Stalin’s Soviet Union was a vicious place, where at any moment the secret police could arrest you and send you off to the gulag concentration camps. Children under the age of 2 got sent with their families, while children above the age of 2 went to relatives or state-run orphanages. One thing that was *not* done was to rip children away from their families and send them to separate concentration camps just for children. Granted, the orphanages weren’t exactly cushy places. But they weren’t concentration camps. Unlike this:
This is a detention center for unaccompanied children. It is set up in an abandoned Walmart store. But this is a cushy detention center. Why, they’re given mattresses to sleep on, instead of being required to sleep on the raw concrete! That at least makes it better than the detention cages on the border:
The cages on the border are where the children are kept for one to three days before they can be shipped off to the “cushy” detention center. They’re not given food during that time, and are not given a mattress or blankets. Because it is a “temporary” holding facility, Homeland Security claims they don’t need to provide any of that.
Note that this photograph dates to 2014, during the Obama regime. Which shows that the Republican lie of Obama not being “tough on immigration” was utterly false. Obama was no friend of immigrants, just as the black community, as a whole, is no friend of immigrants, who they view as having come into America and taken “their” jobs. And so the cycle of viciousness towards our fellow man goes on, despite everything that God says:
Hell, even the Southern Baptists, who are as regressive as you can get without being a total Bircher, are rather queasy about the whole be-mean-to-immigrants thing:
God commands His people to treat immigrants with the same respect and dignity as those native born … we desire to see immigration reform include an emphasis on securing our borders and providing a pathway to legal status with appropriate restitutionary measures, maintaining the priority of family unity, resulting in an efficient immigration system that honors the value and dignity of those seeking a better life for themselves and their families … any form of nativism, mistreatment, or exploitation is inconsistent with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
What is especially hypocritical is people like Vice President Pence and Attorney General Jeff Sessions who claim to be Christian advocating treating immigrants badly, even to the point of wanting to send migrant kids to tent cities in the fierce Texas summer heat, something would have made Stalin chortle with delight since he did the same thing with adults when he sent them to the frozen Siberian north. But Stalin never claimed to be Christian. I mean, if you claim to be Christian, shouldn’t you, like, obey the word of Christ? Isn’t that, like, the whole point of being Christian? But I guess their Christianity stops when they exit the churchyard door.
And so we continue treating children in ways that would make Stalin envious in their utter cruelty….
– Badtux the Disgusted Penguin
This is the point at which it becomes undeniably obvious: Private ownership of guns is WORTHLESS against tyranny. That our citizens don’t have a “shoot on sight” policy for ICE agents puts us right at the top of most evil countries in history.
In fact, owning guns probably gives you such a false sense of security against tyranny that you refuse to fight it in ANY way… particularly with violence, but definitely without even votes.
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Cruelty is the point. It’s a strategy to make the U.S. seem like such a hard-arse place that illegal immigrants (and anyone else who might think of defying The Man in any way, like not prostrating themselves on the ground immediately upon any contact with anybody who’s wearing a “law” enforcement badge) will be too afraid to do whatever it is they wanted to do. Deliberate inculcation of fear in a population — that’s called terrorism. It’s what Sovok Amerika is now — a terrorist state.
I’m glad you pointed out that President Hopey’s admin. had started that Wal-Martcentration camp. An early pro-Twitler commenter on the New York Times story about the issue raised that, as if it made it all right. Rs: “We hate Obama and everything he stood for, but if that ni-clang! did something which our kkkult leader copies, then it’s OK because the Kenyan did it first.” Gives ’em an excuse in their twisted little psyches. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it. Obama’s use of drones to murder people around the world, including American citizens, is part of the reason why I was less than totally enthused about him. This is another splotch on his performance.
I wonder whether the conversion of this Mall-Wart was part of the Jade Helm paranoid freak-out? I recall the pisstheirpants brigade screeching about a store that was being converted to house people, as evidence of their feared FEMA camps meme. The same fools who were trembling over that are undoubtedly cheering because it’s being used to lock up Meskins.
So how long before reports come about about paedophilia (as it’s spelt here) and other crimes against children start coming out of these KKKoncentration camps? The media here, and across the world, has been full of stories for years about how pervs prey upon poorly monitored kids. It’s like the residential schools for First Nations youth in Canada, the “Stolen Generation” Aboriginal children who were taken from their families here, so many abandoned boys and girls who were farmed out to abusive foster homes… Places like these are a target-rich environment for sickos. Setting the world up for another cohort that will be twisted into monsters that perpetrate foulness on future generations.
One of the psych wards where I work is a youth inpatient centre. I know what kinds of shit young people, especially boys, get up to. Fighting, fucking, smashing shit up, escaping, getting messed up on any substance they can obtain, cutting themselves, hanging or other suicide attempts… And this is amongst teenagers who are getting psychiatric treatment, with decent food, living conditions and a generally caring environment, while being monitored by heaps of people with a duty to treat them kindly. The ones I see have not been ripped thousands of miles away from the world they know, under traumatic conditions, and then been dealt with like they’re scum. Admittedly, the youth I meet have underlying mental problems, so they’re more likely to play up than stable ones. But fleeing one’s native land and being ripped from parents is going to crack open any underlying psychiatric issues, or create its own ones.
What Amerika is doing, under Fauxbama and Trumpolini, is going to be the new Catholic Church abuse scandal. It’s happening now, real-time, in front of our eyes, except that so many eyes are averted. AmeriCa could do so much better. But AmeriKa doesn’t want to. For shame…
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The Tangerine Turdnuggets Evil Elf may have quoted Romans 13:1 to justify his evil but Stephen Colbert, a righteous man, reminded his viewers that Sessions should have read further to Romans 13 : 8-10
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Or, perhaps, Romans 14:10 or 13.
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I gather that nobody told them that One Day in the Life of Ivan Desinovich was not an instruction manual.
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Neither was 1984, but the bastards took it that way anyhow.
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This issue has not been at the top of my list of things to delve into. There are only so many hours a day I can spend looking at outrages. But because of your blogging about it and the posts by Charlie Pierce and others at Esquire magazine online, I’ve paid more attention.
I don’t often watch MSNBC segments online, but I dialled up this one by Lawrence O’Donnell when he talked to Senator Jeff Merkley and a reporter who got a Potemkin Village tour of the Wal-Mart kidcentration camp. The visuals made it seem even creepier. And not just the mural of Der Leader on the wall of his prison for the pint-size.
His (and Hopey’s!) were just about the only mugs that got filmed inside. No living faces were shown. Not of workers; not of imprisoned kids. Sekkkrecy!!!! Makes it easier for the sonderkommandos to hide from warcrimestrials of the future. It also make the teenaged victims into non-persons. Someone might feel sorry for little Pedro if they saw his sad eyes and tousled hair. Can you recall the facial expressions of doomed prisoners you saw behind barbed wire in Holocaust and Gulag camps? You won’t be doing that with Amerikkka’s victims!
The whole notion of “You aren’t allowed to see what we are doing” is creepy as hell. Not even if you’re a high government official like a U.S. Senator. To throw the authoritarians’ mantra back at them: “If you’re not doing anything wrong, you shouldn’t object to us watching what you’re up to.” When I was a newspaper reporter back in the 1980s and early ’90s, there was a presumption that activities of the government should be open to scrutiny. It was society’s tax dollars that were paying for it, so society should know what was going on.
I used to be able to go by RIGHT to the state prison and the big mental hospital in the last Florida town where I worked to talk to criminals and crazy people for news stories. I had to call to organise times/appointments, of course. Couldn’t just rock up to the guarded entrances and say “I want to talk to Murderer A or Schizo B about what they had to say in a letter they wrote my newspaper.” The authorities at those places didn’t like it. But blanket bans on contact were not on the cards then. Now the default position of anyone with the power to get an interloper handcuffed by the cops is to say “No, you can’t see that!”
It extends beyond the governmentosphere, too. Back when I used to write reviews and take photos for the Urbanspoon restaurant review wiki site, I got hassled several times by mall security goons for taking pix of restaurant shop fronts. people could walk by and see that shit with their EYES, but someone with a camera was perceived as a threat who must be stopped by someone with a badge. In so many ways, the world is becoming more of a police SState, down to the granular level, not just the cops. We’re all pigs now!
(Me too, in a small way. I often have to limit the information I give out about patients when someone calls the ward, even when I’m sure that it’s a family member, because I’ve talked to them before. Ditto with aspects of patients’ medical records, when they ask about certain things. Confidentiality! I’d like to think that I have a good reason. But official secret-keepers always do, don’t they? The families and patients might not agree.)
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Bukko, there are serious privacy concerns with allowing children’s faces to be broadcast on the public airwaves. I’m fine with them not showing the childrens’ faces. There’s plenty of photographs they showed where the children are turned away, like standing in line for their prison rations, that are bad enough. It’s the same reason why you’ve never seen any photographs of the children that I taught. It would have been a violation of their privacy. Even today, twenty years later, when they’re all middle-aged men and women now.
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The more I think about it, the more torqued up I get. I could go on, but I have other things today (even though it’s a shitty, rain-blowy winter day in June here.)
Just one more thing — the vibe I get from all this is that “Illegal Immigrant is the New Jew (or Jap).” It’s so clear. Not just from the concentration camps that are being built for them, but because they have been set up as the scum that Amerikkkan society despises. And no one cares about what happens to them.
Reich-wingers, I expect them to be 100% on board with cruelty. But on the left-wing sites where I scan comments, there’s mild disapproval of massive lockups of adults; somewhat more strident sympathy with the kid thing. Even on one left-ish econoblog (Naked Capitalism) commenters who fuss over the abuse in Twitler’s time are labelled by the blog owners (Yves Smith and “Lambert Strether”) as “virtue signallers” if they weren’t also objecting from the time when Obama was doing this.
Is anyone (aside from Hispanic groups) protesting (in a big way) about this? I mean physically, in public, not just writing screechy Tweets (or comment bloviating like me!) The websites I read were geared up for the first anti-Trumpolini marches in 2017, but they’re crickets on this insofar as demos go.
Concentration camps for illegals is a test to see how far things can go. “First they came for the Mexicans…” Next it’s going to be Muslims, if there’s a spectacular enough Islamic terrorist attack within U.S. borders. Eventually, homeless people, poor people, leftists, anyone who stands in the way of what the Police SState wants to do. I reckon what we’re seeing is the first of many mass imprisonments.
I’m not so paranoid as to think that there’s a step-by-step Clampdown plan hat’s been written down by some Illuminati Deep State. But things evolve. The forces of hatred and control that have been cooked up in the Amerikkkan stewpot are gonna keep on burning. As Charles Pierce sez at Esquire, “there’s a wildness loose in the land.” This shit’s going to keep rolling, unless Americans rise up en masse to stop it. I don’t see that happening. You Sovokamerikans are so fcuked.
(And Australia is not way better. Witness the Gitmo-style immigrant cruelty camps on Manus Island in New Guinea, the birdshit island Nauru and on Christmas Island, a flyspeck place Australia owns in the outer reaches of the Indian Ocean. Australia uses publicity about these hellholes to scare potential boat-borne immigrants from floating in here. IOW, this country too is a Terrorist Nation to certain groups. And they lock children up there, too. There’s plenty of shame to go around in the Developed World. Not that I’m for totally open borders, but it’s possible to have immigration rules without resorting to deliberate savagery.)
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I’ve been grumbling about this for years (and also about the Australian concentration camps for immigrants, I’ve been boycotting Australia ever since they started that shit). But yeah, there was a lot of people who seemed down with it when Obummer was doing it, who are just now getting upset about it now that Trump is doing it. Partisanship fucking sucks. Right is right and wrong is wrong, but the average American seems down with casual bigotry and savagery if it’s their team doing it regardless of right and wrong. And not sure the average Australian is much different, except they have a bigger definition of “team”, maybe.
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And before you grouse at me for boycotting Australia and not the United States, I live in the United States. I don’t have much choice in that, since no other nation wants old farts like me who are too old to do lots of hard physical work but not old enough to bring in American retiree dollars.
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Boycott away — it’s your life. No one with capital-P Power cares what we ants do on our own anyway. When we COMBINE, that’s when they start to worry. Which is why they pit us against each other.
One of the things that gives me hope (through my admittedly rose-coloured glasses about the place) is that there ARE organised political groups in Australia such as the Green Party which are pushing for better treatment of refugees. Unfortunately, the Greens are a marginal party when it comes to seats in the national Parliament. Their numbers are about evenly matched with a racist party called One Nation that’s run by a woman who’s a combination of Leona Helmsley and Roseanne Barr. In a national legislature that’s closely split between the local equivalent to the R’s and D’s, though, small balance-of-power groups can have some clout.
I get to talk to a lot of people about politics, both at work and when I go door-knocking on Green campaigns. Many Aussies try to be politically correct and express sympathy for refugees and immigrants. There are “Bring Them Here” rallies to close the island torture camps every few months.
Sadly, though, I copped some hostility toward new arrivals when I was going door-to-door during a campaign a couple Saturdays ago in a well-off suburb near the city core. “Refugee” (someone fleeing a hellhole for good reason) was equated with “boat person” by a couple of households that I talked to. “Immigrant” was considered to be “African youth gang member who does home invasions with their black-skinned buddies.” There have been a few of those lately, and that’s the latest urban fear the way that “wilding” gangs of black “super-predators” were in the U.S. during the 1990s. This in a city that’s as close to left-wing San Francisco as you’ll get Down Under. doG only knows what punters who come to the door are saying in a redneck northern state such as Queensland.
Hearts are hardening all over the world. I think that at some level, probably subconsciously, humans are realising that there are too many of us, and everything we depend on is running out fast. We are getting the sense that if we want to keep what we have, other humans who might compete with us will have to die. Many privileged people would prefer for them to die in their own lands, where we do not have to see them. But there are plenty *cough ICE agents cough* who will be happy to kill the strangers if they come onto our turf.
This will not end well. Even though I’m an older fart than you, I reckon I’ll live long enough to witness a lot of the denouement before my own ending. Not looking forward to that. The seeing, not my ending. I have a feeling that when it’s time for me to go, assuming I do it in a natural fashion, I won’t be entirely sorry to leave the World o’ Shit this civilisation will have become by then.
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From Hullabaloo:
“NBC/WSJ poll:
White men without college degrees approve Trump by 68%-29% margin. The rest of the country disapproves by 60%-38%.
To be precise, 29% are good people.”
I’ve been saying that 25% of people in pretty much any country would work the death camps without much thought. Appears that here it would be 29%.
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But should have emphasized the “white men without college degree” in my 29% comment.
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I’m always trying to think a step ahead, so my question now is “How does the death start?”
Will it be more suicides like the Honduran guy who hung himself (if you believe the official story) in his jail cell after being separated from his child?
Will kkkoncentration camp prisoners start dying from the heat or disease outbreaks? How about hunger and thirst? The Cretins In Charge don’t believe in planning, and they’re not too fussed about decent treatment for people they despise, so I can see that there will be deprivation when supply lines don’t keep up with human needs.
How fast will prisoners be shot down by guards whenever the inevitable restlessness starts? Too many people crammed in too small a space for too long with nothing left to live for are going to kick off eventually. Fascistamericans — the only people whose opinions count to the bastards who deploy the guns — will cheer when migrant blood is spurting.
I can see Twitler ordering the Army to take control of the kkkamps, both because it has the logistics, and because he and Himmler-Miller will start labelling the migrants as “invaders” of Amerikkka. How many months before the military starts the same shit it did at Abu Ghraib?
What a time to be alive! To be witnessing an infamy that will be written about as a horror in future history books (if there’s anybody left alive to be writing books.) I suppose what’s happening in Amerikkka is not unusual, though. Genocide vs. the Rohingya in Myanmar, Rwanda 1994, the crumbling of Yugoslavia, Khmer Rouge, Central American death squads… All that shit happened within my lifetime. But the U.S. likes to advertise that it’s BETTER than shithole places like those. Ah well — so much advertising is just a con…
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Bukko, it gets worse. Just check some of the stories emerging about facilities contracted by DHS and ICE in Texas. The nice ones have a history of medicating kids without authorization and/or permission. The iffy ones make “Lord of the Flies” seem like a Wimbledon Lunch.
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