The Guardian - Inspired by Trump, the world could be heading back to the 1930s
Inspired by Trump, the world could be heading back to the 1930sThe US president tears children from parents, and in Europe his imitators dehumanise migrants. We know where such hatred leads
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/22/trump-world-1930s-children-parents-europe-migrants?CMP=share_btn_fb
You’ll remember Godwin’s law, which holds that the longer an online debate goes on, the likelier it is that someone will mention Hitler or the Nazis. It was an amusing observation and one that served a useful purpose, guarding against hyperbole and fatuous comparison. Except last August, as the American far right staged a torchlight parade in Charlottesville, Mike Godwin suspended his own law. “By all means, compare these shitheads to Nazis,” he tweeted. “Again and again. I’m with you.”
Despite that dispensation, I’ve tended to abide by my own version of Godwin’s law. I try to avoid Nazi comparisons, chiefly because they’re almost always wrong and because, far from dramatising whatever horror is under way, they usually serve to minimise the one that killed millions in the 1940s. And yet, there’s a cost to such self-restraint. Because if the Nazi era is placed off limits, seen as so far outside the realm of regular human experience that it might as well have happened on a distant planet – Planet Auschwitz – then we risk failure to learn its lessons. That would be to squander the essential benefit offered by study of the Third Reich: an early warning system. So yes, when Donald Trump ordered US government agents on the southern border to separate migrant children from their parents, to tear screaming toddlers from their fathers and even to pull a baby from its mother’s breast, he was not re-enacting the Holocaust. He was not ordering the eradication of an entire people or sending millions to their deaths. But there were echoes. And we must hear them.
-snip-
But the echoes don’t end there. The wire cages. The guards telling weeping children they are forbidden from hugging each other. And then this chilling detail, reported by Texas Monthly. It turns out that US border guards don’t always tell parents they’re taking their children away. “Instead, the officers say, ‘I’m going to take your child to get bathed.’ The child goes off, and in a half-hour, 20 minutes, the parent inquires, ‘Where is my five-year-old?’ ‘Where’s my seven-year-old?’ ‘This is a long bath.’ And [the officer says], ‘You won’t be seeing your child again.’” It’s not the same as telling Jews about to die they are merely taking a shower, but in the use of deception the echo is loud.
And if the mechanics of this operation strike a familiar note, so too does the rhetoric and propaganda deployed by those behind it and defending it. You don’t have to go to back to 1930s Germany to know that the first step towards catastrophe is the dehumanisation of a reviled group. It happened that way in Rwanda and the Balkans in the 1990s, and it’s happening in today’s United States. “These aren’t people, these are animals,” the US president said last month. They want “to pour into and infest our country”, he tweeted this week. “Infest” is a word reserved for rats and insects. This is the language of those seeking to choke off human sympathy, by suggesting those suffering are not even human.
Much more on the link
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/22/trump-world-1930s-children-parents-europe-migrants?CMP=share_btn_fb
.
= new reply since forum marked as read
"Here's an idea. The bleeding hearts should be responsible for housing them in their own homes and sharing their own resources with them. Always easy to be charitable when its with other people's money. There are channels to go through in order to cross borders. EVERY country has those channels and some shoot anyone on the spot for crossing the border without proper papers. The USA is the most charitable nation in the world already, so it would be nice if people would quit pretending we can solve every problem and support every illegal that has a sad story."
This is what we are dealing with when we try to engage trumpers with logic and compassion. By the way, when she engages with me, it is on her son's Face book page, she has blocked me. Blocked but just can't resist "poking the bear" so to speak. I no longer have any direct contact with her and don't want any.
People didn't understand that Hitler was crazy, they just thought he was going to fix their economy and get rid of the Communists. They believed the "other stuff" didn't matter so they ignored it, until it was too late. I guess we can understand those uninvolved Germans and maybe forgive them, but that was the 1930's.
We are not in the 1930's and we can see where all this is leading. Seeing patterns and connecting the dots, this doesn't take much guesswork. While I don't in any way believe that Cheeto has enough influence to wreck other countries, he can certainly wreck ours if we let him. He's already destroyed our standing in the free world and he'd like to do a lot more. The Republican Party is blind to all of it and many in the GOP are complicit, so they should go down too.
We Democrats, liberals and progressives will see that the job gets done. Trump and his group of traitors will be destroyed. Our new motto should be "Never again!"
