AOC is Right...

     ...but she was just following a path I'd already long ago set a year ago almost to the day.
      Again, I was virtually the first one in the 5th estate, let alone the almost completely useless 4th, to use the phrase "concentration camps" in connection with these "detention centers" and I was calling them out as such over a year ago. And, unlike AOC, I didn't need the blessing of a concentration camp expert to give me permission to do so. I can see the writing on the wall for myself, thank you, and I'm just as capable as anyone of calling a spade a spade.

     In Eastern Europe 75-80 years ago, there were detention camps, which is how it all started. They were called "relocation camps" and the people of Germany bought it hook, line and sinker. They even set up a model camp (called Theresienstadt) with healthy-looking Jews they would show the press. The idea of the "Final Solution" that brought about the death camps such as Auschwitz didn't come until years later.

     My point is, it didn't start all at once and didn't just pop up out of nowhere. It was a process, an evolution that took 12 years to develop and did so through the silent consent of the German people who didn't actually know what was being done in their name.

     And Masha Gessen makes a good point that the further back in time history's greatest villains recede, the more two dimensional and unreal they appear. And when that happens, history turns into a perennially unlearned lesson, that these things happen only to OTHER people, that, to quote Sinclair Lewis, it can't happen here.

     Well, it IS and it's time we collectively pulled our heads out of our lazy, fat, pasty asses and realize history repeats itself for a reason and it's because, as Santayana said, we ignore its lessons. It also repeats itself because tyrants like Hitler, Stalin and, yes, Trump think alike. The rationales are the same, the tactics and the propaganda are the same. We started out by calling these concentration camps for kids "Tender Age" facilities, a phrase that made Rachel Maddow cry on the air.

     A few days ago, a Trump lawyer actually asked a judge why we can't take away beds, soap & toothbrushes from these child prisoners who violated no laws. What happened in Nazi Germany was a process that took years. What we're seeing unfolding now is taking mere months. Within a year, we've gone from "Tender Age" facilities and what Laura Ingraham called "summer camps" to petitioning judges to allow them to take away from them the most basic accoutrements for human survival. 

     We're already taking away their medicine and they're starting to die in our dubious care. They're spinning, whitewashing and outright lying about what's happening just like the Nazis did. Don't help our evil government along by refusing to recognize history repeating itself. They count on you to not have the guts to confront it.