That’s one important difference. But the causality runs the other way.
Trump, et al, have told us that the goal is to separate take separate the families, to take the children from the parents, in order to torment them in the hope that this will dissuade further immigration. Prosecuting the parents is the MEANS to the END of psychological torture.
It is not the case that they decided to prosecute, and oh no that means the children get taken. They decided to make the parents suffer, and prosecuting allows them to take the children hostage.
It is as if we never learned out lesson by putting Japanese-Americans in concentration camps. Future historians will judge us harshly for imprisoning children for ethnically divisive politics.
It’s such a typical Trump policy - it’s awful, hastily implemented, not fully thought out, and the result is this chaotic nightmare of human rights abuse. They keep doing this, over and over.
We also can’t forget the role of “performative cruelty” in anything Trump does. That is, cruelty inflicted purely for the purpose of delighting his supporters. It doesn’t have to have any other purpose. (Though in this case, it’s pulling double duty.)
I was just thinking that this is a country that’s never learned our lessons from any of the abuses we’ve committed. Native American genocide and “boarding schools;” slavery (and its effective continuation in reconstruction South); Northern segregation, police racism and systemic white supremacy; Japanese-American concentration camps; etc. At best, there was a weak cultural response of “well, maybe we shouldn’t have done that,” but no real reckoning that other countries have had to face over their atrocities.
i would edit the statement above by adding the following where the ** is:
“who never gave a moment’s thought to examining that privilege and looking beyond it”
because despite my being a highly partisan liberal democrat as well as a white, middle aged, upper middle class man i’ve never clung to the illusion that reality was other than deliberately miserable for enormous swaths of americans. i don’t want to sound like some kind of a “not all men” whiner but i DO know the difference between maggots and macaroni.
Makes sense, at a glace that’s very much the Venezuelan flag. Figured i was either missing something or was an incorrect thumbnail so i figured i’d ask.
Apparently you missed the article Wanderfound included. Yes, there were “concentration camps”, but at least one parent was kept with the children, I guess.
Yes, Obama (and Hillary) have their own sins to be judged by history; pretending otherwise won’t change that one iota. This is what a mashup of neoliberalism and neoconservatism brings, that simple.
