I just watched the Oscar winning film "I'm Still Here" about the detention and murder of Rubens Paiva in Brazil. As I was watching, I had the feeling that the current round-ups are but a practice run for what's to come. Lori Corbett Mann wrote on Substack "Here's the most dangerous illusion n America right now:
That if Trump falls, the threat disappears.
It doesn't.
The movement behind him IS organised, well-funded, and already reshaping governance. If you're only looking at Trump,you're missing what's noving beneath him.
This is why there MUST be accountability - collecting evidence of illegal operations, indictments and trials of all who participated and jail time for those convicted..... Anything less will only encourage more of this in the future.
Certainly for the 100,000s of deaths resulting from the shutdown of USAID without notice - we are looking potentially at millions of deaths, many of them vulnerable children.....
Exactly. Trump falls - but there are still tens of millions of his supporters, including the very wealthy and the very influential. What do we do with all of them?
Agree, John. It is a death camp where innocent people will suffer and die. It’s sickening and hideous and I am outraged that such an abomination of cruelty could and would be permitted to exist in America. It’s hideous, disgusting and unconscionable and we must not allow it. We must get it shut down and destroyed, the people kept there returned to their homes.
My heart breaks for the immigrants who will be and have been locked up there. I will speak out against it everywhere and to everyone till we get it shut down and demolished and those who built and allowed it convicted of crimes of hate and other crimes and jailed. They are the ones who must be put away for good.
Each day another insult to democracy and to justice by the felon 34 45 47. You'd think by now with all that has been done he would have been removed from office but he has so many ass kissing deluded sycophants praising him and calling him the greatest president that we ever. The adore his and lavish him with accolades, he feels justified and further emboldened with his mandate. He has surrounded himself with incompetent unqualified fools whose only qualifications are that they will praise him, and give him complete loyalty: conspiracy theorists, podcast hosts, and a cadre of other fools and obsequious dolts. I am sorry but base on everything this is the unfortunate truth and they are carrying out the King's every wish without question. I gp to bedb troubled, I rise and starting thinking what next as I turn on teh morning news. The incompetence and recklessness he and his administration have demonstrated is staggering and the GOP is silent, I suspect afraid that they and their families might be targeted, followed, investigated without cause or arrested by masked goons without warrants, or ID. This is a retribution and fear campaign. It never was about draining the swamp, MAGA or cutting waste, it was about retribution and revenge. He shows all the signs of megalomania paranoia disorder. I am not Doctor but one does not need an extensive medical education to see what is happening. God help us and may we have the courage to stand fast and save our democracy in our own way from the great cities to rural America. We are all in this storm together and we need to forget party and help each other, listen to each other and remember we are all Americans.
I think if we call them concentration camps we draw attention to the parallel, shame and depravity of what the world allowed in 1940s. Never again, we said.
You nailed it, John. Thank you for calling it exactly what it is, a death camp indeed. It is a sickening, disgusting, malevolent dungeon of injustice and cruelty. The monster-in-chief continues to degrade and demean us and all we stand for (or once stood for) as a country, pulling us to the bottomless depths of his depravity.
When we survive/defeat this regime, every member of this regime must be held to account for their treason in Nuremberg style trials. Perhaps this will be the appropriate place to house them. They must be made aware that they will be held to account! The Lincoln Project has a very good ad out that makes this abundantly clear.
I completely agree with you in principle. Here's the dilemma for me. There are many who, all too familiar with the Holocaust, take issue with calling this a death camp. Auschwitz was a place of industrialized murder, along with being a concentration camp. This place, as vile as it is, as deadly as it is, as vile as the sociopaths who have envisioned and created it are, is not the same as that, and we must do everything in our power to prevent it from ever becoming that. How do we express it to people so that it paints an accurate picture and conveys a call to action without suggesting that this, too, is a place of what I've perhaps ill-named industrialized murder? I'm searching for the right words.
It's a concentration camp or a death camp, whatever that summons up in the mind. I call it Alligator Auschwitz as I don't think today's dim Republicans are up to interpreting subtlety. It may not be industrialized but it does concentrate the "undesirables" according to our criminal regime and will result in death of its occupants. It is a form of torture. I think we need to use verbiage that gets the point across.
Words shape the moral architecture of a society—what it permits, what it excuses, what it ignores. They are the scaffolding for our conscience or the wrecking ball that tears it down. And right now, we are in the middle of a linguistic coup—a rebranding of barbarism.
They don’t call it a camp.
They don’t call it cruelty.
They certainly don’t call it evil.
They call it “order.” They call it “law.” They call it “security.”
They call it “temporary.”
They want us to get used to it—to blink less, to react slower, to forget faster. And so they soften the language, strip the humanity, and expect us to repeat their terms like hypnotized stenographers of state propaganda.
But we don’t have to.
We must not.
Because a cage in 110-degree heat is not “policy.”
Because snatching workers from job sites is not “enforcement.”
Because trapping families in metal pens without charges is not “governance.”
Because institutional sadism dressed up in euphemism is still sadism.
Call it what it is: a death camp.
That phrase alone is a moral act.
A refusal.
A reclamation.
Because when the line between crime and cruelty blurs, when legality becomes divorced from justice, language is all that separates consent from defiance. And the reason this movement is obsessed with controlling words is because they know once the spell of euphemism breaks—so does their power.
So no, we do not use their name for it.
We do not retweet their branding.
We do not play PR for fascists.
We do not lend their cruelty the cover of neutral language.
We speak the brutal, honest, unsanitized truth.
Because that’s what history demanded of those who came before us, and it will demand the same of us now. Will we be the ones who softened the edges of atrocity—or the ones who lit the flare and called it out before the silence buried us too?
Speak.
Name.
Refuse.
Not just for the sake of those already imprisoned in the heat, but for the sake of our own souls—so we don’t become the people history will one day ask:
Jon, I wonder if you have seen the film 2073? I watched it this afternoon. It was a sharp shock and shows what the world could be like 50 years in the future. I believe it is being shown on HBO in the US.
I just watched the Oscar winning film "I'm Still Here" about the detention and murder of Rubens Paiva in Brazil. As I was watching, I had the feeling that the current round-ups are but a practice run for what's to come. Lori Corbett Mann wrote on Substack "Here's the most dangerous illusion n America right now:
That if Trump falls, the threat disappears.
It doesn't.
The movement behind him IS organised, well-funded, and already reshaping governance. If you're only looking at Trump,you're missing what's noving beneath him.
This is why there MUST be accountability - collecting evidence of illegal operations, indictments and trials of all who participated and jail time for those convicted..... Anything less will only encourage more of this in the future.
A trial at The Hague is what is really warranted.
Certainly for the 100,000s of deaths resulting from the shutdown of USAID without notice - we are looking potentially at millions of deaths, many of them vulnerable children.....
Exactly. Trump falls - but there are still tens of millions of his supporters, including the very wealthy and the very influential. What do we do with all of them?
We make them persona non grata. We don't patronize their businesses. They can know that they are rich and despised.
Agree, John. It is a death camp where innocent people will suffer and die. It’s sickening and hideous and I am outraged that such an abomination of cruelty could and would be permitted to exist in America. It’s hideous, disgusting and unconscionable and we must not allow it. We must get it shut down and destroyed, the people kept there returned to their homes.
My heart breaks for the immigrants who will be and have been locked up there. I will speak out against it everywhere and to everyone till we get it shut down and demolished and those who built and allowed it convicted of crimes of hate and other crimes and jailed. They are the ones who must be put away for good.
How long will it be just immigrants?
Good and scary question. There have been elected officials threatened and arrested already…
Alligator Auschwitz
100% true!
Each day another insult to democracy and to justice by the felon 34 45 47. You'd think by now with all that has been done he would have been removed from office but he has so many ass kissing deluded sycophants praising him and calling him the greatest president that we ever. The adore his and lavish him with accolades, he feels justified and further emboldened with his mandate. He has surrounded himself with incompetent unqualified fools whose only qualifications are that they will praise him, and give him complete loyalty: conspiracy theorists, podcast hosts, and a cadre of other fools and obsequious dolts. I am sorry but base on everything this is the unfortunate truth and they are carrying out the King's every wish without question. I gp to bedb troubled, I rise and starting thinking what next as I turn on teh morning news. The incompetence and recklessness he and his administration have demonstrated is staggering and the GOP is silent, I suspect afraid that they and their families might be targeted, followed, investigated without cause or arrested by masked goons without warrants, or ID. This is a retribution and fear campaign. It never was about draining the swamp, MAGA or cutting waste, it was about retribution and revenge. He shows all the signs of megalomania paranoia disorder. I am not Doctor but one does not need an extensive medical education to see what is happening. God help us and may we have the courage to stand fast and save our democracy in our own way from the great cities to rural America. We are all in this storm together and we need to forget party and help each other, listen to each other and remember we are all Americans.
YES!!!
They aren't going to stop with immigrants, no more than the Germans stopped with the Jews. We need to stop this out of self preservation.
I think if we call them concentration camps we draw attention to the parallel, shame and depravity of what the world allowed in 1940s. Never again, we said.
You nailed it, John. Thank you for calling it exactly what it is, a death camp indeed. It is a sickening, disgusting, malevolent dungeon of injustice and cruelty. The monster-in-chief continues to degrade and demean us and all we stand for (or once stood for) as a country, pulling us to the bottomless depths of his depravity.
John, you are right...words are powerful and it is and was designed to be a death camp. Thank you for your courage and commitment.
When we survive/defeat this regime, every member of this regime must be held to account for their treason in Nuremberg style trials. Perhaps this will be the appropriate place to house them. They must be made aware that they will be held to account! The Lincoln Project has a very good ad out that makes this abundantly clear.
From now on it’s the Florida Death Camp whenever I speak of it. 💯💯💯
After the first Category 3 hurricane, you won't need a bulldozer to get rid of it.....
Even a strong Cat 1 would go substantial damage to this death trap.
Very true - I was trying to be generous.....:-)
I completely agree with you in principle. Here's the dilemma for me. There are many who, all too familiar with the Holocaust, take issue with calling this a death camp. Auschwitz was a place of industrialized murder, along with being a concentration camp. This place, as vile as it is, as deadly as it is, as vile as the sociopaths who have envisioned and created it are, is not the same as that, and we must do everything in our power to prevent it from ever becoming that. How do we express it to people so that it paints an accurate picture and conveys a call to action without suggesting that this, too, is a place of what I've perhaps ill-named industrialized murder? I'm searching for the right words.
You make excellent points. Although the end results are the same, Germany’s camps were eventually carefully planned execution places.
It's a concentration camp or a death camp, whatever that summons up in the mind. I call it Alligator Auschwitz as I don't think today's dim Republicans are up to interpreting subtlety. It may not be industrialized but it does concentrate the "undesirables" according to our criminal regime and will result in death of its occupants. It is a form of torture. I think we need to use verbiage that gets the point across.
So true
Every word here rings like a bell in the dark.
Because words are the front line.
Words shape the moral architecture of a society—what it permits, what it excuses, what it ignores. They are the scaffolding for our conscience or the wrecking ball that tears it down. And right now, we are in the middle of a linguistic coup—a rebranding of barbarism.
They don’t call it a camp.
They don’t call it cruelty.
They certainly don’t call it evil.
They call it “order.” They call it “law.” They call it “security.”
They call it “temporary.”
They want us to get used to it—to blink less, to react slower, to forget faster. And so they soften the language, strip the humanity, and expect us to repeat their terms like hypnotized stenographers of state propaganda.
But we don’t have to.
We must not.
Because a cage in 110-degree heat is not “policy.”
Because snatching workers from job sites is not “enforcement.”
Because trapping families in metal pens without charges is not “governance.”
Because institutional sadism dressed up in euphemism is still sadism.
Call it what it is: a death camp.
That phrase alone is a moral act.
A refusal.
A reclamation.
Because when the line between crime and cruelty blurs, when legality becomes divorced from justice, language is all that separates consent from defiance. And the reason this movement is obsessed with controlling words is because they know once the spell of euphemism breaks—so does their power.
So no, we do not use their name for it.
We do not retweet their branding.
We do not play PR for fascists.
We do not lend their cruelty the cover of neutral language.
We speak the brutal, honest, unsanitized truth.
Because that’s what history demanded of those who came before us, and it will demand the same of us now. Will we be the ones who softened the edges of atrocity—or the ones who lit the flare and called it out before the silence buried us too?
Speak.
Name.
Refuse.
Not just for the sake of those already imprisoned in the heat, but for the sake of our own souls—so we don’t become the people history will one day ask:
Why didn’t you call it what it was?
Why didn’t you stop it when you had the chance?
We still have that chance.
Let’s not waste it.
YES!!!!
Jon, I wonder if you have seen the film 2073? I watched it this afternoon. It was a sharp shock and shows what the world could be like 50 years in the future. I believe it is being shown on HBO in the US.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt22042346/
Don’t take any notice of the reviews - many of them are by bots/people whose mission it is to protect the men in charge.