I think there's something we have to explore in terms of the doomerism where people expect the US to be Exactly Nazism 2: there is a claim that they are nazis, and this is a true claim. But they are nazis in the sense of "people who happen to be really into hitler for some goddamn reason" - the same sense that, idk, Varg and Douglas P are nazis. This doesn't necessarily mean that the US has been consolidated as a fascist state, which clearly has not yet happened, if that had happened there would be some pretty clear signs ("Bruce Springsteen living in exile in Tokyo" might be one, "Zohran Mamdani arrested, denationalized and deported to Uganda" would be another). And, of course, it might be - and probably is - their ultimate goal! But it hasn't happened *yet* which means that there's still time to do something about it, which is obviously good. It means there's still hope. But certain people, in trying to seek support for their claim that they are nazis, start looking for any terrible news that they can use to support that claim, which means there's an ecosystem of doomer fake news that tries to make you believe that, for example, CECOT is a literal death camp. But it's not, and this fake news is harmful because the people who were deported to CECOT were alive, and it was possible to free them. And you wouldn't free someone that you think is dead! Likewise, the detainees at Alligator Alcatraz that went missing - obviously we do need to figure out what happened to them! But you *categorically do not assume that people who are disappeared are dead, until you know for sure, which usually means literally finding the body* And you do this because nobody searches for the dead, you search for people who might still be alive, and these people might still be alive, and we need to figure out what happened to them.
@julieofthespiritsHegelian Princess Agreed top to bottom.
A side branch: I’m newly frustrated by the way “concentration camp” has become synonymous with “death camp.” The distinction matters because the Nazis operated concentration camps for many years before they turned them into death camps; the original official plan was to •deport• all the Jews from Europe. It turned into mass killing only when deporting that many people proved impossible. And by missing that distinction and forgetting that history, we fail to notice that (1) DHS is most certainly building and operating concentration camps, (2) they are not death camps yet, and (3) this trajectory is exactly how death camps eventually came about under the Nazis. So we miss both the urgency •and• the possibility of action!
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