Coalition of WWII Japanese American internment camp survivors stage peaceful protest at immigrant detention facility on Texas border https://t.co/iZLmM5O0W8
— Nick Estes (@nick_w_estes) June 19, 2019
Thing is, I don’t think this is a power move — it’s the GOP’s frantic effort to appeal to worst elements of its Base by upping the public cruelty, because Trump’s lost his novelty and the economic impact of the GOP’s smash-and-grab is affecting too many ‘dependable’ GOP voters. It’s like offering fentanyl to a heroin addict in withdrawal… assuming the GOP oligarchs are fentanyl addicts already, and the junkie has the key to the drug safe.
I remember reading that, by the final months of World War II, Hitler’s staff was pulling desperately needed resources away from the production of weapons to keep the trains running to the death camps. We need to fight back, hard, but we shouldn’t let an unwarranted despair over Republican power deter our efforts.
What does them a tremendous disservice is fainting-couch rules for sanitizing discussions about a grotesque & criminal policy of taking asylees who’ve broken no laws by seeking asylum, stealing their children, & taking those not sent to concentration camps & putting them in cages https://t.co/RSufgg36E5
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) June 20, 2019
Maybe people SHOULD start talking about whether Border Patrol are like Nazis. They’re not as bad as Nazis, of course. But going even a tiny step in the direction of Nazis is not at all acceptable!
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) June 20, 2019
The current “debate” started, AFAICT, because Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez “decried the conditions of migrant detention facilities the administration is using to cope with a surge of border crossings and highlighted a decision to hold some children at an Oklahoma Army base that was used as an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II.” So Dick Cheney’s favorite daughter Liz — already “the No. 3 Republican in the House” — upheld her family’s proud tradition of inhumanity by pretending the Holocaust meant something more to her and her GOP associates than a rhetorical tool. Every Media Village Idiot (plus some quasi-liberal people who should’ve known better, like Chris Hayes) rushed to wallow in the quicksand…
.@aoc isn't expressing an opinion, she is stating a fact: Border detention centers *are* concentration camps. Trying to reject the label is not going to make the atrocity go away: https://t.co/SdFmfd3IaJ
— Annalisa Merelli (@missanabeem) June 18, 2019
/Children keep dying in the custody of an unaccountable government agency that has herded people deemed without rights into camps in the desert
"I would be very disturbed if someone were to compare what's happening here to anything."
— David Roth (@david_j_roth) June 18, 2019
Oh, good. Auschwitz and Holocaust are trending.
[throws phone in Potomac]— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) June 18, 2019
People policing the use of 'never again' are avoiding who Trump's camps are being built FOR. Asylum seekers fleeing murderous RW governments & the drug war. Many are indigenous, descended from survivors of genocide.
The comparisons to the past don't stop at mere mass detentions.
— Zeddy (@Zeddary) June 19, 2019
So, @chrislhayes invoked Goodwin's Law as a cowardly out from calling concentration camps what they are
…. and Goodwin himself logs on to disagree pic.twitter.com/hwh5GPazUw
— T. Fisher King (@T_FisherKing) June 19, 2019
Not going any deeper into Concentration Camp Twitter today, but the term originated to describe British tactics in the Boer War, and was later applied to Nazi tactics.
Problem with saying “internment camp” instead is that you remind people that Americans had them before.
— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) June 18, 2019
If using the correct English definition of a policy to accurately describe it triggers lots of people then the problem is the policy not the language. https://t.co/EruokBoziE
— Jon Walker (@JonWalkerDC) June 18, 2019
Every camp warehousing people en masse outside of the regular legal system starts the same way: it's the humane alternative and it's just temporary. The rest is history. Read @andreapitzer's One Long Night.
— Justin Miller (@justinjm1) June 18, 2019
Historians: Concentration camps are actually what they are
Journos: But it makes the right wing uncomfortable
Historians: Yea, I mean…it should
Journos: But it's a highly charged term
Historians: Right, that's the point
Journos: But it describes atrocities
Historians …
— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) June 18, 2019
If you're more offended by comparisons to the Holocaust than the treatment of migrants at the border, you're the reason we say "Never again."
— Elad Nehorai (@PopChassid) June 18, 2019
Mathguy
Priceless to see Godwin call Hayes to the carpet.
hells littlest angel
Is it okay to say, “Border Patrol. I hate these guys.”
skerry
@RAICESTEXAS
“The Trump administration argued in front of a Ninth Circuit panel Tuesday that the government is not required to give soap or toothbrushes to children apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border and can have them sleep on concrete floors in frigid, overcrowded cells,”
Trump admin tells incredulous appeals court panel that judge erred by insisting that ‘safe and sanitary’ conditions for detained immigrant children means they must have access to soap. Via @helenchristophi
link
plato
plato
Nazi begets a moderation?
plato
And fuck chris fucking hayes, who will gladly bring in nazis on his ‘show’ just to make his point.
James E Powell
I’m telling you, they really want to make sure Trump is re-elected. No other explanation makes as much sense.
Brachiator
I cannot express how moving this gesture is.
Omnes Omnibus
@plato: No, dumbass, too many links causes moderation. No one is persecuting you.
BR
@Brachiator:
I had the same reaction, and I generally don’t have that reaction to protests or political actions generally. It’s so moving in a time of such dark political news.
Plato
@Omnes Omnibus:
Idiot stalker. GFY.
Aleta
Osita Nwanevu @OsitaNwanevu
If you are in or know of an organization doing immigrant rights or deportation resistance work, reply and I’ll try to signal boost.
Many replies w/ links at the above link. Including a protest at Ft. Sill, OK.
Frankensteinbeck
@James E Powell:
They are, at best, privileged rich whites for whom the suffering of brown people is distant and the discomfort of their friends is real. Most of them are racists, find brown people scary, and have always flaunted that and their love of policies that hurt people they’ll never meet. Oh, and they absolutely cannot face the fact that Republicans are white supremacists. That would destroy their entire worldview. This is wholly consistent with media behavior for decades, where the question asked of every dead black man is “Was he a thug?”, the question asked of every Muslim is “Are you a terrorist?”, white supremacists are at worst ‘white nationalists’, and it was pushing the limits of acceptable discourse to describe any opposition to Obama as ‘racially charged’.
Doesn’t that explanation make perfect sense? It’s simple, clear, and fits a long history of observed behavior. Plus, it includes the testimony of insiders because ‘cult of savvy’ is how it looks up close to someone who absolutely does not want to face the idea that racism is a part of it.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
I always knew Hayes would go full-Broder the minute he became a multimillionaire with a corner office in Rockefeller Center
Ken_L
Lay off the Trumpkins. Remember their shrieks of protest when the Trump Administration said this?
“The (Chinese) Communist Party is using the security forces for mass imprisonment of Chinese Muslims in concentration camps,” Schriver told a Pentagon briefing during a broader discussion about China’s military, estimating that the number of detained Muslims could be “closer to 3 million citizens.”
Schriver, an assistant secretary of defense, defended his use of a term normally associated with Nazi Germany as appropriate, under the circumstances.
When asked by a reporter why he used the term, Schriver said that it was justified “given what we understand to be the magnitude of the detention, at least a million but likely closer to 3 million citizens out of a population of about 10 million.””So a very significant portion of the population, (given) what’s happening there, what the goals are of the Chinese government and their own public comments make that a very, I think, appropriate description,” he said.
Me neither.
LongHairedWeirdo
Apropos of nothing, I did some research into the freedom riders – the people who fought for the rights of Black US citizens to travel on flippin’ *buses* between states.
(If you’ve ever had to travel more than 400 or so miles on a bus, you know how much contempt I have for people trying to deny others that lousy experience!)
You know what one of the big controversies was? “Why can’t you nigg…, uh, NEEEEgROES chill about this? The USSR is kicking up a fuss, saying we can’t be a free nation if our citizens can’t even ride a flippin’ bus. YOU ARE MAKING US LOOK BAD!!!!!”
Seriously:”how *DARE* you complain about a real, honest-to-goodnessi, injustice, if we don’t want you to right now?”
How does that even make sense? How can a human being say that without their heart refusing to continue to supply such a defective brain with oxygen any longer?
Oh: “Concentration” in “Concentration Camps” refers to putting them into a smaller, more *concentrated/dedicated* area. It’s 100%, no questions asked, objectively, and truthfully, appropriate. And if you didn’t believe me already: Chris Hayes is saying I’m wrong. ’nuff said.
(I’ve been informed that I seem to be implying that Chris Hayes is a fucking idiot. So, just to clarify, let me state it it for the record: Chris Hayes is a fucking idiot.)
debbie
Concentration camps weren’t suddenly created. They were at the end of a long, slow process. Go back and see the isolated incidents of intimidation, demeaning, debasement, physical violence, and loss of human rights, and you’ll see we are in this same process.
I lived in NYC when people were bickering whether the Rawandan genocide could be called a Holocaust. The arguing over that, even whether they could use the word but not capitalize it, led to someone suggesting the word be trademarked for exclusive use by the Jewish community. We are a world of concentration camps waiting to happen.
Butch
Bret Stephens on Chuckles Toddler yesterday expressed the opinion that Democrats should get a spokeperson other than AOC so they have someone “who knows what she’s talking about.” That at least didn’t sit well with the other guests.
Procopius
@LongHairedWeirdo: Yes. We did the same thing in Vietnam, but there we called them New Villages. The idea was to “concentrate” the rural population in smaller areas, removed from their homes, to prevent them from providing help to their husbands, fathers, sons, cousins, who were opposed to the government. It received some publicity, but not much. I’m not sure about the Philippine Insurrection, whether we used them there or not.
gratuitous
The panic and shrieking by Trump supporters and sympathizers over calling concentration camps concentration camps suggests to me that calling concentration camps concentration camps is 100% accurate. And these masters of deceit know how damaging it is when their concentration camps are called concentration camps. It strips them of precious approval points, and Trump doesn’t have any to spare.
Don K
Let me see if I have this right – it’s completely outrageous to call the camps on the border “concentration camps”, because “Where are the ovens? There aren’t even any ovens!”, but it’s totes legit to say business owners who won’t provide products or services for LGBTQ couples are exactly like the Jews in Hitler’s Germany. Is that it?
the Conster
@Frankensteinbeck:
Every word of this is correct. Chris Hayes is the smug bro face of the banality of toxic white male supremacy as it is reflected back to us on our TVs day in and day out and which has normalized atrocities because they can’t see what they’ve all become.
Richard Guhl
My parents served in the American embassy in Berlin before the war. They heard and saw where all this ugliness led to up close and personal.
It starts with scapegoating, proceeds through dehumanization, adds sporadic violence, and then rounds people up in concentration camps. We can see that process at work in the behavior of the border guards.
But evidently, the worse offense for some is calling the places where refugees are treated with brutality, concentration camps.
Uncle Jeffy
Hmmmmm…… I thought Liz Cheney was No. 2
...now I try to be amused
@Mathguy:
It was like the Marshall McLuhan moment in Annie Hall.