Monday, May 15, 2006

We Did It Once

Via Misty at Shakespeare's Sister, one of the creepiest articles I've seen yet on immigration:
[Bush] will be lying, again, just as he lied when he said: "Massive deportation of the people here is unrealistic -- it's just not going to work."

Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn't possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don't speak English and are not integrated into American society.

Umm...Germans? "Rid themselves"?

Normally, when one makes a rhetorical maneuver like this, it is immediately followed by some sort of qualifier (a qualifier which, in my view, rarely excuses the tactic) in which the author disclaims that he's advocating genocide or violence. But that's the real scary part--no such qualifier is present. He just happily drops in a reference to how well the Holocaust worked at solving its problem, and moves on to blast the notion that absolute zero-tolerance immigration policy would be impractical. Which, to be sure, is a fair critique...if one is willing to endorse such measures like branding illegals (hey, wasn't there some sort of tattoo thing in the concentration camps too?). It is ridiculous, however, if we are to preserve some notion of an American soul, part of which means not drawing on the Gestapo for policy inspiration.

Incidentally, Vox later tries to give the qualifier at his own site, but Errant Knight dispatches of it relatively easily. Yes, the Holocaust "proves" mass deportations are possible--if one doesn't care about the body count.

Digby, Martini Republic, and BoML have more.

Truly appalling.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I don't know why it's a "rhetorical maneuver" to say that the Holocaust proves certain policies to be possible. It certainly proves that things like mechanized murder, mass deportations, ethnic annihilation and the murder of political dissidents are all both possible and historically feasible.

Interestingly, I don't bother putting a disclaimer here because "possible" and "historically feasible" are qualitatively different from ANY kind of evaluative term. They simply refer to whether or not something can happen at a brute, physical level without any moral evaluation. This is the crucial difference between asking "Can I abuse my child?" and "Should I abuse my child?"

Responses by Errant Knight et. al. which generally say "Yes, the Holocaust 'got rid' of Jews, but it actually KILLED them," are much more cogent because, given the assumption that killing in the process of deportation is bad**, they actually respond to Vox Day's argument that mass scale deportations are possible. I would tend to think that the deportation itself could be possible absent the killing, but I'll readily admit that this is merely historical speculation.

-Greg I

**This is a sensible assumption, but not everyone believes it - i.e. China during the cultural revolution or Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. Thus, the argument makes sense for the US (where we don't want to kill immigrants if they are deported), but doesn't apply to all areas of the world, where some governments might well be indifferent to whether people live or die when deported.