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Anyone defending Trump’s concentration camps on the ground that “there aren’t gas chambers”, has only convicted themselves of absolute moral bankruptcy. These same people will still be justifying these concentration camps when there ARE gas chambers.
Trump’s recent EO is irrelevant to the above, which was true long before that EO was ever signed. Such persons have shown their true colors. And that EO only nominally stops the further sepAration (note the spelling, which Trump managed to fuck up); it does nothing to address those who have already been herded into the camps, many of whom have long since been entirely lost in the system.
THE QUANTUM of EXPLANATION 
Thank you. These recent hate-filled Trumpist/Supremacist anti-immigrant events remind me of some words by France’s 1930s Ambassador to Germany, Andre Francois Poncet, who, having watched the celebration of Hitler’s ascendancy to full power of the German State on January 30, 1933, wrote:
“The river of fire flowed past the French embassy
whence, with heavy heart and filled with foreboding
I watched its luminous wake.”
I admit that I haven’t yet directly observed the American-style “River of fire,” but the hatred I see every day of Latino immigrants (and Muslims, and Africans … anyone not “white”) most definitely has generated within me a “heavy heart … filled with foreboding.”
My hope is that each and all of the collective and empathetic WE can find the means to completely reverse the horrors Trump is inflicting upon us all — before it’s too late.
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Those rivers are flowing, but they are still flowing “uphill” in a way that did not obstruct 1933 Nazis. (The same people who organized the Charlottesville “protest,” where a counter-demonstrator was murdered, are applying for a parade license for Washington DC.)
I continue to think the better analogy to Trump is Mussolini, rather than Hitler. The timing, methods, and political background (we haven’t just lost a colossal war) seem closer to the situation in Fascist Italy than Nazi Germany.
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I basically agree with that, but when I read and ponder Francois-Poncet’s thoughts, my tendency is to expand his context from what it was in 1933 to include my impression of the entire consequence of that era’s Fascist movement. The parallels between what happened back then tend to merge with what’s underway here today. As Mussolini himself put it (assisted by Giovanni Gentile, entry in Encyclopedia Italiana):
Seems to describe today’s right wing politic in this country almost perfectly. Add to that Trump’s deeply embedded and obvious bigotry — plus how that same bigotry and hatred clearly are the prime motivator of his (obviously under-educated) “base” — and suddenly the rivers are flowing downward on that ever-steepening slope toward that ultimate destination where each and every “individual” is accepted by “the State … only in so far as his interests coincide with the State” — as “opposed to classical liberalism [which denies] the State in the name of the individual.”
Hello, Amurkkka.
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The use of the term “corporatism” is often misconstrued from that quote, and taken entirely out of context. When one reads the discussion in context, it is clear that the author (who wasn’t really Mussolini; Il Duce simply took credit for it) that the meaning is going back to the original “copore”, meaning the “body of the people.” The word “fascism” itself comes from “fasce”, which is a bundle of reeds or sticks. Individually, the reeds are easily broken, but when they come together as a “corpore” they are unbreakable. Prior to the 20th C., fasce were honorable symbols of a republic; one can see pictures of the U.S. Congress, where fasce adorn the walls to either side of the speakers podium. So they are not talking about joint stock companies when the discuss “corporatism.”
You can find the complete, original text at Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14058
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Yes, I know today’s ‘corporatism’ is not at all the same as it was in Gentile’s ‘Italiana’ quote, but I find it fascinating that when inserted into today’s vernacular it still so ably defines that portion of our emerging predicament. As Mitt Romney said in his 2014 presidential campaign, “Corporations are people, my friend.” He was using the recent SCOTUS ‘Citizens United’ decision as his basis, of course, and not the ‘old’ “body of the people” concept.
Bottom line: both then and now, the end point of the implicit and extreme right wing politic — Fascism — did and very likely may again result in an Authoritarian (Trump already sees himself as THE prime candidate) in charge, along with a near complete diminishment of the power implied in our Constitution’s first sixteen words: We the people of the United States [aka today’s “body of the people”] in order to form a more perfect union …. Seems to me we’ve already reached the point where the balance of our political journey has essentially become a downhill slope aimed at that familiar old Fascist swamp. The slope may not yet be quite steep enough to guarantee an arrival time, but it’s surely steep enough to cause us remnants of “We the people” to hit the brakes hard and then hope our ‘reverse’ gear still works. Hopefully that will happen before that old but familiar line kicks in: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to relive it” If we don’t want those famous words of George Santayana to EVER come to define our new reality, we’d better hit reverse and start backing up real soon.
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