Comments

1

Heartbreaking, frightening, timely, and brilliant.

Thank you, Charles

2

The tech plantation slave labor is wholly endorsed by ALEK and the big tech slavers who silently pull chips from the pile while subsidizing the indefinite intention of traumatized, filthy, abused, and forcefully drugged into silence so long as they can compete with Huawei's automation machine.

Mugabe could guarantee freedom of speech, but not freedom from speech. Such are these times.

3

Concentration camps? Like the British invented for the purpose of killing Boers off with disease in and malnutrition concentrated camps?

Sounds like a bit of an exaggeration chuckles.

4

Good Afternoon Charles,
I read about Mugabe's death last night. Wow, he lived to be 95 y/o. Alas, Zimbabwe was greatly damaged under his rule. Most unfortunate.

As far as a connection between his death and the "rise in concentration camps" on the US border, I am not having any it. I see no connection at all. I am fairly certain US authorities are not indiscriminately killing detainees in those "concentration camps" a la Mugabe's Zimbabwe (Ndebeles against Shonas).

BTW, I read this piece today by Slavok Zizek (sp.?) and thought of you:

https://spectator.us/trump-re-elected-left-liberal-stupidity/

As I recall, you've read Zizek. This article was interesting.

5

What a shame Charle’s father was one of Mugabe’s economic advisors. Seems socialist stupidity runs in the family.

6

@3 Modern concentration camps are an American invention, first used in 1838 as a key component of Cherokee removal. The "emigration depots" were the first prison camps to bear all the hallmarks of what we now call concentration camps, 80 years before the Boer wars.

Even the name "concentration camp" itself predates the first Boer War by about fifteen years, when Spanish colonial forces coined the term "reconcentraciĂłn" for its prison camp operations in Cuba.

7

@5 From the sound of it, Ebenezer Mudede did everything in he could to shelter young Charles from the darker realities of Zimbabwe's early independence.

It should also be noted that Ebenezer the elder quit his job with Mugabe after only six years, and went to work as an economic advisor for Botswana, which is not now and has never been a communist nation. Not even a semi-socialist one. Ebenezer worked for Botswana twice as long as he did for Zimbabwe, and for that entire time Botswana was a completely ordinary, orderly market-based economy with boring, reliable government regulation. The economy and standard of living of Botswana have grown continuously since independence, and saw their most rapid rise while Ebenezer was on the government payroll.

8

@6 Yes, but I draw from middle school educational memory, not wiki.

9

@8 History doesn't really give a shit about your mediocre primary education, Feebles.

Maybe next time you'll remember your schooling was inadequate, and do that quick internet search before regurgitating a line from a 6th-grade history textbook written 40 years ago, or more?

10

@7- I guess only working 6 years for a mass-murdering sociopath is forgiveable.

11

@9 I’ll take my education over cribbing from wikipedia little boy.

12

@6 robotslave,
I didn't know the Americans created the first "concentration camps" before the term was ever known. I had thought the Spanish created them first. And indeed, you're correct. They were used against the Boers by the British Empire during the Second Boer War (1899-1901). My understanding is that it was a bit of a touchy issue for then President Theodore Roosevelt who was of Dutch heritage. I believed he sided with the British against the Boers. That must have irritated a lot of upstate New Yorkers and Michiganders (states with then heavy Dutch-American populations). Boers, of course were white Europeans largely of Dutch and German heritage who began settling South Africa 300 (?) years ago.

Thanks for the clarification.

13

Hitler had Concentration Camps in Germany.
His Death Camps, he located outside of Germany.
Clever guy, eh?

That Isreali nutnyahoo, he's got his open-air Concentration Camp
where he has his guys (gals, too!) shooting peaceful protesters
from up to 500 or 600 yards from Isreal's border.

Small woder trumpfy Loves him, eh?.

14

Africans were slaughtering each other and enslaving each other centuries before 1619.
As were "native" Americans before Columbus.
Doesn't fit the Leftist narrative, of course, but then most facts don't.

.

Barak Obama built those "camps" on the border.
Is he our Mugabe?
Of course not; just doing what Democrats have done, since 1838, right roboslob?
FDR?

.

Of course Chuck had no idea.
Just like the good citizens of Dachau had No Idea what was going on 3 km away for six years.
We believe you, Chuck.

15

@11 And that's exactly why you're going to keep losing these fights, Feebs. Apparently that crackerjack 6th-grade teacher of yours forgot to tell you education doesn't end with graduation.

@10 I doubt there are many Americans left who realize that forgiveness isn't something you can reserve for those who have done nothing wrong. If they even bother with the concept at all-- it's a lot easier to simply never forgive anyone for anything, isn't it?

16

Glad you mentioned FDR, Poofy.

A traitor to his Class, he welcomed their Hatred.
He let America's Citizens know, he could NOT
help us without we, the People's Help.
He turned America around, put people back to Work
and made them Banksters fuck the fuck off

and he was elected FOUR FUCKING TIMES.

As in Hong Kong, we the people outnumber the
fascists mofos by about half a million to one.

See who really has The Power?
But first, we gotta be Motivated.

17

Nazi Germany concentration camps, starting with Dachau, were first intended to jail political prisoners, mainly communists. Remember the german revolution after WW1 at first pitted monarchists vs republicans, but it mainly devolved into far-right (nazi) vs far-left (communist). Once hitler was named chancellor, and then after hindenburg died they persecuted the communists and rounded them up and put them into Dachau. People died in concentration camps, but they weren't designed for that. Many people were actually released. In comes Treblinka, Aushwitz-Berkanau and the death camps. Those were designed just to murder as many people as possible in as little time as possible, while robbing them of everything they had in the process. You also had the work camps, like Mauthausen, Baden Baden, Peenemunde etc., where the victims were worked to death by, for example mining ore or, hey, building V2 rockets.
It's easy to conflate concentration camps, death camps and work camps. They were all horrible though.

18

"I didn't know the scale of this crime until I was in that room with Ndebele students at that small college in Pennsylvania."

I'm confused. Shouldn't that read "Ndebele-speaking students"? I thought they were all Manicas.

19

Or maybe not. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend," and all that.

21

So Charles, any evidence yet that the US government is starving and executing people being held in detention for entering the USA illegally?

Typically a concentration camp will have a death rate of at least 25% to be effective, what are ICE's centers up to?

Any data?

Or are they hiding the bodies?

....Sound of crickets...

Maybe because you and the AOC crowd look remarkably stupid using the term "concentration camp" as a propaganda tool to compare ICE detention centers with schools, playgrounds and healthcare to Nazi camps and 90% of Americans will see right through that.

22

Before the grammar Nazis show up:

....detention centers, with schools, playgrounds and healthcare, to Nazi....

23

The only concentration camps in America make frozen concentrated orange juice.

24

@21

Less than 2% of Japanese-Americans prisoners died in the "internment camps."

They were still concentration camps.

A concentration camp doesn't have to be the worst example of a concentration camp that ever existed in order for it to qualify as a concentration camp.

The illegal entry of non-nationals into the United States is a misdemeanor according to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

We are putting people in concentration camps for committing a misdemeanor.

As far as your whataboutist comment (#14).
Mentioning that Barack Obama "built those camps" or that Africans have committed genocide doesn't change the fact that what we're doing right now is wrong.

You want to smear Charles with the sins of his father, yet you take no responsibility for the sins committed in your name.

26

"Less than 2% of Japanese-Americans prisoners died in the "internment camps.""

1,862 people died in US internment camps in World War Two, a 1.55%. death rate over two years of internment. The US death rate in 1946, the year the camps closed, was 10% per 100,000 nationally.

Not exactly "concentration camps" whose main purpose was to cause mass death through disease and medical neglect in a concentrated facility.

27

@26

The internment camps were concentration camps.
You suggested as much yourself in comment #14.

You don't get to change the definition of concentration camp (or anything else) to suit your narrative.

Definition of concentration camp:
a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard —used especially in reference to camps created by the Nazis in World War II for the internment and persecution of Jews and other prisoners

Concentration camps have existed throughout the world and throughout history.
It doesn't matter if you like the term or not.
It doesn't matter if you agree with its use in this situation or not.
It is the truth.

28

@25

It's never been necessary to detain everyone who's crossed the border illegally.
This is a new policy created by the Trump Administration.

29

@21

You're claiming these camps offer "schools, playgrounds, healthcare". That's absurd. The conditions are frankly inhumane, and the government has been taking steps to cut costs even further by worsening the living situation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/us/sarah-fabian-migrant-lawyer-doj.html

30

@27 I'm not 14.

I found another definition.

"a place where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labor or to await mass execution."

With a death rate lower than the US average the Japanese internment camps clearly didn't have "inadequate facilities". In fact, they had schools, hospitals, baseball leagues and theaters. Were they just? No. But hardly Dachau which is why you want to use the term, to lie.

We also know why you want to call ICE detention centers "concentration camps", it's a deliberate attempt to evoke Nazi Germany because you know that most Americans only know of that history.

"David A. Harris, head of the American Jewish Committee, argued to the Times in 1998 that the title of the Japanese-American exhibit “dilutes what we have come to understand as the meaning of concentration camps.'’

''Since the Second World War, these terms have taken on a specificity and a new level of meaning that deserves protection,'' Harris told the newspaper. ''A certain care needs to be exercised.''"

So enjoy your propaganda, just don't be surprised when people call you on your bullshit.....

"Aaron David Miller, a distinguished fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center, a Washington-based think tank, is among them. It can be dangerous, he told The Washington Post, to cross-compare the conditions and circumstances of the Holocaust, Japanese American incarceration and the detention of migrants at the border. In the case of the latter, he said he fears introducing the “concentration camp” language at all could be distracting, “letting the Trump administration off the hook” because people may immediately think of Nazi Germany and find the comparison absurd."

31

Thank you for the piece, Mudede.

What I find more concerning than the deplorable treatment of refugees at the border is that there's a large portion of the American population that has no problem with it, and even supports those actions, to the point they deflect the topic by quibbling over what to call facilities designed to hold concentrated numbers of people.

32

Let me explain to you how the Left loses elections in the US:

Leftist: ICE centers holding illegal immigrants are concentration camps!

Average American voter: What, like the Nazis in WW2 pushing people into gas chambers? That’s absurd.

Donald Trump: See, the left is lying to you!

Average American voter: You might be right.

Leftist: No no no… let me explain it to you. While Earl Kitchener built the first modern concentration camps during the Second Boer War from 1899 until 1902, earlier attempts by the Spanish in Cuba were also called concentration camps. However some historians now consider Japanese Internment camps to be concentration camps! ICE detention centers clearly are concentration camps too! They are all Nazis, don't you see! Kitchener, FDR and Trump!

Average American voter: Errrr, ok ….. I prefer Trump's answer.

33

" deplorable treatment of refugees at the border"

Probably because the vast majority are economic migrants.

"they deflect the topic by quibbling over what to call facilities designed to hold concentrated numbers of people."

Then call them what they are, detention facilities, with schools, TVs, three meals a day, access to telephones and healthcare. You're the ones quibbling and trying to rename in order to equate them with Nazi concentration camps.

But be my guest, it only hurts your cause outside the coastal bubble.

34

"refugees at the border"

"In October 2018, the International Organization for Migration conducted a rapid survey of a group of Salvadoran migrants who had banded together into a “caravan” to make the journey north. It found that nearly 52% cited economic opportunity as their motive for leaving the region, 18% cited violence and insecurity, 2% cited family reunification, and 28% cited a combination of those factors. "

So only 18% claim they are escaping violence, and that's from El Salvador, which, by the way, is far less violent now than in the 1980s when there were far fewer migrants. Now we can assume some of those claiming "persecution" are lying because they realize they cannot enter the US simply as economic migrants. So they’ll make up stories, or claim their husband beat them (which means we'd have to accept half the women in Latin America, but that's another story) or do both and claim they’re transgender.

Either way, their claims have to be investigated because it's obvious people are abusing the refugee system on our southern border. I have no problem with legitimate refugees who are vetted, entering this country. I also have no problem with legal immigration, although I think we need a 21st century model that emphasizes education and skills, ie. more Nigerians with college degrees, fewer low-rent Russians with a nephew in Tacoma. More like the Canadian system. I also support DACA for illegal immigrants who have lived in the US a certain period of time and don't have criminal records. I think Obama was moving us in the right direction on immigration: DACA plus deportation of people caught at the border along with deportation of anyone arrested for a crime. Good balance of carrot and stick. Of course, the woke left now thinks Obama was a fascist.

What you can't have is an open border system where anyone who gets across simply gets to stay.

35

Takes a break from chores to check the comments on Charles' post, see it's devolved into a racist 404 troll talking to itself, goes back to dusting.

36

@35 Don’t forget the blow the cobwebs out from between yer legs sugatits.

38

@37 Retard?

Well that’s not very nice.

39

Mehlman the reason people are being held at the border is to satisfy the racist and xenophobic tendencies of Trump’s base. Nothing more than that.

40

@404 et al

I haven't seen any photos of detained migrants playing Xbox.

I've seen lots of photographs and videos of migrants being kept in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions behind chain link fence indoors.

I've also read testimony given by Administration officials wherein they argue that they are not required to provide basic items to detainees like soap and toothbrushes.

All of you concentration camps supporters have said that using the phrase concentration camp is propaganda.
Your claims that the detainees are being treated well is propaganda.
The preponderance of evidence available quite clearly shows that the migrants are being held in concentration camps.

You speak of Xboxes and school rooms and playgrounds.
Where are the pictures of Migrant children playing Xbox?
Where are the pictures of happy migrant children in classrooms, hands raised eagerly awaiting their chance to answer a question?
Where are the pictures of migrant children playing on the playground?
Where are the pictures of the children eating healthy snacks?
The people on Fox News say these things are happening, but there is no evidence to support their claims.

There are lots of photographs and videos of children crammed into Cyclone Fence cages, lying on the floor.
There are videos of children screaming and crying.

If the administration were running these facilities as Humane detention centers there would be ample photographic evidence.
There isn't.

If you don't believe me then prove me wrong.
Share some links.
Share your evidence.

43

You remember when Trump cashed the 13-cent check mailed by Spy magazine? I’d like to see his reaction to an updated hoax: an offer to set up conversation therapy for incarcerated gay migrants.

44

@40 One side wants evidence and an end to cruel and unusual punishment, the other side wants to sneer at people who've gotten themselves all emotional about some whimpering mudblood urchins who made bad choices about what kinds of parents to have.

Save your demands that they play by the rules for those playing the same game.

45

40: Where did she GO to summer camp as a child? Camp Crystal Lake?

47

Thank you, Charles.
@1 spunkbutter and @31 Knat: for the WIN. Agreed and seconded.
@35 Lissa: Keep on rocking the house. You GO, girl!
@36 & @37: Take off those ridiculous MAGA caps before your heads cave in.
How old are you boys----twelve? Life at juvee must be pretty slow today, huh?
At least you still have your Cocoa Puffs and SuperFriends on Channel 4.

50

@36: Oh I'm so sorry 404! I didn't realize what a sensitive little plant you were.
@49: According to the OED we do:
a guarded compound for the detention or imprisonment of aliens, members of ethnic minorities, political opponents, etc., especially any of the camps established by the Nazis prior to and during World War II for the confinement and persecution of prisoners.

Now try not to be stupid and misinterpret " especially any of the camps established by the Nazis" to mean ONLY death camps established by the Nazis, if you can POSSIBLY help it.

51

Thank you for an insightful article.

@20 In the long run, it has to be this way. Colonialism is untenable unless you wipe out the indigenous population (viz. North America, Australia). The error is viewing Mugabe’s sins as peculiarly African. They are not. Mugabe was as human as they come, more’s the pity.

My takeaway from this story is the temptation we all have towards othering. It’s not our original sin, but it’s damn close to it: to see others as less than human on the basis of race, gender, creed, sexuality, accent, tradition. And those we other and hate the most are usually those who we live next to and are our nearest kin. The British, by and large, did not distinguish between Shona and Ndebele, except insofar as they could exploit the tension between the two (a pattern repeated throughout the Empire). To them, it was all “darkies.” These tensions only flared in the absence of outside force.

Who was more German than the German Jew, thoroughly integrated in language, culture, business, often even in religion?

And for whom does the passion of the American white liberal, so open to people of every conceivable background, burn most hotly against but the American white conservative? And vice versa of course. Fox News rages harder against shadowy unreal vestiges of “antifa” than almost any other group. The “race traitor” is always the most effective bogeyman.

Why is racism against blacks so endemic? Because they are our neighbours, and the closer they live, the worse racism becomes. Why is racism against Hispanics growing? Because they are becoming our neighbors, familiar yet alien.

Overcoming this requires a massive act of will, to judge people on the basis of their individual humanity, to deliberately set aside primal fears that we all feel. And to do it again and again, day after day. No, not all X are Y. Yet believing that they are is instinctive, deeply human.

That’s what I take from this. There’s very little, in the final analysis, most people can do about concentration camps. You apply what pressure you can knowing full well how ineffective it is likely to be. And recognize that a simple change in government almost never will fix the problem.

The big problems are beyond most of us. So I take from this how I must engage with people as individuals. Allow them to be that entire universe that they are and engage with and judge them on that basis. Charles has put his finger on something deeply human, a fault that lies buried, sometimes deep, sometimes not at all, within all of our hearts. It challenges to respect each other’s fellow humanity.

52

Fun facts: Obama was doing the same fucking thing Trump is doing and Obama built the cages AND put kids in them....The Stranger was silent

Then the House Democrats went on an Italian vacation in August which is weird if the country they are also charged with running is operating concentration camps.

53

They are obviously concentration camps.

And Obama was no friend to immigrants. But he didn't engage in the level of cruelty that Trump has shown.

54

Fuck the fuck off with all this Obama did it, Hillary did it, George Bush did it shit. Who is doing it now?

55

@52: Ah yes the "But Johnny did it toooooo!11!! Why aren't you yelling at hiiiiiim???" argument. Always popular with toddlers trying to squirm out from under their own misdeeds.
Make sure you stretch.

56

@34 (et.al) - How do you feel about the School of The America's (Ft. Benning, GA) training death-squads who romped around Mexico and Guatemala and El Salvador in the 80s & 90s & even into the 2000's indiscriminately killing & terrorizing people, and seeding the ground for the current Narco-wars? Hell, doubtless some of those USA "trainees" became narco-terrorists.

Did you know that one of those death squads was named "Justice y Ley"? Intentionally to enhance despair..

Do you think, maybe possibly perhaps that the USA has some, I dunno, culpability & therefore responsibility for the continuance of those horrors that our southern border neighbors are desperately trying to escape today?

Yet instead of showing the "great responsibility" that comes with "great power", Twumpet blasts racist xenophobia and has these refugees from terror rounded up and housed in conditions that are literally killing children. (How many adults have died? We may never know.)

Charles is right. When the full light of day is finally shone on the crimes the USA is committing right now, we'll be aghast.

@52 - Republicrats & Demoblicans, money-sucking cruel fuckheads all. What are you possibly proud of? Why try to divide us when the real criminals are the plutocrats & their politician (Rep/Dem, n'importe qui) lapdogs. Stay ignorant, your call.

57

@56: Thanks for referencing the School of the Assassins. Everything our country's leaders did to the Americas, from the 19th Century on, was utterly despicable. It was never our place to train right-wing hit squads to murder all possibility of change in the hemisphere during the Reagan era...just as it was never our place to invent a bandit army to slaughter people whose only crime was supporting the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, and never our place to force that country, literally on pain of death, to vote to end that revolution and put Somoza's cronies back into power. Now(and I say this acknowledging that there are valid criticisms to be made against the democratically elected Maduro government in Venezuela, our leaders, in collaboration with the butchers who run Colombia, are once again engaged in activities it has no right to be engaged in-using force and treachery to try and impose Juan Guaido, a man whose party has virtually no support in Venezuela, whose Milton Friedman/Agosto Pinochet austerity agenda has no support in that country, as head of state. If he is imposed, Trump will probably send in the Delta Force and the Marines to crush all opposition. It's basically doomed to be just as bloody and indefensible as what the US did, by various means, to Guatemala in 1954, the Dominican Republic in 1965 and Chile in 1973.

58

@56, 57 -- Excellent comments, treacle and AlaskanbutnotSeanParnell.
Thank you.

Oh, and not to mention -- our "president's" calls for a Blockade of Venezuela

What the so-called right will refuse to recognize is OUR Culpability in creating shit-hole countries; to do so would indicate Responsibility which, being perpetual victims 1st class, their ideology cannot allow. Never admit to a mistake; always double down.


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