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tl;dr: FYI, Trump has evolved from the 2016 guy who said the Nazis at Charlottesville should be "condemned totally." He's now personally in favor of mass state killings if they're the most expedient way to do ethnic cleansing.
EDIT: Now that I can see the net karma on the "I hope you're right" comment, I've reconsidered whether winning this argument would be in my interests. I'm invoking Godwin's Law on myself to declare that I've lost and the thread is over. Nobody is, shall be, or ever has been, a Nazi.
There’s a Holocaust happening in China today. The Uyghurs, an ethnic group that includes, or included, 11 million people in China, are being rounded up arbitrarily and sent to “re-education camps,” where they are often killed or forcibly sterilized. More than a million, we think, are in camps now.
I used to believe that if anything on the scale of the Nazi Holocaust were to start up today, the rest of the world would rapidly respond and put an end to it. As a kid, I imagined enlisting. But China is too strong. Our leaders get away with not responding, because China simply denies everything. Sometimes with only the thinnest veneer of plausibility, like when they claimed to end the involuntary harvesting of prisoners’ organs, but the number of organ transplants kept rising steadily.
Joe Biden is not responding appropriately to this atrocity out of pragmatism, cowardice, or weakness. Maybe Kamala Harris will be different; we can at least hope.
But this started in 2017. Donald Trump did not respond appropriately either, because he approves of China’s actions.
Here’s Trump’s National Security Advisor at the time:
His administration felt differently, but there wasn’t much they could do. Mike Pompeo officially condemned the Uyghur genocide on his last day as Secretary of State, now that Trump couldn’t fire him. They also got him to sign a bill (co-sponsored by Harris) that sanctioned some Chinese officials for the ongoing atrocity.
Since then, people working for Trump have continued to condemn the genocide, and made pledges in his name to end it if he’s elected. But Trump himself has, as far as I can find, still declined to. In 2022, interviewers asked him whether he agreed with his staff, and he responded “I’d rather not say at the moment.” During his 2024 campaign, he’s said that Xi would be his first call as President, but he would not include human rights in his agenda for the call—in fact, one of his demands would be for them to increase the number of state executions for nonviolent offenses.
This is a consistent principle of his. Here’s President Trump excusing the massacres of Kurds on the Turkish border:
He’s going to try to do the same thing here in America.
Ever since being voted out of office, Trump’s language about immigration has shifted more and more towards the language of ethnic cleansing. He regularly tells crowds that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” There are about 15 or 16 million people here who shouldn’t be, he says, so “we got a lot of work to do.” More recently, he’s made it explicit that when he says “blood,” he means “genes.” It’s not a dog whistle, it’s not a gaffe, it’s not a malicious misreading of his ramblings.
This is identical to Nazi rhetoric. This is as harsh as Hitler was ever willing to be in his campaign speeches. He didn’t say he was going to round up the people poisoning his country’s blood and kill them. He said that he was going to deport them. Even once in power, when his government shifted policy toward extermination, they never admitted it.
A second Trump presidency will detain people suspected of being illegal immigrants, including those retroactively made “illegal,” and won’t be transparent about what happens next. How many of them survive detention will depend on logistics, on whether his new staff quietly rebels, and on how earnestly Trump tries to ensure that his preferred way of dealing with detainees is actually implemented. There are lots of ways this could end up not being a mass state murder. But “Trump disapproves of mass state murders” isn’t one of them.
(He wants pogroms, too. Just put people in charge who will look the other way, he says, and the problem will be solved immediately.)
I don’t think Trump started his political career as a Nazi. In 2017, he famously tried to have it both ways, saying of a rally led by white supremacists and containing avowed Nazis that it included some “very fine people,” but that the Nazis of course should be “condemned totally.” I think he just didn’t care one way or the other, and so was calibrating his remarks so that anyone could persuade themselves he agreed with them. Doing the politician thing, except most politicians don’t do that when it’s Nazis.
But in office, Trump got to know, and came to respect, Xi, and Erdogan, and Putin. His own attempts at mass deportation and building a wall were largely ineffective. But those guys. They knew how to get things done.
And now, after four years out of office, he’s rhetorically committed to the idea that there are millions of people here who shouldn’t be, because of their evil natures and evil genes. Now, all he’s willing to say against Nazis is that he’s never read Mein Kampf.
His Republican Party is, I believe and hope, not a Nazi party. As an institution, it’s not what the Nazi party was in the 1930s, just badly off-kilter. But Trump himself is a Nazi now. He doesn’t call himself that. But then, the Nazis didn’t use that word for themselves either.
For most of the past four years, I’ve tuned him out. I thought I knew everything I needed to know about him. Maybe you have too. But we were wrong—something has changed. People have been crying wolf for so long about Republicans being Nazis that now we just tune it out. Newspapers scared of looking like tabloids resort to headlines about “a fascination with genes and bloodlines.” So I missed it, and most people are still missing it.
Sources https://chinatribunal.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/ChinaTribunal_JUDGMENT_1stMarch_2020.pdf https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-refused-to-say-whether-china-was-abusing-uyghurs-2022-4 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/elections-2024-trump-xi-us-presidential-call-09232024232901.html https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1184897777941307392 (video) https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-bad-genes-immigrants-hugh-hewitt-rcna174456 https://archive.is/nwOXF
Are you saying that nobody can ever again organise large-scale deportations of illegal immigrants because Hitler once used it as an excuse 80 years ago? Or that they can only do it if their arguments are purely economic and make it clear at all times that they love and approve of immigrants & hate Nazis and Xi?
(And of course everyone will take these professions at face value and not at all accuse him/her of being a secret Nazi trying to sound harmless.)
Other than mass amnesty, what is your proposed policy?
Criminalize hiring illegal immigrants.
I'm pro-immigration (especially if it's illegal, since that means we don't need to pay for their welfare.) But that's legitimately the policy I would propose if somehow I was in charge and republicans offered to completely capitulate on climate change if I found a way to put illegal immigration near-zero.
You wouldn't even need to spend government funds to enforce it. Just copy that abortion bounty law-- let people sue anyone they point to that can't prove they only hired people with work authorization.
Without the "pull" factor of jobs, economic migrants just wouldn't come here.
A very good first start, and something we already do in the UK as far as I know. But what happens when they refuse to go? Most of these people don't come from nice countries, it's why they destroy their papers when they arrive. When they start organising unofficial employment and shadow economies, or become criminals? Are we allowed to deport them then?
And to move on to the more contentious area of legal immigration, if a leader like Boris Johnson or Angela Merkel has a rush of blood to the head and imports millions of people over the protests of the native population, it doesn't seem right that we're just stuck with them forever. You can tinker with citizenship requirements but you end up with the same problem once all those visas expire: what do you do when you have millions of people in your country who have no right to be there and refuse to leave?
(The fact that mass migration allows governments to inflict permanent demographic and cultural changes that can only be reversed by applying force on a vast scale is why I think that "the government will neither permit, nor facilitate, large-scale migration" must be an absolute principle of any functioning democracy, on a level with or higher than free speech and habeas corpus.)
(And yes, I am willing to concede huge capulations on climate change in exchange for making immigration near-zero. Climate policy can be reversed decades or centuries later, immigration can't.)
Ideally, fix the economic problems that incentivize shadow economies and/or crime, but sure, I think mass deportations approved by a majority and compliant with the constitution are almost always a bad idea but I might be wrong and it should be considered ethically permissible...as long as your government can credibly promise to do it humanely. There's no way a 25% chance of death camps for millions of people is worth it for the net benefits to the remainder.
I don’t think that ‘the remainder’ is the right way to think about it. By that logic, if two people break into my house (where I live alone), then I should be removed by the police for the net benefit of the remainder.
(Or I should let them squat permanently on the basis that the trigger-happy police are unacceptably likely to harm them. )
You could of course say that this is the position of the Māoris/Aborigines/Native Americans etc. and you’d be right. This is why I’m fixated on getting immigrants out of the country while they’re still new arrivals and 15% of the country and not the established multi-generational 40% they are swiftly becoming given observable birth rate disparities.
Are we talking deontology here now because I think there are a few deontological arguments against death camps.
We're saying that my house is my house is my house, no matter how many other people come in. There is no remainder whose wellbeing has to be balanced. It's role ethics, if you like.
If someone is in somebody else's house, and that person doesn't want them there, there is an escalating series of possibilities, ordered by decreasing preference.
Again, 1 is clearly preferable to 7. But you seem to be arguing that at some level on that list, the owner has a moral requirement to allow the intruder to stay on the basis that the benefit to him of the intruder leaving is not comparable to the damage the intruder incurs.
This just doesn't work as a way to run a society. It gives power to the most bloody-minded people at the expense of the kind and the reasonable, and makes a mockery of ownership and citizenship. It's how you get the bike theft meme. I once saw a drunk man with no ticket hold up a bus for an hour by standing in the doorway, because he knew it was legally dangerous to physically remove him.
I would think very badly of somebody who starts at 7 but if the intruder refuses to leave then the owner cannot be blamed for escalating. The possibility of escalation is what allows most conflicts to end at 1 or 2.
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