Building concentration camps on military bases will lead to the moral injury of American soldiers

boing
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Dachau was opened in 1934, for political opponents at first. The Nazis then added “normal” criminals, with the explicit purpose of humiliating the political prisoners. That was 1934, long before the pogrom and the invasion of Poland. They would march the prisoners from the train station to the concentration camp so that the locals could jeer and spit on them. From the very beginning, Dachau was supposed to be all about humiliation. It was also a work camp rather than a death camp, and also a school of sadism for the SS: all the nasty stuff like gas chambers were for schooling purposes in Dachau. And the locals? Up until 1945, they convinced themselves that the camp was a prison for criminal elements. It took the US Army forcing the locals to march by the crematorium and the bodies stacked like cordwood to shake them out of the turtle shell they had retreated into.

On a different note, I feel we have for far too long romanticised the military, and I say this as someone who spent three years in the Army. We have forgotten everything Vietnam taught us, I fear.

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We have Good Germans. The Best Germans. Believe me.

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We have reliable ways. It would honestly be very easy. But the Republicans are actively opposed to every single one of them, and the Democrats are opposed to most of them.

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All it takes are ordinary men.

https://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/12/books/the-men-who-pulled-the-triggers.html

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Dachau and Buchenwald were pretty much the templates and test beds for how to organise KLs.

As a side note: when they started to throw political opponents into the first camps, it was usually called Schutzhaft - protective care.

Eugen Kogon survived Buchenwald and wrote a book about it in 1946, Der SS-Staat. Das System der deutschen Konzentrationslager, Karl Alber, Munich (1946). 44. Auflage: Heyne, Munich (2006) ISBN 978-3-453-02978-1.

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By mid-1945 a lot of them miraculously discovered that they had been critical of the Nazis all along!

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I think we’ll see similar behavior in a few decades from now in the USA.

Right now? How a about nearly two decades ago when the US introduced torture camps?

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Not all of them. Adding to your collection of links:

Even in retrospect Mayer’s subjects liked and admired Hitler. They saw him as someone who had “a feeling for masses of people” and spoke directly in opposition to the Versailles Treaty, to unemployment—to all aspects of the existing order. They applauded Hitler for his rejection of “the whole pack”—“all the parliamentary politicians and all the parliamentary parties”—and for his “cleanup of moral degenerates.” The bank clerk described Hitler as “a spellbinder, a natural orator. I think he was carried away from truth, even from truth, by his passion. Even so, he always believed what he said.”

[…]

The killing of six million Jews? Fake news. Four of Mayer’s subjects insisted that the only Jews taken to concentration camps were traitors to Germany, and that the rest were permitted to leave with their property or its fair market value. The bill collector agreed that the killing of the Jews “was wrong, unless they committed treason in wartime. And of course they did.” He added that “some say it happened and some say it didn’t,” and that you “can show me pictures of skulls…but that doesn’t prove it.” In any case, “Hitler had nothing to do with it.” The tailor spoke similarly: “If it happened, it was wrong. But I don’t believe it happened.”

But on the whole Germans forever after that rejected the kind of bigoted far-right ultra-nationalist politics that had brought them so much disaster. That’s because, as some of our commenters will be glad to tell you, Germans are so much wiser and better than Americ…wait, what’s that I hear?

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An alternate reading is that if fewer people signed up we wouldn’t have the manpower for perpetual war in a bunch of countries. You might be signing up to protect your country, but you are definitely signing up for all of our recreational wars.

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The problem with the idea of finding those solutions first is that the military is a giant budget black hole. Nothing is financially feasible with our current military.

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no good will come of any of this

Roger That!

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I guess whole books could and have been written about who knew what and when in terms of the Nazi concentration camps. But we know each of those millions of narratives must have passed through three stages at varying times:

  1. “Hitler? Who’s that?”
  2. “I’m starting to suspect [or should suspect] that what’s happening is worse than I can justify”
  3. [Nuremberg trials]

If you’re willing to blow up government buildings at stage 1, you’re Tim McVeigh. If you’re not willing to blow up government buildings at stage 3, you’re Adolf Eichmann. So, clearly, we all need to be paying a lot of attention to stage 2. Especially if you’re in the “can’t happen here” camp, because the longer you hold onto that idea, the faster you will have to rethink your worldview if you want to stay on the right side of history.

If the TGOP regime does end as badly as many of us fear, we are well past the point where anyone can claim not to have seen the warning signs. Even if you still think it’s OK to be a Republican voter, it’s definitely not OK to dismiss the danger out of hand. The stakes are high enough that yes, you can fucking afford to spend half an hour thinking about questions that make you uncomfortable. If, like @Loudoun_hillbilly, your argument is “these camps aren’t actual death camps [yet]”, well, by the time you learn that there are death camps, people will be dead, and it’s extremely unlikely you will be able to do anything to stop it. It’s like saying “there’s no need to slow down, we haven’t even hit the tree yet”.

We still don’t know for certain that America will ever reach the Nuremberg stage. That it’s even a serious question ought to rule out anyone voting Republican for a generation; we’ll see how that goes. But with the current direction of travel, any vaguely ethical person needs to be on alert. What will it look like, from your point of view, if the line is crossed? Fox News will not tell you, and neither will CNN. They’ll report some atrocity, and try to frame it like this is a normal thing that happens, and it will be down to you to say “no, this is not ok”. Don’t wait for it to be gas chambers or journalists pushed out of helicopters; that will be too late.

Protip: If the regime is putting children in cages, and overtly gloating about it, that is as clear a signpost as you are going to get before this road reaches a destination you don’t want to see.

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kraftwerk

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I wonder who is our own Hannah Arendt for today?

hannah-arendt

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Its far worse. Its a black hole creating debt which is destroying the rest of the country in the process

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gitmo has a posse

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Thank you - and this is why what trump is doing is not acceptable on any level. The only sane and patriotic response is outrage.

The GOP may feel cozy over all this now, but there will be justice. No politics as usual following this. The responsible parties will be punished.

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Well said.

Like it or not, we are here. Its time to sound the alarm.

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The German citizens thought the rumors that people were being killed at the camps was fake news.

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