reason than it’s hard to extract crops from land you intend to keep governing if you’ve killed off all the farmers & the townspeople that service them. The crappy conditions were the result of mismanagement and indifference, not intent. Unlike the concentration camps being discussed, as Trump has pretty much said he’s trying to deter refugees. :mad:
*What the phrase “designed to ensure” tends to mean.
Yes, that is what they think of. Since 1945, that has been the definition of “concentration camp”. What types of camps that were called “concentration camps” before 1945 is irrelevant.
That is why when you tell people “They are concentration camps!” and those people don’t see “the deliberate policy of extermination through labor…designed to ensure that the inmates would die of starvation, untreated disease and summary executions within set periods of time”, those people think you are vastly overstating the conditions at those places and will then subsequently discard much of what you say about them.
I personally think the conditions should be better, but I don’t consider them “concentration camps” as used since 1945. But I’m smart and won’t argue about terminology when the actual conditions at the places is what is important. But, a lot of people are dumb. At least 60,000,000 people in this country are dumb, and will stop listening when you say “concentration camp”
Even if you’re right, that’s fine if they’re not listening for now. It took years for the right wing spin masters to successfully hang things like “big government” on the Democratic party. It might take years to permanently mark the GOP as the party of concentration camps and sexual assault. But it’s got to start somewhere.
The effect on his campaign will mostly be positive. Death camps would be even better for his numbers; legalizing the slaughter of foreigners by any white adult citizen would be best of all. The median US citizen is highly xenophobic, and the more brown folks his side can kill off, the further right that median is.
None of this justifies what CBP is doing. Morality is not merely a function of popularity. Anyone in public service needs to remember the difference.
I don’t the British were trying* to kill Boers in their concentration camps, nor the Spanish trying to kill Cubans in their concentration camps, if for no other reason than it’s hard to extract crops from land you intend to keep governing if you’ve killed off all the farmers & the townspeople that service them. The crappy conditions were the result of mismanagement and indifference, not intent. Unlike the concentration camps being discussed, as Trump has pretty much said he’s trying to deter refugees. :mad: