I have seen the future.

I'm not ignoring any part of the story. I accept, entirely, that the boy was wrongfully deported in the first place, and that his parents were *also* wrongfully denied refugee status because it's illegal to deport someone to a place where they will face torture, and that, having escaped torture, they intended to return to the place where their son is a citizen to re-apply for refugee status.

I don't consider that part of the story relevant, except to make it perfectly clear that the original denial of refugee status for the parents was both wrong and illegal, and the deportation of the child was both wrong and illegal, and now they're stuck in an American konzentrationslager.

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Hang on... are you arguing that the family bears responsibility for ending up in a US camp because they tried to sneak back into Canada, or that the Canadian government bears responsibility for the family ending up in a US camp because the Canadian government deported them in the first place?

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dakiwiboid.livejournal.com

Most of the outraged posts I've been reading ignore this angle altogether. They're also ignoring the fact that it's not likely that the Canadian government will take pity on the child and his family.

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Maybe it's less a case of ignoring and more a case of seeing "Hey, these people accidentally stopped in the US and were put in a camp and no-one's bothered to establish why or what they did" as somehow more disturbing than "Hey, these people weren't granted refugee status and were deported from Canada" or "Hey, these people tried to sneak out of Iran"?

I mean, I can see getting upset about all of these things. There's still some prioritizing going on.

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Addendum: erm, exactly what are they being held for, anyway? I mean, unless there's some theory that (one of) the family poisoned the woman so there'd be an emergency landing and they could sneak into the States, and they are actually there for nefarious purposes and require watching, I am somewhat confused as to why they'd be in a detention centre at all.

The faint flickering flame of hope in my heart says "The US is being compassionate, believes the family's account of what happened in Tehran, and does not wish to send them back to that." At which point the account (yes, I realize it's one-sided, but I confess it strikes me as plausible) of how they're being treated seems to go much more poorly with a compassionate motive than, say, granting the family refugee status.

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They're being held for landing in US-occupied territory without a visa to enter the USA, despite not wanting to be there and not wanting to even get off the plane.

And compassion? Bullshit. Compassion would involve NOT PUTTING THEM IN A CONCENTRATION CAMP FOR HAVING BROWN SKIN.

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> They're being held for landing in US-occupied territory without
> a visa to enter the USA, despite not wanting to be there and
> not wanting to even get off the plane.

Seriously and officially?

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interactiveleaf.livejournal.com

There doesn't have to be an official reason anymore, not since the legislation that came about in reaction to 9/11.

These detainess have no right to challenge their detention in courts, and no charges will ever have to be formally filed. Whetehr they are actually eventually filed or not is irrelevant.

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itlandm.livejournal.com

I wonder what is worse, an American concentration camp or living in Iran. This seems to be their alternatives.

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No, just because the US denies them basic rights, abuses them, and imprisons them without cause does not mean that this is the only option. The US could *not do that*, for example.

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desdenova.livejournal.com

You are thinking of some other US that doesn't exist any longer. HTH.

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goblinpaladin.livejournal.com

I'd say they could come here, but we'd do the same thing.

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You're reaching, here. A jail is not a concentration camp; illegal immigrants with pending asylum-seeker status are not 'Canadians' (notice Canadian govt's complete lack of interest in helping them); and unless you have a photo of the kid handy I'd like to know where your use of brown skin as an explanation comes from.

I appreciate that nobody wants bad things to happen to 9-year-olds, especially cute little ones who write multicolored distress notes, but seriously now.

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Uh, read it again.

The child *is* Canadian, the parents are not.

"Brown" is an assumption given that they're from Iran and currently in US captivity.

Did you miss that this is *not* a normal jail, it's a converted jail to hold the victims of the War On Terra, and did you miss that the US has given billions to Halliburton to produce concentration camps?

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I read it just fine the first time, thanks.

1. The child's claim to Canadian status is apparently not a plausible enough one to motivate 'his' govt to lift a finger for him and his parents. Perhaps his parents' status as customs-evading fake-passport-purchasers (for $40 000! What the hell line of work are these people in anyway? My entire family's liquid assets don't total $40 000!) has the Canadians scared?

2. Iranian people are brown, now? In the sense of 'not-white', I presume? Are we talking about some kind pan-nonhonkyism here? Franz Fanon would be a happy man if he were still alive, but I warn you that you might find the idea a hard sell for the Iranians.

3. Be precise: is this a jail, an internment facility, a concentration camp or a konzentrationslager (the last being your terminology)? Because your use of the latter two terms certainly comes across as a harnessing your argument to a set of inappropriate WW2 moralities to make disagreement a kind of 'wrongthink.'

Why am I fixating on these points? Because: if you are the kind of person who is appalled by the Right's duplicitous use of vague yet morally-loaded phrases to defend their point of view (c.f. the bullshit concept of 'Islamofascism'), you really should try harder not to descend into the same mudpit in your responses.

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1. The child's claim to Canadian status is apparently not a plausible enough one to motivate 'his' govt to lift a finger for him and his parents.

Uh, not plausible?

He's a Canadian citizen, by virtue of having been born in Canada. This is about as simple as it gets.

2. Iranian people are brown, now? In the sense of 'not-white', I presume? Are we talking about some kind pan-nonhonkyism here?

Pretty much. In the USA, if you come from or look like you might come from a poor country or a muslim country, you're treated like shit and liable to find yourself in a camp for the rest of your foreshortened life. I shortened this for my own convenience.

3. Be precise: is this a jail, an internment facility, a concentration camp or a konzentrationslager?

It is not a jail, because jails hold people who are either awaiting trial or have been convicted of a crime and sentenced. These people are neither, as the USA has absolutely no intention of allowing them basic rights. The latter three are all the same thing, and this *is* clearly that.

Have you ever been to Dachau? The parallels with the decade before the Second World War are not only present and clear, but the US seems to be making an effort to make them closer.

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1. Fine. The case is cut and dried. and the Canadians are leaving him to rot in Texas... for... some perverse, Machiavellian reason?

2. Ah. Interesting. I recommend you try travelling through ANY first world customs with a third world passport sometime, even as a non-brown, non-poor person. When you end up jumping through flaming hoops along with the 'brown people,' your views on who is persecuted and why may alter some. Some time I'll tell you about the X-Rays the UK customs required me to have done in 2000. That rocked.

3. No, I've never been to Dachau. Perhaps if I had, I'd have an even harder time correlating "we hardly ever get rice!" with "we were vivisected, gassed to death and turned into soap." BTW, first use of the term 'concentration camps?' 20th Century South Africa, against people of my parents' ethnic group. So, careful whose perspective you write off here.

This is getting more heated than I intended, perhaps because I'm misreading your tone. You seem to be soapboxing. If I'm wrong, the my tone above is rude and I apologize.

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No, I've never been to Dachau. Perhaps if I had, I'd have an even harder time correlating "we hardly ever get rice!" with "we were vivisected, gassed to death and turned into soap."

You're missing my point, then. (Dachau was never an extermination camp, for the record, but that's not the point, either)

For most of the first decade of it's existence, Dachau was a place where you were actually *better* treated than the inmates in Abu Ghraib. The treatment, in fact, was pretty much identical to Guantanamo.

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'round and 'round we go. Now you're using Dachau as the token for the concentration camp type? Don't you think that's disingenous of you, given the general meaning of 'concentration camp'?

I understand your statement that a technical distinction can be drawn between internment camps, labor camps, concentration camps and extermination camps - and in that sense Dachau certainly was a concentration camp as opposed to Auchwitz. However, this distinction is one you have explicity argued against, by your previous assertion that internment camps and concentration camps are the same thing.

You claim that this isn't the point you're trying to make, but your use of WW2 imagery requires substantiation on this point. Put differently: if you're going to use laden terms like konzentrationslager to describe US customs internment camps, don't you feel you should justify this in terms of the overall sense of 'concentration camps', and not cherry-pick one camp which seems to suit your argument?

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Internment camps and concentration camps ARE the same thing. Extermination camps are not.

And I'm not "cherry-picking one camp that suits my argument". Until 1940, all the camps suited my argument. After 1941, none of them did, even if not all of them were actively exterminating the inmates instead of just letting them all die of starvation, exposure, and disease.

Take a look at 1933-37.

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Wow. OK! So: for a certain, highly delineated (and moderately obscure, given the horrors that followed) period of time, some German concentration camps resembled, to some extent, some state-run Border Patrol and DoD facilities in the US. Said resemblance takes place within a contested conceptual field where terms such as jail, prison, holding facility, internment facility, and concentration camp swirl around - sometimes being attributed ironclad meaning, sometimes not.

Whew. Seems like a lot of work. If I were you I'd make the link to US internment camps for Japanese-Americans in WW2 instead of to Dachau, but I guess that lacks the kind of punch that red-flag words like konzentrationslager provide (and which you appear to be hell-bent on retaining).

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jsbowden.livejournal.com

#1 You live in the District, at AU no less, and that there are people who can come up with 40k in cash is a shock to you? Some of your classmates drive cars that cost twice that (my sister in law went to AU, been there, seen that).

#2 Iranians are ethnically Persian. They aren't typical European in skin, hair, and eye color.

#3 It's a place where we shove people who aren't US citizens under the misguided belief that the rights spelled out in the Constitution of this country have language that excludes foreigners, despite my inability to find any such language anywhere in the text outside of the sections covering who's allowed to vote, hold office, and how non-citizens become citizens.

Fuck the right, if they're gonna use overloaded propaganda, then they get it turned on them in kind.

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1. I'm not American, and neither is my family. In fact, we are citizens of a third world country, and our family assets are thus fairly miniscule in dollar terms - the same situation, at a guess, as the Iranian family in question. Hence my query. Did you miss that? It's in the same userinfo you checked to find out what college I'm at.

2. Ah. And anyone not-white can be lumped together under the blanket term of ~~untermensch~~ brown, eh Hermann? Try telling a few Persians they have more in common with Masai than Croats, and see how far you get. Or wait a moment - there is a term for what you're doing. Edward Said writes on it a little, go read Orientalism.

3. Why do you feel the need to descend into hyperbole to make your point? I am contesting

theweaselking's use of the term konzentrationslager as applicable to the facility in question here. Your points - and the Rumsfeldesque refrain of 'they did it first, so we can do it back' - ignore this, and instead pertain to the legal unjustifiability of US internment facilities in regard to the constitution. However, comparing the violence meted out by the Nazis against their own citizens (or, through proxies, the citizens of occupied territories) to contemporary American practices seems to further widen the gulf between the situation suffered by the Iranian family and, say, German citizens of Jewish descent in 1935.

This argument has long since passed the point where I hold any faith that a resolution may be reached, but I'm afraid that my commitment to clear and precise use of terms is stronger than yours, and hence I feel I must continue. Perhaps this would be less wearisome if I, too, adopted a narcissistic fantasy about 'turning propaganda on its users?' Puh-lease. You think Condi et cie are to be found on LJ much? And if they were, do you think your self-righteousness would shame them into good behavior?

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And anyone not-white can be lumped together under the blanket term of untermensch brown, eh Hermann?

Pointing out that being non-caucasian gets you treated like shit in the US is not the same, at all, as saying that this is a good thing or that you agree with it. So yes, I'd say you *are* flying off the handle a bit, here.

However, comparing the violence meted out by the Nazis against their own citizens (or, through proxies, the citizens of occupied territories) to contemporary American practices seems to further widen the gulf between the situation suffered by the Iranian family and, say, German citizens of Jewish descent in 1935.

I still don't think you quite grasp the history involved.

What do you think being a German Jew in 1935 was like, seriously?

We're saying we see definite parallels between the situation of 1930s Jews in Germany and 2000s Muslims in the USA. You're saying "but they're not gassing them wholesale, so it's not the same". We're saying the mass executions didn't start until almost a decade later, but that the progression so far, to this point, has been damn near identical. And then you bring up the ovens again.

You're missing the point. We're not saying they're at that point. We're saying the treatment of Muslims and Arabs in the USA is at an earlier point, heading in the same direction, using the same tactics and rhetoric.

And that this scares the shit out of us.

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bumpycat.livejournal.com

I must say I think you are overstating the situation here, both in calling the detention facility (how's that for newspeak?) a concentration camp, and by saying that Muslims in the US now are being treated like Jews in Germany in 1935.

The prison where they're being held is grim. And the circumstances in which they are being held suck, big-time. But it's nowhere near bad enough to be called a concentration camp.

Muslims are regarded with suspicion in the US. But the leader of the US is publicly saying, in policy speeches, that Muslims are valued citizens and that the US has no quarrel with Muslims per se. Can you picture Adolf saying that in 1935? Is anyone in the US government seriously proposing to intern all Muslims? (That's a rhetorical question. No, they aren't).

What I'm saying is, save your ammunition. If we make these kind of (untrue) statements now, when it's NOT AT ALL bad, people will start to ignore us. Hyperbole = hysteria = people not giving a fuck when things do turn really bad.

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