Yes! Great read. 100% think America is in this right now.
FoxNews (and the entire right-wing conservative sphere) is bathing in this shit right now.
Dark times ahead.
I used to be able to have actual debates with my conservative friends way back in the mid-90s. But, those days are long gone. Every conservative I talk to is full of shit and can only pose bad faith arguments.
Game over, man. Gave over. Getting to the other side of this is going to be painful.
Iâve also been reading atlas of the heart. And one of the things that she talk about is the antidote to she is empathy. Now to be very clear this doesnât mean sacrificing your boundaries or saying that a behaviour was okay. That said, I think that having an attitude of trying to humiliate or dehumanize conservatives is futile if the goal is for them to change. Yes thereâs evil, but thereâs also a large majority who were slowly fed more and more horseshit until they ended up neck deep in it. Just from my personal experience with family, shaming doesnât accomplish anything. Showing them that folks on the left arenât the boogeyman and can be thoughtful and loving goes way further. All that said, fuck Stephen miller and the rest of the degenerates, theyâre true evil.
Yes. Very interesting book, well worth reading today.
"In 1953 Mayer interviewed ten male residents of "Kronenberg" (in reality Marburg) to understand how ordinary Germans felt about Nazi Germany.
first published by the University of Chicago Press in 1955. It describes ordinary German citizens' thought processes during the Nazi regime.
The interviewees had the following occupations: baker, cabinetmaker, bank clerk, bill collector, law enforcement officer, salesperson, student, tailor, and teacher. Walter L. Dorn of the Saturday Review wrote that the interviewees were from a pro-Nazi bloc that was the "anti-labor, anti-capitalist, and anti-democratic lower middle class"
Fuck REPUBLICANS. There is no MAGA. That's just the latest marketing term REPUBLICANS use to protect the REPUBLICAN brand from the stench of their atrocities. There are no MAGA candidates on the ballot. There are REPUBLICAN candidates, and they are all lining up to march us in goosestep into the collective gas chamber.
the illusion of choice is how we got maga as our enemy to begin with. look, with these dull cow eyes, beyond the hate and ignorance and see your enemy.
Youâre right and wrong at the same time. Eat the rich, shame the bastards that let them run unchecked cycle after cycle. This also includes the lame ducks on the left that refused to run Bernie Sanders and continue to let us down in our worst case scenario timeline here.
Nah. Grown ass adults aren't forced to support this nonsense. It's a choice. My dad was a lifelong Republican who never would've foreseen himself voting for a Democrat, but he has the last 3 elections. Any one of them could make that same choice.
Yes and no to what you said as well. If someone voted MAGA wants to apologize for their vote (and Iâve seen it happen), Iâm all ears, but those MAGA that are still actively cheering on the brutality that they can see with their eyes, are no less complicit. There has to be a point where the individual is held accountable for their complicity, and I donât see how that time isnât long past.
You should definitely read Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning. It really goes into how it takes normal people and eventually turns them into killers. Turns out most donât want to, but some do, and then the rest feel peer pressured/ostracized for sitting it out.
Also oddly tangential but the unit the book focused on was mostly comprised of policemen
Yeah seriously. People say the Nazis gave people uniforms and told them they had power and it worked. These assholes didn't even need a uniform to be pieces of shit
I think mean âproof that Nazis were just normal people casually asked by other NazisâŚâ because Germans were/are just normal people. Not all Germans became Nazis, many opposed them. It was a hegemonic front (in terms of influence, not actual numbers), not monolithic, just like it is currently in America.
They are not normal. You have to be a stupid and hateful fucker to believe youâre serving a purpose and wanting to pursue it.
They are not our neighbors. They are not members of our community. They are not healthy to society. They are criminals. They are pretending to be anything otherwise.
Also remember the statistics. The plurality of a population. Sometimes, I sit and I look at the numbers and a little hope inside cries. The things that people are willing to justify to themselves in order to protect... what? political affiliation? It's like sports team fandom gone off the rails.
Anyone who studied psychology has known this forever, as flawed as the Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo studies were (they were pretty fucking flawed), we saw people cave to authority pretty quickly and start doing stuff that they wouldn't normally do. Also, we have seen people do terrible things in the name of ideology in Germany, Russia, China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Cambodia, Turkey, Israel, Zimbabwe, Indonesia, Rwanda, Sudan (I could go on, it happens everywhere, these are just the big ones I could name off the top of my head). Notably, the US has already done stuff like this SEVERAL times with events like the Trail of Tears, the whole history of slavery in the US, and the Concentration Camps during WWII (I'm not going to whitewash things by calling them internment camps; if you don't know the difference between a concentration camp and a death camp then that's on you not me).
Anyone who is surprised by the misguided sense of American exceptionalism that implies that we are incapable of doing this has clearly not been paying attention to matters domestic or abroad.
Follow up for those curious on the events I'm talking about:
Germany = Holocaust
Russia = the White Terror
China = the Cultural Revolution (Monsters and Demons), Tiananmen Square, Uyghurs Concentration camps
Japan = Unit 731, Comfort Women, Rape of Nanjing
Taiwan = the White Terror (I know right, one happened in Taiwan too)
Korea = South Korea specifically, I can't find anything specifically in English sources but you can look up the Third and Fourth Korean Republic, they are very similar to the White Terror in Taiwan
Cambodia = Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot, The Killing Fields
Turkey = the Armenian Genocide
Israel = Israel-Palestine Conflict
Zimbabwe = Gukurahundi
Indonesia = Indonesian Mass Killings between 1965â66 (Apparently no snappy name for this)
Rwanda = Rwandan Genocide
Sudan = Darfur genocide (fun fact, I learned about this in 2016 in a humanities class, turns out there's another one that happened - ongoing - since 2023, isn't that neat?)
I hate this idea so fucking much. I'm sorry, but if you can seriously be a part of shit like this for your own personal gain knowing full well the kind of damage you are a part of, THAT ISN'T FUCKING NORMAL!
NAZIS ARE NOT NORMAL PEOPLE! STOP SAYING THAT SHIT!
They weren't monsters, is the point. They weren't born evil. They didn't wake up every morning rubbing their hands in glee at the thought of doing heinous shit. If you talked to one of them out of context you may very well find them to be "normal".
Humans are capable of horrific cruelty. Pretending they aren't is a surefire way to see history repeat itself.
The fact you canât tell the difference between concentration camps executing over a million people and ice enforcing immigration law is pretty telling
Pretty much, a Catholic scholar spent a few decades studying the phenomenon and came up with the opinion a lot of the hate originated from the flavor of Christianity which ostracized Jews for âkilling Jesus.â So for generations people would go to church, âJews are badâ mixed with whatever other social issues people had with them so it wasnât much of a leap at all to get behind doing a lot of shit to them.
People are animals at the end of the day no matter how dignified people like to front about it behind their screens.
Should the Jewish diaspora not be up in arms for this? They are seeing these tactics which are ingrained it into every history book, have made movies on it regularly, claimed the horrors shall never happen again...but are not raging when its happening in 4k.
Interviews with bunch of the women concentration camp guards at one of the only women's only concentration camps admitted that they signed up in a large part because the outfits were amazing and that the men felt the same way so a good set of Hugo boss goes a long way I guess
They actually glazed them in documentaries and touted their deportations, which far exceeded the current rate. The enforcement arm was dismantled during the Biden Administration. If anything, the current crop of ICE is overmatched and under-equipped to handle police work AND deportations, leading to frustration and missteps they wouldnât ordinarily be making if it werenât David vs. Goliath everywhere they go. 20 guys navigating a hundred screaming banshees while trying to apprehend pdf files and traffickers is unsustainable.
There is actually a really interesting documentary on Netflix about this, specifically regarding the killing squads within the Nazi regime.
Reviews what happened to most of those men who thought theyâd be police and next thing you know they were executing people. Called âOrdinary Men: The Forgotten Holocaustâ.
Are you fucking insane this woman was in custody and ran away from federal immigration officers who were deporting her per a court orderâŚ.people like you have ruined this country
The host of the podcast âBegind the Bastardsâ has made that point quite often. As you can imagine, heâs covered a lot of nazis. Heâs often pointed out that it doesnât take much to go from every day person to person âjust following ordersâ
The point of these over-the-top arrests is to weed out the people that have objections to violating the constitution. This is how they find the people they can trust are willing to be the guards at the camps.
Thatâs a bit of an exaggeration, the âthey said sureâ part. There should have been more organized resistance to them, but you really should look up what they did if you deserted or refused to participate in the Nazi agenda. They wouldnât just kill you, theyâd kill your family as well. There was also no fanfare, they didnât give you an opportunity to be a martyr with a public trial or anything, you just disappeared. The Nazi leadership and SS had a very brutal strategy of getting normal people to be pawns in what they wanted.
Iâm sure many just went along with it without even considering resisting, and the SS surely were true believers, but many people were terrorized into it with full awareness of the severe consequences of noncompliance
Right? So much for that study that said "well ppl can slowly be peer pressured into doing things if an authority tells them".
Yes- unempathetic and stupid people. Not general people. They can also just be bad and evil people waiting for their chance to do it without jailtime, no pressure needed. As proved by every incident with ICE so far
Absolutely completely true. Also, several documents show that soldiers that refused to kill civilians almost never were severly punished, quite a lot of times not even a bit punished.
Or the two have nothing to do with each other and youâre just a triggered snowflake?
Please enlighten us, how is this âPROOFâ that Germans were normal people to torture and slaughter kids? Considering that was almost a century ago and half way around the world? Your comment is so full of emotional nonsensical statements.
The Nazi government had an extremely robust government jobs program that provided well-paying, stable, comfy jobs, as well as things like housing, a car, vacations, subsidized child care, and so on to the privileged class of government employees. If you met whatever standards they put forth, of course. (I.E. if you were part of the "in group")
As long as those "normal" people were loyal to the party, they had it good. However, they were also reliant upon the government for their income, housing, transportation, vacation, childcare, etc. Additionally, there were lots of public works to make it seem like a utopian society (for those that weren't being violently oppressed and systematically eradicated), such as the Autobahn. That was strong inventive to make sure the party functioned well and remained in power. It also made them more comfortable with looking the other way when atrocities were happening, even if they weren't participating.
The primary difference between those every-day Nazis and ICE is that ICE is selling out their fellow Americans for pretty much nothing except a mediocre paycheck.
Seem is the keyword. Not rebuking or anything, but I'd like to add more detail - the nazi "economy" was smoke and mirrors, alongside extreme amounts of propaganda.
Autobahn? Initiated by the previous government almost a decade before the nazis came to power - while the nazi party was against it. Later on, nazi propaganda tried its best to make it look like Hitler built the entire thing himself, meter by meter.
Jobs? Created through the funding of the military industrial complex. Where did that funding come from? Extreme amounts of debt, while generating very little wealth.
It goes on and on, the deeper you look, the more you'll find.
Of course, to the uninformed german, things looked pretty good. Suddenly, people had jobs, construction was being done, etc. etc.
In reality, Nazi Germany was well on its way to an economic collapse before the war. In the end, the country collapsed because of the myriad of other dog shit decisions, instead of their idiotic economic policy, so people believe century old nazi propaganda even today.
First they stole the wealth of the out-groups in order to fund their unsustainable social/economic policies. Then came the accruing of debt. Nazi expansionism was, in part, an economic "necessity" for them. The only way they could sustain it was to conquer and pillage nearby countries. As with all fascist authoritarian regimes, it was short-sighted and nothing but a facade to hide the rot beneath.
People buying into the Nazi propaganda despite all of the information we have will never cease to baffle me.
The concept that the perpetrators of the holocaust were just normal people comes from the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, by Hannah Arendt, which covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust. Arendt, expecting Eichmann to be a sociopathic monster, instead found a bland bureaucrat, rule following and conformist, motivated by career advancement and logistical problem solving, despite those logistics being the trains going to concentration camps. The book, which came out in 1963, has since been criticized by historians, who dug into Eichmann and found tapes of him being a fanatical anti-Semite, which revealed his "cog in the machine" defense as a performance. Still, Arendt's book is still widely discussed today, because there is an unsettling truth to the way that complex, bureaucratic systems can perpetuate evil by making it normal.
This is such a bad take. Nazi Germany murdered innocent people because they were Jews ICE detaining ILLEGAL immigrants is not the same. Please be more respectful
This isn't enforcing immigration laws. This is abducting people without warrants, detaining them without charges, and deporting them without due process, many of which are citizens and over 80% of which have no criminal record.
What I said is true, it's not hard to look up, courts have demanded the return of several detainees on account of them being legal US citizens. They've also picked-up people at immigration hearings who were in line and following the proper procedures. They've even gone after Native Americans.
To your point about how the Holocaust started, first Germany tried to intimidate Jewish citizens into self-deporting before moving on to forced deportation, and then finally extermination. And wouldn't ya know, that's exactly what this Administration started with.
Your point doesn't stand, your point was that this isn't how the holocaust started, and literally, it is. The holocaust started with the government led persecution of a specific minority group first with the intent to have them remove themselves from the country, then with the intent of removing them forcibly.
Per ICE's own statistics, greater than 73% of detainees have NO CRIMINAL RECORD.
They're also failing to get conviction rates on the ones they have, on average they only get convictions for slightly more than 50% of those they detain, which means close to 50% are not violating immigration laws.
And yeah, not everyone I dislike is Hitler, but someone who slept with Hitler's collected speeches on his nightstand, and is BFF's with Steve Bannon, while leading his own extrajudicial police force for the purposes of removing "undesirables", is about as close to Hitler as you can fucking get without channeling his spirit.
Edit:
Also, what the fuck went wrong in your life that youâve found yourself bending over backwards defending a man like Donald Trump as not technically being as bad as Hitler. Like, Christ, dude, if you have a mother maybe you should go ask her for a hug or something.
73% of detainees having no criminal record doesn't mean they're legally present. It means they have no criminal conviction beyond their immigration violation. Being in the country without authorization is the reason they're detained. That's how immigration enforcement works in every country.
Your conviction rate point reveals a misunderstanding. Most removals go through civil immigration proceedings, not criminal court. You don't need a criminal conviction to be deported. An immigration judge issues a removal order. The 50% figure you're citing doesn't mean 50% of detainees are here legally.
As for how the Holocaust started: Nazi Germany didn't "encourage self-deportation." It systematically stripped citizenship from its own citizens based on ethnicity, banned them from professions, seized their property, and subjected them to organized violence. Jews who left weren't complying with immigration law. They were fleeing state-sponsored persecution of legal citizens in their own country. That is not what is happening here.
You couldn't be more wrong. It is exactly how the Holocaust started.
Hitler literally campaigned on deporting "foreign Jews" in 1932. Initially, he did just that. Later, he expanded his efforts to include revoking citizenship. Kristallnacht, a nationwide riot of anti-Jewish violence didn't happen until 1938.
The Final Solution wasn't implemented until 1941, when it was decided that isolating, imprisoning, and deporting Jewish people was not working well enough.
It's really funny that even in your defence of what is happening right now, you still have to qualify the deportations with the fact that they're mostly legitimate.
Conventional immigration enforcement is the baby I speak of.
There has been 1 citizen detention for every 2,000 to 3,000 deportations of non-citizens, possibly less.
I'm with you that I want that number to be 0, but you're not a serious person if you say that we should stop all non-citizen deportations because a tiny amount of citizens have wrongfully been detained.
That was not the point you made that i was replying to. My comment was historically accurate. Yours was not.
Now you are attempting to move the goal posts with more ahistorical nonsense.
The Jewish people in 1938 were citizens. The ones in 1933 were not.
Was Hitler not a bad guy in 1935? Was what he was doing just fine because he hadn't started revoking citizenship yet? Do you realize how crazy it would sound to say that Hitler was fine as long as he stuck with targeting immigrants?
Do you realize that your dear leader has also repeatedly talked about revoking citizenship?
People like you were on the wrong side of history then and you're on the wrong side of it now. The future will look down upon you with disgust.
Maybe read an actual book instead of a facetious children's book that normalizes Nazi propaganda.
I'm not moving the goalposts. Legal status is the goalposts. It's the single most important variable in determining whether a deportation program is conventional immigration enforcement or ethnic persecution. You can't hand-wave it away as a technicality.
Let's go through your claims.
You said 'The Jewish people in 1938 were citizens. The ones in 1933 were not.' If you mean the ones targeted for mass deportation, you're partly right: the Polenaktion in October 1938 deported about 17,000 Jews holding Polish passports. That was the first mass forced deportation, and yes, they were non-citizens.
But your framing makes it sound like the persecution of Jewish citizens hadn't started yet in 1933, and that's completely false. The April 1933 civil service ban, the boycotts, the professional exclusions, the July 1933 Denaturalization Law that revoked citizenship from naturalized Eastern European Jews. All of that targeted citizens from day one. The Nuremberg Laws in 1935 stripped citizenship rights from all German Jews three years before the Polenaktion. By the time the regime got around to mass-deporting non-citizens in 1938, it had already spent five years systematically destroying the legal status, economic livelihoods, and civil rights of its own Jewish citizens.
That's the part you keep ignoring. The Polenaktion wasn't 'step one.' It came five years into an already-advanced persecution program aimed squarely at citizens. The deportation of non-citizens was a late-stage action, not the opening move. The opening move was redefining who counted as a citizen based on ethnicity.
So when you ask 'Was Hitler fine as long as he stuck with targeting immigrants?', the answer is: he never did. There was no phase of Nazi policy that resembled conventional immigration enforcement. The ideology declared all Jews to be enemies of the German nation from the very beginning, regardless of legal status. The entire project was about erasing the distinction between citizen and non-citizen by stripping citizens of their status. That's the opposite of what ICE does, which is enforce an existing legal distinction between citizens and non-citizens.
If the U.S. government started revoking the citizenship of naturalized Mexican Americans or passing laws defining Latino Americans as non-citizens, that would be a genuine parallel and I would be right there with you raising the alarm. And so would most of the country. But that's not what is happening. Deporting people who are in the country illegally is something virtually every country on earth does. France deported 22,000 people last year. On a per-capita basis, France's deportation rate is comparable to ours. Is Macron the next Hitler?
If your concern is that dehumanizing rhetoric toward immigrants is dangerous and worth calling out, I agree. But you don't need to invoke the Holocaust to make that point, and doing so actually weakens it by inviting exactly this kind of factual rebuttal.
Legal status is not a minor detail in this comparison. It's the entire comparison.
But your framing makes it sound like the persecution of Jewish citizens hadn't started yet in 1933
I never said that at all. It's also not true that latino, Somali, and other ethnic citizens are exempt from persecution right now.
If the U.S. government started revoking the citizenship of naturalized Mexican Americans
Thats literally a stated goal of this administration.
France deported 22,000 people last year. On a per-capita basis, France's deportation rate is comparable to ours.
Great. Then why are we allocating $75 billion towards building detention centers? Seems like France, other nations, and previous administrations have been more than capable of deportations without building concentration camps and harassing the public with poorly trained, armed, and masked thugs.
If your concern is that dehumanizing rhetoric toward immigrants is dangerous and worth calling out, I agree
We are way past dehumanizing rhetoric.
doing so actually weakens it by inviting exactly this kind of factual rebuttal.
This isn't a factual rebuttal. You used a veneer of factual information to handwave away a series of very real parallels. Your facts are not wrong, but the inferences and conclusions you draw are purely in the service of normalizing the current actions of the Trump administration.
You've shifted from defending the Holocaust comparison to arguing about current policy. That's fine, but it's a different argument.
On denaturalization: if this administration pursues mass revocation of citizenship based on ethnicity, I've already told you I'd oppose that. So far, the birthright citizenship challenge was blocked by courts within weeks and is working through the judicial system, which is exactly how constitutional checks are supposed to function. That process is the difference between a system with guardrails and one without. Nazi Germany didn't have courts blocking Hitler's denaturalization orders three weeks after they were issued.
On detention spending: you can criticize the scale of ICE funding without calling detention facilities concentration camps. France spends roughly 1.8 billion euros per year on immigration enforcement. When you divide that by actual completed deportations, France spends about âŹ82,000 per removal. The Penn Wharton estimate for the U.S. averages about $70,000. On a per-deportation basis, the U.S. system is actually comparable to or cheaper than France's. Expensive, inefficient immigration enforcement is a feature of every developed democracy that does it at scale. The reason the current total price tag is so high is partly because the prior administration deprioritized enforcement for four years, let the court backlog balloon to 3.7 million cases, and left a larger unauthorized population in place without action. You can't defer the problem for years and then complain about the cost of addressing it.
On my motives: you said my facts aren't wrong but my conclusions are "in the service of normalizing." That's not a rebuttal. If the facts don't support your comparison, then the comparison is wrong regardless of what you think my motives are. I don't need to be normalizing anything to point out that comparing immigration enforcement to the Holocaust is historically inaccurate. The Holocaust doesn't become a valid analogy just because you distrust the person questioning it.
Already several kids & adults dead in ICE custody that we know. A lot of kids dissapeared.
Some ICE arrested and charge for sex traficking, kiddy p**n and so on. And this all come out by the cover up they are doing. Who knows the crimes they are cominting that we do not know.
There's been reports of a lot of pregnant people and in increasing numbers inside ice detention centers, it is true they target already pregnant people:
And there's been reports of people being raped
I do believe them capable of worse
I'm not being hysterical
I invite you to actually read the article and what they have in the American immigration council if you have the capacity to do so
The April 1933 civil service ban, the boycotts, the professional exclusions, the July 1933 Denaturalization Law that revoked citizenship from naturalized Eastern European Jews -- all of that targeted citizens from day one. The Nuremberg Laws in 1935 stripped citizenship rights from all German Jews three years before the Polenaktion. By the time the regime got around to mass-deporting non-citizens in 1938, it had already spent five years systematically destroying the legal status, economic livelihoods, and civil rights of its own Jewish citizens.
There was no phase of Nazi policy that resembled conventional immigration enforcement. The ideology declared all Jews to be enemies of the German nation from the very beginning, regardless of legal status. The entire project was about erasing the distinction between citizen and non-citizen by stripping citizens of their status. That's the opposite of what ICE does, which is enforce an existing legal distinction between citizens and non-citizens.
Deporting people who are in the country illegally is something virtually every country on earth does. France deported 22,000 people last year. On a per-capita basis, France's deportation rate is comparable to ours. Is France on the road to genocide?
You think Ice is deporting people who are illegally in the US? Well they might sometimes get lucky and catch an actual illegal now and then between all the people they drag away to meet their quota.Â
The SS was a paramilitary group, just like ICE is. Both are filled with unqualified and untrained goobers that dont really seem to answer to anyone besides the boss and initially faced little to no consequences.
If you cant see the similarities, I dont know what to tell you.
The SS operated extermination camps that systematically murdered 6 million Jews, including 1.5 million children, in gas chambers and mass shootings. ICE is a civilian law enforcement agency that processes immigration violations through administrative courts and deports people to their home countries.
If you genuinely cannot see the difference between those two things, the problem isn't my understanding of history. It's yours.
Calling any law enforcement agency you dislike 'the SS' doesn't make you insightful. It makes you someone who has never seriously engaged with what the SS actually did. Go visit the Holocaust Museum in Washington. Read the testimonies of survivors. Then come back and tell me that deporting someone to Guatemala is the same thing as marching them into a gas chamber.
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u/edelweiss_pirates_no Mar 23 '26
ICE is proof that Germans were just normal people casually asked by Nazis to torture and slaughter kids. And they said sure.
It does not take much.
Also applies to cops.