A large part of my education in Film & Media Studies was concerning propaganda and subterfuge. German cinema, Russian cinema, even some Black African cinema of the Apartheid. Misdirection , stonewalling and psychological camouflage are real things.
If you haven’t seen it, I recommend a video thesis by one of my former guest professors, the late Harun Farocki, called (in English) Images of the World and the Inscription of War, if you can find a copy.
Just to be clear: the very first person to do that, and to insist on doing that, was Liz Cheney. She, like yourself and other people who jump to conclusions, keep inserting “nazi” into this equation.
This is about concentration camps, yes. That’s exactly, by definition, what the border camps are. Camps that legal immigrants seeking asylum are being put into. They are obeying the “fucking law” and being rewarded by being separated from their families and put into actual, no-joke concentration camps.
If you want to compare them to Nazis, like Liz Cheney did, feel free.
And to clarify further, I don’t see the endgame of these camps as extermination camps as the Nazis did. I have trouble believing they will end up with gas chambers and ovens, but what I do see is shitty camps full of death and disease and dehumanization and even torture - don’t forget Abu Ghraib - to an even greater extent than they are now, and that is a blight on our society’s soul that will be very hard to atone for.
Here is the main issue…extremely disturbing things are happening in both our collective consciousness and physically at the border, and for many decades, in the source countries where the USA went over to stir up political trouble.
Yet the neo-liberal and conservative elements who stand to gain from this problem welcome a debate over semantics. They pretend not to, but they do.
It’s a distraction, and extremely reductive.
Whenever this comes up, I see a lot of screaming on social media from well-meaning leftists warning that the gas chambers and ovens are coming any day now, and that the clear next step will be to round up all hispanics, all trans people, all gay people, anyone not WASP, etc.
The real, present issue of putting legal immigrants into cages is horrific enough that inventing imaginary holocausts is a selfish, self-serving distraction as well.
The endgame is more of what we’re seeing right now in these camps: overcrowding, denial of necessities of, inadequate food, denial of medical care, denial of proper shelter from the elements, separation of families. This is the same endgame that was present in the original Boer concentration camps, at the Soviet gulags and, yes, at the less “advanced” Nazi camps (typhus was as effective a killer as Zyklon B was).
As a right-wing populist politician in a recent TV drama puts it, camps like this are mainly about “letting nature take its course”. No gas chambers needed. Also, since modern fascists are playing a long game, no mass round-ups needed, either: they fully expect that the camps will be waiting when your number finally comes up.
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