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Hyperbole at Its Finest
This showed up on my Facebook newsfeed this afternoon. I have probably lost a friend over my reply:
Stunning perhaps, but not accurate. In 1937, the German Jews who were detained were sent to work camps and death camps. That is the first difference. Neither of those happen to those detained by ICE. The German government turned on its own citizens. Their German citizenship counted for nothing. Every single country in the world has citizenship requirements, including Canada and Mexico—the two countries that border us.
Do we need immigration reform? Absolutely. Should have done that years ago. Would I have tried to gain entry into a better country to help my children any way possible? Certainly. That is a different question than killing, maiming, or enslaving people. As long as we are talking in hyperbole, nothing will be accomplished.
I felt badly (a little) because I rarely confront such but then I went to the original and I was kind. Where does this nonsense come from? What part of citizenship laws do people not understand?
Published in Immigration
I read a little further… Mexicans are the new Jews.
How can we even address such?
Well, for one thing, I would think that the “old” Jews might find such a facile comparison rather offensive.
AU, is there a way to enlarge the piece that heads your OP? I can’t read it and I think it’s vital to your theme.
Fake history is a useful tool for the left.
As I don’t know how to embiggen anything, I’ll just type it here…
Some of my students are carrying around their documents “just in case” they get detained by ICE.
Their parents are making contingency plans for child care and finances in case of detainment.
I am not overreacting when I say the parallels to 1937 Germany are stunning.
Hyperbole is how they communicate. It’s the same with the effort toward protections for religious beliefs. NPR has been reporting that if I am a doctor who gets protection for my religious beliefs (so I don’t have to do abortions or transgender surgery), I am such a hateful person that I will refuse to perform an appendectomy on a gay person.
Jews were not subverting the rule of law, which the Left constantly engages in because they’re all so morally superior and have a greater vision for the world.
Our society will cease functioning without the rule of law.
I don’t Facebook because I don’t want to know the stupid things my friends (and, sadly, some family) are posting. It makes relating to them so much easier. ;-)
I am so-o-o-o not happy that I asked! Thanks AuMom.
Take particular note of the preemptive strike in “I am not overreacting. . . ” Does this person teach rhetoric?
I’d also suggest that the person is doing the students a major disservice by fomenting irrational fears when the person, as an educator, should be putting them more at ease. I am not overreacting when I say it could be considered a form of abuse.
When the stakes are high, people tend to over-react. For a parent who lives in America without papers, I’m sure the imagination runs wild. What could be worse than being plucked off the street and taken to a concentration camp, leaving your children to starve to death?
The fact that the teacher of their child sees parallels to 1937 Germany is stunning.
Here’s one comment to my post…
Hmmm…family escapes death from gangs and corrupt officials to the US. the US give Temporary status, but then decides to send them back after years of safe living to a place they don;t know, but still could kill them….Not a death camp, but them some lived through the death camps.
Hmmmm… family comes to the US without papers with children since they did not want to leave them. Many years later those children may be deported to a country they do not know, placed into potentially violent environments they know not how to deal with and no real hope of really surviving…bit at least they didn’t get sent to a “death camp”. Only a country where the chance of dying rose dramatically.
The problem with your position Tina is you seem to forget these people are also…human beings. Jews were human beings and the world choose to ignore them till it got really ugly. Are you the out of sight, out of mind kind of person? I get that feeling.
Me, I’d like to figure a way to do two things…one, not allow this country to toss children or young adults over the “wall” and let them fend for themselves. I’m not a cruel person. Second, I’d try to work a balance with those that have temporary status, many for over a decade instead of tossing the over the wall into a place that cannot deal with them.
I accept that illegal immigration is an issues this country needs to address, but taking it out on children and families who’ve been here for a long time is not a good start. Border security? Sure, but given many of the people that pick the fruits and vegetables of this land are immigrants, legal or otherwise, I think there is a better way to solve this problem then through fear mongering and Us against Them.
Would you not agree?
And…
However, in 1937 Germany did not yet have death camps, Kristallnacht did not happen till 1938, but there was a growing sentiment, fostered by the Riechmark that Jews were “bad people”. let us also not push aside historical comparisons, even if the players are different. What concerns me is that today, it is far easier to push a mass of people to hate faster then ever could have happened in 1937.
That is the lesson. Unless we are vigilant, history repeats with different players.
One really should know history if one chooses it as a weapon.
Then there is this jewel.
Syria…In flames
Iran…Oppressive
Iraq…Poverty, extreme danger
Most of upper Africa…Poverty, starvation, extreme danger
Etc etc etc
Etc etc etcgt take them all and in that I agree with limits, but instead of helping horrible people rule, maybe we try, Idunno, to help good people lead. We spend $450B in a defense budget that no one can match…most allies. If we took even apart of that and helped lift countries up…who knows…maybe folks would want to go back.
I am just sick of despots and corrupt politicians running this country and feeding the rest of the despots for their own largess and not for the benefit of humans.
Didn’t we learn that trying to fix other countries was a mistake in Korea, Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc?
Bless you ! You’ve got more courage than I for even trying to take ’em on.
Talk about stunning! ^
I agree that the parallels to 1937 Germany are stunning, although it’s worse in Canada and Europe than here.
Wait. These countries are dangerous environments that deportees would have no hope of surviving. Does that make them … dare I say … S—-holes?
One of our favorite restaurants is called La Casa de Isaac and Moishe…owned by Orthodox Jewish, dare I say it, Mexican immigrants. National Margarita Day is February 3…maybe a plea of “Can’t we all just get along?” is in order.
So apparently there ARE Sh**hole countries…
edit [ekosj beat me to it]
AU Mom – Assuming one even wants to jump in to the fray on such FB postings (at considerable peril), I think your response was the way to do it: Point out the nonsense in an even-handed way, free of drama and hyperbole. (Drama and hyperbole being two of the Left’s favorite debate tools.) You didn’t stoop to name-calling or judgement. Well said.
Very much in the way that Jordan Peterson recently eviscerated a Leftist TV journalist, conservatives need to be ready to calmly and logically call “nonsense” when we see it.
That said, FB is such a whirling cesspool that to even dip one’s toe in the debate risks being sucked down the drain.
I’m getting a mental image of this imbecile thinking of herself as the new Schindler, hiding illegals in her basement. #Resist
I don’t mind getting along, but do find it aggravating how no one points out the tremendous amount of indebted servitude most citizens pay for the privilege of rescuing the immigrants.
In Calif., due to our state’s Supreme Court overturning Prop 187, we are required to pay AFDC, food stamps, housing vouchers and Health Care to anyone who applies from a foreign nation. (As long as they provide their name, and state they are indigent.) As an added bonus – no one from outside the USA needs ID.
However, if an American citizen applies for such, they need birth certificate, driver’s license, copies of at least three months of banking records. So the tax payer who actually has paid into the system is the last one helped.
In Calif., we pay over 7.5% on sales tax, plus there is a state income tax that is not insignificant either. And the Federal Program that reimburses the states for the costs accrued for the immigration, that program usually forgets to pay one red cent. We are still owed around 28 billion dollars from back in the 1980’s.
We as a nation will certainly learn that about interventions and endless unwinnable war the very moment that defense contractors are offered up an IOU instead of tremendous profits.
Tucker Carlson has been asking the same provocative question over and over to progressive immigration activists with no answer: “How many people should America allow to immigrate?” Activists never set a ceiling. It seems (as is proposed by the twitter comment in the OP and other like-minded individuals) that our immigration policy is to be driven by the needs of potential migrants. So anyone who needs to come to America (as the migrant defines it) must be allowed to come. If you follow that math the nation is to be continually swamped by the needy. And when you arrive at that wonderful day in which the state of America is such that whatever it is that the rest of the needy world wants, it isn’t available in America, what will the immigrant activists say then? “Mission Accomplished”
From a comment to your post: “Me, I’d like to figure a way to do two things…one, not allow this country to toss children or young adults over the “wall” and let them fend for themselves. I’m not a cruel person.”
Programs like DACA and general laxity in immigration enforcement encourage just such a thing, except they are tossed in this direction. https://www.cbp.gov/site-page/southwest-border-unaccompanied-alien-children-statistics-fy-2016
Your call to limit hyperbole was met with more hyperbole and extreme misrepresentation of the proposals on the table. DACA is on the table because it is a direct result of the mishandling of illegal immigration, but few people are suggesting wholesale deportation.
Those worries of yours are decent ones. Whenever the nation at large is presented with some type of “humanitarian crisis” as the meme to get this or that to happen, I become extremely wary.
I still remember as a ten year old sitting and reading Life and Look magazines and their portrayal of saffron robed Vietnamese monks committing suicide by fire. And soon, in part due to how Americans felt those monks needed democracy, we were embroiled in the 12 year war in Vietnam.
This immigration issue is much the same. The real goal is not to help anyone. (If we had wanted to help the poorest of the poor south of the border, NAFTA would never have been passed.) The immigration matter exists to Balkanize the USA.
Circa 2001-02, the CIA’s own official website had discussions of the need to do so. From time to time, the CIA has released or had leaked discussions of how there is apt to be a coming Civil War in Calif. One such war would be between the timber interests and environmentalists. The other would be between Spanish speaking people and English speaking people.
Top officials from various orgs calmly speak about how in ten years the populations in Europe will be “flipped” from German or French or Italian control to Muslim control. Same thing is planned here, except from Western culture over to hispanic.
Unlimited immigration to a welfare state does not end well for anyone.
A little bit of VDH may help.
http://victorhanson.com/wordpress/mythologies-of-illegal-immigration/
This person is a teacher?! That’s upsetting.
You’ll be pleased to know that, when the occasion arises, I point out to my students that anyone who compares the US with Nazi Germany is a reprehensible moron. (By coincidence, I happen to be teaching Nazi racial policies at the moment).
Example thought experiment: if you drove around 1937 Berlin with a bumper sticker reading I LOVE MY COUNTRY BUT I FEAR MY GOVERNMENT, how far would you get?
Forgive me for hijacking the thread, but: I’m teaching the interwar USA to another class and I put up on the board ‘Harding cut taxes and the economy recovered.’ Some of the brighter (13-14-yo) kids looked confused and pointed out that cutting taxes deprived the government of money, which could be used to build schools, hospitals, infrastructure etc. How would you explain this phenomenon to smart young teenagers who, this being the UK, naturally see public services as good and government as the motor of economic growth?
Does that mean the Left is going to start boycotting Mexican products, until their indigenous population gets a two-state solution?
Don’t say “cut taxes”. Say “cut tax rates”.
In your particular example, I don’t believe that the government was deprived of money since the Harding Administration (well, the Andrew Mellon economy) was an instance where the Laffer Curve worked, and the tax cut increased revenues because of the draconian tax rates that preceded it. How’s that sound, teach?