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Comment by karlkloss | Hacker News Reader

From liberating concentration camps to running them. How tf did this happen? And why do people think this is ok?

The US was running some at the same time back then too, so honestly is it that surprising?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...

It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen, he is still a Japanese. American citizenship does not necessarily determine loyalty... But we must worry about the Japanese all the time until he is wiped off the map.[...]I am determined that if they have one drop of Japanese blood in them, they must go to camp.

This is a good question. It's worth noting that the US forces did not in fact uniformly liberate every concentration camps prisoner: they left those incarcerated for being homosexual. So even back then the lines were blurrier than commonly taught.

AFAICT the motte is enforcing immigration law. The bailey is a turning off of any sort of human empathy based on "they shouldn't have broken the law".

Personally I'm mostly ambivalent about immigration enforcement (especially with the current state of the law), but strongly against concentration/torture camps. It's sad that the latter has to be stated as an explicit position these days, rather than still being the shared American value that it had been.

> AFAICT the motte is enforcing immigration law

This is a fig leaf. The motivation is racism. (Trump has deported up to 1M people so far the vast majority of whom have no criminal record.)

Sure, I don't disagree with your thrust. But I was talking about how "people think this is ok", in other words how they justify supporting it to themselves. I'd say racism is more part of the bailey, something that also gets rationalized away, the quiet part (now often out loud, especially in online spaces), etc.

This era is a lesson in the nature of power and what people will do to get it. The lesson is: liberal democracy must be continuously defended with positive action.

In the US, both political parties work for Capital, not the workers and do not provide positive action. This leaves an opportunity for fascists to be elected to power by campaigning on solving the problems that arise from unregulated capitalism. What else are voters going to do? Keep voting the a political system that does nothing for them materially? The counter is a government that delivers for citizens. That means: low food and energy prices, healthcare, job security and worker protections, housing affordability, etc. (And I don't want to hear any quibbling cop outs from liberals or centrists or the vote blue crowd about how Kamala was the only sane choice who promised to keep GDP growth above 5% or cancel some modicum of means-tested student loan debt etc.)

So, that's how you get concentration camps after once liberating them.

As a libertarian, to me the choice was between an uninspiring milquetoast pilot who would at least fly the plane (even though I've never liked the heading) versus the gremlin on the wing trying to bring the plane down. Part of me does have to wonder if I were twenty years younger would I have voted gremlin. But the reality that so many people did eagerly vote for the gremlins (and continue to cheer them on) really shows how entitled and out of touch we've become - our political system most certainly does provide for us materially, even as it grinds our self-determination to dust to better extract our economic value. But good times create weak men, and all that.

Eh the majority were liberated by the soviets.

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