I might change my mind if it literally gives you wings » « Emergence!

To be fair…

In the comments, we got a mild objection to the term “Alligator Auschwitz”, which is fair, except that it reminded me of this cartoon.

“Remember: When discussing modern atrocities that sicken the conscience, we must always be SCRUPULOUSLY FAIR.”

We have to give our regime time to mature and rise to the level of mass murder.

Although, to be totally fair to the other side, I’d rather we did the scolding before the death camp fires up the ovens.

I might change my mind if it literally gives you wings » « Emergence!

Comments

  1. StevoR says

    Isn’t Alligator Alcatraz what Trump and his henchmen call it?

    Lessee what does wikipedia say?

    On June 19, 2025, Uthmeier publicly announced the detention center in a video posted to Twitter, in which he called it “Alligator Alcatraz.” The name was subsequently adopted as the official title of the facility.

    Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alligator_Alcatraz

    If memory serves soime “facilities”‘ (pukes) inthe Shoah were both Concentration and Death camps or twinned with such. Does it matter? How much does it matter?

    I do agree its better to be more accurate and to steelman rather than straw man but still..

  2. soc25 says

    You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
    Before you are six or seven or eight,
    To hate all the people your relatives hate—
    You’ve got to be carefully taught!

  3. StevoR says

    @ ^ soc25 : Song lyrics? Poem lines? Sylvia Plath maybe? Certaionly familiar~ish from somewhere I think..

    PS. Meanwhile, what do we call what has already been happening in the concentration camp in El Salvador and how much do we really know about what is happening there probly to many innocent people like but thankfully not now including Obrago Garcia.. ?

  4. StevoR says

    PPS. If people think there’s issues with a lot of refugees seeking asylum now, just wait till whole regions of our planet are rendered uninhabitable or underwater or both due to Global Overheating. Which is probly gunna happen sooner than expected..

  5. raven says

    To be fair, what the Israelis are doing in Gaza right now isn’t really Genocide.
    Or at least much of a Genocide.

    It is ethnic cleansing.
    They aren’t really going to slaughter all 2 million Palestinians in Gaza. Yet.
    They do want them to go away somewhere though.
    So far, the main difficulty is that there is no place that will accept the 2 million ethnically cleansed deported Palestinians.

  6. jenorafeuer says

    StevoR:
    You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught, Rodgers and Hammerstein, from the musical South Pacific.

  7. chesapeake says

    Thought it might be Vonnegut., but no.
    “YOU’VE GOT TO BE CAREFULLY TAUGHT” LYRICS
    Cable:
    You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear,
    You’ve got to be taught from year to year,
    It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear—
    You’ve got to be carefully taught!

    You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
    Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
    And people whose skin is a different shade—
    You’ve got to be carefully taught.

    You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
    Before you are six or seven or eight,
    To hate all the people your relatives hate—
    You’ve got to be carefully taught!
    You’ve got to be carefully taught!

    I was cheated before
    And I’m cheated again
    By a mean little world
    Of mean little men.
    And the one chance for me
    Is the life I know best.

    To be on an island
    And to hell with the rest.
    I will cling to this island
    Like a tree or a stone,
    I will cling to this island
    And be free—and alone.
    “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” (Rodgers/Hammerstein II)
    © 1949, Copyright Renewed, Williamson Music Company (ASCAP) c/o Concord Music Publishing.

  9. John Watts says

    A federal judge recently blocked ICE from using racial profiling to carry out indiscriminate immigration arrests in L.A. So, what’s next for ICE if they can’t target people based on their appearance? The answer is simple, they could stop ANYONE, regardless of race or ethnicity, and demand to see their papers. That may be a step too far even for this poisonous administration, but if the Latino roundup numbers aren’t to his liking, Stephen Miller (aka Bald Himmler), could order his masked thugs to harass anyone they want and let the courts sort things out. Did you speak out in public against Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza? You must be an antisemite. Off to the Everglades with you. And, no, you don’t get one phone call.

  10. stuffin says

    PZ – “We have to give our regime time to mature and rise to the level of mass murder.”
    Chinese Proverb – A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

    We were sending them to South Sudan and El Salvador but now we have our very own special confinement camp. Wonder how many more will be built over the next three years of this Administration.

  11. jenorafeuer says

    With regards to You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught, it’s also worth noting that after the play’s debut in 1949, Georgia tried to pass a law banning the play as ‘Communist’, largely because of that song. (And the fact that there was an inter-racial relationship, the pushback to which in the play is what caused the song to be sung.) Rodgers and Hammerstein straight out stated that the number was staying in, even if it meant the play as a whole would be shut down.

    (The play was also based on James Michener’s first novel, which had won the Pulitzer Prize the year before. looks things up Hunh. And apparently Michener was writing tracts complaining about the Electoral College back in 1969.)

  13. says

    I hate it when some pedant tries the “It is not an extermination camp” gambit. I put it in the same category as those who said during the Orange Taco’s first term that “comparing him to Hitler is unfair, because (a thing he has not done yet, a list of which continuously shrinks)”, i.e., the category of bullshit.

    Auschwitz did not start as an outright extermination camp either. On a cursory read of the wiki, the “Final Solution” was formulated about a year after the camp was established as a “mere” concentration camp for “criminals”.

    The USA has now masked thugs kidnapping people of one ethnicity in broad daylight and concentrating them in impromptu facilities, and there still are people who split hairs over minutiae in terminological exactitude? What was over-the-top rhetoric yesterday is turning into a sad reality tomorrow at an alarming rate, yet still someone feels the need to “whell, akshually” warnings about the direction the country is going? There is only one answer to such people: Fuck off, ye wanker.

    MAGA wants it to be named Alligator Alcatraz, giving it a macho and American ring to it, whilst alluding to it being used to combat real crime.

    Alligator Auschwitz is a good rebranding, it keeps the alliteration and ring of the name the MAGAts gave it, whilst showing the true fascist purpose behind it.

  15. brightmoon says

    Alligator Auschwitz , that’s what I call it too. ICE hasn’t been too crazy around here, NYC in a Hispanic neighborhood, but I’m a mixed non-Hispanic and I’m actually a little concerned for my safety and the safety of some family members who are former green card holders and now citizens . Honestly I check monthly to see that I’m still registered to vote even though New York is a blue state and doesn’t go along with a lot of trumpish abuses

  16. laurian says

    The problem with any derivation of A******* A******** is it’s lazy snark, validation of Godwin’s law if you will.

  17. imback says

    Don’t ever compare this to Auschwitz
    It could be no worse than punk mosh pits
    Sure some people died
    And a mass grave’s outside
    But stop to consider the posh bits

  18. Hemidactylus says

    Given we are officially a fascist country and the horror show of mass deportation that upsets me greatly I am all in on calling it Alligator Auschwitz. Wish I could post my all time favorite DerSantis meme with full on Third Reich allusions, because that’s where we are at.

  19. wanderingelf says

    laurian @ 16:

    The problem with any derivation of A******* A******** is it’s lazy snark, validation of Godwin’s law if you will.

    You probably shouldn’t cite Godwin’s Law unless you actually know what Godwin’s Law is. “Alligator Auschwitz” is a perfectly suitable satirical nickname. As others have pointed out, Auschwitz did not begin as a death camp, it started as a concentration camp for those the Nazis deemed undesirable (the mass murders came later). “Alligator Auschwitz” is at least more accurate than “Alligator Alcatraz,” since Alcatraz was a prison, not a detention facility. Unlike many of those detained in Florida, the inmates at Alcatraz were convicted of crimes in a court of law (presumably in accordance with due process). The “detention facility” in Florida is pretty clearly a concentration camp, not a prison.

  21. Stuart Smith says

    Saying it isn’t an extermination camp is pretty disingenuous anyway. They put a bunch of people in cages, dropped the cages in a region prone to hurricanes and flooding, and now they are waiting. When the hurricane warning arrives, they will only be able to evacuate the guards, and the inmates will drown in their cages as a result of “a tragic accident.”

    So yeah, unless they have a plausible plan to evacuate the entire facility if it’s in the path of, hell, even a tropical storm, it’s a death camp.

  22. unclefrogy says

    back in the olden days when I was a youth I was a soldier in Germany. I decided to take a trip to visit
    Dachau. After the liberation all the buildings were burned down but they have rebuilt some for the memorial. I grew up I south L.A. and was shocked by the reproduction. I had seen that style of construction before. It looked just like the “tool sheds” you would find in old oil fields like Signal Hill simple board walls and cheap roofs all with plenty of gaps and the identical simple wooden shelves to hold the things stored there. neither were structures for people.
    I saw some pictures the other day of the new facility down in Florida, I have seen that kind of stuff before as well. simple shelves inside chain link “walls” just like you would find in cheap public u-rent storage places or other ware houses again not places for people to live in.
    It is clear they are not considering what goes in there to be human beings.

  23. Erp says

    Dachau opened on 22 March 1933, 3 months or so after a certain person came to power.

    I also note mosquito spread diseases are another threat to the health of those there.

  25. John Morales says

    imback, from my Wikipedia link above:

    In 1933, the first communist prisoners were being rounded up for an indefinite period without charges. They were held in a number of places in Germany. The slogan Arbeit macht frei was first used over the gate of the Oranienburg concentration camp,[8] which was set up in an abandoned brewery in March 1933 (it was later rebuilt in 1936 as Sachsenhausen).[9]

    Not that the USA has a secret police rounding up “illegals” for an indefinite period without chargeshabeas corpus right now, right?

  26. StevoR says

    @6. jenorafeuer & #7. chesapeake : “StevoR:- You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught, Rodgers and Hammerstein, from the musical South Pacific.”

    Ah. Cheers! Thanks for that.

  27. vucodlak says

    It is intended to be a death camp, and here’s my reasoning why (I’m copy/pasting something I wrote from a place with a restrictive language filter, hence some of the odd spellings and references)-

    Alligator Auschwitz, on the other hand, was built to be a death camp. They didn’t build it where and how they built it for “security” or to save money or even for kickbacks. Sure, some of the contractors were in it for the kickbacks, but DeSantis, Trump, and the hateful ghouls at DHS weren’t. They were in it to murder people.
    Accounts suggest that the people in the camps are being starved. However, starvation is a slow death. Hell, my mom was starving the last couple of months of her life, and that’s still not what ended her life. The disease that made her unable to eat did that. It might not have, had she not already been weakened by starvation, but that’s the real hell of it- starvation plus disease is an extremely efficient ender of lives.
    So, take Alligator Auschwitz: a camp constructed in the middle of swamp (swamps being infamous for harboring a vast number of disease-causing organisms) with inadequate sanitation (another well-known vector for disease) and protection from the elements. Cram it full of people, well over it’s ostensible capacity, so that diseases spread faster. Starve them to weaken them further.
    The Notsees murdered millions that way. Not with guns or bombs, but with much older and deadlier weapons, employed in service of mass murder conducted with almost scientific precision. We did much the same thing to the people who lived on this land before us- it’s where the Notsees got a lot of their worst ideas- and we’re dusting off the moldy oldies of atrocity. Someone’s been reading; my money’s on Stephen Miller, but there are plenty of awful people in this administration who seem like the type to flog it to Holocaust documentaries.
    This is a camp designed to murder immigrants and other designated undesirable. It’s a prototype, I suspect, and if it works half as well as I fear it will camps just like it will be popping up like poisonous mushrooms. Yes, some soulless, conscience-free scumchunks’ll line their pockets off it, but that’s a side benefit for the people in charge. The camp is designed to be plague-ridden slaughterhouse, pure and simple.
    The really attractive thing about this scheme is that it’s real easy to claim it’s merely incompetence that’s responsible for the deaths. They weren’t murders, no, it was just a mistake. They didn’t know, they’ll claim, and our complicit media will eat it up until it’s far, far too late.
    It’s no mistake. Alligator Auschwitz is just the latest weapon in the Trump regime’s armory of genocide.

  28. lotharloo says

    Yeah, the flower is so right. How can you call Trump a fascist when he has not managed to fully become a dictator yet.

  29. raven says

    What others have mentioned above is something I was wondering about also.

    This warehouse style facility seems likely to be ideal for the spread of infectious diseases. Hundreds of people housed in close quarters.

    Especially mosquito borne diseases.
    It’s in a very large subtropical swamp, the Everglades.
    These would be malaria, Zika, Dengue, West NIle, viral encephalitis, and whatever mosquito spread viruses are around at any given time.

    This is typical of the GOP.
    That this concentration camp will be full of sick people, some of which will die is a feature, not a bug. The cruelty is the whole point.

  30. fernando says

    You (USA citizens) already have your Beer Hall Putsch (6/1/2021 Capitol Attack), your Dachau/Auschwitz (Alligator Alcatraz), your SA/SS (far-right militias), your Nuremberg Laws (the Trump laws about citizenship), your “Junkers” (Billionaires) and a whish for avenging a defeat and a common enemy to explain that defeat (desinformation and deeprooted racism between too much people).
    I wonder when will be the Reichstag Fire.

  31. numerobis says

    raven@5:

    To be fair, what the Israelis are doing in Gaza right now isn’t really Genocide.

    So you think Israel is not committing acts with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group — such as killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, or deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part?

    So far Israel doesn’t seem to have imposed measures to prevent births (other than bombing maternity wards, but it’s bombed medical facilities indiscriminately so that fits more into the “conditions of life” article), nor forcibly transferred children to other groups. But the five articles aren’t all required, so it doesn’t matter that Israel could do worse.

  33. raven says

    So you think Israel is not committing acts with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group…

    I’ve called it genocide before and will again.

    Even if technically it isn’t genocide (yet), the intent is there.
    And it is heading in that direction.

    Over 80%, and possibly as high as 90%, of the population in Gaza has been displaced since the start of the current conflict.

    Around 90% of the population of Gaza is homeless and living in refugee camps in what was once the urban areas of Gaza, most of them women and children. The death toll next winter is going to be high. Again.

    I was making the point that the distinction between a concentration camp and a death camp is about the same as that between ethnic cleansing and genocide. It might be there but that line between them is pretty thin and fuzzy.

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