When I put up that last post about shameful moments in American science policy, I felt like Science had forgotten one that I personally consider our most lethal mistake…but it’s so deeply ingrained in American culture that maybe it’s taken for granted. It’s always there, and so it’s easy to overlook. I think the greatest science lie ever has to be our history of racism which led to the enslavement and genocide of other human beings that our society judged inferior.
That crime has never gone away, and we’re currently compounding it. An ICE detention center is performing mass hysterectomies on immigrants.
On Monday, a nurse at a private immigration detention center in Georgia came forward about a range of dangerous medical practices at a U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility. According to her, the center has not only ignored COVID-19 protocols, but is actively performing mass hysterectomies on detained people.
The whistleblower, Dawn Wooten, worked at the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) — which is operated by LaSalle Corrections — where she allegedly witnessed the company’s refusal to test detainees for COVID-19 as well as spoke to several people who each had their uterus removed as part of an unwarranted hysterectomy procedure. According to the official complaint lodged with the Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security, Wooten said that the facility was performing hysterectomies on people who reported having heavy menstrual cycles or other more serious pain, but that “everybody’s uterus cannot be that bad.”
“I’ve had several inmates tell me that they’ve been to see the doctor and they’ve had hysterectomies and they don’t know why they went or why they’re going,” Wooten said in the report. She also noted how ICDC consistently uses one out-of-facility doctor, who is responsible for the hysterectomies in addition to accidentally removing the wrong ovary in one patient. “He’s the uterus collector.”
It’s possible this nurse is a disgruntled employee, and that she’s misinterpreting an excess of zeal in treating sick patients as a pattern of mass sterilization, but isn’t it odd how ICE, which has never been particularly good at managing the health and safety of the inmates in their concentration camps, is suddenly so solicitous and thorough in treating the reproductive health of the prisoners?
It’s also in line with historical practice.
This isn’t the first time the United States has forced people — especially people of color — into unwanted sterilization, which is a human rights violation and a form of eugenics, according to the World Health Organization. For more than 70 years, California led the country in sterilizations; during that time about 20,000 people were sterilized against their will in state institutions. In the South, Black women were treated as “practice” for incoming medical students and had been sterilized unknowingly during C-sections. Other times, they were coerced in order to retain welfare benefits. Sterilization was so wide-spread in North Carolina that a bill was passed in 2015 to give victims financial compensation.
Of course, when it comes to undocumented immigrants, who are regularly referred to as “unwanted” “aliens” by the current president, it’s not so surprising that these practices went unreported for so long. One immigrant in the complaint put it best: “This place is not equipped for humans.”
ICE and Homeland Security were established under George W. Bush after the post-9/11 freakout. Can we stop trying to resuscitate the reputation of that horrible mass-murderer and criminal, and can we start condemning the Republicans who created the fascist Homeland Security Act, every Democrat who voted for it, and all the presidents since who have allowed ICE to continue existing? Shut it down, and fire our version of Dr Mengele, “the uterus collector”.
You mean we should be actually holding Democrats responsible for the things they’ve supported, and that we should care about more than party affiliation? PZ, based on what other commenters here have said to me in the past, you need to shut up and commit yourself for a psych exam — if not worse — and ought to be banned, because Blue No Matter Who and if you criticize Biden (who voted for DHS/ICE and was part of an administration which expanded them and renewed the contracts of the people who were running the camps who had already gotten the government sued for the way they were treating immigrants) you hope Trump wins. After all, it can’t possibly be that both major parties are made up almost entirely of scumbags who would more appropriately be on trial at an international court than in charge of a country. Obviously Democrats and Republicans are Manichaean opposites and since Trump is bad all Democrats must be positively angelic.
Of course we can’t have fascism without a dose of eugenics.
We need to ship the entire top echelons of this administration off to The Hague.
We need to ship the entire top echelons of this administration off to The Hague.
Kinda makes it obvious why they have been sanctioning ICC investigators and threatening military action if necessary to prevent Americans from being brought before the court.
My immediate reaction to reading this: “Aaaaaaaacccckkkkkk what-the-fuck-what-the-fuck-what-the-fuck!?!”
Also: I don’t understand what comment #1 is trying to say, the message is muddled and the prose confusing, and I can’t figure out what it has to do with PZ’s quote.
Ah, Vicar. Like a turd you float to the top of most all these discussions of the Democratic Party’s heinous perfidies.
You can of course point to an example of a commentator here calling for your psych exam for your brave heterodoxy, or an example of Biden being placed above criticism, or of grievances against Biden/the Dems being a bannable offence.
Oh. No, wait, I’m sorry. “Other commentators.” Plural, even!
So roll out those examples, mate. I’m all agog. Just put your money on the table for once, you useful idiot.
No matter how much you condemn the actions of Democrats, have no fear, the Vicar will condemn you for your milquetoast ways.
That guy who attacked the ICE facility will eventually be seen by history as pretty much the only person with the fortitude to try to deal with ICE appropriately.
Hard to imagine things getting much worse. Hell, things aren’t even getting worse, we’re just now learning more about how truly bad things have been. Yes, we absolutely need to do a much better job at holding our elected officials to account. As for condemning those who voted for the Homeland Security Act: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/107-2002/s249
Lot of them are still in elected positions, or running for (re)election for various offices. Go ahead, hold them to account and demand that they apologize and promise to make amends for the crimes against humanity that their vote has unleashed or else you will not vote for them (if you’re in a position to vote for them in the next election).
This is nothing new for the US government. This was official government policy in Puerto Rico for decades. Latinos and hispanics have been dealing with this racist policy for 100 years in the US. It is nice to see white people finally giving a damn.
https://www.panoramas.pitt.edu/health-and-society/dark-history-forced-sterilization-latina-women
So The Vicar are you trying to be the king of fallacies. Does PZ say anything in his post declaring Dems are wonderful? Of course you ignore this line ” every Democrat who voted for it”. If you want to argue how about you argue against what PZ actually said not what you want him to have said in your fever dreams. If you want to keep setting up strawmen and knocking them down, then people are just going to laugh at you, belittle you and question the level of your intelligence, and rightly so.
I’ve got to wonder if he is elected if Biden will really do anything about ICE and Homeland Security or just mouth platitudes.
With my mother having been from a poor Mexican American family with a worthless father I’m sometimes surprised she wasn’t sterilized and my sister and I exist.
The Vicar seems to be projecting again. Or maybe I’ve just fallen for his Poe (a distinct possibility).
His false dichotomy is laughable. One can easily recognize that “centrist” Democrats are largely indistinguishable from almost all Republicans in areas like the economy; but it’s also obvious (to me, at least) that most Democrats are far better than almost all Republicans on matters that I tend to think of as basic human decency. I know how I’ll be voting, and it won’t be for any Republican nor for any third party candidate, and I won’t abstain.
I do wish, however, that “centrist” Democrats weren’t so gormless as to think that they can actually negotiate with enough Republicans to make a difference.
He won’t actively encourage them. It may not be much, but it’s an improvement. Obama directed ICE to restrict their attention to undocumented immigrants with criminal records who posed an actual danger. Of course, ICE as an agency hated having their hands tied like that. Under Trump, the priority is exactly reversed. Deport as many people as possible. Go for the ones who are the easiest targets (so presumably, the least dangerous and–initially–least suspecting of being subject to enforcement). I am not advocating either approach, but at least Obama was not engaging in active ethnic cleansing. I would expect Biden to move back to this, and of course ICE and some large percentage of my fellow white Americans are going to throw a hissy fit over it and scare themselves with stories about the dreaded MS-13 gangs. Well, screw them.
The thing is, even in 2016, the most that was likely to be accomplished was to protect an open SCOTUS seat (which the Republican Senate probably would have blocked indefinitely), hold on to some environmental protections, leave ICE about the same instead of weaponizing them further. For whatever reason, a large number of (and again I am going to say) white Americans seemed to think it was time to elect Bernie Sanders for some kind of people’s revolution. No, that wasn’t going to happen, and whether it was prevented because the DNC “rigged” the outcome or because of actual voter preference, the point is that it was not going to happen.
I have been accepting shit my entire life. I get that other people want something better. I just want to dull some of the pain, but sure, if you think you can do better, I would love to see it.
And I admit that as cynical as I thought I was, the subject of the OP is shocking, getting into Josef Mengele territory. I am aware of some of the history of forced sterilization, but I thought we moved beyond it (hahaha, yeah sorry). Of course, when you deny people any legal recourse, this kind of thing is inevitable. In fact, I think an inevitable part of the process is that serial killers rise to positions of power, like Mengele, because they’re the ones who really want the job. You need strict, explicit policies in place to prevent this.
Not everything about Trumpism can be explained as preserving white dominance but it covers a great deal of territory. You have Stephen Miller working (mostly behind the scenes) declaring the US a white nation. The reprioritization of ICE to deport anyone for any reason, and even murmurs about reversing naturalized citizenship. You have “shithole countries” (which presumably do not include Slovenia). You have cultural sideshows like the Duggars and religious movements that come down to “more white babies.” Naturally, we will see the opposite trend of suddenly being in favor of “reproductive health” when the outcome is fewer non-white babies. I mean, we’ve been down exactly this road before and weren’t even very shy about it.
I am not surprised in the least, I thought this was going there when they first proposed the homeland security act in the first place.
What does surprise me a little is that it took so long for it to become public.
In all of this just remember that private companies contracted with the government are in this up to their eyeballs and are making money treating human beings like feed lot cattle just another means to make easy money.
uncle frogy
I saw this last night, and immediately thought, “Isn’t Joseph Mengele supposed to be dead?”
Well, Zombies are notoriously hard to kill so it isn’t that surprising.
We don’t need to fire this guy.
We need a thorough public investigation, and if crimes were committed, a trial and a prison sentence.
Between this and Guantanamo, the GOP has the market cornered for crimes against humanity.
@13
Maintaining the status quo is not an improvement. It is maintaining the status quo. If you really believe the key difference, in this arena at least, is that Biden just won’t encourage this, then nothing gets improved if he wins. Not getting worse is not the same as improving. Biden needs to be pulled to the left, and if he is resistant to that, he needs to not be supported. There is no other way to dull the pain than by addressing the problem, which is a lack of activity on the part of our representatives (or those who wish to be) to put an end to these atrocities. Pity parties and guilt trips don’t work, especially not when they’re used strategically to discourage people voting their principles and to instead fall in line behind a platform that won’t even try to make things better.
It’s not an improvement in level. It’s an improvement in rate of change, which eventually shows up in level. Given that the US is precipitously falling into “failed state” territory (if we’re not there already) I will vote for putting the brakes on, even if the result is far worse than standards I might have had 10 years ago.
(a) What would be sufficient to count as “improvement” in your view? (b) What reasonably likely set of circumstances could get us there?
If you can’t answer both questions, I’m not really interested.
FWIW, I am in favor of pulling Biden to the left. In fact, that seems like about the only strategy that makes sense. We’re stuck with him, so let’s work with what we have.
And… sorry for the triple post, but is was precisely failure to protect the status quo in 2016 that got us into the shit we are in now. I would have liked to see Bernie Sanders elected president. I certainly would have voted for him in the general election. My belief was that it was very unlikely that he would appear as a major party candidate in November 2016, and this belief was backed up by empirical results that were effectively beyond my control. (I am entirely unconcerned at least in this context about whether it was “fair” or the DNC “rigged” things. The point is that by Nov. 2016, there were precisely two candidates with a realistic probability of being elected.) (And actually I voted for him in the 2020 CA primary, which made sense at the time.)
There is a certain argument that protecting the status quo just leaves us with a false sense of security. Well, congratulations, then! I think very many people have been shaken out of a false sense of security. The 2016 election was a smashing success in that regard. Involuntary removal of women’s uteruses is certainly an effective way to shake us “milquetoast” “neolibs” out of slumber. Well played!
@raven
Until you have 30 years experience in public international law, you have no idea how large that market is.*
*Note: I do not have those 30 years experience. I have no experience. I have a little education on the subject and GOD DAMN.
Uncannily, I can already hear the applause of the audience for the five-Oscar film in twenty years’ time.
But between now and then, it’s all gone worryingly quiet.
@22 Well, it was very similar to a Buffy episode. https://buffy.fandom.com/wiki/Gentlemen
@PaulBC 18, 19, 20
If I had any sense that there could be a meeting of the minds on the concept of “reasonably likely”, this might not look like a flaccid attempt to continue to undermine advocacy for even mild levels of progressivism.
I’d like the candidate I vote for to not only explicitly condemn this, but condemn the concentration camps in toto (so as to effectively condemn all of atrocities that have been reported already coming out of these camps, ranging from the drugging and raping of adults and children alike and the shredding of documentation of those imprisoned and are subsequently “lost” in the system) and promise that if elected they will simply and immediately grant citizenship to everyone who was detained in those camps as a first step towards repaying a debt we’ve incurred that we can never fully repay, to dismantle ICE, and to institute a new department tasked solely with reuniting the families that were ripped apart from each other. Anything less than that is unacceptable. Anything less than the bare-minimum humanity extended to brown people afforded by the above is what permitted the US to get here in the first place. That is the very least of an improvement that should be on the table. Slapping band-aids on this is not a solution, it just allows it to resurface again later. While that’s acceptable to the segment of the Democratic voters who will never be personally affected by things like this, at some point it becomes beyond the pale to those of us whose lives and families are regularly being put up as bargaining chips at the political table. If you cannot, or perhaps choose not to, understand that, I suspect it’s often very easy for you to not be interested.
No, we’re not. Because the election is not the end point. It is just a point. If you allow yourself to look at more than the next competition between your team and the opposing team, you’ll see there is far more than that one nigh hopeless strategy (that I believe should still be pursued regardless of it being hopeless, mind you).
That’s some bullshit right there. Clinton chose not to campaign in key battleground states, instead trying to win over red states that were never going to vote for her (either specifically her or any Democrat) in the first place. Clinton ran a more negative campaign than even Trump did (sources:https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-52599-0_4 ; https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0002764218756919 ), and it turns out messages of “don’t vote for X” can dissuade people from voting at all. Kind of matters to give people a reason to vote FOR you and not just AGAINST someone else. There are lots of ways to note vote for someone. Importantly as well, Sanders’ supporters showed up for Clinton in 2016 at a higher rate than Clinton supporters showed up for Obama in 2008 (source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/08/24/did-enough-bernie-sanders-supporters-vote-for-trump-to-cost-clinton-the-election/). Obama still won. He motivated people across the spectrum to vote. Clinton didn’t motivate the pragmatists and centrists and moderates in swing states, and progressives only showed up out of fear of Trump. We’re in the shit show that resulted from 2016 because the DNC chose to abandon Americans, not because any segment of Americans chose to abandon the DNC.
Except it hasn’t shaken enough of you out of your slumber, because more of you are fighting more desperately to get us to shut up about these injustices than about stopping these injustices. This isn’t new. The barbarism reported here is not new, it’s just another instance. For years now, just in terms of the concentration camps, we’ve had reports and seen videos and heard testimony about the inhumanely cramped conditions, the drugging and raping, the document shredding, the infants ripped away from parents, all the people lost in the system who cannot be found, the American citizens detained for weeks in these camps who just happen to also have brown skin. And still, the pragmatists pray at the alters of compromise and bipartisanship and electability, telling the progressives throughout that entire time to quit the pie in the sky dreaming of maybe the US not having concentration camps where children are drugged and raped (such a radical extreme progressive position!) and instead do exactly the same thing that lost in 2016 but with Joe Biden instead of Hillary Clinton. Cool. It’s so great that you care enough about minorities and refugees to fight more passionately for “not getting worse than children getting drugged and raped, eugenics, kidnapping, and overcrowded living conditions that would make slave ships blush” than for “let’s fix this.” You’re magnanimity truly knows no bounds.
Please don’t shut up. I just wish more people could vote tactically once the election cycle has moved to that point. The fact that Trump won in 2016 and not Clinton puts us even further from any reasonable targets of “bare-minimum humanity” than we would otherwise be. It is disastrous that Trump won, and I am unapologetic about my vote for Clinton, which I’m very certain was the right thing to do (if a bit meaningless here in CA). A lot of my family is in Pennsylvania. They all voted for Clinton. In that case, it could have made a difference.
Independent of the effect of my sister-in-law reposting literally fake news (before Trump stole the term) like https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fbi-agent-murder-suicide/ … and no I don’t blame her or like-minded people for changing the election outcome, but I do wonder what the fuck they thought they would accomplish by doing that. There was a long and heated primary. After the convention, Bernie Sanders himself acquiesced to not being the nominee, and (his supporters want you to know) campaigned for Hillary Clinton. That’s the point where if you can’t throw your support behind a candidate, you can at least avoid going out of your way undermine them when the beneficiary will be someone even worse. (Politics is a contest, and Republicans are better at it. The only reason they don’t always win is that they represent a minority of American voters.)
Even Noam Freaking Chomsky said it would be better to vote for Hillary Clinton when it finally came to that point.
I agree that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was terrible and insulting. The fact that she won Orange County and lost traditional Democratic working class regions is incredible (but less so when you find out she didn’t even campaign there and bragged that she would “replace” these voters with suburban Republicans). Obama was a better campaigner who created an effective playbook for winning elections nationally that other Democrats choose to ignore.
We are “stuck with” Biden for this election cycle. I thought the scope of my statement was pretty clear.
@kome And here’s another point. The Sanders supporters I know on facebook weren’t talking about injustices committed against brown-skinned people.
That were talking about (a) emails! OMG emails! (b) Debbie Wasserman Schultz “DWS” to those in the know, and Oh what an awful person she is (c) some bizarre Harry Potter analogies involving Dolores Umbridge that mostly failed to land with me, though I liked the Harry Potter movies and (d) the “rigged” primary.
Seriously, if the topic had come up that there might be an ethnic cleansing campaign in the works, I admit I might have been tempted to point out that Trump was likely to make it even worse than those awful “neolibs” were already doing. But… here’s the thing. It never, EVER, came up.
As far as I could tell, 2016 was basically a referendum on whether DWS is a big meanie who cheats on primaries. And that referendum went out decisively against DWS. We sure showed her! Hillary Clinton might have been “coronated” at the convention, but she lost to Trump.
@PaulBC
Lets not forget the Seth Rich conspiracy that was also something the left couldnt shut the fuck up about in 2016. And all of a sudden they care now about latinos being put in cages? As a latino myself fuck all of y’all. You still had a hand in having Clinton lose. Im not saying she has no blame. Her campaign was stupid in that she stupidly assumed people would do the right thing and vote against fascism. At least her error was foolishness where as the lefts is deliberately insidious in their propaganda.
Oh and in cade it wasnt obvious. These propaganda campaigns did the most damage in battleground states because they dissuaded votes from those on the fence.
I have, in the past, advocated punching Nazis every time they stick their revolting heads out of their holes and spread their hate. I have been wrong and foolish in that, and I apologize.
We’re well past the point at which punching Nazis accomplishes anything. The Nazis are mainstream and in they’re in power. They’ve built the camps, and they’re the butchering people they’ve put in them. This is now a full-blown genocide, and we’re sitting here saying nothing worthwhile while they come for the immigrant. It’ll be our turn soon enough, and soon there won’t anyone left to speak for us.
Everyone here knows what must be done. Everyone here knows what it took to break their power, even temporarily, the last time. We can sit around singing “violence never solves anything” to ourselves until they break down our doors and solve us with great violence, or we can accept that yes, it’s happening here (again).
Or maybe they won’t come for us at all. If we’re “good,” if we never do anything but call the worthless fools in congress (most of whom couldn’t care less), vote for the candidates they allow us, and march peacefully with snarky signs on our days off, maybe they won’t even bother to kill us. Why should they go to the trouble, if all we’re going to do is sit around and whine endlessly about the 2016 election?
Just kidding- they’ll get to all of us eventually. Our only real choice now is whether we die with “clean” hands, or a clean conscience.
Remember what it took to break their power last time. Don’t expect it to cost any less this time.
vucodlak @29, are you advocating for WW3?
logicalcat@27 I have not seen anything like the continued attacks from the left against Biden that were leveled against Hillary Clinton right up until the election. Maybe that’s a hopeful sign. I’m not sure if I should be surprised. Circumstances are different with the pandemic and maybe finally some panic over Trump, but Hillary Clinton is also a uniquely despised figure, owing both to a quarter-century billion dollar smear campaign and scarcely concealed misogyny. She was a pretty terrible candidate in my opinion (though I agreed with her on policy about as much as I did Obama). That is still a really crappy reason to cede a SCOTUS seat to the Federalist Society (actually two but we would not have known in 2016).
Anyway, I never asked Sanders supporters to “shut up” about universal health coverage. I agree with that part. My dispute is with their complicity in a smear campaign that originated in the far right and benefits the far right. Sorry, but they did this and I have the receipts in my facebook history.
I knew exactly what I was voting for in 2016 and, yes, it was a desperate attempt to hold onto some shreds of the dreaded “status quo” while congress could re-align. I have no idea, absolutely no idea, what Sanders supporters thought he was going to be able to accomplish with a GOP House and Senate that any other Democrat–or a wax dummy behind the Resolute desk–would not have accomplished just as readily.
Anyway, different year. This year my main concern is that Trump will stop the vote on election night when it may show him ahead and then assemble an army of lawyers for SCOTUS and an army of thugs to intimidate local officials to that by mid-December all the “serious” people agree that he won a close election. The fact that I am not already planning some kind of escape just shows that it hasn’t really settled in (if I didn’t have a house and kids approaching college age, it would be more feasible).
And my scenario above might seem a little far-fetched if it wasn’t exactly what happened already in 2000 when we still followed “norms.” If not exactly, then different only in degree and not kind.
@29 In the live-action WWII RPG, I know exactly what character I play: refugee. There are many refugees from that era I admire greatly, more than I do generals, heads of state, and political thinkers. It’s as honorable a role as any, and by no means an easy one.
Business Insider reports that Mahendra Amin is the one accused of doing hysterectomies without consent at the ICE concentration camps in Georgia.
https://www.businessinsider.com/lawyers-identified-gynecologist-at-center-of-whistleblow-ice-center-complaint-2020-9
Yeah, Business Insider, that oh-so-leftist media outlet. Can’t be trusted here.
@34 I like Business Insider, but they like Forbes, and Teen Vogue among others have produced an unusual amount of good reporting in the Trump era. They may not be leftwing, but they are not Fox News either. And the depth of analysis (yes, I am talking about Teen Vogue here) far exceeds CNN.
Feminist Info is a page on facebook. One of their posts today about ICE in Georgia wisely noted:
@Vucodluk
2016 is how we got here in the first place and right now its happening again in 2020 where a faction of the left want to cede power to nazis because they think it will magically turn into a win for socialism in the future. You want to fight nazis? With who? The ones who claim to want to fight them are also the ones supporting them by proxy. We dont have the man power im afraid.
And sometimes not even by proxy. Theres plenty of leftists who think letting trump win will bring about revolution. Except i have no faith in their revolution and i despise the fact that they helped nazis come to power in the first place. I used to hang out with these third party voters. They admitted this to me. And they paint me out tonbe the foolish one for not stepping in line.
@ John Morales, #30
I’m not advocating it- I’m saying it’s already begun, and the longer we pretend otherwise, the worse it will be for everyone involved. The “it” in question being a civil war rather than a world war. I don’t expect the rest of the world to clean up our mess. Although, unfortunately, it’s already spilling over into the rest of the world.
Sorry about that.
@ PaulBC, #33
I expect to be in a camp wearing whatever the modern equivalent of a pink (I am queer/pansexual) or black (I am mentally ill, and I can’t hide it anymore) triangle is in a few years, if I do nothing. And I’ll almost certainly do nothing. I always do nothing, without direction. Call it cowardice, call it the product of my abusive upbringing- neither is wrong, nor do both tell the whole story.
Trump has been making noise about “doing something” about crazy people since before he was elected and, even if he’s voted out (and actually leaves), whatever rough beast the Republicans run against Biden in 2024 will be worse. The Republicans are fully invested in the “crazy people are responsible for mass shootings, if the shooter was white” narrative, and things are only going to get worse. That’s what always happens when problems aren’t addressed- they get worse.
I won’t last long in a camp. They won’t even have to do anything else to me- just lock me up and take away my meds. Without those I want to die. I’ll finish the job for them in no time at all.
Which, honestly, will be no great loss. An empty, meaningless end to an empty, meaningless life.
@ logicalcat, #37
The mid-1940s is how we got here in the first place. It started long before that, but the ‘40s were perhaps the best chance we’ve ever had to clean up the cancer. We’ve had other chances, but that was probably our best. The soldiers coming back from Europe had no love for Nazi scum. Instead of doing what you should do with cancer, instead of cutting and burning it out, instead of poisoning it so that it withered away, we decided to let it in.
Instead, we went to war with “the Reds” while a hideous white tumor ate away at our insides, metastasizing and mutating until they’d wrapped their malignant tentacles around the levers of power. Now they stand triumphant, having conquered us from within. The fact that a man like Donald Trump was allowed to take office at all is a testament to how deep the rot had spread.
2016 isn’t how we got here. 2016 was the inevitable result of treating Nazis like they’re merely people with whom we have an ideological disagreement. 2016 was always going to happen, and it ain’t “the left” who welcomed that cancer into our flesh with open arms.
No, I really fucking don’t. I’m getting old, I’m sick, and, frankly, I’m tired of violence.
Just because I don’t want to do something doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done.
Yes. With who?
I don’t want a revolution… well, that’s a godsdamned lie. I do want a revolution, and a peaceful one at that, but we’re not going to get it. The best we can hope for now is a remission and that, when all the cutting and burning and poisoning is done, that a body remains that’s able to carry on living.
@Vucodluk
Your comparison of cancer with nazism is very apt. Your entire post is correct but with 2016 I meant the current state of fascism is where it started because we could have pushed back and taken it into remission if Hillary won instead of accelerating it by having Trump win. But you are right it started before 2016. Hell in 2016 I remember saying that Trump isnt new. All the crazy shit hes said ive seen other republican politicians say. The only difference is that Trump is an aggregate of them all.
But im sorry, a portion of the left actually did welcome it. We cant ignore that. There was plenty of talk of a Trump presidency leading to socialist revolution out of the ashes. There was also plenty of accusations of democrats “crying wolf” at trumps fascism. And there was plenty of propaganda from the left meant to undermise Hillary Clinton that persists to this day. And those very same leftists are at it again. We cant ignore that. I dont think 2016 was inevitable because nothing is. We could have curtailed the fascists rise to power significantly if republicans lost because it means two democratic wins in a row forcing the opposition to rethink their allegiances. But that didnt happen. We can’t ignore this. Obviously not all leftists fell forbthe propaganda and bad arguments but we know all too well the damage a radical irrational group can do.
@42
Yup. And I’m sure it is not hard to find people still saying it. I actually agree that electing Hillary Clinton in 2016 was like hitting the snooze button. But I don’t see how waking up to the hellscape we have been aiming for since 1980 at least is a great improvement. Plus, I would prefer to call it a tactical holding pattern. We knew that any Republican would fill at least one SCOTUS vacancy and carry out some kind of new tax scam that further reduced the ability of the People to collect revenue for public good and handed more of our wealth to private interests who will demand still more in return for that favor. This is the part that was totally predictable. I knew what I was voting for in 2016. Hold on and prepare for something better in the next round.
But the other point that actually just crystallized for me is that while I knew Sanders supported universal health coverage and other reforms I agree with, all of his supporters that I knew personally were absolutely driven by hatred of Hillary Clinton, the Clinton machine in general, the DNC, “neoliberals”, and hatred of people who were entirely off my radar like Debbie Wasserman Schultz. The sheer ferocity with which they continued to attack Clinton even after Bernie Sanders, Michael Moore, and Noam Chomsky all warned that Trump was a bigger problem has convinced me that the most important thing to them was making sure Hillary Clinton lost, second most important was sticking it to “DWS” and… beyond that I have no idea. I would like universal health coverage too. I also think that the ACA is a poor excuse for healthcare legislation. But show me a way to get somewhere better. Doing the dirty work of the Republican nominee is not the way.