“Put the trans people in camps.”
Oh, how easily we forget history.
I recently saw a post on Facebook regarding something that a well-known comedian, conservative talk show host, and ex-Fox News commentator is alleged to have posted on his blog:
It’s time. Put the trans people in camps. All of them. No more of this nonsense.
“Put the trans people in camps.”
Who does this person think he is? Is he actually as clueless as this statement implies he might be? Does he have any idea of what his statement implies? I think I know some of what his problem is: He’s never done military service even in peacetime, let alone in a hot combat zone. He’s never seen with his own eyes what a war zone looks like, or what corpses look and smell like when they’ve been dead for two weeks and are still not buried, because just going outside from wherever you are sheltering can get you shot by a sniper. So the bodies just lie in the street, rotting. Just look at news reports from Ukraine, or the Matthew Brady photos of dead soldiers at Gettysburg. Those aren’t even in color, yet they are still horrifying.
And he’s too young to have any memories of conversations with relatives who might have served in Europe in WWII. My Uncle George, age 21 in 1945, was a Private in the US Army and was with an engineer battalion that entered Buchenwald the day after it was liberated. He saw with his own eyes what a concentration camp was all about, and he told me of this experience — just a little, because even after 40 years it still gave him nightmares.
Every nation that has ever resorted to putting non-combatant civilians in concentration camps — including The United States of America (I’m referring, of course, to Manzanar, and all the other WWII Japanese internment camps) — is stained with the tarnish of a Crime Against Humanity that will never completely disappear. If the taint of FDR’s Executive Order 9066 is any “less evil” than the Wansee Protocol, it’s only because Manzanar wasn’t a place where civilians were packed naked into bunkers and gassed to death with hydrogen cyanide. In huge numbers. Including women, children, elderly and disabled people, LGBT people, and members of ethnic and religious groups, and political systems (Soviet Bolshevism for example), that the regime didn’t like.
Of course, let’s not forget that WWII, and ethnic cleansing, wasn’t only happening in Europe! It actually started in Asia in 1937 with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, and by the time it ended, hundreds of thousands of Chinese non-combatant civilians had died at the hands of the Japanese military.
Somewhere between 60,000,000 ~ 100,000,000 people lost their lives in WWII. Look at that number again. Look at all those zeros to the left of the decimal point. Let it sink in for a while, and think about the fact that somewhere north of 2 million of those dead — all non-combatants, and largely women, children, and elderly — died in the gas chambers, mostly at Auschwitz. Young men, who should have been in college studying to do something interesting with their lives, instead were in SS uniforms, up on the roofs of those bunkers, opening canisters of Zyklon B (an insecticide originally developed for fumigating buildings), and pouring the contents into those rooms jammed with screaming, terrified women and crying children.
And this blogger, and plenty of other political Conservatives—says that he wants to put me and my friends into camps? He may think he’s making a light-hearted joke, but close your eyes for a moment and try to imagine yourself in Auschwitz on a cold winter day in 1944, as the stench of decomposing bodies heaped like firewood, seasoned with the smoky barbecue aroma of burning corpses from the crematorium, permeates every breath you take, and ash from the smoke stacks rains down on the whole camp like a heavy snowfall.
And now tell me how funny that joke feels to you?
