Men and women who do to children and parents what ICE did in Mississippi the other day are the kind who could run a death camp. Men and women who have been running the Republican-fascist-Trumpian child concentration camps could run death camps. Give them twelve years in power, they would get to that point. It might take less time.
The people who support Trump, today, who still support Trump today, the ones who turn out to his rallies, the ones who support him on FOX and on other media venues, witnessing these things, are the kind of people who could support death camps. I don't remember them booing the one of their number who suggested shooting asylum seekers at one of Trump's Nazi style campaign rallies. I don't remember him or them rejecting that idea which, days later, was done by one of his supporters in El Paso, apparently there are people in the El Paso area, working in hospitals, who still support Trump after one of his supporters acted as his fellow Trump supporter advocated - only it was not asylum seekers, it was people who he thought shared an ethnicity identified by the Trumpian code language.
The movie-TV presentation of the descent of Germany into full Nazi atrocity, compacted and foreshortened in time to fit into the conventions of those media give you little sense of the gradual and the intentionally planned habituation the Nazis used, a combination of racist and bigoted propaganda, violent terror, scapegoating and normalization of their genocidal program. Even long scholarly books, taken individually, can't give you more than an idea of how that process of the normalization of depravity was done in increments.
One of the defects in looking at history through even scholarly books is that those have a beginning, a development and, generally, an end. Human culture is continuous. What was done by the German military-political-scientific establishment during the Holocaust had been done in a trial run decades earlier in East Africa, many of the ideas that became real in Nazism had been current in German and, more generally, in Western intellectual culture for decades, I have documented that with many examples though in nothing like exhaustive fashion, from Haeckel and Huxley, through Ploetz and Pearson, George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, Oliver Wendell Holmes, . . . Nazism as an ideology formed in the culture of 19th century German intellectualism, the formation of the party in 1919 was just the crystallization of that poison into a solid form. Its precursors weren't exclusive to Germany and Austria, their direct equivalent is rampant in English language and Italian and other cultures. It didn't end in 1945 with VE and VJ day, it continued, mostly in the form of Marxism and tin-pot facism and in apartheid. American apartheid, Jim Crow, persisted. That depravity is an eternally spewing sewer, it is rampant in all of the university departments, it fills the media, most effectively in entertainment media, the most watched, most consumed media. I would date the resurgence of it into Trumpian neo-Naism in the 1970s.
We're a lot farther along in the echo of that history, though the echo is as loud as the original. Only we aren't hearing it. It hasn't been two and a half years, this started well before Trump, before him Republicans in some number had a sense that they needed to maintain a skim coat of decency, after him they know that they can win without that cover. That wasn't just a minor detail, by jettsoning even the mere appearance of decency, they unleashed the full, cruel depravity that ICE and other government agencies committed in Mississippi this week. They've been doing that and worse with the public being informed of it since the first reports of toddlers, babies, older children in concentration camps came out. The goddamned media, the vaunted "free press" spent most of its energy whining about the use of the term, the totally accurate and justified term, they are as much a part of this as the German media were in the 1920s. They were handing slogans and cover words to Trump's supporters and themselves. Anyone who thinks they're going to save us is stupidly delusional.
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