Gitmo being used as a transit camp for deported illegal immigrants is not at all as say, Sachsenhausen or Dachau being used to illegally dumb german citizens and torture them there indefinitely because they criticized the ruling regime. When Trump starts trying to dump opposing intellectuals, Hollywood producers and "wayward" reporters or writers into Gitmo for indefinite detention, then we can make some firmer claims of literal dictatorship.
If anything, the use of Gitmo under Bush II, when actual U.S citizens were held there indefinitely under terrorism charges was closer to the mark than this now.
I am however personally pessimistic about the probity of a camp run on a remote island without any oversight. And I think insisting that everyone wait until after a dictatorship is fully embedded and engaging in retaliation against political enemies (after making open threats to do so) is strategically stupid, much like saying you need to let an asailant get in 4 or 5 punches just to be sure the first two weren't accidental.
They may been operated by hundreds of regimes, but the term is 100% identified with Nazis now. It's a rather daft statement to say that these are not equated.
The reason this is being discussed here is because it isn't.
You realize this is a democratically elected government whose leader was already president once without a dictatorship?
Just a couple of weeks ago a federal court stopped his plans to end birthright citizenship in its tracks, and what was Trump's response? "We'll appeal it in court".... Oh damn! all those dictatoring plans stopped by the monstrous hurdle of constitutionally mandated judicial oversight.... You'd almost think he's not quite.... a dictator.
This kind of tedious hyperbole not only ran rampant before and during the first four years, it also made it harder to make genuine criticisms of Trump gain attention. With so much hysteria about every bullshit little thing being touted far and wide as an example of a 21st century Hitlerism, it's easy for the critics to be viewed as a laughing stock except in their own little echo chambers of like-thinkers.
Because all I've been seeing so far were excuses, he won't do that's (that promptly were then done), contorsions to justify his insane dribble and complete disregard for the law.
This guy is going to destroy your country, and it's absolutely mind-boggling people are cheering him.
He was already president for four years, and the next four years were so bad for the world and the US that he was asked to come back overwhelmingly. Or it could just be because the Republicans run democratic primaries that party leadership can't just overrule or turn into a mockery, and the Democrats don't.
> insane dribble
"Drivel." It's a common error.
Tell me, how many other governments can you list that planned to deport large numbers of people living in their country out to a special Island in order to take advantage of its extraterritorial legal limbo?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Solution
Most famously on Nauru https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nauru_Regional_Processing_Ce...
Truly, at least use some basic bloody comparative reasoning to formulate arguments.
Most if not all of them.
You are conveniently leaving out the one very important detail that justifies the deportations: Illegal. These people getting deported are illegal aliens, they broke the law crossing the border illegally so they cannot complain about getting arrested, charged and convicted, and deported back where they came from. They have no right to be here.
What's worse, these initial rounds of deportations are prioritizing illegal aliens with violent criminal records. These people are factually the worst of the worst. Of fucking course we should and will deport them.
The majority here crossed legally and overstayed their visa. That's just basic table-stakes knowledge for this issue, please remember it. Bonus points if you know that overstaying is a civil infraction like a parking ticket, below the level of a misdemeanor.
> these initial rounds of deportations are prioritizing illegal aliens with violent criminal records.
That's what the professional liar says, but why would you trust him on that?
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...
> These people are factually the worst of the worst.
How the hell can you "factually" know that when the Trump administration still won't even explain what criteria they are using!? (Even assuming they'll be making any honest effort at all.)
I'm not sure what you intended with this phrasing, but it's a very wrong and provocative one (though you likely did not indent that). The Holocaust's victims were by and large not citizens of Nazi Germany. Jewish residents of Germany were stripped of citizenship in (as I understand) 1935—mirroring President Trump's promise to systematically strip citizenship of American-born, non-white immigrant descendants. Nazi-era Germans did not view German-born Jews as "citizens" by any possible torturing of that word. White nationalists, in the United States, do not view many non-whites as citizens of America, even if they were born American and lived their entire lives in America, as American citizens.
The distinction between "true citizens" / "external foreigners" is not a footnote to the Holocaust; it's the central thesis of German Nazism, that subgroups of people native to the German region were foreign aliens without true loyalty or allegiance.
(This more of a tangent, but the majority of the Holocaust's victims were not even German residents; they were captured and murdered from other European countries Nazi Germany invaded and ravaged. Auschwitz' victims, for instance, were almost entirely from Central and East Europe. The wording you chose, elevating the "citizen" above the "foreigner", as if concentration camps for foreigners is some second-class, not-100%-full-on-Nazi thing, is a disturbing language for one familiar with the German version).
In a weird way the events of WWII saved the US from going down the same path because we were on it. Anything literally Hitler did became politically toxic and it's a bit worrying that this toxicity is wearing off. It kept us far away from the fence.
The thing that matters for concentration camps is large groups of related civilians detained to advance a political goal— to restore Germany to its former greatness or to make America great again.
None of anything from Trump's government is at all comparable so far and making such comparisons, aside from being a genuinely idiotic case of ideological exaggeration, is also an insult to real victims of real historical concentration camps and violent regimes.
For all the self-congratulatory patting on the back by many readers on HN about their "superior" intellectual reasoning, I see a remarkable abundance of largely failing at such reasoning when it comes to many comment threads and subjects on this site.
It’s been less than two weeks and you are already doing the groundwork to preemptively excuse it.
that and the Nazi salute at the inauguration.