For several years Elena and I have been discussing Alanna’s report on genocide and how relevant it still is. As I sit here listening to President Obama speaking at the Holocaust Museum, I decided to take the plunge, find Alanna’s thread which is almost 4 years old, June 8, 2008, and reposting it.
Read the process of how genocide happens. Think about it first in terms of the Holocaust and then how it applies in modern countries today. Then do the really uncomfortable thing and think about it in our own country. Have we contributed to making someone or a group of someones “others?” Being an “other” is where it all starts.
This was an uncanny unplanned article on Huffington Post that was discovered AFTER Moon reposted this thread.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leo-pierson/on-states-rights-and-anti_b_1442997.html
Immigrants–particularly Latinos in both their specificity and generality–are seen as “other” than what some folks–from everyday citizens to those embedded in our national security apparatus–conceive of as “real Americans”, or productive, law abiding members of society. Even though greater than 85% of Latinos are citizens and legal residents, we disproportionately carry the burdensome weight of being illegal as stigma.
So in the case of the contemporary immigration question, specifically Latinos–not entirely unlike the Irish, Italians and Jews in times past–have been dehumanized and demonized as undesirables, as illegals. And it isn’t just those who are undocumented; we are all caricatured as “illegal criminals”. Even our children, who represent roughly a full third of our population, are caste in such stigmatizing terms as anchor babies… dog food… parasites. As Elena Schlossberg cogently stated in a 2007 county board meeting, “They are talking about children! And [politicians] have not taken a leadership role to stop this!”
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June 8, 2008
At the risk of setting off a firestorm, I’d just like to post these 8 Steps that have been identified by an organization entitled – Genocidal Watch, these steps are part of a process that has been identified in cases of genocide. Again, this doesn’t mean we are having or going to have a ‘Holocaust’ experience, but it’s wise to be aware of these steps. So, here it is – The Genocidal Process ‘:
THE GENOCIDAL PROCESS
Prevention of genocide requires a structural understanding of the genocidal process. Genocide has eight stages or operational processes. The first stages precede later stages, but continue to operate throughout the genocidal process. Each stage reinforces the others. A strategy to prevent genocide should attack each stage, each process. The eight stages of genocide are classification, symbolization, dehumanization, organization, polarization, preparation, extermination, and denial.
Classification
All languages and cultures require classification – division of the natural and social world into categories. We distinguish and classify objects and people. All cultures have categories to distinguish between “us” and “them,” between members of our group and others. We treat different categories of people differently. Racial and ethnic classifications may be defined by absurdly detailed laws — the Nazi Nuremberg laws, the “one drop” laws of segregation in America, or apartheid racial classification laws in South Africa. Racist societies often prohibit mixed categories and outlaw miscegenation. Bipolar societies are the most likely to have genocide. In Rwanda and Burundi, children are the ethnicity of their father, either Tutsi or Hutu. No one is mixed. Mixed marriages do not result in mixed children.
Symbolization
We use symbols to name and signify our classifications. We name some people Hutu and others Tutsi, or Jewish or Gypsy, or Christian or Muslim. Sometimes physical characteristics – skin color or nose shape – become symbols for classifications. Other symbols, like customary dress or facial scars, are socially imposed by groups on their own members. After the process has reached later stages (dehumanization, organization, and polarization) genocidal governments in the preparation stage often require members of a targeted group to wear an identifying symbol or distinctive clothing — e.g. the yellow star. The Khmer Rouge forced people from the Eastern Zone to wear a blue-checked scarf, marking them for forced relocation and elimination.
Dehumanization
Classification and symbolization are fundamental operations in all cultures. They become steps of genocide only when combined with dehumanization. Denial of the humanity of others is the step that permits killing with impunity. The universal human abhorrence of murder of members of one’s own group is overcome by treating the victims as less than human. In incitements to genocide the target groups are called disgusting animal names – Nazi propaganda called Jews “rats” or “vermin”; Rwandan Hutu hate radio referred to Tutsis as “cockroaches.” The targeted group is often likened to a “disease”, “microbes”, “infections” or a “cancer” in the body politic. Bodies of genocide victims are often mutilated to express this denial of humanity. Such atrocities then become the justification for revenge killings, because they are evidence that the killers must be monsters, not human beings themselves.
Organization
Genocide is always collective because it derives its impetus from group identification. It is always organized, often by states but also by militias and hate groups. Planning need not be elaborate: Hindu mobs may hunt down Sikhs or Muslims, led by local leaders. Methods of killing need not be complex: Tutsis in Rwanda died from machetes; Muslim Chams in Cambodia from hoe-blades to the back of the neck (“Bullets must not be wasted,” was the rule at Cambodian extermination prisons, expressing the dehumanization of the victims.) The social organization of genocide varies by culture. It reached its most mechanized, bureaucratic form in the Nazi death camps. But it is always organized, whether by the Nazi SS or the Rwandan Interahamwe. Death squads may be trained for mass murder, as in Rwanda, and then force everyone to participate, spreading hysteria and overcoming individual resistance. Terrorist groups will pose one of the greatest threats of genocidal mass murder in the future as they gain access to chemical, biological, and even nuclear weapons.
Polarization
Genocide proceeds in a downward cycle of killings until, like a whirlpool, it reaches the vortex of mass murder. Killings by one group may provoke revenge killings by the other. Such massacres are aimed at polarization, the systematic elimination of moderates who would slow the cycle. The first to be killed in a genocide are moderates from the killing group who oppose the extremists: the Hutu Supreme Court Chief Justice and Prime Minister in Rwanda, the Tutsi Archbishop in Burundi. Extremists target moderate leaders and their families. The center cannot hold. The most extreme take over, polarizing the conflict until negotiated settlement is impossible.
Preparation
Preparation for genocide includes identification. Lists of victims are drawn up. Houses are marked. Maps are made. Individuals are forced to carry ID cards identifying their ethnic or religious group. Identification greatly speeds the slaughter. In Germany, the identification of Jews, defined by law, was performed by a methodical bureaucracy. In Rwanda, identity cards showed each person’s ethnicity. In the genocide, Tutsis could then be easily pulled from cars at roadblocks and murdered. Throwing away the cards did not help, because anyone who could not prove he was Hutu, was presumed to be Tutsi. Hutu militiamen conducted crude mouth exams to test claims of Hutu identity.
Preparation also includes expropriation of the property of the victims. It may include concentration: herding of the victims into ghettos, stadiums, or churches. In its most extreme form, it even includes construction of extermination camps, as in Nazi-ruled Europe, or conversion of existing buildings – temples and schools – into extermination centers in Cambodia. Transportation of the victims to these killing centers is then organized and bureaucratized.
Extermination
The seventh step, the final solution, is extermination. It is considered extermination, rather than murder, because the victims are not considered human. They are vermin, rats or cockroaches. Killing is described by euphemisms of purification: “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia, “ratonade” (rat extermination) in Algeria. Targeted members of alien groups are killed, often including children. Because they are not considered persons, their bodies are mutilated, buried in mass graves or burnt like garbage.
Denial
Every genocide is followed by denial. The mass graves are dug up and hidden. The historical records are burned, or closed to historians. Even during the genocide, those committing the crimes dismiss reports as propaganda. Afterwards such deniers are called “revisionists.” Others deny through more subtle means: by characterizing the reports as “unconfirmed” or “alleged” because they do not come from officially approved sources; by minimizing the number killed; by quarreling about whether the killing fits the legal definition of genocide (“definitionalism”); by claiming that the deaths of the perpetrating group exceeded that of the victim group, or that the deaths were the result of civil war, not genocide. In fact, civil war and genocide are not mutually exclusive. Most genocides occur during wars.
And here are the steps for prevention:
PREVENTION
A full strategy for preventing genocide should include attack on each of genocide’s operational processes.
Classification may be attacked either through devaluation of the distinctive features used to classify (e.g. amalgamation of regional dialects and accents by exposure to mass media, standardized education, and promotion of a common language) or through use of transcendent categories, such as common nationality or common humanity. Promotion of mixed categories, such as the financial incentives for inter-caste marriages in Tamil Nadu, India, may help break down group endogamy, but do not combat genocide in bipolar societies where mixed categories have no recognition. In bipolar societies, transcendent institutions like the Catholic Church should actively campaign against ethnic classifications. Special effort should be made to keep such institutions from being captured and divided by the same forces that divide the society, e.g. through hierarchical discipline from Rome for the Roman Catholic Church.
Symbolization can be attacked by legally forbidding use of hate symbols (e.g. swastikas) or ethnic classification words. “Nigger” or “kaffir” as racial expletives may be outlawed as “hate speech.” Group marking like tribal scarring may be outlawed, like gang clothing. The problem is that legal limitations on hate speech will fail if unsupported by popular cultural enforcement. Though Hutu and Tutsi were forbidden words in Burundi until the 1980’s, the prohibition had little effect, since other euphemisms and code-words replaced them. Prohibition may even become counter-productive, as part of an ideology of denial, which prevents people from naming, discussing and overcoming deep cultural divisions. However, without symbols for our classifications, they would become literally insignificant. Yellow stars became insignificant in parts of France and Bulgaria because many Jews refused to wear them and were not turned in by their Christian neighbors, who rejected the Nazi’s classification system. In cultures that reject negative symbolization, resistance can be a powerful preventive tactic. In Denmark, the popular resistance to Nazi classification and symbolization was so strong that the Nazis did not even dare to impose the yellow star, and Danish “fishermen” smuggled ninety-five percent of Danish Jews to safety in Sweden.
Dehumanization should be opposed openly whenever it shows its ugly face. Genocidal societies lack constitutional protection for countervailing speech, and should be treated differently than democracies. Hate radio stations should be shut down, and hate propaganda banned. Although restrictions on free speech are not necessary in a healthy polity, even in democracies hate speech should be actively exposed and publicly opposed. Direct incitements to genocide should be outlawed. Incitement to genocide is not protected speech. Hate crimes and atrocities should be promptly punished. Impunity breeds contempt for law, and emboldens genocidists, who can literally get away with murder.
Organizations that commit acts of genocide should be banned, and membership in them made a crime. Freedom of association in a democratic society should not be misconstrued as protecting membership in criminal organizations. At Nuremberg, membership in the SS was itself prosecuted. Similarly the Interahamwe and other genocidal hate groups should be outlawed, and their members arrested and tried for conspiracy to commit genocide. The UN should impose arms embargoes on governments or militias that commit genocide. Because arms embargoes are difficult to enforce, for Rwanda, the UN established an international commission to investigate and document violations of the arms embargo. The UN may also require member states to freeze the assets of persons who organize and finance genocidal groups.
Polarization can be fought by providing financial and technical aid to the moderate center. It may mean security protection for moderate leaders, or assistance to human rights groups. Assets of extremists may be seized, and visas for international travel denied to them. Coups d’état by extremists should be immediately opposed by targeted international sanctions on their leaders.
Preparation: Identification of victims considerably speeds genocide. When ID cards identify victims’ ethnic or religious group, or when victims are forced to wear yellow stars, the killing is made efficient. As soon as such symbolic markers are imposed, a Genocide Watch should be declared and diplomatic pressure should demand their abolition and impose targetted sanctions on regime leaders. When death lists are drawn up, the international community should recognize that genocide is imminent, and mobilize for armed intervention. Those identified should be given asylum, and assistance in fleeing their persecutors. Had the U.S. or Britain in Palestine accepted all Jewish immigrants, millions of lives might have been saved from the Holocaust.
Extermination whether carried out by governments or by patterned mob violence, can only be stopped by force. Armed intervention must be rapid and overwhelming. Safe areas should be established with real military protection. An intervention force without robust rules of engagement, such as UNAMIR in Rwanda in April, 1994 or UNPROFOR in Bosnia, is worse than useless because it gives genocide victims false hope of security in churches or unsafe “safe areas”, delaying their organization for self-defense. In bipolar societies, separation into self-defense zones is the best protection for both groups, particularly if international troops create a buffer zone between them.
Experience with UN peacekeeping has shown that humanitarian intervention should be carried out by a multilateral force authorized by the UN, but led by UN members, rather than by the UN itself. The Military Staff Committee envisioned in Article 47 of the UN Charter has never been organized, and the UN does not have a standing army. The strongest member states must therefore shoulder this responsibility in conjunction with other UN members. The U.S. is now promoting the organization of an African Crisis Response Initiative composed of African military units coordinated and trained by the U.S., Europeans, and other powers. Regional forces such as those of NATO, ECOWAS, or the EU, or mandated by the African Union or Organization of American States may also effectively intervene if given strong support by major military powers.
Denial, the final stage of genocide is best overcome by public trials and truth commissions, followed by years of education about the facts of the genocide, particularly for the children of the group or nation that committed the crime. The black hole of forgetting is the negative force that results in future genocides. When Adolf Hitler was asked if his planned invasion of Poland was a violation of international law, he scoffed, “Who ever heard of the extermination of the Armenians?” Impunity – literally getting away with murder — is the weakest link in the chains that restrain genocide. In Rwanda, Hutus were never arrested and brought to trial for massacres of Tutsis that began years before the April, 1994 genocide. In Burundi, Tutsi youth gangs have never been tried for killing Hutus. Burundi judges are nearly all Tutsis, as are the army and police. They seldom, if ever, convict their own.
Social order abhors a legal vacuum. When courts do not dispense justice the victims have no recourse but revenge. In societies with histories of ethnic violence, the cycle of killing will eventually spiral downward into the vortex of genocide. In such societies, the international community should fill the legal vacuum by creating tribunals to prosecute and try genocide. That has been done for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and will soon be done for Cambodia. We finally have the International Criminal Court (ICC) that will have world-wide jurisdiction to try genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. But the ICC still has no jurisdiction over genocide committed in nations that contain over half of the world’s population because their nations have not become parties to the Rome Treaty of the ICC. The Court must be supported by effective institutions to arrest and imprison those indicted and convicted by the Court. Only such a permanent court will provide a deterrent to those planning future genocides.
The strongest antidote to genocide is justice.
Alanna,
I suggest a trip to the Holocaust Museum in DC to get an education on what you are trying to compare to PWC. Then you can come back and apologize to the residents for even suggesting such a thing! Totally absurd. It’s like comparing a brutal murderer to someone calling another a name. You’ve lost it. How can anyone take what you say with any thought to actuality or fact. Anything you say will forever be considered a stretch of the imagination, and little else.
SA,
You’re the one who is hysterically overreacting. Alanna is trying to educate you about where this kinda of thing has gone in the past. Luckily, we have a society with many checks to prevent the bloodletting. On only needs to listen to the civilian testimony on Oct 16 to hear the threat of violence under the surface. If there were no consequences for those who would engage in violence, maybe we already would have had blood spilled in the streets.
In fact, we already have had blood spilled in the streets. The undocumented mexican who was murdered for simply being a mexican last February. Funny, how his death doesn’t even cross your mind SA. How come this man’s murder isn’t foremost on your mind SA??
Nice try to discredit what Alanna said, SA. Why don’t you illuminate some of the small steps countries took on the way to their individual massacres. Everyone refuses to address the steps societies took prior to murdering their populations. Alanna didn’t say that PWC was headed for a mass round-up of some of its citizens. She merely posted what an organization called steps to the genocidal process. Just as military training evolved in the twentieth century to make killing a human target more acceptable by desensitizing soldiers, inflammatory rhetoric makes it easier to dehumanize groups of people. But, hey, I guess some Republicans think pinging on Hispanics will improve their chances of getting their more looney candidates elected.
So whose words are more frightening to the illegal immigrants? The other, or your insinuation that we are about to plunge into genocide? The sky is falling, the sky is falling! Give me a break. No normal rational person could take this stuff seriously. How about getting back to dealing with reality, and letting movie producers dream up the fictional horror stories.
Come to think about it, not one case of profiling has even come before the courts much less a case of genocide!
Mackie, could you refresh our memory as to this February incident you are referring to? While very sad, it is still a single incident. People have been attacked and killed for being gay, but have you seen a mass pogrom against gays in recent history? They seem to be gaining more and more rights, state by state.
I think what most of us are seeing are Latino vs. Latino crime–especially gang violence against their own kind. I hardly think that there is some mass movement afoot to destroy Latinos. They seem to be doing a pretty good job of it themselves.
Again, the same group of users trying trying to paint everyone as an extreme hater for even hinting that we are progressing toward a pattern of genocide… So appalled that we a person would DARE to speculate that a group of backward thinking dominionists might be composing law in order to secure their supposed “Privilege.”
Northern Virginia needed workers, the workers came, they built these houses and started to settle in. Now there is nothing left to build and the American elite will be g-d damned before they see their manufactured frail illusion called “The American Dream” being stained by the ways of “3rd world cultures.”
But the sins of the 50’s still cause their souls to sweat, they long so hard to discriminate against others, but fear being labeled racist…or more appropriately classist. They have worked hard to revise the English lexicon, stating with no genuine authority that the word “Racist” has the same connotations as the word “Ni%%er.” Once the Dominionist has denied the ability of the those whom disagree define their evil intentions, they move on to change other crucial data in order to smoothly progress with their agenda. Revising the past is a big step, another is to deny all allegations made against them, then turn around and accuse the dissenting party of the same allegations, all the will having no apologies for their blatant cultural cleansing.
It’s a giant game, the same justification of fascism again and again and again, the same playing to the imaginary audience, marginalizing the opposition as being “Extreme.” The Nativist chief defense tactic is to paint themselves (the oppressor) as the victims and to paint the opposition (oppressed/defenders of oppressed) as the Tyrants, invaders, criminals, etc.
To put it bluntly these “help Saves” are cowards! They fear anything they don’t understand and they have yet to understand that America is changing and there is not a damn thing they can do about it, they don’t have enough lung power, they don’t have enough bullets, they don’t have enough years to live and fight against evolution.
You can try to marginalize me all you want, but this is a virtual world and I am a real Man I am not ashamed to say that I am an instrument of the Re-Evolution of this continent. A molecule in a flood of united humanity of which leaves you two options…
“Role with da flow brotha…
…or be rolled by it!”
-PEACE
BTW this is for Carlen!
Everything is an epic cartoon struggle to you, Rod, isn’t it?
Hey Rod,
Are they, or are they not, entering the sovereign nation of the USA without authorization and in huge numbers? That is the definition of vast ILLEGAL immigration. That is what everyone is trying to prevent, not the stoppage of immigration through the legal process, and certainly no one has ever advocated physical harm. All this BS about poor oppressed peoples is something that may describe conditions in Mexico, but then there are plenty of countries with poor oppressed people. Those countries just don’t happen to be within walking distance of our borders. Evolution, I think not. Evolution generally improves the species, and by the looks of some neighborhoods we’re heading back to the stone age.
Rod is making the HSM crowd larger than life. Such power, such an epic struggle! The big, bad bugaboo here is your own overcrowded imagination, Rod. I have talked to many naturalized Americans who take issue with illegal immigration. Does that make them the minions of Gospel Greg, nativists, Nazis, whatever? Or in their stunning white mind-controlling powers, has HSM been able to turn even those LEGAL immigrants to their evil ways against the brown invaders?
Get real. This is real life, not one of your cartoons.
Second Alamo,
I have been to the Holocaust Museum, several times, each time I remind myself that the German citizens were no different than any other modern civil society. The lesson of the Holocaust is that we must NEVER forget, not only because we are compelled to give homage to the millions of lives, not just the Jews, but the 10 million people that perished in the concentration camps, but because if we forget, we are will become complacent so that another Holocaust will happen. Oh, wait, that’s right, it’s already happened, Rowanda, Bosnia, and Darfur. Yet, it was only Bosnia that the world interferred to stop carnage. Hmmm, what do Rowanda and Darfur have in common? Sorry, I digress, let me go back to my point. The world did nothing during the Holocaust , as children, women, and men, burned in chimneys, as if they were nothing more than trash, the world stood silently by. The lesson of the Holocaust is not simply of murder, it is about the human condition, it is about reminding us that good people can do heinous acts and evil people can do unspeakable acts.
You cannot reduce this discussion to you guys are stupid, there is no Holocaust happeing in PWC or this country. No one is saying a holocaust is happeing! Maybe your memory is short sighted. But the original resoluution would have had teachers and school counselors behaving like the secret police, “rooting” out any person they suspected of being and “illegal invader”. Marty and Mike thought that by dilluting the resolution, the rhetoric would fade, and life would return to normal. But that didn’t happen, life did not return to normal and still hasn’t in PWC. I wonder, what would our county be like if government emplooyees had been forced to act as the immigration ghestapo? Children denied the ability to go to parks,libraries, and pools. I believe that we have not seen the worst yet, the congressional and senate races will re-invigorate the poisen on the anti immigration side, have no fear SA. Right now, there are enough people holding the “dam” intact, but the level of hate is rising, and that concerns me, as it should you too, what happens if the dam breaks? What would have happened if Tancredo had been the Republican nominee and not McCain?
Emma,
I believe that, for now, HSM has lost much of its power, but that is only because Corey has been somewhat neutered by the Board. They grew weary of immigration being the only issue this county seemed to talk about! We have a broken immigration system, people have legitimate concerns, no agrument here. It’s when legitimate concerns somehow morph into ethnic bashing that I start to take notice. The problem is that there is huge middle ground of citizens that want reasonable AND humane solutions, but the few very vocal and hateful voices have unfortunately drowned out that civil discussion. I don’t know anyone that is FOR illegal immigration, I certainly am not, but when people try to reduce it to either you are “for” OR “against” illegal immigration, that doesn’t allow much room for discussion!
OnefortheRoad,
It is clear you are not “credible”. Your posts are schizophrenic in nature and you are clearly choosing to single out LPOW for harrassment, he is neither an HSM , KKK or neo-nazi member. Most likely people will choose to disregard your comments, which I believe is the best recourse.
again more sensationalism,
if anyone wants to know what genocide and such really are I suggest you visit the holocaust museum as the admin person said, that’s really about the only area I agree with them these days since they’ve gone so far off the reservation. I think the post was really out of touch with what we are supposed to be discussing here and again proves the point I’ve tried to make all along, that this blog is really a front for the anti-illegal immigrant movements, you all started out in the center but really made a slow but deliberate move to the left. Now your transformation is complete and you all can drop the charades now
Some of you all are really resisting being functionally literate. Alanna is NOT saying that PW County is conducting genocide. She saw an interesting article and posted some parallels. Something to think about.
Genocide starts somewhere. It is a process, in most cases, not an event, at least in modern history. It starts when it becomes ok to say disparaging things about another group of people; when it becomes ok to publically marginalize others.
It stops when people recognize where something like this might lead and speak out.
Oh, I get it now! This is similar to the tactic used to prevent anything negative being stated about certain minorities. If you state a negative, no matter how true in fact, then you are accused of racism. Only now if you state anything negative about those ethnic groups that make up the illegal immigrants, then you are preaching for future genocide. Very clever strategy indeed. That is if we all buy into it, Not.
Newsflash: after yesterday many members of HSM were seen packing up their belongings and fleeing PWC after Taco Truck Ted announced the cleansing of HSM members had begun. There is a new wave of foreclosures in many neighborhoods. This will provide affordable housing for immigrants entering PWC! It also explains the absence of posts from HSM members in the past 12 hours. Now we can continue debating without their interference! Anyone remaining that is seen wearing a red HSM sticker will be immediately questioned by the police and if their HSM membership is confirmed will be sent to a detention center for deportation. All HSM members will be denied basic services such as health care, education, so that they will get the idea they are unwelcome in PWC.
OneForTheRoad- Do you feel like a “man” now? Threatening people? What’s up with you?
“OneForTheRoad- Do you feel like a “man” now? Threatening people? What’s up with you?”
He’s Trolling, he’s just looking to pick a fight and get attention. He plays to both blogs and switches sides randomly, just ignor him, he gets off on getting people mad.
What is wrong with you people? I am entitled to everything in this country, including free medical care, free education for my children, even those born outside the country. I am entitled to have multiple children born in your maternity wards, while giving you false payment information. You will pay for their births. As they grow older, you will pay to subsidize their food through WIC, and as long as I can keep her pregnant, you will pay to feed my woman too, because I, my mate, and my children are entitled. I am entitled to work and not pay payroll taxes. I am entitled to stand outside the local 7/11 to solicit this work, and while doing so drink Modelo Esecial beer. If I have to releive myself, I am entitled to do so wherever I please. I am entitled to drive a car without a license and I refuse to be bothered by insurance. I will buy fake documents on 18th street in DC, and will use your children’s social security numbers whenever I please, to take out loans and mortgages, and if I can no longer pay, I will default on them. I will live wherever I damn well please, with whomever I care to do so, your local zoning laws be damned. I don’t care about social graces, and I will leer at your wives and daughters and catcall in spanish. I don’t care about you silly “age of consent laws”. No girl is too young for me. If I need strong bonds of companionship, I am entitled to band together with my countrymen and form a gang, and we are entitled to engage in all manner of criminal activity, up to and including preying and victimizing people of our common ethnic background.
And when you object to my behavior, I will call you a racist and threaten to sue you and your governement. I will get my liberal benefactors to carry my fight to the highest court, and get your elected officials to pander to me. You know what? I believe that I will win this invasion. Too many of you are guilt-ridden idiots who can’t see what I am doing. The rest of you are elitests who believe you will be able to exploit me for your own political and financial gain, but in the end it is I who will be in power over you. The few who oppose me on rational and legal grounds, I will marginalize you with names like “biggot”, “racist”, and “nativist”, and there are plenty of your countrymen who will help me do it.
Hi Alanna, Thank you for posting this. Although I agree that PWC is long way from this, what we see here has distinct features of early organized white supremacist groups that, if left to their worst impulses, could go this way.
There is so much nastiness posted on BVBL and other blogs about immigrants in PWC (remember the references to Latino children as “dogfood”?) and it is this type of dehumanizing rhetoric that has been so common, and disturbing, throughout the immigration debate in PWC.
What we all need to pay attention to here is how the “Help Save” movement has made it perfectly acceptable to express overtly racist sentiment in public, which is pretty much what the Genocide Process states is an early step in the process to full dehumanization.
I would also ask you all to take a second ook at how fascist movements took hold in Europe in teh early 20th century. It was not an overnight process, but a slow creeping progression. The Nazis were particularly good at using seemingly innocent and innocuous cultural icons (like the Grimms’s Fairy Tales) as a means of shoring up their position as they redefined what it meant to be a “true” German. The “illegal is illegal” argument bears a striking resemblance to some (and I mean SOME, not all) of that early 20th century rhetoric. -SC
Just in case it isn’t clear to people, please ignore oneforthroad. I think it was Mando that had the intial suggestion, and we should follow that lead.
OneFOrTheRoad is probably Greg. One of the tools of psych warfare is to confuse the enemy.
OneForTheRoad is obviously very threatened by what I’ve written here. Makes me think I’m not too far off the mark.
This is the REAL taco truck ted: If you want to make fun of me go ahead. It will not change my feelings on illegal food service business from a residential home while commiting tax evasion. Hell why don’t we just say no to all laws. Because it is law that made civilization from total kaios.
OneForTheRoad- You have not answered my questions yet. Why are you threatening people? And, what’s up with you?
OneForTheRoad has been placed in time out until the Blog-Mom is home and can review his posts. I did this with her approval because people felt that threats were being made.
New rule until Mom gets home: Do not threaten anyone. If you don’t like my decision, tattle to her later today.
Meanwhile, perhaps other bloggers might not want to respond to OFTR. Granted he not only enjoys talking with himself, but also arguing with himself, but let’s not give him the time of day.
One For The Road is a very cheap slave to Greg, for now I see out of all our sorted arguments, Greg has picked out the one planted threatening remark by OFTR to use as an evidence that we are a violent extrememist group and has made a special place for it on BVBL.
Very mature Greg! I lift another one up to the King of Cowards! (or are you going by “King of Kings” these days?)
Anyway, I think this sheds some light on who OFTR really is. It seems Greg’s most radical opponents are the ones he authors himself, a sick narcisist martyrdom complex if I have ever seen one.
good grief, what a child….
I just can’t take the absurdity of these concepts any more. OF COURSE, genocide starts as a process like the one abouve, but your conclusions or implications are that “enforcing the law” to prevent “illegal” immigration is equivalent to a path toward genocide is way over the top, even ludicrous.
The one point you are supporting the most here is that “DIVERSITY” is good, “INTEGRATION” is BAD. “LAW” is BAD, “illegal” is good. and the real kicker, Dividing the country into different “ETHNIC, Gender, Religious, and Racial POLITICAL groups, with “DIFFERENT LAWS” for each is the ultimate path to peace and prosperity.
Does not the Division of the nation into “FACTIONS”, and DIFFERENT ETHNIC GROUPS that align politically to make laws that apply only to them, line up directly with one of your “genocide” steps?
Anarchy and “lawlessness” is not “Freedom”. Ethnic division and seperatism, is not “Freedom” and “Equality”. Diversity is not “integration”. It is the very FACT that the nation is dividing into different ethnic political factions, that will create the conditions for your worst nightmare, a country unable to enforce law equitably and fairly under a common “senate”, a country unable to promote a market economy and growth in wealth under a common and stable law, and politically stable government, a country that will define “socialism” as the way to wealth for all, as it slowly sinks deeper into “povery” for all (just look at the rest of the world to know this), and a country that cannot support the supremacy of “individual” rights applied equally to all, because to many ethnic, gender, religious and racially divided “factions” are politically at war with each other over “special” laws that should apply only to them.
These are the steps to an “apartied” and a “seperatist” state of “law”.
The very concepts of “liberalism”, equality, and “socialism” you covet, will destroy your peace, freedom, stability and ability to enfoce the law the same for ALL “individuals”. If you stay this political course, you will try to balme everyone else for your own creation of competing and “warring” political factions aligned along ethnic, gender, religious and racial lines. You will see Germany and Russia, emerge again if liberals get the “ideologies” they covet.
I think people who think this way are as dumb as “turnips”, and know nothing of history, the bill of rights, the constitution, the common law of the Greeks and Romans, the concept of integration and “political integration” and the core concepts of “civil rights” and “individual rights”. None of these concepts are based on creating anarchy, freedom from the law, ignoring common law, promoting ethnic diversity and political seperatism, and creating a “welfare state”.
This thread takes the cake for “dumbest in history”, of this blog.
rod2155, Yup. Every bad thing is Greg’s fault.
IllegalisILLEGAL,
I saw your post on bvbl. A slight correction, OFTR was put into moderation by me. It was a temporary solution to something I saw as a problem: threatening people and groups.
The blog is Alanna’s and she will determine the final outcome, when she is home. Were it up to me, and it is not, he would be banned. Please make sure you carry the story correctly.
Michael said:
Michael, there were no conclusions drawn in the thread opener. Please reread it before you assume.
This has been an interesting discussion. Of what, I am not quite sure.
Plain and simple, it is a discussion of how events that are happening right now in PWC may lead to genocide, and how we should watch out for that.
Moon-howler- I did correct myself, even before you posted here.
See post on newest thread.
Mando@6/23/08 15:24 said:
I am not so sure that socialism is a prerequisite for genocide. Was Turkey a socialist government when certain government groups killed over a million Armenians?
Was Germany a socialist government? Hitler was elected. Stalin was elected. Certainly Josef Stalin committed genocide. He had more people killed than Hitler, according to some sources.
IllegalisILLEGAL,
Thanks. So much is buzzing back and forth. I wanted the right buzz to cross pollinate;)
@Elena
There is a candidate in the city of manassas that is running on rooting through school records to “indentify” the illegal immigrants. I’m sorry, any person that targets children is unacceptable.
Holy Dead-Thread, Batman!!!
Its not really all that dead Slow, unfortunately, human beings have not evolved much in the last 65 years.
@Elena
Back to the present, April 23, 2012
Interesting that someone over in the City is running for school board and wants to pull the birth certificates of children of illegal immigrants. I am not sure what the ultimate purpose is other than scaring those parents in to not sending their kids to school and thus saving the City money.
speaking of “OTHER.”
So Moon and I are talking about “reviving” this thread and who calls in?! Alanna, to tell me my name has been mentioned in a article on Huffington Post. So I go investigate and lo and behold, an article on immigration and “others”. Couldn’t have been more perfect.
@Elena
This has certainly been a morning of irony. How bizarre all this happened this morning.
It’s nice to see that some folks still haven’t changed, even after 4 years. 1 person has changed. Mums the word.
Speaking of genocides, the UN is launching an investigation into the treatment of Native Americans. Apparently the UN doesn’t understand that exceptionalism grants us an exception to having our warts exposed like the unexceptional rest of the world.
http://goo.gl/GkqLO
@Moe, How far back to you think they will go?
Man, we could be having like the Nuremburg trials over Sitting Bull or something.
Moon – I haven’t seen anything on the scope of the investigation, so I don’t know the answer to your question. This is, in my view, an area we’ve largely ignored. In 2007, the UN passed the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People with 144 nations voting for and 4 against. One of the 4 later changed its stance, but we are still among the 3 nations on the face of the planet opposed to the declaration.
I can certainly see why we oppose it. Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, The buffalo Dance killings, 80% alcoholic rates on the Lakota reservations today, the list goes on.
I am not so sure that it does any good to dredge all that up. We killed them and we stole from them. What else is there to know? It was bad and a blight on the nation. I don’t want China coming in here telling me we have a bad nation. I think it should come from within. Often these exposures give other people the moral high ground who don’t deserve it.
Team Jacob here!