I've traveled around a bit but haven't noticed Australians are more angry than anyone else. Interested in this comment.
There are many things to change about Australia. Sunny dispositions are one thing; true grit to make the effort to change things, something else ..
I'm kind of getting annoyed by everyone throwing around the term concentration camp. It's like when we were calling everyone a Nazi.
Concentration camps are what's going on in China. People in their own country are being rounded up, murdered, raped, harvested, forced to work, and other horrific things because of their religious beliefs, nationality, or political beliefs.
When someone gets on a boat and tries to immigrate to Australia or any other country without the proper paperwork and then they are held in a center until the government figures out what to do with them (i.e. not harvesting their fucking organs) that is absolutely not a concentration camp.
When you try and create this false equivalency between a real concentration camp and a detention center, you devalue what a concentration camp is, and the terrible experiences of the victims of the holocaust. When people think concentration camp, they are horrified. When you call these detention centers concentration camps, they start forgetting what a concentration camp actually is, and start associating it with these detention centers. It actually enables white supremacists; what great gift you're giving them when they can gaslight us into thinking that Jews were just held at these detention centers and not these horrific concentration camps.
That's not ok. These aren't concentration camps. It's not even close to the same thing, and be propagating this idea that they are, you devalue past experiences, lessen the horrors that people are currently experiencing, and generally make the world a worse place to live.
You may not like it, but given Australia's history for inspiring tyranny, these concentration camps are a heinous thing for the Australian people to be supporting - in any way.
I live within spitting distance of your 'real' concentration camps - Mauthausen - and I have worked with refugees from the Wests' illegal wars for over a decade now.
I'm very much afraid that calling the Australian camps 'dention centres' is a propaganda effort by the Australian government to ensure its own people have no responsibility for what happens in them. If these camps were on the mainland, Australian civic society would have oversight - and this is a can of worms for which Australians, particularly its war-monger classes, are ill-prepared.
I've gone to places like the Holocaust Museum in the United States and witnessed the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis, people being executed, starved to death, gassed, forced into slavery (many of which currently going on with China's new Holocaust of Muslims) and I simply don't see those same activities being systematically conducted by the Australian (or any western) government. It's just not even remotely the same and I don't know how you can justify coming to that conclusion.
Even if you thought that these governments were doing much worse than what may be in view of the public, I'm bewildered as to why you would think that intentionally equating concentration camps (Nazis and Chinese) with detention centers is in any way helpful. Do you think when the Nazis rounded up Jews they gave them medical care and food and water?
Maybe you should revisit Mauthausen and get a more proper perspective. To me it seems that your work has clouded your judgement.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2018/11/05/worl...
Sorry about the amp link. NYT paywall bypass.
But I'm confused as to how this situation is remotely comparable to a concentration camp? Do the Chinese let Uighur Muslims apply for asylum in other countries? Are kids at these camps being forced into slave labor? Are they being murdered?
These are refugees who, frankly, are getting a shit deal in life. That has nothing to do with actual concentration camps. The Australians are not rounding up people and gassing them, harvesting their organs, or forcing them to be re-educated.
These aren't comparable situations!
They were normal folk from poor countries who wanted the Western lifestyle and knew their best chance was to fake it in Australia and exhaust the courts.
Proof: when the boat route to Australia closed, very, very few are asking for asylum in Indonesia.
It just hurts some snowflakes SRC sensibilities to admit this.
PS. I really think Western democracies should hold a binding referendum on whether billions of poor people have a right to migrate to their countries, or not. You are tearing yourselves apart over it.
Austrias Mauthausen: a real memorial to the victims, out in the open. (Occasional vomiting teenager notwithstanding.)
Australians hide their crimes against humanity in places nobody reasonable will ever visit, because they don't want to know about Australias crimes against humanity.
The Austrian people maintain Mauthausen, because they never want to forget the atrocities.
The history of The Australian State is rife with injustices and crimes against humanity. The Australian Genocide is a real thing.
It's very clear to me you just want to grandstand. And in doing so you're creating even more problems. If you want to criticize Australian treatment of refugees, go for it. Don't call these detention centers concentration camps though, because that's not what they are. There is simply no comparison and I am still bewildered that you would think so.
Australia got away with its genocide while the worlds attention was elsewhere. Don't even try to defend this.
To re-center the discussion I think it's bad in just about every conceivable way to refer to the facilities we first discussed as concentration camps. While they could potentially fit a technical definition of "concentration camp", they are a far, far cry from what we mean when we say concentration camps.
In colloquial use, concentration camp refers to what the Nazis did to Jews and others in the 1940s, and now also refers to the current genocide that is occurring against Muslims in China (which I also find disturbing that Muslim majority countries are largely silent on the issue). It does not refer to a country intercepting potential unauthorized migrants and then giving them food, water, shelter, safety, and giving them the opportunity to apply for asylum in the intercepting country or in others. To equate these two, totally different things (for lack of a better word) is irresponsible and unhelpful. If these were concentration camps, the Australians would just sink the boats and kill them before rounding them up, wouldn't provide food and medicine, or allow people to apply for asylum - they would just force them into forced labor, or murder them (like the Chinese and Nazis).
This self-hatred that people in Western countries have is bewildering, and I don't understand why people lie to themselves. Maybe people have a pathological need to be outraged? Maybe we're bored?
-edit-
I'd also like to add, while the treatment of Aboriginals is certainly regretful (to understate the hell out of it) - let's not try and put the Australians in a unique category. There is not a single country or people that doesn't have blood on its hands. Ideally in the West, we now know better, but that doesn't make us perfect, and that doesn't mean we don't also criticize and condemn other countries or peoples for their mistreatment of others. Throughout most of history, most of the time there was no afterthought once you wiped out a people.
-edit2-
Since I can't reply to your last comment - why did you change the subject?
If your family was First Nation, probably you'd not have as hard a time seeing the similarity that some make in comparing Australia's genocide with those that occurred elsewhere in the world. In fact, systematic eradication of what was considered a 'lesser people' did happen in Australia's past - it was an official government policy for far too long, and in many places in Australia, is still happening. Children are still being taken from their families, never to return.
Its not just the offshore concentration camps.
Your idea that crimes against humanity are only done by those who manifest their violence in an overt manner, is precisely the issue with Australia today. It is getting away with its crimes against humanity, precisely because peoples expectations, as you demonstrate, require a much more violent, overt act before they will respond.
Australia is getting away with it. It has systematised oppression at scale, behind the scenes, with industrial efficiency.
In the meantime, the ADF's support of Saudi Arabia's forces in the campaign in Yemen, against innocent people, remains unreported and out of our focus.