Oldbear83 said:
Dachau, Auschwitz and the other Nazi Death Camps have memorials for good reasons. Even the infamous Soviet Gulags were not designed primarily to kill prisoners, as the Nazis did with their camps. Certainly no facility ever constructed by the American government can be compared to the Nazi's death camps - any argument making such a comparison is de facto false, a product of gross ignorance at best, or willful dishonesty in many other cases.
People for the overwhelming majority visit the camp memorials for the same reason people visit Holocaust museums; to honor the memory of the victims, and those who fought to end the regimes like the Nazis or the Soviets. Most visit the memorials for personal reasons, and it is completely out of line to use such memorials in an attempt to shame political opponents whose worst act in their lives does not come anything close to these atrocities. Such comparisons cheapen the suffering of the death camp inmates, and reduce the evil of the Nazis to caricature, to be used for dishonest political advantage.
Not one person here supported the Nazis values or philosophies. The lesson of Dachau for us is to protect the American Dream and respect the good our neighbors do. Leave hypocrisy to the fools who can manage nothing better.
One of reason the memorials exist is so "We never forget."
People go for personal reasons so that we grieve the inhumanity of humankind to one another. We contemplate the evil and hatred of our on hearts. We contemplate how easy it is to fall into the trap of dehumanizing another person (for example calling a pastor 'a fraud' when one does not know a damn thing about that pastor as pastor or person).
BUT over against the myriad ways we experience termination camp personally we cannot and must not let of the political implications for our day.
The political implications cannot simply be reduced to "the USA is nothing like Nazism so don't compare us to them." That is our and our blindness to the dehumanization happening now with our President. His targets change but he has come after Hispanics, blacks, gays, immigrants, trans peoples, lying about protesting players, lying about me a Democrat, slandering people as socialists, slandering citizens, attacking the free press as the enemy of the people, Muslims, not condemning the murderous Crown Prince of SA. .
If our personal revulsion of the extermination really means "never again" then we damn well better take a critical look at our political leadership and especially DT.
I think one could take any Hitler speech on his hate for Jews, invalids , goys, Romas, and his shameless use of blaming them for the economic plight of Germany and plug in Muslims, immigrants, blacks, Democrats and it would match perfectly. It began with his campaign announcement speech ("They are sending...." who the hell is 'they').
As citizens touched personally, deeply by the pain of Auschwitz then that citizen must enter the political realm and head off this danger to our humanity, democracy and citizenship.
Personal and political are bound together
Waco1947
