Indeed. Its an ugly truth to face, but it won't go away because you don't face it. All that not facing it does is make you personally culpable in covering it up and condoning it.
Agent Fisher wrote: ↑2019-06-26 09:13pm
I don't view them as concentration camps. I don't think it's accurate or like the connotation that the term brings. They are detention centers for people caught while illegally entering the United States. If they're rounding up illegal immigrants who have already entered and settled into the nation's communities and suburbs, sending them to those centers and keeping them there, then yes, they could be considered concentration camps, just like the Internment Camps of WW2 for Japanese descendants in the U.S. could be considered concentration camps. To label the detention centers as such is a clear attempt invoke the memory of the Holocaust and to bring those emotions to the fore front of discussions about them.
Edit: I think if we're going to complain about something, we need to be accurate about it and not try for hyperbole. The Detention Centers are a fucking mess and need to be sorted, but labeling them as Concentration Camps isn't going to help.
Its not merely that they are a "mess". They are, by the admission of administration officials, designed to be cruel as a "deterrent", and conditions there have reached a point where it is causing children to die:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigr ... rs-n954781
Which isn't counting all the people who die trying to cross the border, or will die when they get shipped back to situations of extreme poverty and violence, or the many traumatized children who will undoubtably commit suicide some years down the road due to the life-long mental health issues these camps will leave them with, even if they are one day freed. And yes, some of these atrocities predate the Trump administration- but Trump has done nothing to resolve them and has often deliberately acted to make them worse.
And TRR, no, it's not an ethnic cleansing. My sister in law isn't being rounded up for being Nicaraguan, none of her family is. My best friend, born to two illegal immigrants who've since obtained legal status in the US, isn't worried about being rounded up and sent packing and neither are his parents. My coworkers and friends who are from Latin America aren't worried. This isn't the mass round up, detainment, and deportation of anyone of the Latin American ethnicity, this is attempting to reduce the number of people who have, and are attempting to, illegally entered and settled in the country.
Ethnic Cleansing definition as per Google:
"the mass expulsion or killing of members of an unwanted ethnic or religious group in a society"
Now, that the primary motivation of Trump's border policy is racism and xenophobia is unquestionable. All the crap about saving jobs or saving money or immigrants committing crimes is so much bullshit, as statistics have shown repeatedly that migrants have lower crime rates than the general populace, and that we actually benefit economically from immigration. This is certainly a policy of mass expulsion, and as conditions become more and more deliberately inhumane and dangerous, it is moving quickly towards becoming an (unspoken, at least in public) policy of mass killing.
And from a UN website (I underlined the most pertinent sections):
https://www.un.org/en/genocidepreventio ... sing.shtml
Ethnic Cleansing
Background
Ethnic cleansing has not been recognized as an independent crime under international law. The term surfaced in the context of the 1990’s conflict in the former Yugoslavia and is considered to come from a literal translation of the Serbo-Croatian expression “etničko čišćenje”. However, the precise roots of the term or who started using it and why are still uncertain.
The expression “ethnic cleansing” has been used in resolutions of the Security Council and the General Assembly, and has been acknowledged in judgments and indictments of the ICTY, although it did not constitute one of the counts for prosecution. A definition was never provided.
Definition
As ethnic cleansing has not been recognized as an independent crime under international law, there is no precise definition of this concept or the exact acts to be qualified as ethnic cleansing. A United Nations Commission of Experts mandated to look into violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia defined ethnic cleansing in its interim report S/25274 as "… rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area." In its final report S/1994/674, the same Commission described ethnic cleansing as “… a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.”
The Commission of Experts also stated that the coercive practices used to remove the civilian population can include: murder, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, extrajudicial executions, rape and sexual assaults, severe physical injury to civilians, confinement of civilian population in ghetto areas, forcible removal, displacement and deportation of civilian population, deliberate military attacks or threats of attacks on civilians and civilian areas, use of civilians as human shields, destruction of property, robbery of personal property, attacks on hospitals, medical personnel, and locations with the Red Cross/Red Crescent emblem, among others.
The Commission of Experts added that these practices can “… constitute crimes against humanity and can be assimilated to specific war crimes. Furthermore, such acts could also fall within the meaning of the Genocide Convention.”
Your defense, such as it is, is apparently that its only targeting illegal immigrants, not Latinos generally. But its been clearly shown that that is not the case, that lawful asylum seekers and legal residents are often targeted, and again, the motive is very clearly at least to reduce the growth of the Latino population in America.
It should be noted that I use the term "ethnic cleansing" in lieu of the even more loaded term "genocide", though I feel that that term might also be applicable (underlining mine, again):
https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml
Genocide
Background
The word “genocide” was first coined by Polish lawyer Raphäel Lemkin in 1944 in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. It consists of the Greek prefix genos, meaning race or tribe, and the Latin suffix cide, meaning killing. Lemkin developed the term partly in response to the Nazi policies of systematic murder of Jewish people during the Holocaust, but also in response to previous instances in history of targeted actions aimed at the destruction of particular groups of people. Later on, Raphäel Lemkin led the campaign to have genocide recognised and codified as an international crime.
Genocide was first recognised as a crime under international law in 1946 by the United Nations General Assembly (A/RES/96-I). It was codified as an independent crime in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention). The Convention has been ratified by 149 States (as of January 2018). The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has repeatedly stated that the Convention embodies principles that are part of general customary international law. This means that whether or not States have ratified the Genocide Convention, they are all bound as a matter of law by the principle that genocide is a crime prohibited under international law. The ICJ has also stated that the prohibition of genocide is a peremptory norm of international law (or ius cogens) and consequently, no derogation from it is allowed.
The definition of the crime of genocide as contained in Article II of the Genocide Convention was the result of a negotiating process and reflects the compromise reached among United Nations Member States in 1948 at the time of drafting the Convention. Genocide is defined in the same terms as in the Genocide Convention in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Article 6), as well as in the statutes of other international and hybrid jurisdictions. Many States have also criminalized genocide in their domestic law; others have yet to do so.
Definition
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Elements of the crime
The Genocide Convention establishes in Article I that the crime of genocide may take place in the context of an armed conflict, international or non-international, but also in the context of a peaceful situation. The latter is less common but still possible. The same article establishes the obligation of the contracting parties to prevent and to punish the crime of genocide.
The popular understanding of what constitutes genocide tends to be broader than the content of the norm under international law. Article II of the Genocide Convention contains a narrow definition of the crime of genocide, which includes two main elements:
A mental element: the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such"; and
A physical element, which includes the following five acts, enumerated exhaustively:
Killing members of the group
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
The intent is the most difficult element to determine. To constitute genocide, there must be a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Cultural destruction does not suffice, nor does an intention to simply disperse a group. It is this special intent, or dolus specialis, that makes the crime of genocide so unique. In addition, case law has associated intent with the existence of a State or organizational plan or policy, even if the definition of genocide in international law does not include that element.
Importantly, the victims of genocide are deliberately targeted - not randomly – because of their real or perceived membership of one of the four groups protected under the Convention (which excludes political groups, for example). This means that the target of destruction must be the group, as such, and not its members as individuals. Genocide can also be committed against only a part of the group, as long as that part is identifiable (including within a geographically limited area) and “substantial.”
The main difficulty would be in proving intent to destroy, at least in part, the immigrant population, as opposed to simply relocate them. However, it should be noted again that this is actually a fairly narrow definition of genocide. For example, various politicians and organizations have recently determined that the systemic mistreatment of First Nations people in Canada, and the resulting high murder rates of First Nations women in particular, constitute genocide.
"I know its easy to be defeatist here because nothing has seemingly reigned Trump in so far. But I will say this: every asshole succeeds until finally, they don't. Again, 18 months before he resigned, Nixon had a sky-high approval rating of 67%. Harvey Weinstein was winning Oscars until one day, he definitely wasn't."-John Oliver
"The greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan."-General Von Clauswitz, describing my opinion of Bernie or Busters and third partiers in a nutshell.
I SUPPORT A NATIONAL GENERAL STRIKE TO REMOVE TRUMP FROM OFFICE.
