WTF Border patrol Facebook group smears Latinx pols, jokes about migrant deaths, and more

Innula Zenovka

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For all that's wrong with my country, I feel very proud that it produced a man like Sir Nicholas Winton, and that -- in this respect, at least -- the government was prepared to welcome the children and that British families were glad to take them in. Men like that I can look on as an inspiration and someone to whose example I have to try to live up.

I just hope there's an American equivalent of him somewhere.
 

Romana

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As long as most do believe in the American dream, and are convinced that this will only happen to illegal immigrants but never to themselves then there's still a long way to go before this happens.

Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller, who first was a supporter of the Nazis and later became an opponent, and was a "personal prisoner" (which means let him suffer hell on Earth, but keep him always barely alive) of Hitler from 1938 - 45 in KZ Sachsenhausen, put it into these words - which basically is the story of his life to that time so far:


Ah by the way the official wording is "detention center", as being confirmed by a well known expert:

This tweet of 45's proves that the cruelty is the point, and that he enjoys it. Which of course is not a surprise.
 

Bartholomew Gallacher

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I was quite embarrassed when she mentioned the trains, as I didn't have any previous knowledge of them. I know that we were not taught of them, despite having a *fairly* thorough education of the holocaust, and despite having read, but not heavily, of the holocaust, I was completely unaware of them prior to her telling me about them. I didn't think to ask where her grandfather boarded, having no knowledge of them. I looked it all up when I got home, as she instructed me to do. I was dumbstruck at how few made it out in this manner and in what manner they were received.
In Germany there's one artist sculptor Gunter Demnig, whose goal of life is to keep the memorization of the concentration&extermination camp victims alive. He also wants to show that these victims came from everywhere.

So what he's doing is to investigate victims, travel near the place they lived and putting "stumbling blocks" made out of brass and with an inscription into the pavements. He's been doing this since 1992, over 70.000 of these blocks have been deployed in 22 countries so far.

The inscription is always the same: telling who lived there and birth date, when they were taken away and their fate including date of death, if known.



Some cities though forbid those stumbling blocks for a long time.

And some jewish communites were also against them, arguing that people were "literally trampling on the name of dead nazi victims."
 

Brenda Archer

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In Germany there's one artist sculptor Gunter Demnig, whose goal of life is to keep the memorization of the concentration&extermination camp victims alive. He also wants to show that these victims came from everywhere.

So what he's doing is to investigate victims, travel near the place they lived and putting "stumbling blocks" made out of brass and with an inscription into the pavements. He's been doing this since 1992, over 70.000 of these blocks have been deployed in 22 countries so far.

The inscription is always the same: telling who lived there and birth date, when they were taken away and their fate including date of death, if known.



Some cities though forbid those stumbling blocks for a long time.

And some jewish communites were also against them, arguing that people were "literally trampling on the name of dead nazi victims."
This one looks like a couple and their 20-year-old daughter. I think it’s very moving. If we forget the past, we’ll be tempted someday to repeat it.

That’s always been part of the problem in the US. It’s not only that we’re coming from the legacy of deliberate racism - it can be argued the modern form of it was largely invented here. But also, for a lot of Americans, the fascism preceding WW2 is a thing we assume didn’t happen here. We don’t remember the ways our hard Right inspired the European one and we have not experienced the results of fascism strongly enough to recoil against it, however much the war cost some individuals. There’s a pre-WW2 quality to a lot of American Right wing politics that has us mired in naïveté and immaturity.

It’s as if it’s going to have to happen here, before we will believe it.
 

detrius

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In Germany there's one artist sculptor Gunter Demnig, whose goal of life is to keep the memorization of the concentration&extermination camp victims alive. He also wants to show that these victims came from everywhere.

So what he's doing is to investigate victims, travel near the place they lived and putting "stumbling blocks" made out of brass and with an inscription into the pavements. He's been doing this since 1992, over 70.000 of these blocks have been deployed in 22 countries so far.

The inscription is always the same: telling who lived there and birth date, when they were taken away and their fate including date of death, if known.



Some cities though forbid those stumbling blocks for a long time.

And some jewish communites were also against them, arguing that people were "literally trampling on the name of dead nazi victims."
I remember when that moron Bubba once posted that Trump was "the most persecuted man in history", my thoughts immediately went to these tiny memorials that litter my way to work.
 

Innula Zenovka

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This one looks like a couple and their 20-year-old daughter. I think it’s very moving. If we forget the past, we’ll be tempted someday to repeat it.

That’s always been part of the problem in the US. It’s not only that we’re coming from the legacy of deliberate racism - it can be argued the modern form of it was largely invented here. But also, for a lot of Americans, the fascism preceding WW2 is a thing we assume didn’t happen here. We don’t remember the ways our hard Right inspired the European one and we have not experienced the results of fascism strongly enough to recoil against it, however much the war cost some individuals. There’s a pre-WW2 quality to a lot of American Right wing politics that has us mired in naïveté and immaturity.

It’s as if it’s going to have to happen here, before we will believe it.
It's not just that, I think. One point I hadn't fully realised until I started reading Timothy Snyder's books on the subject, particularly Black Earth, quite how much Hitler, and the Germans generally, saw the USA as a model for their colonial project. I knew that Hitler and the Nazis admired the laws in some US states on racial segregation and eugenics (particularly compulsory sterilisation of those deemed unfit to breed) to the extent they modelled the Nuremberg Laws on them, but it went much further than that:

“For Germany,” wrote Hitler, “the only possibility of a sound agrarian policy was the acquisition of land within Europe itself.” To be sure, there was no place near Germany that was uninhabited or even underpopulated. The crucial thing was to imagine that European “spaces” were, in fact, “open.” Racism was the idea that turned populated lands into potential colonies, and the source mythologies for racists arose from the recent colonization of North America and Africa. The conquest and exploitation of these continents by Europeans formed the literary imagination of Europeans of Hitler’s generation. Like millions of other children born in the 1880s and 1890s, Hitler played at African wars and read Karl May’s novels of the American West. Hitler said that May had opened his “eyes to the world.”

In the late nineteenth century, Germans tended to see the fate of Native Americans as a natural precedent for the fate of native Africans under their control. One colony was German East Africa—today Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, and a bit of Mozambique—where Berlin assumed responsibility in 1891. During an uprising in 1905, the Maji Maji rebellion, the Germans applied starvation tactics, killing at least seventy-five thousand people. A second colony was German Southwest Africa, today Namibia, where about three thousand German colonists controlled about seventy percent of the land. An uprising there in 1904 led the Germans to deny the native Herero and Nama populations access to water until they fell “victim to the nature of their own country,” as the official military history put it. The Germans imprisoned survivors in a camp on an island. The Herero population was reduced from some eighty thousand to about fifteen thousand; that of the Nama from about twenty thousand to about ten thousand. For the German general who pursued these policies, the historical justice was self-evident. “The natives must give way,” he said. “Look at America.” The German governor of the region compared Southwest Africa to Nevada, Wyoming, and Colorado. The civilian head of the German colonial office saw matters much the same way: “The history of the colonization of the United States, clearly the biggest colonial endeavor the world has ever known, had as its first act the complete annihilation of its native peoples.” He understood the need for an “annihilation operation.” The German state geologist called for a “Final Solution to the native question.”
(from Black Earth, chapter 1)
That attitude really informed Nazi planning and policy towards the East -- the general idea was that Germany needed the vast potential resources, agricultural and industrial, offered by Poland, Ukraine and European Russia and which were going unexploited by the racially inferior "Slavic" inhabitants, who would be driven off their land and allowed to starve while these territories were claimed and made prosperous by sturdy German pioneers, assisted by their families and slaves drawn from the German-administered reservations (such as the "General Government", as the remains of what was formerly Poland were called) in which the surviving "Slavs" (formerly Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Lithuanians and Belarusians) languished, as did their native American counterparts across the Atlantic.

As with most other social and intellectual movements, the C18th European enlightenment had a good side and a bad side, and both of those developed in their various ways in the USA as much as they did in Europe. Beebo has already pointed out to me the way that, historically, in large tracts of the US the protection of law and the constitution has never extended much further than the local powers that be allow it to (and certainly not to Native Americans, particularly where the land they happen to be occupying at the time takes the fancy of white Americans), and this is just another point of congruence between the C20th National Socialists and the C19th American politicians, pioneers and soldiers they saw as their precursors.

I don't know if Hitler's views on Andrew Jackson are known, but I'm pretty sure he would have been as great a fan of that gentleman as is the current incumbent of the Oval Office. Certainly many Nazi economic prescriptions could be summarised as "Go East, young man!".

ETA: some enlightening quotes from later on in that chapter of Black Earth:

“The Slavs are born as a slavish mass,” wrote Hitler, “crying out for their master.” He meant primarily the Ukrainians, who inhabited a stretch of very fertile land, as well as their neighbors—Russians, Belarusians, and Poles. “I need the Ukraine,” he stated, “in order that no one is able to starve us again, like in the last war.” The conquest of Ukraine would guarantee “a way of life for our people through the allocation of Lebensraum for the next hundred years.” This was a matter of natural justice: “It is inconceivable that a higher people should painfully exist on a soil too narrow for it, whilst amorphous masses, which contribute nothing to civilization, occupy infinite tracts of a soil that is one of the richest in the world.” As their land was taken, Ukrainians could be given, said Hitler, “scarves, glass beads, and everything that colonial peoples like.” A single loudspeaker in each village would “give them plenty of opportunities to dance, and the villagers will be grateful to us.”
When German occupation came in 1941, Ukrainians themselves made the connection to Africa and America. A Ukrainian woman, literate and reflective in a way that Nazi racism could not have contemplated, recorded in her diary: “We are like slaves. Often the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin comes to mind. Once we shed tears over those Negroes, now obviously we ourselves are experiencing the same thing.” Yet in one respect, colonialism in eastern Europe had to differ from the American slave trade or the conquest of Africa. It required two feats of imagination: the wishing away not just of peoples but also of political entities that were similar to the German state. Hitler’s preoccupation with the racial struggle for nature occluded both nations and their governments. It was always legitimate to destroy states; if they were destroyed, that meant that they should have been destroyed.
 
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Romana

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It's not just that, I think. One point I hadn't fully realised until I started reading Timothy Snyder's books on the subject, particularly Black Earth, quite how much Hitler, and the Germans generally, saw the USA as a model for their colonial project. I knew that Hitler and the Nazis admired the laws in some US states on racial segregation and eugenics (particularly compulsory sterilisation of those deemed unfit to breed) to the extent they modelled the Nuremberg Laws on them, but it went much further than that:


(from Black Earth, chapter 1)
That attitude really informed Nazi planning and policy towards the East -- the general idea was that Germany needed the vast potential resources, agricultural and industrial, offered by Poland, Ukraine and European Russia and which were going unexploited by the racially inferior "Slavic" inhabitants, who would be driven off their land and allowed to starve while these territories were claimed and made prosperous by sturdy German pioneers, assisted by their families and slaves drawn from the German-administered reservations (such as the "General Government", as the remains of what was formerly Poland were called) in which the surviving "Slavs" (formerly Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Lithuanians and Belarusians) languished, as did their native American counterparts across the Atlantic.

As with most other social and intellectual movements, the C18th European enlightenment had a good side and a bad side, and both of those developed in their various ways in the USA as much as they did in Europe. Beebo has already pointed out to me the way that, historically, in large tracts of the US the protection of law and the constitution has never extended much further than the local powers that be allow it to (and certainly not to Native Americans, particularly where the land they happen to be occupying at the time takes the fancy of white Americans), and this is just another point of congruence between the C20th National Socialists and the C19th American politicians, pioneers and soldiers they saw as their precursors.

I don't know if Hitler's views on Andrew Jackson are known, but I'm pretty sure he would have been as great a fan of that gentleman as is the current incumbent of the Oval Office. Certainly many Nazi economic prescriptions could be summarised as "Go East, young man!".

ETA: some enlightening quotes from later on in that chapter of Black Earth:
That's ironic because the Slavs thought of the Jews the same way. They had pogroms to terrorize them and drove them off their land. A lot of us here have family stories of grandparents or great-grandparents who survived pogroms.
So then Hitler did the same thing to them.
The big fish being eaten by the bigger fish.
 
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Da5id Weatherwax

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And here we go quibbling over terminology and not facing the inhuman reality of what these human excrescences are doing. Today. In the name of their nation.

I don't care what you call them, even if you have to append the "neo-" prefix as the usual "but not like THOSE (whatever)'s" fallacy. Call them neoliberal, call them nazi, call them the evil scum they are but for the love of all that could be remotely considered holy, STOP them!
 

Soen Eber

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We must face the evils of today, and not those of the past: for history does not repeat itself but it does rhyme. Now then what are the next steps?
And here we go quibbling over terminology and not facing the inhuman reality of what these human excrescences are doing. Today. In the name of their nation.

I don't care what you call them, even if you have to append the "neo-" prefix as the usual "but not like THOSE (whatever)'s" fallacy. Call them neoliberal, call them nazi, call them the evil scum they are but for the love of all that could be remotely considered holy, STOP them!
We must face the evils of today, and not those of the past: for history does not repeat itself but it does rhyme. Now then what are the next steps?
 

Da5id Weatherwax

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We must face the evils of today, and not those of the past: for history does not repeat itself but it does rhyme. Now then what are the next steps?
Honestly, Soen, I have no idea. If I were still in the USA I would be on the streets. I've been on the streets over here every time the shitgibbon-in-chief has shown his face on these shores.

The evil in the houses of power in the USA is a problem for Americans to solve, if they can. If they can't then I guess the "great experiment" failed.

Like Mr. Franklin said... "A republic, if you can keep it"
 

Eunoli

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Honestly, Soen, I have no idea. If I were still in the USA I would be on the streets. I've been on the streets over here every time the shitgibbon-in-chief has shown his face on these shores.

The evil in the houses of power in the USA is a problem for Americans to solve, if they can. If they can't then I guess the "great experiment" failed.

Like Mr. Franklin said... "A republic, if you can keep it"
There were daily protests everywhere the first six months or so of Trump's reign (using that word on purpose). I think people just started getting weary when they realized they were changing nothing. They shifted to flipping the house in 2016. They did that - and Trump is still at it. I think they are just sitting in their homes saying "wtf" by now.

"Lights for Liberty" is happening nationwide next Friday. I am going and so are my family. We're participating in a protest that will encircle an ICE building with protesters holding lit candles. Its not much, but its all we can do right now. The problem is that things aren't normal. The administration pays no attention to reality. They will likely tell Fox News watchers that the millions protesting next week are protesting FOR ice.

The US needs a strong, vocal leader to bring us together on this. Unfortunately, we have the democrats who are happy to attack each other and even ready to say things about Trump - but no one seems willing or able to step up and say "Tomorrow - everyone with morals and values - we do this."

As to language? We can both stand together and disagree on if its appropriate to use one word or another. So long as we continue to stand together.
 

Innula Zenovka

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That's ironic because the Slavs thought of the Jews the same way. They had pogroms to terrorize them and drove them off their land. A lot of us here have family stories of grandparents or great-grandparents who survived pogroms.
So then Hitler did the same thing to them.
The big fish being eaten by the bigger fish.
I am not so sure about that, having read not only Snyder's studies but also Waitman Wade Beorn's The Holocaust in Eastern Europe, Father Patrick Desbois' In Broad Daylight and Martin Winstone's The Dark Heart of Hitler's Europe: Nazi Rule in Poland Under the General Government. All three seem to paint a very similar picture -- that is, with very few exceptions, almost all the pogroms in Nazi-occupied Europe took place at German instigation rather than spontaneously (there are several memos and cables extant, concerning the locals' deplorable inability to work up enthusiasm for a good pogrom, even after the Germans had taken the trouble to organise one for them) and the areas in which they did take place all had one thing in common -- that is, the areas had all previously been part under Soviet control. Some of these had been placed in the Soviet sphere of influence by the Nazi-Soviet pact and the others (particularly Ukraine, of course) had suffered dreadfully during the Civil War and the Terror.

The result of these regions' recent and bloody history was that the normal state machinery was pretty much non-existent and the best way people could prove themselves loyal to their new masters (particularly if they'd collaborated with the Soviets) was to participate in what the Nazis told them were the Judeo-Bolshevik authors of all their troubles.

Even in Rumania, probably the most violently anti-semitic of Germany's allies, there was popular enthusiasm for spontaneously organised pogroms only in

There were other considerations, too, of course. Apparently, one of the features of the "holocaust by bullets" was that the occupiers and their local agents would hold, in effect, yard sales at which local villagers who had participated in the murders, either as active participants or as passive observers, could buy at knock-down prices any of the effects of the murdered Jewish families that the Germans didn't want. For dirt-poor peasants in a country where the state and money had little meaning, the opportunity to acquire even common household items must have been quite a temptation.

But generally, the picture that emerges in all the books I've read is of the Germans and locally recruited auxiliaries conducting the massacres, with the passive acquiescence, and the generally forced participation (e.g. digging pits for the bodies), of the local people.

The picture in Romania is rather different, of course, but even then -- at least as I understand it -- by far the worst places to be Jewish in Romania at the time were the border regions that had either been ceded to Hungary after WWI and now returned to Romania in return for other disputed territory or in Bessarabia, which had been part of Ukraine until the Invasion of Russia.
 
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Romana

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I am not so sure about that, having read not only Snyder's studies but also Waitman Wade Beorn's The Holocaust in Eastern Europe, Father Patrick Desbois' In Broad Daylight and Martin Winstone's The Dark Heart of Hitler's Europe: Nazi Rule in Poland Under the General Government. All three seem to paint a very similar picture -- that is, with very few exceptions, almost all the pogroms in Nazi-occupied Europe took place at German instigation rather than spontaneously (there are several memos and cables extant, concerning the locals' deplorable inability to work up enthusiasm for a good pogrom, even after the Germans had taken the trouble to organise one for them) and the areas in which they did take place all had one thing in common -- that is, the areas had all previously been part under Soviet control. Some of these had been placed in the Soviet sphere of influence by the Nazi-Soviet pact and the others (particularly Ukraine, of course) had suffered dreadfully during the Civil War and the Terror.

The result of these regions' recent and bloody history was that the normal state machinery was pretty much non-existent and the best way people could prove themselves loyal to their new masters (particularly if they'd collaborated with the Soviets) was to participate in what the Nazis told them were the Judeo-Bolshevik authors of all their troubles.

Even in Rumania, probably the most violently anti-semitic of Germany's allies, there was popular enthusiasm for spontaneously organised pogroms only in

There were other considerations, too, of course. Apparently, one of the features of the "holocaust by bullets" was that the occupiers and their local agents would hold, in effect, yard sales at which local villagers who had participated in the murders, either as active participants or as passive observers, could buy at knock-down prices any of the effects of the murdered Jewish families that the Germans didn't want. For dirt-poor peasants in a country where the state and money had little meaning, the opportunity to acquire even common household items must have been quite a temptation.

But generally, the picture that emerges in all the books I've read is of the Germans and locally recruited auxiliaries conducting the massacres, with the passive acquiescence, and the generally forced participation (e.g. digging pits for the bodies), of the local people.

The picture in Romania is rather different, of course, but even then -- at least as I understand it -- by far the worst places to be Jewish in Romania at the time were the border regions that had either been ceded to Hungary after WWI and now returned to Romania in return for other disputed territory or in Bessarabia, which had been part of Ukraine until the Invasion of Russia.
In Nazi-occupied Europe, yes, but I was taking about before--way before. I'm sorry I didn't make it clear.
 

Da5id Weatherwax

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We can both stand together and disagree on if its appropriate to use one word or another. So long as we continue to stand together.
Amen, amen, amen!

An anecdote for you...

In the midwest I had liberal bumper stickers on my car. I was constantly gettting road rage and abuse from folks.. until I added one more.

It said "Where did you get the idea that LIBERALS didn't have 2nd amendment rights?"

The abuse stopped.

(ah and yeah, for the whole time - both with the abuse and without it, there was a P226 and two loaded mags in my car, required for my work and never drawn except on the range for required requals)
 

Innula Zenovka

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Sorry to post an article using this contentious term but the contents, while horrifying, are worth reading.

It discusses the unspeakable suffering caused to traumatised children in these institutions who are themselves mothers, often as a result of sexual abuse.

“Child-mothers” doesn’t mean mothers of children. It means mothers who are children. And they’re locked up in the child detention camps, too. Many of them are survivors of sexual abuse, many have already undergone some kind of horror on their journey, and the conditions in the camp now put them and their babies at risk.

The phrase crops up, for example, in descriptions of the facilities’ “isolation rooms” for sick detainees: “There was one child-mother who took her baby [into isolation], because the baby got the flu,” law professor Warren Binford, who has interviewed the children, tells the New Yorker. “And then the mother, because she was in there caring for the child, got the flu as well. And so then she was there for a week, and they took the baby out and gave the baby to an unrelated child to try to take care of the child-mother’s baby.”
The New Yorker article mentioned is here: