Gun Free Zone

This “the detention centers on the border are concentration camps” has dragged on.  The latest piece of this fray has sunk to new depths.

The US Holocaust Museum released a statement on social media.

Museum statement on Holocaust comparisonshttps://t.co/dbwuts3E7S

— US Holocaust Museum (@HolocaustMuseum) June 24, 2019

The text of that statement:

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary. That position has repeatedly and unambiguously been made clear in the Museum’s official statement on the matter – a statement that is reiterated and reaffirmed now. The link to the Museum’s statement is here.

The Museum further reiterates that a statement ascribed to a Museum staff historian regarding recent attempts to analogize the situation on the United States southern border to concentration camps in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s does not reflect the position of the Museum.

The Museum deeply regrets any offense to Holocaust survivors and others that may have been engendered by any statement ascribed to a Museum historian in a personal capacity.

I’m pretty sure that the people who manage the Holocaust museum know what they are talking about.

The previous statement linked above is long, but select parts make a very good point.

American politicians from across the ideological spectrum, influential media figures, and ordinary people on social media casually use Holocaust terminology to bash anyone or any policy with which they disagree. The takedown is so common that it’s even earned its own term, reductio ad Hitlerum.

This trend is far from new, but it is escalating at a disturbing rate in increasingly polarized times. The Holocaust has become shorthand for good vs. evil; it is the epithet to end all epithets. And the current environment of rapid fire online communication and viral memes lends itself particularly well to this sort of sloppy analogizing. Worse, it allows it to spread more widely and quickly.

This oversimplified approach to complex history is dangerous. When conducted with integrity and rigor, the study of history raises more questions than answers.

Careless Holocaust analogies may demonize, demean, and intimidate their targets. But there is a cost for all of us because they distract from the real issues challenging our society, because they shut down productive, thoughtful discourse. At a time when our country needs dialogue more than ever, it is especially dangerous to exploit the memory of the Holocaust as a rhetorical cudgel. We owe the survivors more than that. And we owe ourselves more than that.

It is not unacceptable to use the Holocaust as a measure of enormity and to compare other events to it.  But it is the obligation of those making the comparison to be honest in their assessment.

A contemporary (sort of) event that would be honest in its comparison was the Rwandan genocide of the Tutsi.  It was not as mechanized as the Holocaust, which was carried out with German efficiency.  But the language that the Hutu’s uses – calling Tutsi “cockroaches” and alike – was equally dehumanizing.  The Hutu led military factions whipped the Hutu people into a murderous frenzy, not unlike Kristallnacht, and scapegoated the Tutsi for the economic problems in Rwanda.  As a result, almost a million Tutsi were hacked to death by Hutus with machetes.

It was an orchestrated, racially motivated genocide of an ethnic minority.

What is going on, on our southern border does not in any way comparable to that in intent, rhetoric, or action.  You can compare it, but an honest, rational person would dismiss it almost instantly.

If you go through the responses to the US Holocaust Museum’s Tweet, they are just about 100% negative, from people defending AOC telling the USHMM how they are wrong, racist, white supremacist, and on the wrong side of history.

If you see nothing but parallels and history repeating itself with Trump being just “Orange Hitler” than of course, you think that the temporary detainment of people crossing illegally into the United States prior to an asylum hearing is a prelude to the genocide of Hispanics.

If you believe that so much that you are willing to tell the US Holocaust Museum that they are a bunch of Nazi bootlickers, the conversation is over.

There is nothing left to say.  All the rational arguments in the world fall of these willingly deaf ears.

The same Leftists who are saying that arresting and deporting illegal immigrants who have been found in violation of the law, and have had arrest and deportation orders signed by judges, are having their human rights violated by a fascist President, and American citizens should hide them and shield them from federal law enforcement…

Are the same Leftists that cheer on the idea of warrantless door to door raids by law enforcement to arrest and kill gun owners that refuse to give of their assault rifles and high capacity magazines after they pass some broad sweeping gun ban.

Mr. Jose Antonio Vargas wants to know how you will use your privilege to stop ICE from deporting illegal immigrants.

Consider that according to the law, ICE can’t just round up and deport people at will.  An arrest requires a warrant and deportation requires an order, both signed by judges.  In this regard, illegal immigrants have the same protections as US citizens.

No local, state or federal law enforcement officer has the right to grab someone who “looks Hispanic,” ask for papers (proof of citizenship or lawful alien residence), and finding none, tosses said person over the fence into Mexico.

So if you are on a bus, and you see ICE arresting some guy, a judge has signed a warrant for his arrest due to some criminal activity.

Such as…

White Center man convicted of rape accused of attacking victim days after his release from jail

A 35-year-old White Center man who was recently released from the King County Jail after serving time for rape is now accused of tracking down the victim last weekend, pushing her out of her wheelchair and strangling and beating her in front of her young son, according to prosecutors.

Francisco Carranza-Ramirez was supposed to board a flight to California and return to his native Mexico on Monday after King County Superior Court Judge Nicole Gaines Phelps agreed not to impose community custody, or probation, following his release from jail last week, court records show. He is now wanted on a no-bail warrant for violating conditions of his release on the rape charge, according to court records and King County sheriff’s spokesman Sgt. Ryan Abbott.

So if I’m somewhere in public and I see ICE putting a guy in handcuffs, I’m going to be thankful that my tax dollars are being put to good use.

Again, these people are not like Anne Frank, hiding in an attic because of their ethnicity.

Every single one of these people has a deportation order signed by a judge for violation of the law to some degree or another.

When I was a kid (here I go being old fart again) libraries were places of wonder. And for a bookworm like me? The proverbial candy store. Yu had to follow a code of conduct: Be quiet, be respectful to other patrons, the staff and specially the books, no silly behavior. You got two shushes tops as warning and the third was expulsion from the Library.

Earlier I bumped into this article from October of last year: Company to Supply Free Narcan to Libraries. I knew libraries were having a “homeless” (AKA junkies) problem that, but Narcan? And then I read this passage.

DPL (Denver Public Library) administered Narcan 14 times that year and a handful of times so far in 2018. “Those are lives we saved,” she says. “These things can and do happen at libraries because libraries are very public places.”

Once a temple of knowledge is now a location where junkies can come and get their fix and if they OD, the helpful librarian will resuscitate you with Narcan so you can continue shoving a needle up your arm.

That is progress in some circles, I guess.

Miguel has brought up that Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez was invited to tour some of the concentration camps (twice) that have been turned into museums and memorials to get a better understanding of the enormity of that history.

She decided to turn that invitation down, and in just such a classy way too.

The last time you went on this trip it was reported that you also met w/ fringe Austrian neo-Nazi groups to talk shop.

So I’m going to have to decline your invite. But thank you for revealing to all how transparently the far-right manipulates these moments for political gain. https://t.co/TQkaPEESoD

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 23, 2019

Steve King may be sort of a piece of shit, but he wasn’t the one who invited her.  That is clear from his wording “Please accept their offer.”

She received separate invitations from Polish MP and vice-president of the European Conservatives Dominik Tarczynski to visit concentration camps in Poland, from From the Depths which is a Holocaust educational group, and from Americans Against Antisemitism.

None of these individuals or groups are Steve King.

For her to ignore all that and respond only to King and turn down the invitations and claim the moral high ground saying that the far right is engaged in political manipulation shows just how much of a dishonest piece of shit she is.

I thought that she was done when Cuomo and Schumer got burned on billions in tax dollars from Amazon HQ2 by her and they told Pelosi to muzzle her stupid face.

This is way beyond that.

Clearly, this girl thinks she is untouchable.

Why has a book of this importance that came out in its original language in 1995 was never translated and published into English till this year? Because it was embarrassing to the West to have to admit they have been infiltrated all along by Moscow.

I am just a few pages in, but I already know that th Communist Party of the United States was getting yearly six figure contributions from the USSR from a department created for nothing more than influence elections in Western countries. That sounds like ….what’s the word I am looking for? Oh yes! Collusion! The department was ran by one Anatoly Dobrynin who was Ambassador to the US and admired and wooed by the Media and the Left for being enlightened and Pro Western.

And like I said, this is just in the first pages of a heavily documented book.

Judgment in Moscow: Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity by Vladimir Bukovsky is available in Dead Tree Format and Kindle