No surprise there.
Broadly, one can just take a lot of classic Nazi rhetoric and simply replace “Jews” with “immigrants” and one gets current Republican rhetoric.
And that’s not a coincidence. The actual point, in both cases, is simply to establish an “other” toward which to get the rank and file to direct their frustration and anger, and in both cases because the rightful targets of their frustration and anger is the ruling class - the same people who are not coincidentally promoting and bankrolling the whole thing.
If you look at who the Nazis targeted, it’s almost exactly the same groups of people the Republicans target. Union leaders, communists and socialists - people who believe in working together to make things better. The physically disabled and mentally ill. The homeless and the immigrants. Sexual and religious minorities. People of other races and nationalities.
The camps didn’t start as (and often weren’t) places to murder people. They were places to put people, to hold them until something could be done about them, some place where they could be deported or exiled agreed to take them. But it’s hard to get other places to accept large groups of people you’ve labeled “undesirables”, so time drags on.
And if they’re just sitting there, doing nothing, surely it just makes sense to put them to work in places where there isn’t enough labor. Maybe those factories that don’t want to pay workers enough to face the horrible and unsafe working conditions, that seems reasonable, they can contribute to society that way
And it’s hard to justify “supporting” people in the camps with food, clean water, sanitation and health care, when so many of your “own” people are struggling, so you start depriving them of these things - it’s not your problem, after all, it’s up to the administrators to make things work with what they have. And when disease inevitably races through the camps, well, what else would one expect, “those people” live like filthy animals, they reek, they never wash themselves or their clothes, they scrabble in the dirt for scraps - they really are nothing more than animals, really.
And when you get a train of livestock in, you sort them, decide which ones go to the slaughterhouse and which ones are going to be working animals, well that’s just reasonable too, isn’t it …
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
And that’s not a thing I say easily or comfortably. ;)
It also goes a lot deeper than that.
Yeah - I’m aware of that.
I dont think it’s particularly relevant to the topic at hand though, which is the jarring similarities between the mechanics of Trump’s deportation scheme and the concentration camps of the Third Reich.
That said, it certainly is telling, and not a little ironic, that the regime that Americans generally consider the ur-example of destructive autocracy actually lifted a lot of its strategies and rhetoric from earlier American sources.
Though I have no doubt that one so inclined could trace a lot of the strategies and rhetoric all the way back at least to the Borgias, and undoubtedly further than that.
Yeah, but it’s more fucked up here because all the non-white folks in his crowds are 100% certain “they don’t mean me. I’ll be totally fine.”
That guy in the photo is trying really hard to blend in. I wonder if he knows he’ll never be one of them
About anything happening with the GOP and Trump right now echoes Germany in 1932/33. “Good” for them that Americans are not interested or knowledgeable in history outside their own country.
One American has been very interested:
Last April, perhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed.
I know, I know. He drinks the coolaid right from the source. Still, most Americans would never recognize it. Do you still have a history channel program? Might be the best of times to get some of their productions into main stream TV.
There is a history channel, but they tend to be focused on stuff like racist conspiracy theories claiming that the people who actually lived in various places long ago didn’t do what they actually did, but that it was extraterrestrials instead.
Netflix did a decent documentary on the rise of Hitler recently.
Perhaps some of these conservatives could use some re-education.