Europe can’t do much better. Borders are closed, admissible quotas of immgrants and asylum seekers are reduced, if not stopped altogether, and refugees end up mostly in Greece. Where they stay. Mostly in camps where conditions aren’t any better than these, and often much worse. The UK’s response to asylum seekers is absolutely horrifying, and has been this way for decades.
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I’m ashamed that this was news to me.
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Do you mean US immigration law, that requires asylum seekers to be present in the United States prior to applying for asylum? Or the international law that requires countries to provide a reasonable mechanism for refugees to apply for asylum?
Because if you go by both the letter of the law and the intent, it is the Trump administration that is failing to “FUCKING OBEY THE LAW.”
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HuffPost reported Friday that lawyers had to intervene to force officials to hospitalize four toddlers, all under 3 years old, who were so sick that some refused to eat. One 2-year-old was “completely unresponsive” and her eyes had rolled back in her head. All of the children were being held at the Ursula processing center in McAllen.
The toddlers had fevers, coughs, diarrhea, and were vomiting, the attorneys told the news site.
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Not relevant to the discussion at hand. But thanks.
#logicalfallacy
In what way? If @Fred_Cairns had said, “This is no worse than what’s happening in Europe, why all the fuss?”, you’d have a point. But the way I read it, they’re saying “What’s happening in America is awful. Here are some similarly awful things happening in Europe, which for some reason are flying under the radar, and deserve a similar level of scrutiny.”
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Guards raping little children.
Torture.
Tiny graves in the desert.
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He missed out LGBTQ or disabled, but it’s otherwise depressingly correct.
Already happening and we know about it.
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The USA is at stage 7, and experimenting with stage 8.
Trump doesn’t need to be impeached, he needs to be taken to the court in Den Haag.
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I will try to explain why I still am still not willing to call the US internment camps “concentration camps”.
I read the article, and tried to take the author’s view.
I can understand the intention, and I still feel highly uncomfortable with their choice.
The following statements taken together make it clear that the author knows what they are doing.
However, the staggering death toll of the Nazi extermination camp system—which was created mid-war and stood almost entirely separate from the concentration camps in existence since 1933—led to another result: a strange kind of erasure. In the decades that followed World War II, the term “concentration camp” came to stand only for Auschwitz and other extermination camps. It was no longer applied to the kind of extrajudicial detention it had denoted for generations. The many earlier camps that had made the rise of Auschwitz possible largely vanished from public memory.
Although the Nazi camps [in 1940] were already punitive, order-obsessed monstrosities, the wartime overcrowding that would soon overtake them had not yet made daily life a thing of constant suffering and squalor. The death camps were still two years away.
How much more historical awareness do we really need?
I do not think I am quoting this out of context, and I do think that it is clear that they draw a direct line from the early concentration camps in Nazi Germany to the current US internment camps.
I think @Yri got the same idea:
The point I am trying to make is that despite the situation in the current camps, historical awareness is exactly why I personally disagree on drawing a direct comparison and would discourage everyone doing this.
I am against calling the current camps concentration camps because, not despite being aware of historical facts. I know the author has done their research, referring to 1942 (the Wannsee conference). But I also know that from the very beginning, the Nazis were intending to “exterminate” “unworthy lives”, prominently amongst them the Jewish people. One can historically distinguish between several phases of concentration camps under Nazi reign, and the comparison of today’s camps with the earliest phase would indeed show similarities. One can also distinguish between extermination camps and concentration camps, but KZs like Mauthausen are an example of the horror of Vernichtung durch Arbeit which make this distinction rather impossible in my view. I argue that, in many cases of discussions, those distinctions within the system of KZs partly obscures the fact that they were an industrial system for the destruction and obliteration of human beings, and in fact a whole people. In the public perception, KZs are rightly synonymous with Nazi extermination camps. They cannot be thought without one another. Historians must differentiate. The public opinion should, if informed. But I, personally, draw the line at comparing current camps with the situation during Nazi reign.
The current camps are neofascist abominations, a place where people die. I do believe it will get worse. But I do also distinguish between the Nazis and the neo-fascists.
The conditions in, e.g., Clint even made news on this side of the Atlantic. But make no mistake: the Nazis were a different kind of evil. As of May 1933, KZs became extrajudical areas. The SS were in charge of them. You can, by the way, distinguish between different ‘brands’ of the SS, as you can with Nazi camps Some were worse than others. The Division Totenkopf of the Waffen-SS, which is synonymous with the total horror of the war, were as far as I remember directly recruited from the Wachschutz of the KZs formed since May 1933.
Based on the hindsight we’ve got after the Nuremberg trials and more than 70 years of research and reflection, we can see the horror developing, but we can also clearly see that from the very beginning, the full scale of de-humanisation, extrajudical killings, and complete obliteration under the premise of industrial-scale exploitation was not only a vague possibility, but inherent and ingrained in Nazi ideology.
I do believe, based on my admittedly biased and incomplete knowledge of history as well as current events, that the term concentration camp should not be used because it minimises the horror of the Nazi regime, and respectively over-emphasises the evil of, e.g., the Trump administration. @Wanderfound, e.g., will
probably disagreee when I say that I don’t believe the US are a fascist state already. The gouvernment is led by neo-fascists, but it is not an official doctrine and while US democracy is alien and weird and shitty and biased and a lot of other negative attributes, it is still a democracy. The rule of law might be in danger, butbit is still in reach. And people can vote Trump out. Hope never dies.
One thing that @gracchus wrote resonates strongly with me.
Shit. I do believe you, but I can’t make those assholes my baseline.
One last thing:
I understand your point and your anger. However, I think this is much more then wordplay, as you seem to suggest. I hope my wall of text contains some argument which, at least, make that clear. We don’t have to agree. But for me, this is much more than wordplay. Even if I would think this is purely a question of language, I would have to argue language does matters. Klemperer’s LTI comes to mind to support that point.
I might well be proved wrong, and the US public might willingly support a genocide, as the Germans did. I then might look back on my argument and strong feelings about this issue.
But today, now, I stand my opinion.
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Intersectionality. Racism and classism are not isolated issues; they’re nearly always related.
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I wish hindsight was not the only way you would believe, as that means the damage is already done.
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As you will have noticed, my assessment is based on hindsight. Historical awareness, for me, is clearly indicating that the Nazi KZs are a different thing than the current US internment camps.
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Book tip:
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I appreciate and respect your response. I would note that the current U.S. concentration camps aren’t that far off from the British Boer War ones that established the term: lots of deliberate neglect, sometimes leading to kids dying. It’s less about direct comparisons then noting where these kinds of camps, whatever one calls them, usually lead a country and what they indicate about its present character.
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