On The Fourth

"Those of us who study human atrocity and its aftermath are not in the business of demarcating exceptional evils so that we can pat ourselves on the back every time we don’t quite manage to reach a particular level of violence and horror. A sense of moral responsibility and a heightened awareness of the “trap of exculpatory comparison” explain the outpouring of support in recent days for the open letter from scholars in response to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s puzzling statement that Holocaust analogies are forever inappropriate.

"Detainment facilities that violate the fundamental human rights of a certain population do not need to be run by Nazis to be called concentration camps. Countries that claim a national history of democracy and freedom are not automatically incapable of abusing state power. The words we use matter. The US is currently operating concentration camps. Our only real claim to a history of democracy and freedom rests on the legacy of those who actively fought injustice, including all those now dedicated to eradicating the policies that created the camps.

"It’s the 4th of July. We’re “better than Buchenwald” is no cause for celebration." -- Melissa Byrnes

*  *  *

"The gravitas of this place also exerts a pull on politicians who want to lay claim to its emotional power and aspirational symbolism. The Mall is appropriate for the quasi-political pomp of inaugurations in part because most inaugurations include some kind of call for national unity. Donald Trump is not the first politician to attempt to intertwine his personal brand with the nation’s most revered brand, Lincoln, and Lincoln’s call for “a lasting peace among ourselves.”
 
"But no president since the Civil War has been more uninterested in the rhetoric of healing and unity than Donald Trump. It is difficult to express how deeply repugnant his effort to politicize this space is to commonly held American ideals. The display of tanks near the Lincoln Memorial is just a bitter and expensive absurdity compared with the co-option of Lincoln’s temple for the personal aggrandizement of a man who celebrates political violence, who proudly calls himself a “counterpuncher,” and who regularly tweets insults calculated for maximum divisiveness. In the long arc of Trump’s public career, there isn’t a shred of evidence that he understands who Lincoln was, what he stood for and how he accomplished it." -- Philip Kennicott

DHS Inspector General Report Confirms Abuse At Migrant Concentration Camps

BREAKING: Office of the Inspector General releases new pictures of overcrowding at Border Patrol Facilities in TX. One senior manager calling this a “ticking time bomb.” #Immigration #ICE @NBCNews pic.twitter.com/bQdde1LYmB

— Gadi Schwartz (@GadiNBC) July 2, 2019

The pictures are from the DHS Inspector General's report  “Management Alert—DHS Needs to Address Dangerous Overcrowding and Prolonged Detention of Children and Adults in the Rio Grande Valley.”  Here's a link to the report.

Meanwhile, a tiny man with tiny fingers and a tiny, sick brain confirms that the cruelty is the whole point:

If Illegal Immigrants are unhappy with the conditions in the quickly built or refitted detentions centers, just tell them not to come. All problems solved!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 3, 2019

Malignant son of a bitch.

Letters We Wish We'd Written Dept. -- Concentration Camps

From today's Washington Post:

Call them concentration camps. The detention centers at the border are, by dictionary definition, concentration camps. Calling them so isn’t inflammatory; it is accurate.

I used to wonder, how on earth did the Holocaust happen? How did people stand by? How did people participate? I see now how easy it is. We all know about the concentration camps at the border, and yet we minimize and justify them at best, defend and praise them at worst.

The Nazis didn’t start with Auschwitz. They started with dehumanizing. Jews weren’t people. We were illegal. We stole jobs and businesses. We were dirty. We were rapists. We were immigrants who didn’t belong. Sound familiar?

We aren’t shooting, gassing, starving or overworking immigrants at the border. But we don’t give them soap or water, or a place to sleep that isn’t an overcrowded concrete room with the lights on all night. They don’t have adequate access to doctors or medicine. (Many people in Nazi concentration camps died from disease and overcrowding. Anne Frank and her sister died from typhus.)

And now justify sitting idly by, as we advance our concentration camps. We all like to think we would have spoken up; we would have attempted to stop the Nazis. But by sitting here, we prove we wouldn’t have. We would minimize and justify them at best, defend and praise them at worst.

Call them concentration camps. And end them. Or “never again” will mean nothing.

J.M. Van Pelt, Burke

We're living in that historical moment where horrors are being minimized and justified by some, and we need to realize that we're all involved in those horrors whether it suits us or not.

Monday Reading

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.  Today, a few longer reads.

Will Bunch has a must- read on the assault on democracy by dimwit demagogue Donald "Rump" Trump and his rotted out Republican Party (with a healthy assist from a supine media):

Do you smell something? That’s the stench of freedom dying, and it’s coming from America’s southern border, where refugee children seeking U.S. asylum as they flee murder, rape and degrading conditions in Central America have instead been tossed into a growing gulag of squalid concentration camps, created by an administration desperate to cling to four more years of power.

Warren Binford, a law professor at Willamette University tasked with monitoring government compliance with a court order on how long migrant kids can be held in detention, said not only is Trump’s Border Patrol not complying, but attorneys are shocked at what they found at a Clint, Texas, facility where hundreds of youths have been sent: Children sleeping on frigid concrete floors, covered in filth, unable to shower for days, and taking care of one another because the authorities are looking the other way. [snip]

Here’s the big picture, and it’s as alarming as it can get. Phase I of Trump’s assault on democracy is over. The public and to some degree the press has grown numb to thousands of lies and to outrageous and even allegedly criminal behavior by the 45th president. The Democratic House that was elected in 2018 to hold Trump in check has had nearly six months to prove that it’s remarkably ineffective at doing its one job — by allowing the White House to walk all over them in defying subpoenas, in following the law or even providing basic information. [snip]

So Phase 2 is now here, and it’s as bad as your worst fears about a Trump presidency. To rally his base and get the anger that he needs out of his opponents, that means moving from rhetoric to roundups on immigrants, which will not shrink but swell the population of America’s concentration camps. It’s no surprise that Trump’s immigration-crackdown plan coincided with both his own reelection launch and this week’s Democratic debates, because he wants his opponents playing defense. And if Trump’s tough talk and his utter disdain for smart diplomacy triggers war in Iran or North Korea or somewhere else, he will challenge the electorate to dare oppose “a war president.”

Speaking of stench, this report from ABC News describes how fast America has been de-sensitized to the creeping fascism playing out on our southern border:

From sleeping on concrete floors with the lights on 24 hours a day to no access to soap or basic hygiene, migrant children in at least two U.S. Customs and Border Protection facilities face conditions one doctor described as comparable to "torture facilities."

The disturbing, first-hand account of the conditions were observed by lawyers and a board-certified physician in visits last week to border patrol holding facilities in Clint, Texas, and McAllen, a city in the southern part of the state. [snip]

After assessing 39 children under the age of 18, she described conditions for unaccompanied minors at the McAllen facility as including "extreme cold temperatures, lights on 24 hours a day, no adequate access to medical care, basic sanitation, water, or adequate food."

All the children who were seen showed evidence of trauma, Lucio Sevier reported, and the teens spoke of having no access to hand washing during their entire time in custody. She compared it to being "tantamount to intentionally causing the spread of disease." [snip]

Conditions for infants were even more appalling, according to the medical declaration. Many teen mothers in custody described not having the ability to wash their children’s bottle.

And children who were older than 6 months were not provided age-appropriate meal options, including no pureed foods necessary for a child's development, Lucio Sevier reported.

Always keep in mind, the cruelty IS the policy with these fuckers.

The Salt Lake Tribune, in deep red Utah, isn't mincing words:

Yes, we do have concentration camps.

They are not work camps. They are not death camps. At least, not on purpose. Our government is not building massive gas chambers and industrial crematoria. It is not conducting sick medical experiments on members of an unfavored class.

But that does not mean that the places into which we are herding tens of thousands of migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers are not properly called concentration camps. Because that is precisely what they are. [snip]

When some in the public eye dare to tell that truth, as the media-savvy Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did the other day, enablers of the administration’s cruel policies cry foul. They say that using correct terms such as “concentration camps" — or, worse, invoking the term “Never again” — unfairly equates what is going on now at our southern border with the Nazis’ “Final Solution” — the deliberate murder of millions of people.

It is true that we are not doing that. We are doing this. The two are not morally equivalent. And we probably don’t have reason to fear that this is necessarily going to become that.

But, then, we never do.

Because that starts as this. Some of the people who study, and some of the people who survived or are descended from survivors of the Holocaust, are pointing out that that crime against humanity did not arrive overnight.

It worked its way up, from nasty political speeches (check) to politicians seeking and gaining power with promises to protect the purity of the nation from foreign invasion (check) to denying basic human rights and decency to people of an unfavored class (check).

Too bad so many national media types =cough= Chuck "Not My Job" Todd =cough= don't have the same sense and moral clarity (unlike colleague Jose Diaz-Balart on =sigh= Telemundo, who fact- checked the dimwit demagogue in real time).

(You can use this navigator to check out organizations that provide relief to refugees at the southern border, if it's in your heart to give.)

Speaking of conservative Mormon Utah, guess what its residents Google most?  Hahaha. (For our home state, it's =wince= David Hasselhoff, for some unfathomable reason.)

That last tidbit was found via Infidel 753's always worthwhile link round-up.  See what you're missing if you don't check it out?

Exceptionally Cruel

Merriam- Webster dictionary:

concentration camp: a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard —used especially in reference to camps created by the Nazis in World War II for the internment and persecution of Jews and other prisoners.

***

Nearly a week ago in a tweet, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) described the places where the Trump regime is warehousing asylum- seeking families as "concentration camps." Since then, there's been a lot of reaction and counter- reaction to the characterization. The perpetually outraged right took great umbrage at the use of the term (as well as the usual "both sides" jackasses), being the defenders that they are of a morally superior "American exceptionalism."  Of course, these are the absolute last people on earth who have a claim  to speak for "American values," something the new generation of Millennial progressives is keenly aware of, a higher proportion of whom are people of color.  They and their families have experienced the gap more starkly than most between the moralistic "American exceptionalism" rhetoric and the American reality.

Peter Beinart makes the point that Ocasio-Cortez's comment points to this reframing of "exceptionalism" in light of the Trump regime's America's treatment of families on the border:

Ocasio-Cortez’s comment about concentration camps is only the latest example of this broad challenge to American exceptionalism. She didn’t claim that Trump’s detention centers are the equivalent of Auschwitz. But she denied that America is a separate moral category, so inherently different from the world’s worst regimes that it requires a separate language. On Tuesday night she retweeted the actor George Takei, who wrote, “I know what concentration camps are. I was inside two of them, in America.” This was another act of linguistic transgression. When remembering the detention of Japanese Americans during World War II, Americans have generally employed the term internment camps—largely, the historian Roger Daniels has argued, to create a clear separation between America’s misdeeds and those of its hated foes.

Masha Gessen makes a similar point:

... It is not an argument about language. Ocasio-Cortez and her opponents agree that the term “concentration camp” refers to something so horrible as to be unimaginable. (For this reason, mounting a defense of Ocasio-Cortez’s position by explaining that not all concentration camps were death camps misses the point.) It is the choice between thinking that whatever is happening in reality is, by definition, acceptable, and thinking that some actual events in our current reality are fundamentally incompatible with our concept of ourselves—not just as Americans but as human beings—and therefore unimaginable. The latter position is immeasurably more difficult to hold—not so much because it is contentious and politically risky, as attacks on Ocasio-Cortez continue to demonstrate, but because it is cognitively strenuous. It makes one’s brain implode. It will always be a minority position. 

If your image of America today is that we're not creating concentration camps, how does this fit that image:

A prematurely born infant and her 17-year-old mother spent seven days being almost entirely neglected in Border Patrol custody, according to lawyers who visited an immigrant processing station in McAllen, Texas, on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The baby, barely a month old, was wrapped in a dirty towel, wore a soiled onesie and looked listless, said one of the lawyers, Hope Frye. The mother was in a wheelchair due to complications from her emergency C-section and had barely slept ― the pain made it too uncomfortable for her to lie down and she was afraid of dropping her baby, the immigration and human rights attorney said.

How about this:

Four toddlers were so severely ill and neglected at a U.S. Border Patrol facility in McAllen, Texas, that lawyers forced the government to hospitalize them last week.

The children, all under age 3 with teenage mothers or guardians, were feverish, coughing, vomiting and had diarrhea, immigration attorneys told HuffPost on Friday. Some of the toddlers and infants were refusing to eat or drink. One 2-year-old’s eyes were rolled back in her head, and she was “completely unresponsive” and limp, according to Toby Gialluca, a Florida-based attorney.

How about this:

A 2-year-old boy locked in detention wants to be held all the time. A few girls, ages 10 to 15, say they’ve been doing their best to feed and soothe the clingy toddler who was handed to them by a guard days ago. Lawyers warn that kids are taking care of kids, and there’s inadequate food, water and sanitation for the 250 infants, children and teens at the Border Patrol station.

The bleak portrait emerged Thursday after a legal team interviewed 60 children at the facility near El Paso that has become the latest place where attorneys say young migrants are describing neglect and mistreatment at the hands of the U.S. government.

"... [A]t the hands of the U.S. government."  Those are the children, who are the most helpless of all. That's us government- by- the- people citizens.  That's the banality of evil. That's America. That's reality, 2019.

If you're as sickened by this as we are, please contact your Senators and your Representative and demand that the government immediately provide humanitarian aid -- including medical assistance -- to these victims of our exceptionalism.  Because, this is cruelty being used as a deterrent to migration. It's cruelty as policy, and it's being done in your name and ours.

BONUS:  But of course.

If there were pictures of little blonde children sleeping on cement floors covered in their own filth, it would take all of 24 hours to get them out

— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) June 22, 2019

BONUS II:  If only...

These are crimes against humanity. Everyone responsible for it, from the guards who took the clothing to the federal lawyers defending it in court to Trump and his administration leaders, should stand trial over this. https://t.co/66ttnryKVR

— Robert Cruickshank (@cruickshank) June 22, 2019