But don't call them concentration camps

[SkepticThinker]

Who says the administration doesn’t want to provide them? The judge in the case acknowledged the administration was trying to provide them but there were sometimes temporary overcrowding conditions happening.

So if things are so terrible, how come illegal aliens are literally climbing walls to get into the detention centers? And how come they don’t ask voluntarily to immediately leave to go home, as they are free to do so? Because this is a ginned up fake controversy, that’s why.

Maybe because the places where they've desperately fled from are worse? Has that not occurred to you?

 

[SkepticThinker]

Agreed. Calling Americans Nazis waters down the horrors of Nazi Germany. Same for slinging around the worlds "fascist", "socialist" and "racist" for everything in which they disagree. Overusing such terms and imagery waters down the actual wrongs committed by those who actually were fascists, socialists and racists.

Example: Claiming the US has concentration camps on the border which many see as detention centers for illegal aliens caught within out borders may cause those same people to think that real concentrations camps like we did with the Japanese AKA American citizens, weren't so bad. If so, then they might think that the Nazi concentration camps for Gypsies, Soviets, homosexuals, mentally retarded and, yes, Jews, weren't so bad either. It's a dangerous path but one often used by political zealots, anti-Americans and other extremists.

"One side always argues that nothing can be as bad as the Holocaust, therefore nothing can be compared to it; the other argues that the cautionary lesson of history can be learned only by acknowledging the similarities between now and then.

But the argument is really about how we perceive history, ourselves, and ourselves in history. We learn to think of history as something that has already happened, to other people. Our own moment, filled as it is with minutiae destined to be forgotten, always looks smaller in comparison. As for history, the greater the event, the more mythologized it becomes. Despite our best intentions, the myth becomes a caricature of sorts. Hitler, or Stalin, comes to look like a two-dimensional villain—someone whom contemporaries could not have seen as a human being. The Holocaust, or the Gulag, are such monstrous events that the very idea of rendering them in any sort of gray scale seems monstrous, too. This has the effect of making them, essentially, unimaginable. In crafting the story of something that should never have been allowed to happen, we forge the story of something that couldn’t possibly have happened. Or, to use a phrase only slightly out of context, something that can’t happen here.

A logical fallacy becomes inevitable. If this can’t happen, then the thing that is happening is not it. What we see in real life, or at least on television, can’t possibly be the same monstrous phenomenon that we have collectively decided is unimaginable. I have had many conversations about this in Russia. People who know Vladimir Putin and his inner circle have often told me that they are not the monsters that I and others have described. Yes, they have overseen assassinations, imprisonments, and wars, but they are not thoroughly terrible, my interlocutors have claimed—they are not like Stalin and his henchmen. In other words, they are not the monsters of our collective historical imagination. They are today’s flesh-and-blood monsters, and this makes them seem somehow less monstrous."

The Unimaginable Reality of American Concentration Camps

 

[SkepticThinker]

One loses freedom after committing a crime.

What crime have they committed?

 

[Revoltingest]

I just read an interesting article on the subject, that speaks to what you've touched on here.

The Unimaginable Reality of American Concentration Camps

I notice something that is also interesting.
Before Trump was in office, Obama had "detention centers" too.
And the very same source you linked criticized them....
Opinion | Mr. Obama’s Dubious Detention Centers

One difference is that during Obama's reign, they were "detention centers".
Only when Trump took office did they become "concentration camps".
If the former name was cromulent, why the change?
Moreover, the NYT makes the comparison between Trump's camps & Nazis,
but they never even remotely linked Obama with Nazis.
I suspect that it's just possible that the NYT (who loathe Trump), aren't
concerned so much with accurate denotation as agenda driven connotation.
Their proffered justification for the new terminology is dishonest.

So perhaps the argument should be about whose "concentration camps"
were worse....Trump's or Obama's?

 

[SkepticThinker]

The Third Reich wasn't equal to the Third Reich -- in 1933.
I see many of the same psychosocial and economic forces at play today, here in the US, and even in Europe.
Frog in a saucepan?

We've become an oligarchy. Even X-President Carter has acknowleged this.
Mussolini equated Fascism with oligarchy: "the union of state and corporate power."
Britt pointed to a 14 point correspondence way back in '03. The 14 Characteristics of Fascism, by Lawrence Britt, Spring 2003

With Everything Changing How Can We Know the Consequences?

"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it - please try to believe me - unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, "regretted," that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these "little measures" that no "patriotic German" could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head."
Milton Meyer. They Thought They Were Free. p.168. Bolding mine.


It can happen here. Sweeping the early symptoms under the rug will only hasten the transition.

Elie Wiesel said the same thing in his book, Night.

 

[Revoltingest]

What crime have they committed?

Is It a Crime to Enter the U.S. Illegally?
Excerpted....
Whether it’s by crossing the U.S. border with a "coyote" or buying a fake U.S. passport, a foreign national who enters the U.S. illegally can be both convicted of a crime and held responsible for a civil violation under the U.S. immigration laws. Illegal entry also carries consequences for anyone who might later attempt to apply for a green card or other immigration benefit.

The penalties and consequences get progressively more severe if a person enters illegally more than once, or enters illegally after an order of removal (deportation) or after having been convicted of an aggravated felony.

What Is Illegal Entry to the U.S.?
The immigration law actually uses the term "improper entry," which has a broad meaning. It’s more than just slipping across the U.S. border at an unguarded point. Improper entry can include:

• entering or attempting to enter the United States at any time or place other than one designated by U.S. immigration officers (in other words, away from a border inspection point or other port of entry)
• eluding examination or inspection by U.S. immigration officers (people have tried everything from digging tunnels to hiding in the trunk of a friend’s car)
• attempting to enter or obtain entry to the United States by a willfully false or misleading representation or willful concealment of a material fact (which might include, for example, lying on a visa application or buying a false green card or other entry document).

(See Title 8, Section 1325 of the U.S. Code (U.S.C.), or Section 275 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (I.N.A.) for the exact statutory language - www.uscis.gov/laws/immigration-and-nationality-act.)

Criminal Penalties for Improper Entry to the U.S.
For the first improper entry offense, the person can be fined (as a criminal penalty), or imprisoned for up to six months, or both.

For a subsequent offense, the person can be fined or imprisoned for up to two years, or both. (See 8 U.S.C. Section 1325, I.N.A. Section 275.)

 

[Road Warrior]

"One side always argues that nothing can be as bad as the Holocaust, therefore nothing can be compared to it; the other argues that the cautionary lesson of history can be learned only by acknowledging the similarities between now and then.

But the argument is really about how we perceive history, ourselves, and ourselves in history. We learn to think of history as something that has already happened, to other people. Our own moment, filled as it is with minutiae destined to be forgotten, always looks smaller in comparison. As for history, the greater the event, the more mythologized it becomes. Despite our best intentions, the myth becomes a caricature of sorts. Hitler, or Stalin, comes to look like a two-dimensional villain—someone whom contemporaries could not have seen as a human being. The Holocaust, or the Gulag, are such monstrous events that the very idea of rendering them in any sort of gray scale seems monstrous, too. This has the effect of making them, essentially, unimaginable. In crafting the story of something that should never have been allowed to happen, we forge the story of something that couldn’t possibly have happened. Or, to use a phrase only slightly out of context, something that can’t happen here.

A logical fallacy becomes inevitable. If this can’t happen, then the thing that ishappening is not it. What we see in real life, or at least on television, can’t possibly be the same monstrous phenomenon that we have collectively decided is unimaginable. I have had many conversations about this in Russia. People who know Vladimir Putin and his inner circle have often told me that they are not the monsters that I and others have described. Yes, they have overseen assassinations, imprisonments, and wars, but they are not thoroughly terrible, my interlocutors have claimed—they are not like Stalin and his henchmen. In other words, they are not the monsters of our collective historical imagination. They are today’s flesh-and-blood monsters, and this makes them seem somehow less monstrous."

The Unimaginable Reality of American Concentration Camps

I do not know of any dictator, despot or other evil leader who thought they were evil. Hitler loved his dog Blonde until he used her to test the suicide pills.

There's a clear difference between remembering history (kudos to George Santayana) and equating something to history. The latter of which is what is being done here. It's one thing to ask "Are we on the path to creating concentration camps in the US like we did with Americans who were of Japanese descent or as Hitler did with 'undesirables" like homosexuals, gypsies and Jews?" but it's another thing to say "The US has concentration camps".

 

[SkepticThinker]

Yeah of course, isn't that obvious. As long as it's not straw men, it's totally fine.

Alternatively, it might be morally objectionable to lessen the degree of atrociousness of a particular atrocity by comparing it to another atrocity that in no way hits in the same ball park. There's a reason why we don't call school shooters "bullies". I think we can all agree that there is something wrong happening here. But you're degrading the severity of the Nazi and other similarly severe concentration camp and the people who went through it, by comparing it to these immigrant camps. 'They weren't given toiletries' vs. 'they were made into toiletries'. If you can't see the difference - or if you phrase the issue in a way that blurs the difference, you're doing something wrong.

Read the Wiki article on the Hoeryong concentration camp, is that the conditions these immigrants are going through? Can you imagine someone familiar with the conditions here hears that there were concentration camps in North Korea. "Oh yeah, we have those. Can you imagine? No toiletries, cement beds, truly inhuman conditions!".

Don't get me wrong (as you'd clearly like to). Having young children or even adults sleep on cold slabs of stones every night is a terrible breach of humanitarian conditions. No government should be able to get away with forcing those conditions on anyone. But I don't think drawing the comparison really expresses the vital urgency for help these North Koreans had. I don't think a comparison to the living conditions in Nazi concentration camps in any way resembles the the severity of the conditions these families are going through.

What this type of comparison does do, is diminish the extent subhuman cruelty can reach. Human can get so bad that they'll make children put their blankets and pillows down on stone floors to sleep and then not give them tooth brushes. No. 'People' can get so bad that their victims will spend each and every morning wondering if they'll be shot, poisoned or tortured that day, while subsiding on a single bowl of soup, working 20 hours a day in the freezing European winters with nothing but a worn shirt and pants, having seen the rest of their family murdered in cold blood in front of their eyes. They can kill 31 people because one of them tried to escape. They can force a human to stand on his tip-toes for 24 hours with water up to his nose. They can practice their surgical techniques on children. When you draw a parallel between these conditions and those, you're the one hurting people. You're teaching them to forget the lessons of the past, the true depths of inhumanity that people can reach. "This is the direction that Nazi Germany/North Korea took! Take care that we don't follow their path!", maybe. "This is like Nazi Germany/North Korea!", no. No, not at all.

And how did it get that far? I mean, it didn't just happen all at once. In happened in incrementally small steps over time.

Elie Wiesel talks about these small steps adding up to massive horrors and warns about how it can all happen before we realize how bad it really is, at the point where it's too late to do something about it, in his book, Night.

On the contrary, we are teaching people to most definitely NOT forget the lessons of the past and how horrible, awful, terrible things can actually happen when we aren't vigilant enough.

 

[SkepticThinker]

I notice something that is also interesting.
Before Trump was in office, Obama had "detention centers" too.
And the very same source you linked criticized them....
Opinion | Mr. Obama’s Dubious Detention Centers

One difference is that during Obama's reign, they were "detention centers".
Only when Trump took office did they become "concentration camps".
If the former name was cromulent, why the change?
Moreover, the NYT makes the comparison between Trump's camps & Nazis,
but they never even remotely linked Obama with Nazis.
I suspect that it's just possible that the NYT (who loathe Trump), aren't
concerned so much with accurate denotation as agenda driven connotation.
Their proffered justification for the new terminology is dishonest.

So perhaps the argument should be about whose "concentration camps"
were worse....Trump's or Obama's?

Different circumstances and conditions would be the difference, I would guess.

 

[Revoltingest]

Different circumstances and conditions would be the difference, I would guess.

My guess is NYT's bias driving their use of connotation
to sanitize their friends, & demonize their foes.

 

[SkepticThinker]

I do not know of any dictator, despot or other evil leader who thought they were evil. Hitler loved his dog Blonde until he used her to test the suicide pills.

There's a clear difference between remembering history (kudos to George Santayana) and equating something to history. The latter of which is what is being done here. It's one thing to ask "Are we on the path to creating concentration camps in the US like we did with Americans who were of Japanese descent or as Hitler did with 'undesirables" like homosexuals, gypsies and Jews?" but it's another thing to say "The US has concentration camps".

In my opinion, the better question is, how does a society end up on a path that ends in concentration death camps? It seems unimaginable, but it has happened before. I want to know how to avoid that happening again.

 

[SkepticThinker]

Is It a Crime to Enter the U.S. Illegally?
Excerpted....
Whether it’s by crossing the U.S. border with a "coyote" or buying a fake U.S. passport, a foreign national who enters the U.S. illegally can be both convicted of a crime and held responsible for a civil violation under the U.S. immigration laws. Illegal entry also carries consequences for anyone who might later attempt to apply for a green card or other immigration benefit.

The penalties and consequences get progressively more severe if a person enters illegally more than once, or enters illegally after an order of removal (deportation) or after having been convicted of an aggravated felony.

What Is Illegal Entry to the U.S.?
The immigration law actually uses the term "improper entry," which has a broad meaning. It’s more than just slipping across the U.S. border at an unguarded point. Improper entry can include:

• entering or attempting to enter the United States at any time or place other than one designated by U.S. immigration officers (in other words, away from a border inspection point or other port of entry)
• eluding examination or inspection by U.S. immigration officers (people have tried everything from digging tunnels to hiding in the trunk of a friend’s car)
• attempting to enter or obtain entry to the United States by a willfully false or misleading representation or willful concealment of a material fact (which might include, for example, lying on a visa application or buying a false green card or other entry document).

(See Title 8, Section 1325 of the U.S. Code (U.S.C.), or Section 275 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (I.N.A.) for the exact statutory language - www.uscis.gov/laws/immigration-and-nationality-act.)

Criminal Penalties for Improper Entry to the U.S.
For the first improper entry offense, the person can be fined (as a criminal penalty), or imprisoned for up to six months, or both.

For a subsequent offense, the person can be fined or imprisoned for up to two years, or both. (See 8 U.S.C. Section 1325, I.N.A. Section 275.)

Are we not talking about people seeking asylum?

 

[Road Warrior]

In my opinion, the better question is, how does a society end up on a path that ends in concentration death camps? It seems unimaginable, but it has happened before. I want to know how to avoid that happening again.

A great question and one that has been extensively studied. An entire college course could be designed around that question alone since it touches on multiple social, economic and technological factors.

 

[Revoltingest]

Are we not talking about people seeking asylum?

Some are.
Others aren't.
Illegal entry isn't the right way to apply for asylum.

 

[Road Warrior]

Some are.
Others aren't.
Illegal entry isn't the right way to apply for asylum.

Agreed. If Trump wasn't such an idiot, he'd have realized that we'd be better off working with Mexico to solve this problem rather than condemning them as rapists and murderers.

 

[SkepticThinker]

My guess is NYT's bias driving their use of connotation
to sanitize their friends, & demonize their foes.

Well, Trump seems to have taken a different path than the Obama Administration did, in many ways.

Jeff Sessions told us all about their new zero tolerance/deterrence policy a year ago.


"The family separations are a result of the Trump administration’s zero tolerance immigration policy that requires apprehended immigrant adults to be prosecuted by federal authorities.
When Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the policy he noted that it would likely lead to more family separations, but said it would also deter future immigrants from trying to cross the southern border.
President Trump has attempted to change the public’s perception of the issue by falsely blaming the Democrats for the policy."
Homeland Security docs show admin thought zero tolerance policy would deter border crossers: report

 

[oldbadger]

"The Trump administration went to court this week to argue that migrant children detained at the United States-Mexico border do not require basic hygiene products like soap and toothbrushes in order to be in held in "safe and sanitary" conditions. Trump's team also argued that requiring minors to sleep on cold concrete floors in crowded cells with low temperatures similarly fulfilled that requirement." Trump administration argues in court that detained migrant children don't need toothbrushes or soap and they can sleep on concrete floors

I keenly await the arrival of the resident Trumpettes and Usual Suspects to explain how questioning unnecessary, blatant cruelty to children means you support "open borders" or "hate America".

This sounds like something out of a Dickens novel.

Please Sir.... I'm hungry Sir. Can I have some more soup?
More!!!! Fetch my cane, Boy!

Honestly, how do governments get away with this inhumanity?

 

[Revoltingest]

Well, Trump seems to have taken a different path than the Obama Administration did, in many ways.

Jeff Sessions told us all about their new zero tolerance/deterrence policy a year ago.


"The family separations are a result of the Trump administration’s zero tolerance immigration policy that requires apprehended immigrant adults to be prosecuted by federal authorities.
When Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the policy he noted that it would likely lead to more family separations, but said it would also deter future immigrants from trying to cross the southern border.
President Trump has attempted to change the public’s perception of the issue by falsely blaming the Democrats for the policy."
Homeland Security docs show admin thought zero tolerance policy would deter border crossers: report

This doesn't really address the propagandistic nature of employing the term
"concentration camp". But if we're to apportion blame, Trump is not alone.
He & both parties aren't cooperating to create a coherent & sensible immigration
system. Dems oppose increased border security, leading to the floodgates being
opened. And with this increased inrush, they've not authorized more money for
the camps.
When 2 sides foul the nest with their fighting, both deserve blame.

 

[Revoltingest]

Honestly, how do governments get away with this inhumanity?

By convincing everyone that the other side is to blame.
This relieves everyone of responsibility.
Sloth & blame are more important than problem solving.

 

[Tumah]

And how did it get that far? I mean, it didn't just happen all at once. In happened in incrementally small steps over time.

Elie Wiesel talks about these small steps adding up to massive horrors and warns about how it can all happen before we realize how bad it really is, at the point where it's took late to do something about it, in his book, Night.

On the contrary, we are teaching people to most definitely NOT forget the lessons of the past and how horrible, awful, terrible things can actually happen when we aren't vigilant enough.

Vigilance isn't achieved by describing things out of proportion.